If you like Mark Rothko’s paintings as much as I do, you’ll be happy to know that the Tate Modern (which houses many of his works, including the Seagram murals which I’ve sampled above) has created a website where you can take a panoramic look at their Rothko exhibit.
[via the excellent Open Culture]
Ever since it last October we’ve enjoyed the restaurant at the corner of Front & Jarvis called That Corner Spot. After our first visit I blogged about the good beer (all local: Amsterdam & Mill Street), good food (good breakfast, excellent veggie burger), good produce (all procured from St. Lawrence Market across the screet) and good music. In the last month or so, though, it’s really taken a turn. Granted, it’s probably a turn for the more profitable — there are far more people in there now than before — but it’s also a turn for the generic. Gone is the small, local-focused menu; there’s now page after page of food available. The local beers, though still available, are now relegated to a small, mis-printed subsection of the menu. The simple tables, arty decor and interesting music have been replaced with generic tablecloths, Audrey Hepburn prints and light jazz. It hasn’t become a bad place; it’s just become every other place and lost what made it interesting. Like I said, it probably means they’ll survive a little longer, but I won’t be going back.
I always thought the generic name seemed out of place for a cool spot like that. Now I guess it fits perfectly.
We needed a day like today. After all the hours we’ve been working lately it felt good to sleep in and then just spend the day doing relaxing stuff. I probably should have done some work, but I figure keeping my sanity intact was worth getting a little behind. After working the past couple of weekends I’ve somewhat lost track of what day it is. I’m lucky I remembered to call my mother this morning for her birthday.
After a quick breakfast snack we strolled down to the Distillery District. I mainly wanted to check out the sale at Lileo, but nothing jumped out at me (or rather, nothing under $400 jumped out at me, so…) so we strolled around a little more, had some lunch at the Mill St. Brewpub, and collected the components of a meal for tonight. Little shopping at St. Lawrence Market on the way home and that was that. Too bad it was so cold and windy today; I’m desperate for a warm, sunny patio. One thing at a time, though; I’ll enjoy my relative relaxation while I can get it.
OK, back to lying in front of the hockey game.
Many years ago, as a teenager, I played drums in a rock band. An awful, awful rock band. There was much covering of Kiss and April Wine and Metallica and Steve Miller. Every song written by one of the the guitarists was…well, exactly the same. There were shows at fire halls and weddings and high school gyms. It was an equal mix of painful and hilarious. It was like a tragic hoot.
The band went through multiple names and lineups (including me…I left/was replaced near the end of high school) but the one constant was my friend Adam. I’ve known Adam for as long as I’ve known anybody, and we were good friends growing up. He was the one with talent…good songwriter, good guitarist, great singer. But he was also the one who believed in it the most.I liked playing the drums and hanging out with Adam, but I never believed it would go anywhere and knew I’d be going off to university. Others, like Adam’s friends Bruce or Jason or Mike, or his brother Justin, seemed to be in it mainly to have a blast or get girls.
But Adam wanted to make music. Always. In the summers he worked with me on my dad’s farm he carried around a little hand-held tape recorder so he could capture all the little songs he’d make up or piano tinkling he’d do if he was in our house. The music was one of the fun things about being in his orbit. He had determination and a nice voice and a friendly laugh and, most of all, a good heart, and so he managed to charm a beautiful girl named Sonya (in spite of himself…I was there that night…it wasn’t the smoothest) who he would eventually marry. After high school he moved to Ontario and recorded an album with a whole other set of guys, but didn’t stay long. Back home, there were more bands, more albums. Nothing really stuck.
Adam and I didn’t see each other much after high school. We kept in touch every now and then on email and Facebook. But he’s living there and I’m living here and I don’t see him much when I get home. We always kind of moved in different circles anyway, apart from when we played together. But I’ve kept up with how his music’s gone. He always managed to get me a copy of whatever CD he’d just put out with whatever band. It was hard to keep track sometimes, honestly.
But in the last few years his band Big Deal has done well locally. They were playing bigger shows…big bars in other towns, ECMA satellite shows. I watched them on Halifax’s Breakfast Television morning show. Despite Adam’s massively fucked back (I’ve lost count of the surgeries that my mother recounts on the phone…I think maybe Adam has too) they were getting attention and selling records and winning fans. A song he wrote about Sonya became a pretty big local hit.
So earlier this week, when I read this story by our mutual friend (and reporter) Andrew Wagstaff in my old hometown newspaper, I couldn’t stop smiling. Big Deal, consisting of the three guys I’d played with and known since childhood, and the drummer who (I think) replaced me all those years ago, had been signed to a record deal with Attack and a distribution deal with EMI. I know there are four guys in the band, and I’m sure there’ll all pretty happy about it, but the guy I’m truly happy for is Adam. My good friend, after all those years of shit bars and back spasms and teachers telling him he’d never amount to anything…he just willed his band into a record deal. He just got the letters E, M and I attached to his music.
Today, as I write this, I probably miss Adam more than I ever have. I feel sad that I couldn’t be there last night when Big Deal played a for-old-time’s-sake show at the local community hall, just like we did as kids. I feel a little bit envious that he’s chased something for so long and just gutted it out. But mostly, I’m proud of my friend.
Kick ass, brother. Just don’t hurt your back when you do it.
I need a new MP3 player. Just a small one to hold my newest music; I find that my new music disappears into the depths of my player — which I usually have set to play all songs randomly — and I need a small one I can use for the ten most recent albums, plus a few hundred other songs.
Normally this would be an easy exercise. Ever since I bought my first MP3 player nine years ago, I’ve been a loyal Creative user. They’ve always been solid devices that never break, don’t force DRM or native file formats and are incredibly easy-to-use.
Lately, though, Creative just doesn’t seem to be keeping up. Their players have always been utilitarian (read: ugly), which was fine because (unlike most people) I don’t buy an MP3 player to be a fashion accessory. But their new players look almost comical, their features are falling behind and their models don’t seem to fit what I need.
Now, there’s an obvious, ubiquitous suggestion: the iPod. Problem is, I’ve never been an iPod fan…they’re expensive, I don’t like the wheely interface, they occasionally require ridiculous fixes like being dropped on the floor, iTunes sounds like a nightmare and, I’ll be honest, I’d hate feeling like a sheep every day when I passed fifteen grandmothers and tweens shaking their Shuffle on the subway.
But goddamit, their devices seemed like the only viable ones still out there. I started to wonder if anybody was even left in the game, or if all the other manufacturers had simply ceded their ground to Apple. I’m not getting a Zune, especially not after that whole ‘every 30GB device in the world blew up at the same time’ incident, and besides they look like they were produced in the Cold War era Soviet Bloc.
I had started to resign myself to the iDea of being an iPod oWner, but then I found anythingbutipod.com…and all was right with the world once more. The 8GB Samsung P3 looks pretty nice…maybe I’ll check one of those out.
A few weeks ago Richard Florida’s blog ran a whole series of charts showing (American) state-by-state trends in quality-of-life indices — physical health, GDP per capita, etc. — for what Florida has famously dubbed the Creative Class, vs. the Working Class.
In this series, though, Florida wasn’t touting the advantages of the creative class so much as he was worried by the outlook for the working class.
So maybe it’s time to think twice when we hear how important it is to save “good” working class jobs. Individually, that may well be the case. Some of these jobs pay very well, and lots of people who lose them may find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to find similar work at their pay levels
But from the point of view of society and economic development broadly, it’s important to recognize that states with large concentrations of working class jobs do very poorly in terms of wealth and well-being.
These findings distress me personally. Looking them over and over, I found myself thinking back to advice my father – who spent more then 50 years as a worker in a Newark eyeglass factory – gave my brother and I long ago. “Boys,” he said, “I do this so you won’t have to. That’s why you have to stay in school, study hard, and go to college.” I understand much better now what he was driving at.
Me too.
Memo to the author of this blog: it is March. Most people did this 3 months ago.
[ed: Bite me. I’ve been busy.]
I can’t keep waiting until I watch all the reportedly great movies from 2008 that I’ve not yet seen. I’ll just have to go ahead and pick my ten favourite films of last year now. The Wrestler be damned. Here you go, the top ten in alphabetical order:
A few like Cloverfield, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, It Might Get Loud and Pineapple Express just missed the list. And apparently all five I saw at Hot Docs were made in 2007, so none qualified for this list, though The Last Continent or Stranded: I’ve Come From A Plane That Crashed In The Mountains might have.
By the way, I don’t think Lion’s Den has made wide release yet, and I’m not sure it ever will, so keep your eyes peeled.
And, of course, a few films really disappointed me:
Yeah, that’s right, Tropic Thunder. Maybe it was all the people talking it up, but my god did I ever dislike that movie. If you took Danny McBride out of it I’m not sure I would’ve laughed even once. And Tom Cruise…christ, that shtick was annoying. I’ll be entirely happy never to watch that again.
So…what did I miss?
On Saturday Nellie wanted to see I Love You, Man (imdb | rotten tomatoes) and I needed a laugh after a long day at work, so to the AMC at Yonge & Dundas we went. Nellie has an alarming affection for both Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, and I like them both (in a pretty different way though) and love Rashida Jones. Besides, it just looked funny in the trailers, and funny was what I wanted.
Happily, we both really liked it. It was kind of in the vein of Knocked Up, I guess, except that it never lapsed into relationship cliche. The relationship between Rudd and Jones didn’t feel Hollywood, it felt pretty real. Other characters, like Segel’s and the hilarious asshole played by Jon Favreau, were sillier, but always funny. Rudd actually played it pretty straight, except for one scene (from which this post takes its title) that had me almost crying and I’m pretty sure was just Paul Rudd being Paul Rudd. Lots of other laughs through the whole movie too.
Side note: Rush featured very prominently in this film (they were actually in it). We also saw the trailer for Adventureland (imdb) and a character in the trailer has a funny bit involving “Spirit Of The Radio”…is Rush the official band of 2009? Does Geddy Lee have incriminating video of one or more studio heads? Weird.
I apologize for the poor quality of these images, but I just had to show you the ridiculousness that we walked past last night on the way home from Smokeless Joe.
You’ve probably all seen a stretch hummer limo before. They’re the preferred ride of gaggles of horny, be-tuxed teenagers and d-list actors trying to make a splash. We saw this one last night:
But take a look in front of it:
That behemoth was about two feet higher than the “regular” stretch hummer limo and longer. We had to get a closer look.
The engine hood of the truck looked bigger than anything my father uses to haul several tons of blueberries/bees/what have you. Sure enough, a little googling revealed that it was a Ford F-650. It also holds about 30 people and has an 1800 watt sound system. What. The. Christ. This was way more than a stretch hummer; what the hell is this monstrosity called?
Ah.
We saw this display on Adelaide Street, west of University. Not surprising; only in clubland would enough douchebags congregate to warrant the arrival of the almighty Mammoth. All hail.
The Junos are set to air tonight. I could not care less about this fact — the Junos have long since proved irrelevant to anyone with even a passing appreciation for music as an art — except that the disgust felt by music writers at the nominees is, well…delicious.
From Ben Rayner at the Toronto Star:
It’s Juno Awards season again, and we all know what that means: Nitpicking, kvetching, bitching, bellyaching, bemoaning and generally venting our displeasure in the direction of whomever the Canadian recording industry has singled out for celebration this year.
Still, we watch, don’t we? And while we groan and shake our heads and grumble “What a farce! How meaningless!” whenever someone hands Nickelback or Michael Bublé – or Bryan Adams’s designated representative in Canada – another one of those little glass statues, we also secretly long for F—ed Up to take home that “alternative album of the year” award because … well … because that would be freakin’ awesome. Especially if Anne Murray has to present the trophy.
And, thus, we are complicit in the whole, hated awards-ceremony process.
Robert Everett-Green of the Globe and Mail was a little less reflective:
“Thinking about this year’s Junos makes my head hurt. They’ve already elevated Nickelback above all other Canadian musicians. The rock louts from Hanna, Alta., have five nominations, more than anyone else. My first response was to close my eyes to the horror. Go ahead, Juno, give the awards to Don Cherry, for all I care.
Juno’s idiotic nomination rules give an automatic berth in key categories to acts that sell the most records, and have put Nickelback in contention for album and group of the year. To suggest this band’s receipts prove it’s the best Canada has to offer is like saying nobody in this country makes better sandwiches than Subway. Bear in mind that Neil Young’s Chrome Dreams II got no nominations at all. Neither did excellent albums by Shad, k.d. lang, the Sadies, We Are Wolves and Cadence Weapon.”
Poor Nickelback has been taking a beating in recent weeks over what is seeming more and more like canonization from the Junos — not surprising, since it’s the favor of the Canadian recording industry’s favor that decides the evening’s winners. But even the Edmonton Sun slammed them today:
“‘You don’t have a clur (sic) about music. How can you say a washed-up old man like Bob Dylan is better than Nickelback?’
I got that e-mail nearly eight years ago, and I’ve had it taped up near my desk ever since. Mainly because it’s hilarious on multiple levels — clur? But along with that, it neatly encapsulates the essential difference between music critics and Nickelback fans.
Which is, in a nutshell: We think Nickelback sucks. And they think Nickelback rules. And neither one is going to change the other’s mind.”
It’s too bad that the Junos haven’t seized on all the international critical attention on the honest-to-goodness great music coming out of Canada in recent years, instead rewarding the likes of Nickelback and all facsimilies thereof and throwing in token nominations to the likes of Fucked Up or The Stills (nominated for best new group…puzzling, as they released their first album in 2003, I think). But it’s nothing new. The Junos have always sucked; that’s why god invented the Polaris Music Prize.
Oh, and a final thought from Mr. Rayner, one which lifted me from my chair and led me to applaud:
“Great Big Sea: I live with a Newfie. I know dozens of Newfies. I lived in Glovertown for six years when my family first moved to Canada. The broad consensus, from what I gather, is: embarrassing.”
Hear hear.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 