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May 31, 2007 >> Two men I don't-didn't knowSo not much has happened lately; or, alternately, a LOT has happened and I just don't feel like writing about it.
But a guy pulled me aside from a busy intersection the other day and very calmly explained to me that all this *gesturing at skyscrapers* would be our downfall. We would be punished like little children, probably by the Russians. He said that churches were devilish because they've forgotten the snippets of Jesus that dealt with abandoning your worldly possessions and working for love and love alone. The pamphlet he gave me had a picture of an American dollar bill on fire.
It is somewhat terrifying that, in the moment, all of this made perfect sense.
And then in the subway station another guy (in a Hawaiian shirt) swore at us and said we were too loud, that we were giving him a headache. He was crazy. Sometimes headaches mean SEVERE NEUROSIS. I wondered what it would be like if he had tried to throw me in front of a train. Is that automatic entry to heaven, if some fucking psycho murders you because you were too noisy? Are you forgiven for all that you've bought?
Posted by Chris at 05:43 PM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink
May 23, 2007 >> Just down the road...
There's a helicopter overhead, droning through the window. Off the balcony and around the corner huge police vehicles cordon off the route. It's just down the road but only the internet can tell me what the hell is going on. Some kid went swimming, but he's not swimming anymore. He's full of holes and swimming red.
I pass that school everyday on the bus and I didn't even know it had a pool.
Posted by Chris at 06:07 PM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
May 21, 2007 >> Happiness through destruction
On a night when everything explodes, Toronto burns neon. I never really imagined that May 24 could be anything more than retardedly drunk, but from the balcony things look different. The horizon bounces and pops and even the ghetto is festive. Population density is, on occasion, something to consider with a smile.
Posted by Chris at 10:06 PM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
May 13, 2007 >> Brand New Religion
I like to follow up on guilty musical pleasures from time to time, to see where the so-called emo sound has meandered to. Most bands predictably devolve into utter retardation (see: The Used) or slog through the same material without the catchy hooks that made it enticing the first time round (Taking Back Sunday, Thrice). Perhaps more interesting is the trend of moving from hearts to hard religion. Brand New's The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me and Cursive's Happy Hollow both get a little spiritual, or a lot spiritual.
Cursive has always been a little out there, so songs about the epistemology of creation aren't that surprising: ("They say there was this big bang once, but the clergyman doesn't agree. There was this big bang once but it don't jive with Adam and Eve, original sin, idyllic garden, some talking snake giving apples away.") It just so happens that Cursive drop-drops a concept album critiquing organized religion alongside other contemporaries.
Brand New, on the other hand, has a brief and furious history of spewing disdain for heartbreaking / shallow women: ("And even if her plane crashes tonight she'll find some way to disappoint me. Why not burning in the wreckage, or drowning at the bottom of the sea? Yes I still taste you, and thus reserve my right to hate you.") It's pretty venomous stuff, the soundtrack for a teenage breakup and subsequent burning of an ex's clothes in a steel trashcan. A homeless barbecue.
All this cursing and brooding must've got to frontman Jesse Lacey, because The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me turns abruptly inwards and contemplative. The anger turns off like a faucet. Still selfish, Brand New seems to tire of facile females (and, perhaps, of relentlessly abusing them). It's now time for repentance, in a certain sense, and to take on the Big Questions in life. Such as, will I get away with fucking all these chicks, giving them chlamydia and then writing songs about how clueless and worthless they are? I'd be scared of God too.
Still, the album reads more like a sour grapple with the supernatural than a glowing submission to the Almighty. In 'Jesus / Jesus Christ', Lacey wonders about the afterlife before concluding:
"I know you're coming in the night like a thief
But I've had some time to hone my lying technique
I know you think that I'm someone you can trust
But I'm scared I'll get scared and I swear I'll try to nail you back up
So do you think that we could work out a sign
So I'll know it's you and that it's over so I won't even try
I know you're coming for the people like me
But we all got wood and nails
We turn, turn out hate in factories
We all got wood and nails
And we sleep inside this machine"
Hilariously enough, Christian kiddies are crawling all over this tune as a sign of newfound faith. I am somewhat curious as to where they drew that assumption from, beyond the song's title, as it looks a lot to me like Brand New is sad and lonely and evidently ready to crucify Jesus a second time. And then sell the raw footage to Mel Gibson. Now these are still sketchy characters, but at least they're tackling the repercussions from a new angle. Regardless of how you read the song, it's somewhat more thought provoking than yet another drama-fest about teenagers drinking on an overpass, or a teenage car crash, or whatever. Fuck teenagers!
Anyway, I find it interesting that the next step up the lyrical hierarchy from romance is often pondering one's existence. Too bad most bands never even take that first evolutionary baby-step. But what comes after that? Singing about unicorns and dragons? Prog rock?
Posted by Chris at 01:08 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
May 12, 2007 >> A Zoo Tale: Geese Losing Their Patience
After wandering across five continents we were thirsty for booze. The Polar Bear Patio - a driving force in our meandering trek - turned out to be sadly barren, chairs upturned and courtyard chained off. "Oh, we don't serve alcohol until after May Two-Four," the young lady behind the counter at a nearby Harvey's explained. This represented a double-disappointment in the zoological adventures of Scutterk and Clemens, both because we are raging alcoholics and because we were at Harvey's.
We share a childhood memory of the zoo in which kids all around us feast on McDonald's while we glumly eat a homemade picnic on the grass, suffering healthiness and envy. That's the only recollection that persists twenty years later: the monkeys, the elephants, failed to impress significance upon us at that once-tender age. We can only remember that our families denied us the glory of the Happy Meal, ungrateful little bastards / bitches that we were. So, in part, returning to the bestial scene of the crime was to be a significant correction of past injustices, and we had planned to cram our faces with gross Big Macs. Revenge tastes like grade-D meatstuffs.
However, recollection and reality ultimately proved to be incompatible. Harvey's has ripped the lucrative whiny-kid-hates-animals market away from McDonald's in the lengthy interim, and to make matters worse May 2-4 was weeks away. Dreams denied across the board, time working against humankind.
Fiercely abandoning Harvey's, we crossed paths with a delightfully instructive posterboard on the behavioral science of geese. If their heads are up, they'd like you to keep your distance. If their heads are down, they're losing their patience! This made a lot of sense, as prior experience with geese has shown them to be fuckheads no matter where their heads are pointed. After pretending to be a goose and issuing each of these warnings in a vaguely Arnold Schwarzenegger-ish voice, we moved onwards. Two specimens of this apparently hyper-aggressive breed of asshole bird ominously flapped overhead.
Later, when we had grown tired of the antics of somersaulting spider-monkeys (they have prehensile tails which work as a fifth hand... AWESOME if they ever want to turn tricks in New York City), we headed for the exit. Beyond the unabashed shame of the Zoo Store, where you can buy Zoo Hats and Zoo Keychains and probably even Zoo Condoms, Green-Eyed Scutt spotted a bathroom. While she went to do girlie things, I noticed that a goose - presumably one of the ominous geese we had seen earlier, for narrative purposes - was stalking the grounds.
A young mother had wheeled her baby stroller up to the reprehensible bird and was angling for that perfect photo, a freeze-frame of happy little Susy plus wild denizen to be ooh-ed and aww-ed over on Facebook. Meanwhile the goose was in full 'I'm Losing My Patience' stance: neck rigid, eye evilly trained on the infant, hissing like Hellspawn. The child was understandably crying and yelling it up (our well-trained instincts, even from birth, are to avoid being pecked by asshole birds), but mom was well engrossed in the production of Memory. My own childhood McDonald's disappointment immediately paled in comparison to the trauma this kid would one day face, and I suspect the ensuing photo of squalling terror will only make things worse: "Look Suzie, this was from our first EVAR trip to the zoo!" / "Great mom, and now you know why I'm a prison guard with obsessive-compulsive disorder."
The icing on the cake was when Green-Eyed Scutt rejoined me and the goose immediately turned to terrorize us instead. Scutty let out a scream - the kind of spontaneous squeal I hear when slices of bread suddenly erupt skywards out of her toaster - and we inched past the furious avian, Keeping Our Distance. Who knows what would've happened if we hadn't learned how to interpret the complex, cryptic body language of geese? CARNAGE, that's what.
The zoo is no place for a young child with a healthy future.
Posted by Chris at 09:07 PM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
May 10, 2007 >> Updating Elsewhere
Part of the higher education process is jumping onboard popular trends just as they cease to become popular. Thus I am required to keep a "blog" of thoughts and feelings about my Interactive Design class (innovative, I know!). It's so nu-wave I could scream, or maybe type.
If you don't like school, you'll never want to go here: Designing an Interactive Clemens.
Posted by Chris at 02:57 PM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
May 04, 2007 >> Abraham does it on Jetplanes
Remember that time when I told you about Jetplanes of Abraham? Probably not, because you have a poor memory from smoking so much pot. Regardless, I saw them again last night at the yuppie-fest Drake Hotel. I remain firm in my conviction that these guys are the proverbial Next Big Thing in Canadian music. They added a new violin-girl, Jackie, who does backup vocals on some of the (I thought) weaker songs and adds additional layers of sauce to the Jetplanes pizza. It's getting pretty BSS-ish up on that stage now, there are so many band members that it looks like nobody has anywhere to move. This is what it would be like if sardines tried to play awesome tunes.
Remember, Clemens called it... in the third person. If Jetplanes blows up in the next couple years, you'll be sorry that you didn't listen now! The band members told me it was okay to piratize and distribute their album when I saw them at the Horseshoe, so let me know if you want some songs.
Posted by Chris at 01:09 PM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
May 03, 2007 >> Bun yur Facebook
Hello. I was probably going to write something here tonight, something PRETTY FUNNY MAYBE, until mine fingers deceived me and created a Facebook account. Yes, I have fallen. So far I have learnt that it is ghey to post on your own wall, and that people inexplicably spend a dollar to send tiny pictures of stupid mushy valentine's shit to each other. Also it sorta feels like Pokemon, where you have to 'collect' all your old high school friends. Basically a big dumbass waste of time, a filthy extract of virtual pomposity and ball-grabbing. Utterly unable to tear wide-eyed self away from spectacle.
Posted by Chris at 02:45 AM >> Commentations (5) | Permalink
May 02, 2007 >> A Zoo Tale: Rhinoplasty
The obvious question that follows is, "How did this particular rhinestone cowboy lose its horn? Did it slip into the drain while the rhino was washing dishes? Did the rhino trade its horn for three magical wishes, and accidentally wish for world peace but it didn't work out? And maybe the second wish was for more wishes, but genies are smart about that now so no dice, and the third wish was for a delicious ham sandwich which turned out to be slightly stale?" I asked Green-Eyed Scutt and she somberly pointed towards a mural painted behind us in the rhino paddock, a mural which seeks to address and answer these very questions. Whence the rhinelette's horn? Howforso did the mighty beast decline?
Clearly we can see that minorities are the culprits. A brown man stands guiltily with a horn in his hand, a felled rhino before him. There are some perspective issues here, like how is a poacher bigger than a rhino for example, but whatever. Of particular interest is the quizzical expression on the poacher's face, as if to say, "Oh golly gee, did I murder yet another rhino? Whoopsie-daisy!" He sorta looks like he can't believe this is his job, that he gets to spear tiny little rhinos and break off their curiously oversized horns.
At least it's better employment than the other guy on the right there, the dude who is selling baskets of horns. Where's his body? You can't even see it, so either he has no body or it's just really dark in his Rhino-Horn Emplorium [sic]. Which is an unsafe; a health and safety violation. Employees might trip and fall over a basket of horns in the shadows and get skewered in an ironic act of rhino post-postmortem revenge. Still, this customer service representative looks kind of evil so that's what he gets if that's what he gets. It's important to notice that business is bad... nobody is buying rhino horns! Perhaps better marketing is in order, as a crudely painted 'MARKET' sign is likely to get swallowed up by today's fast-paced branded economy. A celebrity endorsement might help.
So the rhino's horn was taken by Bad Men, vague Arab-types who are depicted as incompetent and a little bit pathetic. They have all these horns, taken senselessly, without even drafting up a decent distribution model. And so the mural answers questions, but it also brings shame. Think of the zoo's rhino, pacing idly within its enclosure every evening after the crowds of onlookers have dissipated. All he has to look at is a mural about how his horn got stolen by a couple of fucking retards, and probably his brother's horn too. Hardly a confidence booster.
Posted by Chris at 12:13 AM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink