Stairwells

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!

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

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:

1. There is a positive correlation between ignorance and brashness
2. 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

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.

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

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

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.