Man as Microcosm

Hold Fast

2010-07-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

Acute pressures from multiple spheres (personal, professional, intellectual, activist) are converge into one rapidly approaching zero point. I have only myself to rely on at this point: the time spent studying Badiou's distinction between heroism and courage in between endless listenings of metal anthems lionizing steadfast resolutness in the face of crisis has just been preparation for putting the analysis and critique on hold while I get down to business. Alright, then, here we go.

Oh, hi down there!

And since my iPod is brokified, which for me is akin to having my fellow athiest-in-a-foxhole abandon post at the first sign of a firefight, I've been subsisting on the same cultural effluvia as before, with the exception of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï, Hithcock's Strangers on a Train, and Sophie Fienne/Slavoj Zizek's The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, none of which are portable, which is for the best when you really think about it.

Run the Numbers

2010-06-26T11:36:00.001-07:00

Likelihood that I will attempt to watch a movie after coming home mashed, alone: 25%

Likelihood that I will attempt to watch a movie after coming home mashed, with friends: 95%

Likelihood that I will make it through said movie in either scenario: less than 1%

Oh well. I guess you only really need to see the first 20 minutes of Suspiria to appreciate it anyway.

"I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. I certainly don't to justify myself to anyone about this. I don't care what anyone things or reads into it. I have often had journalists walk out of interviews when I say what I feel about this subject."

- Dario Argento

Daily bread: Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath - The Rebel Sell, Slavoj Zizek - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Future of the Left - Curses and Travels With Myself and Another, Drudkh -Microcosmos, Twilight - Monument to Time End, Discordance Axis - Jouhou, Archers of Loaf -Icky Mettle, Dario Argento - Suspiria

Beauty

2010-06-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

I have two half-written polemics to be posted on this blog that I can’t motivate myself to finish, even though I feel strongly about the subject matter. The reason for my apprehension is as simple as it is jarring (at least it is for me): I simply don’t want to engage in a critical reflection today - I want something beautiful. I don’t want to give up my criticality, but I do want to reflect a bit on what it means.

I’m interested in locating the intersection of political, economic and cultural forces that drive social phenomena, investigating in particular how these forces are shaped by, and shape, space. In the tradition of my intellectual forebears, these sort of investigations involve a lot of critique. Critique and critical reflection often seem negative – this is wrong, that must be changed, and so on – but, in the grand tradition of Enlightenment thought (which, ironically, I am often critical of), critique is designed to be either transcendent of its subject or to elucidate possible transformations of its subjects in order to improve the subject’s condition. For the sake of example, if we critique a certain local government’s policy, the whole objective of pointing out its flaws is to sketch out ways that the local government’s policy could be improved. It’s no coincidence that the subtitle of Marx’s Capital is A Critique of Political Economy: Marx pointed out the failings, inconsistencies and contradictions of capital in order to create the groundwork for a more just and stable mode of social organization. Capital was meant to be ten volume set, with volumes towards the end of the set to be dedicated to finding the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. Unfortunately for us all, Marx only really completed the first volume of Capital (volumes two and three were drafts edited and completed by Engels), and so we have been left to pick up the pieces from where the master left off, and figure out what a better, post-capitalist world might actually look like, and how it might function.

Adorno: good at figuring out what is wrong with art, popular culture and the relationship between people and capital, bad at seeing anything positive in anything, ever.

Our search begins with critique. We critique the undialectical straightjacket of modern science and its cloak of pseudo-objectivity, yet an alternative to the contemporary scientific method remains elusive. We critique the structural mechanics of capital, especially in its neoliberalized, free-market form, but alternative modes of economic organization lack the clarity and simplicity of capital exchange and monetary valuation, which David Harvey correctly points out are perhaps the only universally understood measuring stick for value. Critiques of the unjust and exploitative power relations that shape the world economy are as convincing and affecting as ever (in particular see Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums), and yet these power relations remain obdurate, for the simple reason that the world economy requires immiseration and poverty in order to discipline labour and establish fertile conditions for competitive locational advantage and Schumpeterian “creative destruction”. In sum: Marxian critiques of cultural, political and economic formations are often accurate in pointing out their failings, but what often seems missing is the transcendent end of critique, with a vision of a better world in mind.

David Harvey wrote in Spaces of Hope something to the effect of “a ship that knows not where it sails can make no use of the wind”. I am a firm believer in this. What is the point of criticality if it isn’t driving us towards a better world? What is a better world – more personal gratification? Economic stability? Social justice? In effect, what is point of understanding all the failings of capital if there is no understanding of love, death, sex, religion, family, or communication? As the elder Marcuse succinctly put it, “not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production”.

And so we come to beauty. I won’t take this time to try and figure out what it is, or how my conception of beauty is shaped (Pierre Bourdieu, you and I can have that conversation another time), but I am slowly coming to the realization that I need to take more time to appreciate it. There are significant hardships awaiting us if we don’t significantly change the architecture of our collective politico-economic sphere, but these changes are meaningless unless I/you/we understand what we are changing for. This is a deeply philosophical quandary, and not one that I can answer at the moment with any sense of depth or profundity, but I do know this: I am taking some time, possibly the rest of this summer, to try and understand how my ideals of beauty are formed, and experience this beauty in the fullest. This will probably involve making a lot of mistakes and doing things that I know on a rational level to be kind of foolish, but, you know, sometimes even I have to give myself a break.

Last night I attended a fundraiser for Comrad Sound, a small local arts/community development centre in danger of closing. The fundraiser was packed full of energetic, intelligent, enthusiastic people of a variety of demographics. It was beautiful.

Other beauties: David Cross – Bigger and Blackerer, Wolf Parade – Expo 86, Angels of Light – Everything is Good Here/Please Come Home and split with Akron/Family, Washed Out – Life of Leisure, Karl Polanyi – The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Tom Waits – Bone Machine, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Kurt Vonnegut – Armageddon in Retrospect, Earth – Hex; Or, Printing in the Infernal Method, activism

Ruminations

2010-05-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

My life has been strange lately; a weird combination of monastic retreat and jubilent extroversion, personal growth and personal loss, total eagerness and crushing ennui. As always, I've tried to keep myself busy in order to distract myself from the losses and solitude, but these things have a habit of catching up to me. Still, I think about the future a lot. It's almost all I think about: the ten million things I want to experience, achieve, and accomplish. It is both my opiate and my stimulant, a wellspring exuberance and a font of melancholy. (It's also potentially a source of all of this pseudo-romantic prose, but that's another matter altogether)

In my latest bout of - nausea? angst? melancholy? - I stumbled across a copy Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, which I had meant to read for a while and never really got around to. It's mystical and passionate, even if parts of it are totally opaque to me. His ninth thesis, however, has struck me, and I've included it below.

"A Klee drawing named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
- Walter Benjamin

I think this passage reflects the overall pessimism of the Frankfurt School, and it's hard not to think of negative dialectics and an inescapably grim historical materialism while reading this passage, which are not things I am prepared to totally buy. I also think that sometimes it's hard not to imagine myself/ourselves as being similarly hurtled forward through time by a force so inexorable and violent that it precludespossibility of meaningful change, and you/I/we are left with nothing to do but fixate upon the ruins piling up at our feet at a mounting pace.

It is 12:20 pm, May 19th 2010. It feels like it's about to rain. I am waiting for a train bearing a friend who will be late for a meeting that might not happen. I am working at a job that has been a learning experience, but has been spiritually exhausting. It is a limited tenure, but I have found out that I may be able to extend my contract for another year. Maybe. I need the money. I am beating my wings against the fury of an incoming storm and I am not sure how it will turn out.

Stay tuned.

Substance: Arkhon Infaustus - Orthodoxyn, Watain - Sworn to the Dark and Casus Luciferi, Busta Rhymes - When Disaster Strikes, Stars of the Lid - And Their Refinement of the Decline, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter - The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed, Ernest Hemmingway - The Sun Also Rises, Japanther - Rock n' Roll Ice Cream, LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening

Portal

2010-04-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

Last night in the apartment I've spent two years living in with Ana. These have been the two happiest/most productive years of my life. No time to think about that, for now - just have to finish a paper for a grad seminar in the next few hours (somehow), pack (somehow), and move tomorrow (somehow).

I have friends helping me move tomorrow. I decided I needed to buy some beer for my labourer friends, because beer is the universal unit of exchange for labour power. Digging through my stuff I found my old skate, put on some Suicidal Tendencies, and skated down the block to buy some beer, and somehow, against all odds, I reversed the ageing process by no less than four years.

Gateways: Suicidal Tendencies - S/T, Dissection - Storm of the Lights Bane, Liars - Sisterworld, Natural Snow Buildings - The Snowbringer Cult, Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury, Gang Starr - Daily Operation

So Busy, So Bored

2010-04-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

So many deadlines approaching, and yet, with all the work I have to do I somehow find myself doing this. I should be reading critical theory and writing about urban social movements, but instead I find myself raiding friends of friends via Facebook and lurking on various electronic nonplaces. Sure, it sounds glib, but I grew up in a suburb, and spent a lot of time playing video games, isolating myself, hanging out on message boards, reading alone. I'm used to the idea of
boredom, but somehow still haven't found a way to be bored without being self-destructive. Maybe a little bit more time in this room with no windows will help? Maybe not.

Yeah, whatever.

Marching to the beat of: Gang Starr - Daily Operation, A Grave With No Name - Mountain Debris, Jodi Dean - Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Failures - 1st LP, Atlas Sound - Logos, Lustmord - [O T H E R D U B], some black metal bullshit, disappointment

Get Sad

2010-04-12T20:59:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across this wonder. I've listened to And We Parted Ways on Mt Jade about 15 times in under and hour and a half (the other time was spent listening to the other two songs intermittently). I don't have any money, I can barely afford to eat, and I can't go to the University's year end student party on Friday because I have to work (so I can eat). I haven't been to that party since 2005. I am feeling old: not in that shitty, "my body is giving out on me" way, because let's face it, I'm only 24 (and even I need to give myself a break sometimes), but I feel like my youth has slipped away, and I've lost all my excuses to be reckless and carefree, although then again, maybe I was never that reckless and carefree? Maybe I've always been as scared as I am right now?

It's April 12th, 2010, and it's 10:00pm. I am sitting in a brightly lit computer lab with no windows doing something I hate, listening to sad music, thinking about last summer, my future, comic books, my brothers, how I'm too old to live but too young to die, and I swear on everything that I hold sacred that I can smell rain right now.

Polemics I: Politics

2010-04-08T18:10:00.001-07:00

Ann Coulter spoke in Calgary a couple weeks ago. Ranting, raving, carrying on, clutching a few guillable suckers close to her wizened bosom and drawing a few (25 or so) guillable suckers outside of her talk to protest her supposed hate speech. So what did the people who listened to her speak and those who protested her speaking have in common?

By either showing up to hear what she had to say or by showing up to stand in solidarity against the tyranny of her loose-cannon, paranoid xenophobia, the effect is the same: either approach demonstrates a tacit acceptance that Coulter is presenting a valid political perspective. The real danger of people like Ann Coulter isn't that they will inform public policy, but rather that they degenerate and corrupt popular conceptions of politics, and in so doing, undermine the basis of democratic decision-making.

Let's be honest about what Ann Coulter represents: she is a vulgar product of the same commodity culture that has profited wildly from keeping the general citizenry uninformed about politics. She is no more a political theorist than I am a Vietnamese horticulturist. Coulter and her ilk are to politics what late-night TV ads are to science, consistently reaching for the lowest-common denominator, lowering the popular expectations to cheap, immediate entertainment with no lasting significance. These are Slap-Chop Politics.

The old opiate of the masses was the promise of heavenly reward for earthly misery, the new opiate of the masses is the promise of material success stacked up against the twin threats of the permissive "liberal media" and the phantasmagoric leviathan of big government. Along the way, terms like "liberal" and "conservative" are so freely and inaccurately applied that they lose their rich historical meaning and become empty signifiers, only to be defined through their shallow inclusion in base, petty invective. Liberalism, in the sense of the preservation of individual rights and liberties, and economic liberalism, or homo economicus' right to free markets, are undifferentiated, and we are all poorer (and more confused) for it. Indeed, contemporary politics are nothing if not confusing, and through their confusion, disempowering for anyone with a desire to alter the twin status quo of neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy. Popular North American politics have conflated the neoconservative drive to preserve the Christian tradition and American exceptionalism with the neoliberal lust for free, unregulated markets, leaving an unprepared Left fighting uphill against an increasingly monolithic set of political assumptions, becoming more deeply entrenched over time through institutional configurations and social relations.

Plato's allegory of the cave is instructive here: we have mistaken the flickering shadows of network television sniping as valid political thought, losing sight of the interest groups funding these networks and busily undertaking Raymond William's "selective tradition", choosing which cultural symbols will be valued and lionized, and which will be ignored. These shadows obfuscate power relations by simplifying and degenerating political ontologies and discourses. If many people were to be shown that the spectrum of political thought extends far beyond the simple continuum of Liberalism <---------> Conservatism it might disrupt the prominent role that vested media interests play in shaping culture industries, aesthetic tastes, and political discourses. Of course, we have no-one to blame but ourselves for descending into the cave in the first place. Come outside, polities of the West: we have nothing to lose but the chains of ignorance and albatross of political degeneracy.

Indulgences: Sparkmarker - Products and Accessories, Method Man, Ghostface Killah & Raekwon - The Wu-Massacre, Barkmarket - L Ron, Mike Davis - Planet of Slums, Aerosols - 1st LP, Veins - S/T, Drive Like Jehu - Hand Over Fist/Bullet Train to Vegas, Poser Disposer - Waiting to Inhale

Shards

2010-03-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

Two and a half weeks until school is done. I can start playing music again. Three BMO songs finished, two of which involve scatological humour (my inner child needs a break sometimes too).The one is called "I'm Going to Need Another Autopsy, Scully", which is pretty self-explanatory, I think. Interview for two jobs today. Finish making brown stock this morning. Go see Until the Light Takes Us with pals tonight. Go to activist meeting beforehand to talk about risk assessment. Finish paper that was due yesterday. Look at potential new apartment tomorrow. Possible book review with program director/mentor next week. No time for complete thoughts or sentences, just straight ahead forward, one goddamn maniac fueled on caffeine and grindcore, skirting disaster and collapse, because I'll deal with those later thank you very much.

Hello Edward Burtynksy, could you stay away from the next 30 days of my life, please?

Essentials for spring living: Defeatist - The Sixth Extinction and Sharp Blade Sinks Deep Into Dull Minds, Human Remains - Where Were You When..., various Edward Burtynsky photos, Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain, Jeru the Damaja - The Sun Rises in the East, Dr. Octagon - Dr. Octagynocologist, Disfear - Misanthropic Generation, the way that the 2006 Sokol Blosser Dundee Hills Pinot I opened last night slowly evolved, The X-Files: Season 2

Pattern Recognition

2010-03-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

Back to the monastary. Another few weeks of sleepless nights and it's all gone. Let's see if I can come down clutching some more wisdom tightly to my breast, hmmmm? Time to defer to the master, I suppose:

"For we are like tree trunks in the snow. They appear to lie flat and with a small push one should be able to dislodge them. No, it can't be done, because they are firmly planted in the ground. But, look, even that only appears to be so."

- Kafka

Roots: Combatwoundedveteran - I Know a Girl Who Develops Crime Scene Photos, Discordance Axis - The Inalienable Dreamless, Dinosaur Jr. - You're Living All Over Me, Josef K - Only Fun in Town/Sorry For Laughing, The Flying Luttenbachers - The Truth is a Fucking Lie, Greymachine - Disconnected

In which the author reaches for a higher plane of existence and grabs on to ... something.

2010-03-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

The sun is out. It's gorgeous, it feels like summer. I'm done classes in less than four weeks and I'm thinking about my future. I'm applying for jobs (or I would be if I wasn't writing this blog). I'm sitting down and focusing, and for me focusing isn't the blank screen or the nothingness of the Buddhists, but it's having all channels on at once and letting myself become overwhelmed in the glorious overload of information and sensory inputs. Let the images and messages make themselves clear, because thinking of everything is the same as thinking about nothing but nothing.

You can write about it in a formula if it helps. Isaac Asimov worked it out: that we exist, because we have to exist, because we cannot possibly exist, and it can be proved with math if you believe in that sort of thing. 0 ± 0 = 0, nothing equals nothing, which really means that everything equates to nothing, everything that is nothing. Ex nihilo nihil fit - out of nothing comes nothing - or creatio ex nihilo - out of nothing comes everything, all the same, because 0 ± 0 = -1 + 1 = ∞ ± ∞. Nothing can exist without everything, because nonexistence constitutes existence, and everything cannot "be" without nothing, therefore nothingness is not possible without something(ness), thus all there is is everything, converging at a point in the middle of the existential contrast, the droning God-loop equilibrium, the circle of life, Ouroborous circling hungrily in pursuit of his own tail, and so on.

Doesn't this make so much more sense than that horrible run-on sentence?

Back to the point at hand and the matter in question. What I'm doing, where I'm going, all of that. Point is, there's nothing in store for me, but there is everything for me. I've never had a chance, not even a small one, and the moment is lost like tears in rain (score one for Rutger Hauer's on the spot revelation, where he too probably saw into the void) before it even happened, but that's because even where it doesn't exist it will always exist, and energy is never lost or destroyed, but just transferred (thanks, laws of physics!), and so we're always stuck in that uncomfortable stage of becoming, becoming, becoming. Listen closely enough and you can hear Sisyphus cracking his head against the boulder as he lurches it up hill, as is his eternal task, and laughing - laughing! You would too. You should!

I never had a chance, you never had a chance, none of us ever did, but that's what makes us so fucking free, so stop what you're doing, right now, right in the middle of this sentence, and grab on to that heaving temporal wave before you drown in it.

Lifeboats in an ocean of time: Throbbing Gristle - DOA: The Third and Final Report, Groovie Ghoulies - Travels with my Amp, The Dictators - The Dictators Go Girl Crazy!, White Static Demon - Decayed, The Slits - Cut, Public Image Ltd. - Metal Box

It's time to play "funny band names seen on Calgary show posters"

2010-03-13T18:58:00.001-08:00

Natalie Portman's Shaved Head

Compiling ammunition for Halloween a full 234 days in advance

2010-03-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

Hate to get all 160 character on you, but this requires your immediate attention. Yaz meets The Gossip meets controller.controller*, with a descending riff that sounds like it could have been copped from South of Heaven's title track thrown in for good measure.

* Yes, I know that controller.controller's rhythm section makes up 2/3 of this band, but still.

27b/6

2010-03-08T22:15:00.000-08:00

Just remember....

... we're all in it together.

Tickling my id with: Final - Solaris, Send More Paramedics - A Feast for the Fallen and The Hallowed and the Heathen, Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works '85-'92 and Windowlicker, The Knife - Tomorrow, In a Year

Smiling Back

2010-03-04T07:09:00.000-08:00

I stayed up until 4:00am writing a mid-term (that I'm still not done), I'm hungry, and I just realized I don't own a pair of jeans that don't have big fucking holes in them. My apartment is a mess right now. I probably don't have to do some of the extra curricular research for the City that I wanted to this semester, and I recently had to pull out of a project that I'd been working on since September. My girlfriend of six year is moving to France in May, and then to Victoria when she returns. Things are hectic, things are changing.

But....

Yesterday I held a speaker session with one of the academics I respect most, after spending a night out on the town with him on Tuesday. I want to study under him at UBC, and I think I left a good impression. I'm headed off to breakfast with him and my program director in 40 minutes. The things I'm writing are stronger than they've ever been. I'm going to get to see some of my friends today who I haven't seen in basically forever. Last night I got the idea that maybe I should move to Toronto, which is kind of an exciting proposition. I'm 24 years old, about to complete my undergraduate degree, and yeah, it's too late for everything, I know, but I have my whole fucking life ahead of me and I might never be as free as I am right now and yes I am stressed out and overworked but good things are happening and life is good right now.

When the stakes are high, the odds are stacks against you, the chips are down, and the absurdity of the whole deal snaps into focus, sometimes there's nothing left to do but smile back.

Foundations: Isis - Panopticon, The Pixies - Surfer Rosa, Alice in Chains - Unplugged

And ANOTHER Thing...

2010-03-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

It needs to be said, so I'll just say it: the Olympic aesthetic is a decidedly fascist one. The torch burning, the flag waving, the mindless nationalism, the rhetoric about the "purity of sport" and supremacy of an elite class of athletes ... christ, we're one step away from eugenics here.

The ancient Greeks did not have a torch ceremony. The first Olympics torch ceremony was in Nazi Germany, in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Nice, eh?

Anyway, we've got another two years until the IOC uses the rights of the athletic elite to trample on the rights of the underclass in London, so until then let's everybody practice your indifference towards 95% of the sports that are involved in the Olympics (and 95% of the worlds social justice concerns that you have no stake in, apart from your shared stake in the wellbeing of other people).

Today's nutritional intake: Rational Youth - Cold War Nightlife EP, Iron Maiden - S/T, Zero Boys - Vicious Circle, Arghoslent - Incorrigible Bigotry

The Procession of Simulacra and Social Movements

2010-02-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

I was in Vancouver last week for the start of the Olympics. It was a really strange time for me.

On one hand, I was excited about the Olympics. Large parts of downtown Vancouver had been pedestrianized, and were accordingly vibrant and brilliant. The massive support for street culture at this time reflected some of the excitement that got me interested in cities in the first place: it reminded me of sitting in classes during the fall of 2005 (!), after a year and a half of a boring and directionless university experience, and being stimulated by the thought of streets as a point of contact, social negotiation, struggle, and not-so-quiet beauty. I would be lying if I said I didn't find this really engaging. Many of my friends in Vancouver were similarly excited about the buzz in their city.

On the other hand, I felt some affinity for the argument that the glitz and the glamour of these games were obfuscating some disturbing social trends. The story by now should an unfortunately familiar one: gentrification, displacement, place-marketing, the construction of amenities for the wealthy at the expense of social welfare programs, and so on. In the case of Vancouver, however, these processes were hurtling forward at warp speed. Serious questions need to be (and have been) raised about the magnitude of funding that the City of Vancouver has dedicated to sprucing up Yaletown while a scant few blocks away the notorious Downtown East Side, Canada's poorest postal code, continues to grapple with deeply entrenched poverty, homelessness, crime, and drug addiction. Serious questions need to be asked about the viability of the Canada Line skytrain and twinning the road to Whistler, and why money wasn't spent on more sensible systems. Serious questions need to be asked about why housing promises for the game have fallen through, and about the scale of the games' incomprehensibly huge ($1 billion CDN) security budget. Serious questions need to be asked about the relevance of the Olympics themselves and the amount of investment they attract in a world where over 3 billion people still live on under $1USD per day (of course, this observation calls into question the whole spectacle endemic to neoliberal capitalism, and so it shouldn't be a surprise why it gets overlooked ... but still, come on).

I had one friend who shared these concerns, and he took to me a large protest of the games on opening day. I would estimate that the protest drew about three thousand attendees. It was peaceful and inclusive, and managed to march all the way to gates of BC Place, where it was stopped by a line of (surpsingly congenial) police officers. It was framed in class terms, which I think was the right idea. It emphasized democracy and communication, which again I think was the correct notion. And yet there is one thing about the protest that bothered me, and continues to bother me.

There were a small group of self proclaimed anarchists wearing requisite balaclavas and waving black flags at the forefront of the march, chanting anti-state slogans and coordinating their action with scouts operating ahead of the march via their cellphones. There were bored looking teens in brightly coloured keffiyeh snapping pictures, undoubtedly for their blogs. There scraggly looking men smoking joints and shouting "viva la relolution!". There is a no 2010 site offering "militant merchandise". There is a Tent City in the DTES where the population of homeless persons is outnumbered by middle-class UBC students. I look at all of this and can't help but wonder if revolution itself has become an empty signifier.

Revolutionairy social action, or playing right into the hands of
what marketing has informed us we should anticipate?

Have suburban malls selling Che Guevera shirts, radio-friendly punk rock, flag-burnings in Rage Against the Machine videos, romanticized accounts of revolution in television and film and so on commodified the concept of revolution so thoroughly that it has precluded a popular conception of what a real revolution (or really effective social action) might look like? If so, no matter how well-meaning these protests are, how effective can they actually be? Is the Spectacle, as Debord has it, really so skilled at processing and coopting dissent, turning it into a hapless caricature? Is there any hope for meaningful social action that can escape cliche, irony and marketing logic, or are these forces too deeply entrenched - in short, has Adorno's negative dialectic crossed the rubicon?

I don't want to think about the answer to that question right now. I'll have to, soon, but I don't want to right now. I want to believe in communication, I want to believe in democracy, and I want to believe in consensus, but some days...

Artistic ammunition for ontological warfare: The Raincoats - S/T, The Fall - This Nation's Saving Grace, David Harvey - The Urbanization of Capital, Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender, Magrudergrind - S/T, Antipop Consortium - Fluorescent Black, Iggy Pop - The Idiot and Lust For Life, Jig Ai - Katana Orgy, As the Sun Sets - 7744, Lioness - S/T EP

a spontaneous, desperate urging in fewer words than are in this sentence

2010-02-11T16:51:00.001-08:00

PLAY FROM YOUR FUCKING HEART

I Just Want to Forget

2010-02-07T01:01:00.000-08:00

I can't do it. Spiked hair, spiked drinks, the most banal music conceivable, the most desperate-yet-spoiled people imaginable, matching smiles, gladhanding, pretedetermined futures, pervasive marketing, just do what your parents did and take the life that was advertised to them, and don't ask too many questions, and no, I can't fit in here. I don't even try anymore. I won't go through the motions. Are you uncomfortable? So am I. Your discomfort will probably not last as long as mine. Maybe that's my problem. Maybe. Maybe. Then again...

Substance: Wolf Eyes - Human Animal, Final - Reading All the Right Signals Wrong, Rotten Sound - Cycles, Fushitsusha - The Caution Appears, Parlamentarisk Sodomi - De Anarkitiske An(n)aler, Santogold - Santogold, Official Secrets Act - Understanding Electricity

I Can See Through Time

2010-01-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

All of you. I can see all of you. All of you with a future in the academy, I can see you. I can see you teaching first year political science courses and graduate seminars in anthropology, spending late nights in offices cluttered with unread papers and empty coffee cups, drunk and misty eyed at dinner parties, where you silently fume at how difficult it is to communicate with the majority of other people.

All of you with a future in business, I can see you. I can see you backslapping and clinking expensive scotches in exclusive clubs, spending early mornings in offices cluttered with valueless financial instruments and steaming cups of coffee, drunk and libidinous at office holiday parties, where you prey on young blood to recapture an elusive and lost sense of youth.

All of you with a future in the arts, I can see you. I can see you balancing the asceticism your means impose and the indulgence your will necessitates, spending long afternoons in quiet bedrooms with sleeping lovers and blank tablets, drunk and reckless at parties you've snuck into, where the vulgar tendencies of moneyed tastemakers frustrate and sardonically amuse you.

Just a sampling to be sure, but so many of you are tipping your hands to me. I can see straight through it, straight through time. I crave mystery.

Bedrock: Curse of the Golden Vampire - Mass Destruction, Techno Animal - Brotherhood of the Bomb, HEALTH - S/T, Wormrot - Abuse, Graf Orlock - Destination Time: Today, Weekend Nachos - Unforgivable, Dälek - Gutter Tactics, Discordance Axis - The Inalienable Dreamless, David Cross - I Drink For a Reason, Frederico Fellini - Satyricon

Lungs

2010-01-12T08:07:00.000-08:00

I am back from Mexico City. All kind of bilious and yellowed mucous is frothing in my unhappy throat, and Montezuma has taken his revenge on me in spades. I started getting sick after I ate a hamburguesa at Burger King (I know, nothing else was open, OK?) called "El Furioso". Yeah, I know.

Maybe it wasn't the food that did it though? Maybe it was the thought of that meal after a day where I safely toured where The Other Half lives, amid dirt floors, stray animals, corrugated tin roofs and an absence of clean drinking water. Perversely, I laughed, both at my own decadence and self-loathing/self-pity. It didn't, and to a certain extent still doesn't, feel real.

Yeah, when it hits you, you will know. Until then...

Affinities: HEALTH - Get Color, Zola Jesus - The Spoils, Birdflesh - The Farmers Wrath, 3 Inches of Blood - Battlecry Under a Winter Sun, Young Widows - Old Wounds, The XX - XX, Wire - Pink Flag, Fever Ray - S/T, Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds

Fin de siecle

2009-12-03T02:57:00.000-08:00

9 hours ago I watched a man who had been teaching at this university since the early 70s give his last lecture ever before retiring. He finished his career with some Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

And then he frantically urged us that if we didn't rage now, all would be lost for us in the future.

Jesus, man.

Motivation: caffeine, Drive Like Jehu - Yank Crime, Q and Not U - Different Damage, Sex Machineguns - Ignition, Squarepusher - Big Loada, The Tuss - Rushup Edge, The Smalls - S/T, and all the reading I've done on successful urban agriculture programs in Havana, which gives me some hope to rage against the drying of the light myself.

I have a phobia that someone's alway near...

2009-11-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

It's all catching up to me now. There is no time for anything but study, caffeine, and grindcore, all day, every day (at least until December 14th). Two days ago this meant staying at the library until 3am grappling with a presentation on Marxist ecology (which went well, thank you very much), which meant that the trains had stopped running, which meant an hours walk home. As I turned off onto a darkened street I hadn't walked down before, a car pulled up behind me. Strange, I thought to myself. Why would pull over here? Nothing here but a chain-link fence, and me, alone, walking beside it, and virtually no lighting. Oh.

I pulled my headphones out (which at the time had Reign in Blood, conveniently enough, playing at top volume). I quickened my pace. I looked back and I saw the driver get out and pull something out of the back seat. Oh. I quickened my pace again, and kept looking over my shoulder. He was following me now. Oh.

Then I saw him cross the street. Perhaps he was going to the seniors centre to drop something off, I thought to myself. No sooner had this thought crossed my mind that he broke into an open run directly at me. I sort of sensed that one coming. Backpack full of library books (so much so, it was literally bursting at the seams) I ran as fast as my legs could carry me. I heard shouting over my shoulder - I'm still not sure if it was "where the fuck are you going" or "what the fuck are you doing", but I didn't want to stick around and find out.

Long story short, I smoked his sorry ass. Backpack full of books nonwithstanding, I could run way faster. I suggest that all would-be muggers of Calgary do mroe cardio, because self-preservation lends my legs more speed than greed or malice lends yours.

Support: Storm and Stress - S/T, Grizzly Bear - Veckatimist, Watchmaker - Erased From the Memory of Man, Darkthrone - The Cult is Alive, Kool Keith - Lost in Space, Fyodor Dosteovsky - The Grand Inquisitor and House of the Dead, Boredoms - Soul Discharge '99, David Harvey - Nature, Justice and the Geography of Distance, debates about the merits of academic inquiry, and the Vietnamese subs from the bake chef that have been a staple of my diet for about four years running.

I am the eggman...

2009-11-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

I really liked the graffiti in Germany. It always meant something, it was always some sort of invective or witticism that stirred me, even if I only understood 18.2% of the scribblings proclaiming that "Grüner Kapitalismus is Schiesse" or advocacy "für Sozialrevolution jetzt!". Grafitti in Canada seems so boring. So uninspired. Until today.

Leaving the university I saw a tag that said CUNT in big huge letters. Juvenile, I thought to myself. Then I walked a closer and I could make out some script just over the offensive term that I could just barely make out. Walking closer, I could see that it said WALRUS. Someone wrote Walrus Cunt on the Math Sciences building and I still can't stop laughing at the thought of it. Dear lord.

Stuff, stuffed together: Talk Talk - Laughing Stock, Fuck the Facts - Stigmata High Five, Circle Jerks - Group Sex, Immortal - All Shall Fall, Darkthrone - A Blaze in the Northern Sky, John Bellamy Foster - Ecology Against Capitalism, the brown stock simmering in my kitchen

Deep breath before the plunge...

2009-11-17T15:21:00.000-08:00

Deadlines are rushing at me like fear-affected suburbanites rushing towards a truck full of H1N1 vaccines. My stomach is in knots almost all waking hours of the day and I am not sleeping. I am so fucking caffeinated that my hands shake, even though I don't really need caffeine to keep me running - adrenaline and a fear of letting other people down usually takes care of the rest.

Happiness?

Yes, happiness.

I just spent five days (five glorious, glorious days) in Vancouver visiting friends and setting up an academic research conference. Man, that place is epic, although 5 straight days of non-stop rain and greyness was a little wearing. I'm pretty grateful for any occasion I have to take five days off to ride bikes, party like a student (because, you know, I'm much more responsible in Calgary), get excited about academia with other young academics, record music, get intimated some of the most opulent real estate in Canada, get intimidated by the worst urban squalor Canada has to offer, have heart-to-hearts, make new friends, and ride bikes. But...

Five days off has crippled my academic process. Or at the very least hobbled it, in a similar way to how Russian peasant used to pay people to break their ankles so they couldn't get conscripted to fight on the front lines in World War I. Or maybe in the way Duane Allman (and probably quite a few others) shot himself in the foot so he could keep playing music and not get drafted for Vietnam. People with foot fetishes might not make good draft dodgers based on these experiences. I don't know. Maybe?

The gerbil racing around powering the wheel in my noggin is going at Mach speed. I like all of this, actually. I like being wired on grindcore and coffee and new knowledge, and I think that a little forlornity and confusion and heartache makes those end-points so much more satisfying. I like sitting down and writing something like this, a letter to the void, with no preparation, just sincerity that stream of consciousness writing provides. This might not make sense now, but in a few months, it will.

Currently enjoying: Lock Up - Hate Breeds Suffering, Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock and Roll, Patton Oswalt - My Weakness is Strong, Various Artists - This Comp Kills Fascists, Vol. 1, Femme Fatale - Fire Baptism, Venetian Snares - Filth, Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice, and my ongoing successes with French cuisine.

Food and Jedis

2009-10-28T12:53:00.001-07:00

A couple days ago I promised some friends I would give them a recipe that I used to cook for them the other week. This seems like a good space for that sort of thing, so I will probably use this in future to upload some of my favourite recipes, because the only thing I like more than cooking (and eating) is sharing knowledge.

Anyway, there is just one problem: I don't really measure when I cook. Measuring is really more for baking than cooking, and I think that an important part of cooking is learning how to get a feel for your ingredients, kind of like Luke Skywalker learning how to deflect laser bolts with his lightsabre with that helmet on in the first Star Wars. That's right, I cook like a goddamn Jedi.

So here is a recipe that is quick, easy, and a good way to maximize the use of a cheap cut of beef. Pomegranate juice is super fucking expensive, and I am assuming this recipe would probably work with blueberry juice (good concentration, lots of antioxidants) or maybe cranberry juice in a pinch (lots of antioxidants, similar tartness, but concentration is a little lower). If you are going for cranberry juice, I would probably recommend springing for the good stuff (read: anything but that gross, sugary Ocean Spray cran-cocktail stuff).

Without further ado...

Striploin With Pomegranate Reduction

You'll need the following:

Two medium-sized striploins
Olive oil
Balsamic vinegar
Rosemary
Pomegranate juice
Brown Sugar
Arugula
Black pepper (or a peppercorn melange, if you can get it)
Good salt (kosher salt or better)

1. Chop a couple sprigs of rosemary. Coat the striploins with the rosemary, salt and pepper (and when I say coat, I mean really rub that stuff in there).

2. Heat olive oil (a tablespoon or so) in a frying pan to a medium-high temperature. When the oil starts to lose its viscosity and smoke a little bit, it's talking to you: throw the steaks in. Remember, you want to sear both sides to get a nice crisp texture. For medium-rare, it will be about three minutes or so per side.

3. Remove steaks from pan, set aside. Add 2 cups of pomegranate juice, 4 cups of brown sugar and 2 and a half tablespoons of balsamic to the pan. DO NOT throw out the juices from the steaks - that stuff is like liquid gold. Bring content of pan to a boil and then simmer until reduced to desired thickness (approximately 5 minutes or so). Keep your eye on the pan - if you let it reduce for too long it basically caramelizes.

4. In a seperate bowl, toss arugala with olive oil and balsamic (a tablespoon and a half of each, perhaps, pending on how many servings you are preparing). Add salt and paper.

5. Slice steaks into strips and drizzle reduction overtop. Plate with argula mixture and a big chunk of bread.

Reccomended pairing: a good New Zealand Pinot Noir will make this one sing. An entry-level Villa Maria pinot, for example, should have the right balance of acidity, herbaceousness, tannin and fruitniness to make this dish work out.

Enjoy with two friends, depending how big your appetites are.

Indulgences: Guided By Voices - Human Amusements at Hourly Rates, Jay Reatard - Matador Singles 06-07, Cannibal Ox - The Cold Vein, Aphex Twin - Hangable Auto Bulb and Windowlicker, Grand Belial's Key - Judeobeast Assassination, Thomas Pynchon - Vineland (finally finished this one!), Manuel Castells - The City and the Grassroots

Cargo Cults

2009-10-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

There are two Tim Hortons right beside each other in Mac Hall. As in, less than 20 feet away from each other. Apparently one of them is owned by the Student's Union and one is owned by the University. These two Tim Hortons are competing with each other, and both establishments are totally lined up at all times. This is the sort of coke or pepsi "choice" that is slowly driving me insane.

I have never bought a coffee from either of these places, and I never will. For an extra 20 cents or so I can buy fair trade coffee from a locally owned business. Sure, my 20 cents isn't changing the fucking world, but if it can help me feed my caffeine addiction without completely selling myself out to the system I hate, then that should be enough.

Also, I've written a ton of songs lately. Like six or so. What the hell? I haven't been writing for months, and all of a sudden I've had a weird rush of creativity. What new thing or person in my life is causing all this creativity? Some days not only do I not know the answer, but I don't think I really know the questions either.

Support: Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights, Daughters - Hell Songs, David Byrne and Brian Eno - Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, David Harvey - The Right to the City, HEALTH - Get Color, Horse the Band - Desperate Living and the 1987 Ridge Monte Bello Cab that made last night so fun for me (and is making this morning excruciating).

A Question of Degree

2009-10-03T08:41:00.000-07:00

Everything I know how to do well, I know from my experience drinking wine. That's where I learned how to deconstruct things around me and reconstruct them in way that makes sense to me. It's where I learned how to practice restraint when necessary, but also how I learned that when appropriate, to always tend towards indulgence.

Indulgences - No Age - Nouns, J Dilla - The Shining, American Music Club - The Golden Age, We Are Wolves - Total Magique, Fugazi - Repeater, and wine, good lord, wine. Villa Maria 2006 Cellar Selection Pinot Noir tickles my fancy right now.

Going Off the Rails on a Swayze Train

2009-09-14T21:02:00.000-07:00

I will seriously never understand our culture's obssession with celebrity death (as a quick side bar: for anyone reading this who has already picked up on the self-defeating irony of this first sentence, please respect my right to contradict myself every once in a while. After all, it's necessary to breach this subject anyways). I suppose that if we celebrate the life of a celebrity it is only logical that we pay them their respects after death, but Christ on a bike, the amount of attention that film/TV/music stars recieve upon death is disproportionate bordering on farcical, even worse so than the attention they recieve during life. The fact that Michael Jackson was nothing less than lionized immediately following his death (which of course was tied into a massive marketing campaign for Jacko paraphenalia) is a little revealing about a cultural response we seem to be conditioned into, wherein we seem to be justifying to ourselves that these figures are worth paying so much attention to in the first place.

So, Patrick Swayze. The fact that man dies of cancer may indeed by tragic, but it is perhaps more tragic that this death is like to grab front pages across the world, while buried on page A26 lies unread news about issues that should be of real concern to us. The death of celebrities is painted more often as the death of an ideal rather than the death of a person, and it is shameful that we should have our ideals about issues such as social justice or environmental stewardship so tightly wrapped up in people who often unqualified to address these same issues. Perhaps this is the result of culture that has become acutely delocalized and can no longer fix its gaze and attach its ideals to community leaders, but rather to a large and grandoise body of jet-setting celebrities upon, whom we can collectively imprint our values.

Here I turn to sarcasm, to ridicule. Certainly we are worthy of healthy amounts of it. So please, when I crack a joke about Patrick Swayze over the next week, don't look at me like I'm some kind of monster - after all, why should a man who lived most of his life as a wealthy playboy capture our gaze when there are far more needy people still living that require our attention? I'm just holding up the mirror so we can see how stupid we look.

The goods: Encounters at the End of the World, DJ Shadow - Endtroducing..., Madvillain - Madvillainy, Deep Wound - Deep Wound 7", Siege - Drop Dead, Liars - They Were Wrong So We Drowned, Charles Bukowski - Ham on Rye, John Coltrane - Coltrane, Fugazi - In on the Killtaker, Sun Ra - The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra Vol. 1

Heart is Everything

2009-08-19T14:20:00.000-07:00

Where are all the people who aren't afraid to be sincere? We're socialized into it early enough, on schoolyards and in sports locker rooms - mask your sincerity behind thick walls of irony and sarcasm. It's much easier deal with the put-downs that follow when you declare that, yes, I really do like Band X, with a sly wink and a "just kidding" than to bear the full brunt of these assaults on your taste and character with honesty. If there is one thing nobody wants to be thought of as being, its boring (or a leper, I suppose, but that's neither here nor there). Of course, the ultimate irony is that over-reliance on the handy crutch of irony itself is possibly the most boring form of self-expression there is!

Your sincerity is not boring! Your honesty is not banal! Let them dismiss you lazily as a bleeding heart, let them chastise your tastes for being threatening. If it helps, maybe try the strategy I've been using: don't be scared to return their scornful gaze with a mirror to show them how fucking stupid they look. Is it stupid to listen to music with screaming in it, or is it stupid to ignore the screams of the most desperate social strata? Is it it silly to refuse to own a car, or is it silly to be party to the construction of cities that are undeniably vulnerable to energy shortages? Can your philosophical underpinnings be any more questionable than those of an socioeconomic world order that coopts dissidence and protest as quickly as they are produced and transforms them into shallow ephemeralities?

I, for one, am ready to be judged on my readings of my environment, for my expressions and for actions. Activism is the only honest response I can fathom to the inequities that assail the integrity of our social networks and environmental life-support systems from all concievable angles. I'm talking about an activism that eschews irony and stabs at the heart of uncomfortable and difficult issues. I'm talking about sincerity, I'm talking about direct, honest dialogue. If you care enough about my expressions to be reading this, surely you care enough to participate. If you contact me at tom.howard@urbancsa.org I promise I will do everything I can to coordinate your own activism.

Refuge: Converge - No Heroes, Burnt By the Sun - Heart of Darkness, David Foster Wallace - E Unibas Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, Robert Kirkman - Walking Dead vol. 10, Mare - S/T, Jesu - Lifeline, Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Staying Naive

2009-08-08T15:25:00.000-07:00

OK, so anyone who knows me is pretty aware that sometimes its difficult for me to live in Calgary - I find the arts sluggish, the politics insane/suicidal, the popular (and "indie") culture self-involved and superficial, and the city itself to be a monstrous, sprawling behemoth that is propelling us towards an unhappy future indeed. Judging from the first sentence of this post, you may have sensed a massive "but" coming. If so, good for you! You are correct. In spite of these shortcomings, summer in Calgary has a special appeal to me. Staying out late without a coat, reading in the city's handful of reasonably well-appointed parks (Riley Park, looking in your direction), people-watching by the river, driving a car down busy downtown streets with the windows down and Agoraphobic Nosebleed cranked to 11 - yeah, it's the simple things, isn't it?

I've experienced some truly wondrous things in some truly wondrous places over the last few months, not the least of which involved early-20th century expressionist galleries, copious volumes of dunkel, making new friends, making new friends over copious volumes of dunkel, riding bikes, hallmarks of modernist and postmodernist architecture in direct proximity to one another, picnics on the steps of the worlds most prestigious art galleries and narrow, winding streets that twist in an organic, mystical logic/illogic. The depth and scope of these experiences defies my ability to relate them here, and they were all fine and well, but there are things about Calgary too that entrance me. I am sad that it will probably be a decade or more before I can eat meatballs in Sweden again, but there is something to be said about staying up late and gorging myself on Canadian beer while watching The Big Lebowski with best friends. I mean, the Swedish meatballs were reeeallly good, but there is a certain amount of timelessness and transcendance attached to the things I can do here with the people I care about the most, and I think that if I dig deep enough under all the ennui this city has to offer I can find most of the things that are good and right and "fuck yeah" about the world.

I'm headed out of some truly inspiring places and I'm launching myself back into all the placelessness that Calgary has to offer, hoping to land softly in soft coccoons of forlonity, earnestness and all-out sincerity. Hopefully I'll be able to abscond from responsibility for a little while longer and savour the fleeting gratification of being young for a little while longer.

Substance - The Big Lebowski, Aura Noir - Black Thrash Attack, Amesoeurs - Amesoeurs, Peste Noir - Ballad cuntre lo Anemi francor, Japandroids - Post-Nothing, Thomas Pynchon - Vineland, Cobalt - Gin, Liars - Liars

You are Number Six

2009-05-22T00:16:00.000-07:00

Be seeing you.

Stairwells

2009-05-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

My, my. Busy, busy, busy. I have the privilege of leaving in five days, but (as per usual) I've made little to no plans. I've also (as per usual) squandered the time I have to get a large amount of schoolwork done. The 80-20 rule (do 80% of the work in 20% of the time) is (as per usual) a real bitch.

I feel like the monolith from 2001 is sitting on my chest right now. I know that I'll get done the things that need getting done, but the anxiety is starting to disrupt my sleep cycles. I've been waking up a lot at night and I've started drinking more coffee again. Even though it's warm outside, the library of the University feels as cold as ever. What is with this place? Why do they keep it at the same temperature as a fucking mortuary, year round? I think its uncomfortable atmosphere mirrors my discomfort with the University/city in general. It'll be good to get out again.

I'll be keeping updates to a minimum while I'm gone. Sorry, but if you want to know what I've experienced abroad you'll have to call me up and hear it from me in person. I'm also deleting my fucking Twitter. What a stupid idea. I'm not really sure I can compress the complex spectrum of emotions I feel or the context of my varied life-happenings into 160 words or less anymore.

"I'm eating bacons and eggs rite now, soooo good"

"Getting arrested, LOL!"

"Come to my house for ultra-beer-bong goat debauchery"

I would rather just focus on the bacon and eggs, arrest experience and ultra-beer-bong goat debauchery than focus on what clever ways I'm going to write about them. And really, if I want to share an experience with you I will probably pay you the minimal courtesy of contacting you directly. Sure, I feel the need to document some shards of existence, but not to circumscribe or truncate it. And on that note...

"... because in life, very little goes right. Right meaning the way one expected and the way one wanted. One has no right to want or expect anything." -Paul Bowles

Supplements for May anxieties - 2001: A Space Odyssey (in case you haven't noticed), 8 1/2, Trap Them - Seizures in Barren Praise, Cursed - Two and III: Architects of Troubled Sleep, Man or Astroman? - A Spectrum of Infinite Scale and the 2000 Frescobaldi Brunello I drank with my family on Thursday.

OOOOH LOOK AT ME I'M SO POSTMODERN! EVEN THIS BLOG TITLE IS IRONIC AND SELF-REFERENTIAL!

2009-04-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

1993 or 2009?

I can't stop thinking about how everyone is repping early- to mid-90s fashion hard this summer. I can't count how many kids I've seen frontin' the nearly ubiquitous lumberjack shirt with Nike high-tops combo, sometimes with baseballs caps (half of which have the lids flipped up), John Lennon sunglasses and even dreadlocks. Everywhere I look, I'm seeing weird tones of purple and pink that I haven't seen since I was 11.

The fact that a lot of people are looking like Pearl Jam roadies is no big deal: we all know that fashion moves in cycles, yadda yadda yadda, but the cycles are feeling like they're getting a little closer together. But in the late 90s it seemed like it was more about mid- to late-1970s fashion, with the mid-2000s ushering in a revival of mid-1980s fashion. If we have moved into an era where everyone is dressing like its 1995, then where will we be in two years? Will everyone be dressing like its 2003, when people were starting to dress like it was 1983? This is the part where my brain 'splodes.

It's got me thinking about postmodernism a bit. Yeah, pastiche is fun, and it's liberating in the sense that you don't need to be slavish to meta-narratives whose applicability is pretty questionable. But on the other hand, when it becomes normative I think it's more or less a free pass to be gleefully self-indulgent and superficial. When everything is so aestheticized and the traditional concept of narrative is subverted, then isn't there a chance we are just moving towards this dystopian scenario where the meaning of all cultural symbols get lost, as the aesthetic of the symbols are recycled ad nauseam with no regard for context?

I know it sounds like warmed over Frederic Jameson/Baudrillard, but it's worth thinking about, I think. I mean, I'm not sure how down I am with every song title/band name being a tongue-in-cheek pop-culture reference ("Walk Before You Run DMC". What is that shit?). Then again I play in a band called Baader Meinhof Overdrive. Then again, I don't think Jordan and I pretend that BMO is supposed to be super-meaningful or insightful. Then again, we have a song about how somebody should resurrect Zombie Reagan, so punk rock can have something to mobilize against. I don't know, my brain hurts. The answers aren't easy, but then again maybe they aren't supposed to be. But then again, isn't the idea that things are "supposed to be" a certain way indicative of a meta-narrative or higher order? If my brain was 'sploding before, then my brain just went supernova now.

The ca-razy postmodern (and not so postmodern) things I'm hyped on right now: Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow, Charles Bronson - Youth Attack!, Spazz - Crush, Kill, Destroy, Stephen Hawking - A Breifer History of Time, 2005 Duckhorn Decoy (perfect mid- to high-range good times steak wine), Planet Earth, Metric - Fantasies (what can I say: this album is shit-hot. It contains no less than five perfect window-down, sing-a-long anthems good for cruising in your white Camaro in 2009 like its 1986. Wait....)

Koyaanisqatsi

2009-04-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

What I've been feeling on a day-to-day basis as of late

The next two weeks of my life will be completely insane. I keep saying to myself, "well, this is the life you chose", but somehow that cheery affirmation of my self-possession and stoic self-determination seems a little muted in the face of the veritable tsunami of work I am facing. Ultimately, is what I've learned this semester worth the payoff of sleeping in the library, losing sleep and having the quality of diet last seen in a Charles Dickens novel?

I think I can answer that question with a resounding "fuck yeah!". The cliche "if you think education is expensive, try ignorance" is tired, but completely true. Working for positive change in Calgary has lead me to face up to some rather pushy, ill-educated individuals. This leads me to lead to two conclusions:

There is a positive correlation between ignorance and brashness
There is a negative correlation between taking a well-informed position in an arguement and my desire to punch you in the fucking head

Right now I'm not sure which is the bigger headache: the ignorance of the stubborn ideologues I contend with, or the enormity of the course load I am currently bearing. What I do know, however, is that the semester will be over on the 24th, and the ignorance of some people goes without an expiration date.

A few of the things that are currently keeping my stick on the ice, as they say: Agoraphobic Nosebleed Agorapolocalypse, Metric Fantasies, Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz, Faust S/T, Non Phixion The Future is Now, William Gibson Virtual Light and a surprisingly large amount of the 80s hightop thrash I grew up on in the early 00s.

Miss Fortune

2009-03-21T21:57:00.000-07:00

It was 13 degrees yesterday. It's fucking snowing right now. I was just out barbequeing and I could hear the pained yelps of birds who clearly flew home too early. Nothing sucks worse than being on the recieving end of an enormously unfunny cosmic joke, I suppose.

I will basically be unavailable for the next month. This week, especially, is fucking insane. Jordan and I have a show this coming Thursday - we're going to meet tomorrow and hopefully finish writing our 10 minute set. At least there will be lots of in-jokes about black metal dudes in wheelchairs, zombie reagan and om nom nom-ing things.

I've taken a weird liking to krautrock lately. It contributes heavily to the following things that are currently keeping me grounded: Can - Tago Mago, Faust - Faust, Neu! - Neu!, Kraftwerk - Kraftwerk 1, 100 Bullets and the massive host of Italian wines I just came across

Go (anywhere but) west, my son.

2009-03-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think to myself, things aren't so bad here. Mostly I think that when I come out of meetings with the small collectives of progessive, open-minded people who are taking an active interest in reource management and planning. Then, I read the paper. Or the latest National Geographic, for that matter.

The first jolt came to me as I attended a Calgary Regional Partnership symposium last a few weeks ago. Ted Morton, our Minister of Sustainable Energy, tried to cover up the fact that he had, that very morning, whittled a $2 billion regional transit fund (enough to start thinking about regional light/hevay rail transit) down to $50 million (not enough to do anything more substantial than buy some more buses). He did this using jokes about his age and inaptitude with technology, neglecting to mention exactly how much he had cut the budget by, also neglecting to mention that the government was still leaving a $2 billion carbon sequestration plan intact. That's right - a plan that targets the source of emission-demand was scrapped in favour for a quick-fix that might not even work. Wtfbruger?

Then yesterday, I read that province is providing an extra $3.31 billion in tax breaks to the oil industry. In 15 years this province is going to look the Rust Belt in the states - a string of former boom towns that have become large slums. Mortgage rates will climb and then drop as our oil supplies run out (our conventional supplies are already WAY over peak), leaving people owing more on their houses than their houses are worth. Oh right, and we aren't collecting any taxes from the driver of our province's economy, so we really have no way of implementing our grand plans for the future.

After graduation I'll be on the first flight out of this town. I'll be headed to place where people understand what the consequences of deregulation, bling idolatry and ignorance are. Ugh.

Things keeping me from smashing my head through the computer screen I'm currently looking at: Genghis Tron - Board Up the House, Frank Miller - Ronin, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!, Swans - Cop, Godflesh - Streetcleaner, Phillip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle, 'cheap and cheerful' Spanish wine.

Aperature of Pinholes

2009-02-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

I lost my effing ipod last week. Curses! I've become basically dependent on it, and it seems strange to walk around without my own personal soundtrack constantly running. Without this constant distraction, however, I'm hearing lots of things I've forgotten about. The sound of a train car full of strangers, for example, all shuffling feet and throat clearing, everybody trying to discreetly surveille everyone else. The muffled roar of far away cars racing while I pace unlit streetscapes late at night. The sound of my own breath when I run. It's like people who work in a machine shop gradually tune out the sound of the machines: what have I tuned out?

That being said, I just bought another ipod today. It's nice to be reminded of all these processes I'm wont to forget about, but certain experiences can augmented (or even overpowered!) by music. It also helps for those times you don't want to be left alone with your thoughts, right?

Things keeping me from becoming unglued: Absu S/T, The Wrestler (brilliant!), Arckanum Antikosmos, Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale, Pilsener Urquelle and the Luis Felip Edwards Malbec I'd been cellaring for three years.

Storm-Static-Sleep

2009-02-05T11:44:00.000-08:00

We are forgetful people. I think our feelings of rage at the creator and impotence in the face of what we feel to be massive injustice can largely be attributed to collectively letting our guard down. We forget. Marx called it alienation, and attributed it to the loss of creativity and identity through the processes of industrial capitalism. He was pretty close, I think, but I also believe it goes a little deeper.

We forget that on all sides, at all times, we are beset by forces, neither benign nor malign, that propel us towards unexpected and sometimes grievous misfortune. At best, it's what Camus referred to as the "gentle indifference of nature"; at worst, if we are to believe Werner Herzog, the unifying elements of the universe are chaos, hostility and murder. I try to believe the former more than the latter, although sometimes I'm not so convinced.

In a sense Marx was right; we all feel alienated, but to attribute this simply to the faceless toil of industrial capitalism is a little naive (this doesn't mean, however, that this system is totally off the hook). I think the feeling of impotence and futility against amorphous and implacable tragedy is fundamental to our existence. At all times are we being hastened towards our own ultimate misfortune, our own death, which is often without meaning and without poetry. And when we are smote by the heavy hand of disease, physical injury or personal loss, we feel this futility at its most potent. We glimpse the world for what it actually is for one cruel instant, and feel the strain of struggling against the current for the totality of our existence. We remember.

Of course, it's easier to forget. It's easier to invent a narrative that will make these things feel meaningful. But isn't that lying? It seems a bit much like setting ourselves up for dissapointment. I'm not saying we need to all turn into depressive nihilists, but I don't think we can stumble through our lives in the darkness of this forgetfulness. As much as possible, I think we need to saturate ourselves in the terrible knowledge of our fragility. It makes times like these a little more tolerable, but not completely so.

Too Old, Too Cold

2009-01-22T16:53:00.001-08:00

Not actually me. I wish!

I'm beginning to think my references are getting dated. It started last semester, when I made a Captain Planet joke to three girls in geography class, none of whom knew who Captain Planet was. What the fuck? I'm not that old. In fact, I'm maybe two years older than those girls from last semester, tops. What gives?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that my teenage years are somewhat of an anachronism. I guess everyone I went to high school with came of age with Outkast, 50 Cent, The Darkness and Justin Timberlake, while I was wired on Minor Threat, Anthrax, Bad Brains and Iron Maiden. High school for me was spent listening to 80s thrash and hardcore while wearing white high-tops, Megadeth shirts and a denim jacket covered in heavy metal patches; in short, emulating movements I had missed by a good 20 years (tragically a year or two before emulating those movements somehow became cool again). Maybe all those years spent intentionally shifting my frame of reference to a time before I was born has eroded my ability to find contemporary references people my age can identify with. Or maybe that's why most of my friends are older than I am?

I don't know. I guess maybe I should shelve the Andrew Dice Clay and Escape From New York references for a couple years and shoot for something a little more relevant. Then again?

Supplements for January living: Ampere "The First Five Years", Isis - ALL, Immortal "Sons of Northern Darkness", Transmetropolitan, The Invisibles, Hypnosia "Extreme Hatred", These Arms Are Snakes "Oxeneers ...", Grinderman "S/T" and lattes, all day, e'ry day