He's Like A Detuned Radio

Drunk again. Looking for a place to bury my head.

I can't imagine what an empty life would be without. A life without an arm perhaps maybe without some essential limb. It's become essential; integrated within me. There will always be parallel paths but there will never be another which will coincide. You have to watch out though, it's those perpindicular paths that cause trouble. A negative reciprocal, if you catch my drift.

I figure drunken nonsenical ramblings can be excused since i'm drunk. And there's no excuse for the crap I normally post.

Goo goo g' joob
Goo goo g' joob
Goo goo g' goo
goo goo g' joob goo
juba juba juba
juba juba juba
juba juba juba juba
juba juba

It poured today. Hard. Though through it all there was the slight glint of light. Forever expanded upon it remained a mystery. It's not that I'd rather be anywhere else, it's that there's one place I'd much rather be. In fact, this isn't nearly as bad as the other million places I could be stuck. The backstory to a life is not something that can be condensed down to a thirty second prologue perhaps the feature screening tomorrow will allow it to be expressed.

This reads like the C paper of a grade eight student. Unfortunately, it's the best that I can come up with on short notice.

The time to see the seven(?) wonders of Windsor is drawing to a close, only 3 months remaining. Book your weekend today. Book now and receive your choice of mattress or one of our two deluxe couches.

I tried writing but not everything can be contained within a blog entry. Certain essential intricacies are excluded via a text-only format. Without said intricacies I will seem foolish. More than likely, I will seem like a fool regardless of what I include in my entryy. I am a fool.

I am slightly buzzed. I feel silly.

Sitting here, listening to Ænima, just sort of staring off into nothing. I haven't listened to this whole album in one sitting in over a year. Our last meeting was one produced out of sorrow and anger; this one isn't. More likely from boredom and solitude.

I need to make some cookies. Maybe I should shape them like eggs.

I have also been playing Diablo.

I feel 14.

It's always the weirdest places that I have the most enlightening conversations. i.e. Tonight with the hostess at Tony Roma's. I've made it a habit of going out for dinner to celebrate/bemoan my first day of the semester. It seems the pace of my life is simply too fast for a city like Windsor. I find the lack of a good roti place more stressful than sitting in rush hour traffic moving an inch at a time. The crowded nature of Toronto's streets/public transportation/roadways is a comfort to me.

My musical tastes also seem to change as I get closer to Windsor. Bright Eyes. The Dears. Even Death Cab. They all seem to be coming up more often in iTunes. A social animal understimulated in his environment.

I fear I'm reverting back to a version of life that I thought I had grown out of. A stage that no longer had any reason to exist with the world that I currently live in.

Pearl Jam

Release
World Wide Suicide
Life Wasted
Severed Hand
Hail Hail
Unemployable
Dissident
Even Flow
Corduroy
I Am Mine
Low Light
Whipping
You Are
I Got Id/(Cinnamon Girl)
Better Man/(Save it for Later)
Jeremy
Marker In The Sand
Black
Rearviewmirror

Wasted Reprise/Man Of The Hour
Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town
State Of Love And Trust
Do The Evolution
Alive

Go
Crazy Mary
Fuckin' Up
Indifference
Yellow Ledbetter

The Strokes

Heart In A Cage
The End Has No End
Juicebox
Red Light
You Only Live Once
Soma
Ize of the World
Someday
Alone, Together
Last Nite
Hard to Explain
Barely Legal
Electricityscape
12:51
Walk On The Wild Side
Ask Me Anything
Vision Of Division
Reptilia

New York City Cops
Is This It?
Hawaii
Take It Or Leave It

Both of these shows were really good and once the Stills got past their sound issues, their show was solid as well. Deafness looms...

No Radiohead album but I guess I'll settle for a Thom York solo one. Pitchfork.

Back in Windsor so more posts will be more frequent.

Sous-titre:(And then there was one...)

Another year past, another script played out, another book to write.

One of my least favourite things about my large extended family is having to listen to everyone's well-intentioned but ultimately pointless advice. Case in point:

a) When I was first heading off to university everyone said how much better it was that we were in Canada as opposed to Greece since I wouldn't be conscripted to the army.
b) Now that I'm at the point where I can see the end of school and turning a year older, how at the age of 23 they were married and expecting their first child and how an engineering degree is useless without a Masters/PHD/MBA because their cousin's fiancee's sister's friend can't find a job.

You never hear the story of the distant cousin who is just doing alright; who is just living a life that I can see myself living. It's either horrible disaster or unreal success. (Note: These are real comments from the past few days.)

"He got a degree in Civil Engineering and couldn't find a job; he should've stayed in school. Now he doesn't have any money and he's not married. Is that why you're not going to stay in school because you're getting married?"

OR

"He stayed in school for 9 years getting a degree in this and then that and now he's making $500 000/year and he's a member at Granite (some pricey golf club. First I had heard of it). You should stay in school so you can become a member there too. And his house, oh, it's four times bigger than yours now."

It seems that getting a good job, living a tidy life and staying in the 416 is no longer an acceptable thing to strive for. It's got to be the moon and anything less is disappointing to everyone. It's got to be the best job, the biggest house in Aurora/Woodbridge/Newmarket. Added pressure points for being the first-born of the new generation.

I quickly resolved the hamster situation on Monday night by dropping off the overly aggressive black male and the overly passive teddybear female off with Peter's sister so that she could take them into PJ's Pets so they could be resold to a loving family who will hopefully not stick them in the cage with another hamster. The remaining hamster has settled into a much more peaceful existence without the clamour of two other cagemates.

I got the Coachella DVD for my birthday; it can be reviewed as one of two things.
1) A brilliant marketing maneuver. Getting people to pay for an informercial of the product that you're trying to sell them.
2) A way to keep the memories of a brilliant trip alive. From the fun of watching unpegged tents rolling around on a Friday night, to the mountains and palm trees all in the same view, to the sight of tens of thousands of people are coming to have the same yet unique experience. And the music, of course.

It's both. And worth it. I get the chills watching the Arcade Fire performance.

I will be back next year.

If I had known what my afternoon had in store for me at Mill Run yesterday, I probably would have stayed home and watched hockey. I headed up to the highland without having swung a club in eight months and without a tee time hoping to squeeze in with some other group. So I ended up with three guys my age who hailed from Keswick. And who were stoned. And who were drunk. And who had brought their own beer (Carling, of course). And who were driving carts. And who crashed their cart into a tree going down the hill from the ninth hole to the tenth teeoff. They completely destroyed the top of the cart as it was abused by limb after limb. After "playing" two more holes, they left after 12 and I'm pretty sure that Mill Run won't ever see a dime in repairs from them. Idiots. Ended up 39-34-73 with a birdie too.

The hamsters are doing well, and by well I mean they haven't killed each other yet, from being confined in one cage. I haven't decided on names yet though I'm kind of hoping that all three are female so I can call them Amy, Leslie and Emily not Lisa though because Lisa kind of sucks. So I definitely need to find out the sex of these beasts so they don't start the "sex" and the eating of the "babies". Hyper little bastards, they are.

Something I'm going to try doing here for a bit is taking a look back to the bands that SPIN magazine said we should keep an eye out for. Each issue had one A-list up and comer, one or two B-list ones and three or four C-list ones. So let's start with the first issue of SPIN that I own with this feature:

January 2000; Cover: Trent Reznor
A:
Tommy Lee (Methods of Mayhem)
"Actually Methods of Mayhem's album isn't half-bad. Sure, it's got the now-predictable heavy guitar riffage and supermacho vocal attack long ago patented by Rage Against The Machine and others. ... Most of all, Lee's got an unhesitating passion for body-moving, pleasure-seeking beats that's rare in most rap-metal."
Ugh, this is not a promising start. Who can forget 'Get Naked'? That song sure rocked the pants off me and countless other sixteen year-olds. Right? That's what happened wasn't it?

B:
Shivaree
A band from the L.A. area was a sound described as "Southern Gothic sound effects with trailer-trash-heroine like lyrics" release their debut album in 1999.
Never heard of them. Though they still seem to be around and have released two more albums, most recently in 2005. You've probably heard one of their songs and didn't even realize it. Their song Goodnight Moon was played over the closing credits of Kill Bill: Volume 2.

Nebula
"A raw, psychedelic hard-rock album full of fuzzed out guitars that often recalls Mudhoney and vintage Blue Cheer."
So this sounds like stoner rock to me. It looks like they got dropped by Subpop after their second album. Who gets dropped by Subpop in the early part of aughts? Prior to this revitalization they weren't exactly the most thriving label. They're still around releasing an album in 2006.

C:
Space Raiders
"The British Trio deliver a mix of deep-house disco-funk and '70s synth beats"
Too late to cash in on the electronica rage of 1997, they had moderate success in the U.K. but couldn't make it across the Atlantic since if it wasn't nu-metal it wasn't getting played. Do Electronica produders who get together to make an album disband after they're done? Nothing since 2000.

8Stops7
"8Stops7 sand down Pearl Jam-like brawny rhythms, riffs and persecutions while singer Evan Sula-Goff tries to build a better Vedder on vocals."
Wow, a band emulating Pearl Jam in 1999 or 2000. They were a dime a dozen, my friend and you got what you paid for. It seems like they only had this one album and broke up or disappeared. Oh well.

The Butchies
"The lesbian punk equivalent of the Backstreet Boys."
God, what does that even mean? Do they have lesbian punk dance sequences? Last album in 2004.

Lil Wayne
"A hardcore reality rapper who doesn't curse, Lil Wayne brings old-fashioned Southern flava to his rapid-fire rhymes."
Finally, someone with some success. Or at least a name I've heard in this millennium. Probably, best know for his nickname "Lil Weezy". He is now the president of the Cash Money Records label and Young Money Entertainment. Weezy is still releasing albums, most recently in 2005 which has sold just less than 900,000 copies.