As my brother did (we were both supposed to do it the same day…or so he thought…it’s a long story) back in December, I’ve narrowed my list of favourite songs from 2008 down to 33. The number’s part of the long story, don’t ask.
I actually took a rough stab at ranking them too, though I’ll no doubt change my mind next week.
Constantines . “Million Star Hotel”
Frightened Rabbit . “Keep Yourself Warm”
MGMT . “Time To Pretend”
TV On The Radio . “Halfway Home”
Santogold . “LES Artistes”
Frightened Rabbit . “Floating in the Forth”
Ladyhawk . “Ghost Blues”
Walkmen . “In The New Year”
Mates Of State . “Now”
We Are Scientists . “After Hours”
Death Cab For Cutie . “I Will Possess Your Heart”
Rogue Wave . “Electro-Socket Blues”
And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead . “Festival Thyme”
Rural Alberta Advantage . “Frank, AB”
Cold War Kids . “Something Is Not Right WIth Me”
Wolf Parade . “Soldier’s Grin”
Fembots . “My Hands Are a City”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds . “We Call Upon The Author”
This Will Destroy You . “The Mighty Rio Grande”
Devotchka . “Along The Way”
Vampire Weekend . “Ottoman”
Wye Oak . “Warning”
Lightspeed Champion . “Devil Tricks For A Bitch”
Tricky . “Council Estate”
Duke Spirit . “Send A Little Love Token”
Fucked Up . “Son The Father”
Ladytron . “I’m Not Scared”
Kings Of Leon . “Notion”
Marnie Stern . “Ruler”
Bowerbirds . “Hooves”
Raveonettes . “The Thief”
Deus . “Oh Your God”
Black Keys . “All You Ever Wanted”
The first time I heard that Constantines song I pulled it out of the playlist and listened to it on repeat. I couldn’t stop listening. It was never not my favourite song of the year.
There are few things as jarring as your elevator going wonky partway through your descent from a high floor. Yesterday Nellie and I — and no one else, thankfully — were heading downstairs in one of our building’s elevators when, just passed the fifth floor, we felt a wicked shimmy. Immediately the elevator ground to a halt and a loud buzzer went off. Alrighty then. I’ve been stuck in elevators before, and I understand enough about elevator safety features to know we weren’t going to plummet to our doom or anything, so after a few wary seconds of making sure we weren’t moving any further, I pressed the call button.
The person who answered told us she was notifying our security guard and calling the elevator company, who should be there in about ten minutes. Great. We chatted while we waited, wondering which floor we were on. Our security guard came up and yelled to us through the door to sit tight. Which we did. For thirty minutes. Security guy came back to check on us once in a while, and told us he’d been calling the elevator tech to get a move on, and he should be here soon. By this point I was getting kind of annoyed, and maybe a little hungry (I’d been on my way down for a croissant) so I hit the call button again. I explained that it’d been half an hour, and where the ass was this technician anyway, Hamilton? This guy put me on hold — I’ll get back to that in a second — and came back on to tell me the tech was fifteen minutes away, blah blah blah, whatever. I asked him if he could do anything to speed things up and he just gave me a party line scripted answer that no, wait for the tech, he’ll be there shortly, wank wank wank. He was being so dismissive that I think I called him a jerk-off.
After about ten minutes (not fifteen! under-promise/over-deliver works hurrah!) security guy yells through the door that the tech has arrived, he’s gone to fix something, all should be well soon. Moments later the elevator starts moving. Up. Goddammit, I just want a croissant! Whatever. It goes to the 22nd floor…kind of random, sez I, since this is neither our destination nor the floor we came from. We get off to find a crowd of people, not knowing this is an accursed elevator, about to get on. We warn them that this elevator might not really be in fighting trim right now, and to send it away. They do, and we walk home to have pancakes instead. All’s well, we call security guy to thank him, and burn a tiny effigy of ThyssenKrupp‘s headquarters. After all, it’s not as if this is the first problem we’ve had with our elevators…they’ve ranged from quirky (doors don’t open for 60 seconds sometimes) to completely inoperative (leading to massive lineups, delays and kvetching) ever since we moved in. It’s probably been the biggest common complaint I’ve heard from other owners, and it sounds as if we’re not the first people to be trapped like this…security guy knew the drill well enough to ask for our suite number because he figured the chairman of the condo board would probably want to give us a call.
Anyway, back to the hold music: this might have been the worst part. I should point out that I don’t think Thyssen-Krupp owns the call centre where my elevator call terminated…it sounded like a security company who then contacts the elevator tech, but the operators certainly know the calls are coming from people trapped in elevators. I know the ins and outs of call centre mechanics well enough to know that putting people on hold is unavoidable, so I don’t mind it like some people do, but here’s the thing: there are times when hold music doesn’t make sense. I wasn’t calling to ask about your store hours, I was calling because I was trapped in a steel box suspended 60 feet off the ground. In such a situation I do not need to hear — and I am not making this up — a tinkly Muzak version of “Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong”. I would like to hear beeping, or an occasional voice telling me someone would be right with me, or something else that suggests urgency on the part of the people tasked with getting me out of said dangling box, not the instrumental dreck I’d expect if I called Sears to buy an ottoman.
I don’t think Esquire gets enough respect. For a magazine that too often gets lumped in to the “Men’s Interest” section of the magazine rack with Details and GQ, it strikes a good mix of fun, hotness and (relative) intellectual stimulation. For examples of the first look no further than {dreamy sigh} their most recent winner of the Hottest Woman Alive award. For examples of the last, I submit the following:
In this country, ten states supply fifty-seven percent of the guns that police recover from criminals in all other states. When compared to the ten states that supplied the fewest firearms, a recent nationwide analysis found that those ten gun-toting states also had nearly sixty-percent more homicides and three times as many cops dead from gunfire.
…
The difference between the states with all those cops shot dead and the others boils down to two obvious realities: gun-show regulations and gun-permit requirements. (I’ll leave you to decide which states have strict rules and which don’t). It’s another symbol with a body count, another political football with terrible consequences in the world as it actually exists. In the name of absolute firearm freedom without any restrictions — which will never be anything but a symbol until private citizens can buy working tanks and fighter planes — all those real cops are really dead.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The irony of 9/11 and the wars that followed was that they were supposed to disestablish irony as a reigning sensibility; instead, they wound up exposing us to ironies of the bitterest and darkest and cruelest kind. That is, not McSweeney’s — style irony, the irony of bright minds roaming free in increasingly confined spaces; but ironies contrived by the brutal hand of history itself. The ironies of the Bush Years were ironies that exposed the consequences of our assent, guided — missile ironies that were unerringly aimed at point after point of the American creed, which began 2001 as the foundation of our belief and ended 2008 as the scaffolding of our credulity. America does not attack countries that have not attacked us. America does not torture. America takes care of its own. America follows the rule of law. America’s laws are built upon the principle of habeas corpus. America’s distinction is its system of checks and balances. American democracy is the inspiration of the world, and American capitalism the envy. America is better than that, no matter what “that” might be. These are not political statements; these are articles of faith, and yet in the Bush Years they suffered a political fate, as they became yoked to an administration that endured the irony of being the most image-conscious in American history at the precise historical moment when any control over how images were either promulgated or consumed was completely lost.
I encourage you to read both; the former is very short; the latter is worth every word of its three pages. And the next time you’re in a store, think about picking up an issue of Esquire.
I like cats. A lot of people don’t. I feel sorry for those people.
See, cats by and large are introverts. They’re quiet, they keep to themselves and they don’t shower people with attention the way that dogs (extroverts, to be sure) do. They have a few people for whom they feel genuine affection; the rest are looked on with more or less genial indifference. Extroverts look at introverts, whether in human or cat form, and think they’re broken. They misread introversion as shyness, antisocial behaviour or rudeness. In my experience extroverts have a hard time recognizing affection or happiness if it’s not delivered in an extroverted (read: obvious) way. That’s why people think that cats (and, um, me a lot of the time) are cranky or stuck-up.
Don’t get me wrong, I like extroverts just fine. Especially dogs…if I had the space for one to live with me, and I could just let it outside to shit, I’d have one…but I don’t have it, and I can’t do that, so no puppy. It’s just that as an introvert I can identify with cats a little better, and a lifetime of chuckling at perplexed extroverts has given me some insight on why cats get a bad rap.
I don’t know why the following fascinates me so, but it does: in about six years, give or take, there will be no one left alive who was born in the 1800s.
Based on the birth dates of the people officially recognized as the world’s oldest, and assuming top-end outlier lifespans remains roughly constant, some time in 2014 we should see the death of the last person whose life spans three centuries. I know that doesn’t really mean anything; it’s just a random distribution of regularly-occurring events around arbitrary milestones, but still…it seems weird. Or rather, it seems wonderful that someone alive today saw the death and birth of two centuries, and also seems vaguely sad that after they pass on we won’t see another of their kind for 86 years.
OK, that’s enough of that, I need to lighten the mood in here a little. Who’s up for some Tequila and a round of Yahtzee? We can call it Yahtzila. Or Tequizee, that’s fine…I’m not married to either.
Sanderson, a defenceman with the Whitby Dunlops, died early yesterday in Hamilton General Hospital. He had been in a coma and on life support since his head struck the ice during a fight in a AAA senior league game Dec. 12 in Brantford.
I’d held back on posting until the shock of the death had passed and the debate turned, as it naturally would, to whether fighting would be banned. I’ve been waiting, but the debate has not come. The lone discussion I’ve heard so far is whether the rules governing the tightness of helmet chin straps (which might have held Sanderson’s helmet on when he fell to the ice) should be more strictly enforced. This seems akin to enforcing seat belt laws for street racers, rather than trying to stop street racing itself.
Anyone calling for an end to fighting in hockey is met with ridicule (even Serge Savard), even deemed unpatriotic or lacking understanding of the game. Horseshit. Fighting proponents quote some circular argument about ‘the unwritten code’ of hockey, that fighters are there to ‘take care’ of a guy who breaks the rules, and respect each other, presumably as they punch one another in the face. Meanwhile referees, old hockey guys themselves, give out penalties for some infractions but look the other way for others if they think a team’s fighter will take care of things, thus perpetuating this myth of fighters being necessary for the game. This mutually supportive argument spins itself in a spiral, but in the face of logic eventually defaults to the tired plea that “it’s always been this way”, surely the silliest rule for why anything should continue.
The other argument, say fight fans, is that without fighting hockey won’t be entertaining. This is an easy one to dispel, as anyone who’s watched even a few minutes of a World Junior game, or any international tournament, can see.
It’s a difficult position to justify that hockey alone is the one league that requires fighting, or at the very least does not punish it (beyond a meaningless 5-minute penalty). In every other major sport, fighting is strongly discouraged (not tacitly allowed) and results in automatic suspensions. The only other sport where fighting is part of some kind of protective ‘code’ is baseball, surely the pussiest of the major sports. Football, on the other hand — which by any measure is as tough, smash-mouth and brutal as hockey, and almost certainly more so — does not allow fighting.
Staying with the NFL for a moment, imagine the absurdity of a scene where an offensive linesman, unhappy at the fact that his quarterback was tackled (clean though it might have been) grabs the opposing player by the jersey, rips off his helmet and starts punching him in the face. The other player starts punching back. No teammates try to break them up, and linesman (understandably) wait until they tire themselves out before interfering. The referee, knowing a teammate would come to the defense of the downed quarterback because of the unwritten code of football, doesn’t bother throwing the penalty flag. He knows these guys just need to let off a little steam. He also knows that if he doesn’t let these guys duke it out at midfield like this, that the other nasty penalties like clipping or face-masking will just happen more often. So goes the common wisdom, without much evidence to back it up.
Back to reality, and to hockey: there’s simply no logical argument for allowing fighting in the NHL, but as long as troglodytes like Don Cherry advocate for it, it’ll be around. If Gary Bettman wants to leave a legacy of actually improving the game, he should ban fighting and watch the rest of the world take his sport more seriously. So long as players in the world’s premier hockey league are allowed to beat each other bloody in the middle of the ice, and then do it again the following night (or even minutes later!), precious few outside of Canada will associate the game with skill, grit or speed. They’ll associate it with thuggish brutality.
Finally, I submit that fighting should be banned if only to prevent pathetic displays like this from ever again occurring:
Four days since I last blogged. The hell is wrong with me lately?
A good four days it’s been though. Thursday night was spent partaking in one of my favourite pastimes: watching the Habs beat up on the Leafs. Friday we had dinner at Fieramosca, and came home to find our Wii Fit waiting for us. We considered setting it up that night, but the wine and limoncello we’d just consumed made us think twice. Ironically.
Yesterday was our get-crap-done day (capped off by an excellent meal and very nice 2004 Cab Sauv from New Zealand), freeing up today for brunch with our friend Cyndy and entertaining CBGBLB, who I think were just using us for our Wii. But they brought us chocolates* and convinced us to order pizza, so we didn’t mind. We also finally put up our TTC wall decals, courtesy of Walloper, which we think look pretty sharp.
I’ll be honest with you: the idea of staying home tomorrow to play Wii Fit and lightsaber duel kind of appeals to me more than the idea of going to work tomorrow.
* The chocolates were from Eat My Words. Very cool idea in support of the Steven Lewis Foundation, and a great gift idea. Check it out.
Time for your sports update, you bunch of wussies.
Tonight I watched the Montreal Canadiens handle the New York Rangers 6-3. That makes them the third-best team in the eastern conference points-wise (though they’re ranked fourth, though, because division leaders get the top three seeds) behind Boston and Washington. While the Canadiens were expected to win the conference this year, no one expected Boston to be as good as they’ve been, or for the Canadiens to suffer the injuries they’ve had.
The Habs are currently missing their #1 goalie Carey Price, as well as what’s essentially their #1 (or at least #1b) line of Saku Koivu, Alex Tanguay and Chris Higgins, not to mention defenceman Mathieu Dandenault, but they’ve won 5 of their last 6. I’m not sure how they’re doing it, but they are. I just hope they can hold it together until those guys get back.
OK, normal cerebrally whiny programming will resume momentarily.
The golden age of television may be over just a few short years after it began. 2008 not only marked one of the worst years of TV in the last decade, but all of the momentum and promise of the past few years seemed to vanish in a haze of crappy, unoriginal new programming, lackluster sophomore shows, flaccid sitcoms and pointless cable comedies.
Deservedly so, too. Just months and years removed from the likes of The Wire, Six Feet Under and The Shield, we’re now faced with this harbinger of doom:
And has there ever been a more depressing sign of TV’s demise than the move by NBC to give Jay Leno, the epitome of a guy who’s flatly bad at his job but continues to be promoted for reasons utterly mysterious to mortal man, a whopping five hours of prime-time real estate, thereby saving themselves from the unpleasant work of finding worthwhile programming to fill their nightly 10 p.m. slot?
The Star also weighed in with a recap (less with the doomsday, more with the funny) of the past year’s horror show:
Herbie Hancock wins Album of the Year at the “Granny” Awards as music pundits slap their foreheads and check their calendars. Nope, it’s not 1983. Ratings plummet.
…
Cloris Leachman dresses like a rapper and asks, “What’s up, homeys?” in an old school hip-hop number on Dancing With the Stars. Viewers, horrified at the spectre of the 82-year-old Emmy winner in short shorts and rapper’s cap, vote her off the following week.
The concept of TV as art seems to be just about dead. Apart from the seven shows I actually care about — 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica, The Daily Show, Friday Night Lights, Life, The Office and The Unit — I’m increasingly seeing the TV as nothing more than a sports & movie delivery device.
Just declare the 4 big American networks 24-hour reality TV channels and be done with it. HBO can buy Netflix and we’ll all be happy.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 