Greendale Saved

It’s just a silly TV show. Some gags and some chucklery once a week by a smart and talented cast and crew.

So why has news that Yahoo! has saved my beloved Community from the brink of extinction yet again filled me with such elation? Is it because Dan Harmon and Chris McKenna are returning to run things? Is it because Donald Glover seems to be finding his smile again after a year of touring and expressed a willingness to bring closure to the story of Troy Barnes? Is it because one half of the prophecy contained in a throwaway line from Season 2 will be fulfilled? Yes to all, but also more.

Community has always been, in many ways, a show about failure, about characters who couldn’t function, or gambled and lost as they stumble back to solid ground. The victories, when they come at all, are tiny and fleeting, a truth mirrored by the show’s history. Renewals tempered with shorter episode orders, no scheduled premiere dates  midseason hiatuses. When it did make the air it was put in a punishing time slot facing down the Chuck Lorre twin-ratings-behemoth of Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, two shows it could never really compete with because it was too busy gleefully jumping up its own ass. It almost seemed poetic that the show would die brushing its fingertips trying to reach the improbably prophesied sixth season.

But for those of us who love the show, who really love it, with the sort of all-encompassing passion usually reserved for Whovians or Browncoats, the show speaks to us because we recognize the struggle. Maybe we gambled and lost, too. Maybe we took the long way around to discovering why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do. As Jeff Winger says to the Dean after his bout of insanity while producing a TV commercial for the school, “We’ve all been there. Which is why we’re all here.”

And there will be many who bemoan that the show was never the same after the “Gas Leak Year” of Season 4, and the losses of Chevy Chase and Donald Glover. That it never regained its spirit even after Harmon returned, that it felt tired and out of ideas and should be left to die. And they can feel free to lean back with their arms folded and a smirk on their mugs. Yesterday I might have agreed with them, but it would only be to soften the loss I was feeling. From now until next spring, I just don’t have it for them. This isn’t refusing to let go of a notion the show may have outgrown, I don’t think Harmon’s the sort to do something he didn’t want to do, even if it was to honour the fans. If he didn’t think he had any stories to tell, he would walk. It’s a silly little TV show, but despite everything going against it, it’s still kicking. And so are we.

Darkest timeline averted, Human Beings.

A Letter to Donald

‘Bino,

I woke up from a mid-morning nap following an overnight shift to a phone blown up with texts and tweets alerting me to the spontaneous listening party you’d announced for your upcoming album in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods park.  I was a little shocked, as far as I knew you were still filming your episodes of Community, but with enough time to throw some clothes on and head down, I didn’t want this to be another of those “Cool things that happen in Toronto that I take for granted and don’t go to.”

There were only about fifty people or so when I showed up, standing around a kid with a pair of amplifiers. I foolishly thought attendance might actually stay at those levels, and that maybe I could tell you some of these things in person, but within fifteen minutes the crowd had swollen to around 200. As the crowd grew and 5.00 came and went the kid with the amplifiers started to look nervous, and it occurred to me it was wholly possible we were about to be trolled by a local crew of kids taking the opportunity to promote their shitty mixtape.  But then you showed up, no fanfare, pushed through the crowd to the picnic table, sat down, plugged your phone into the speakers and started playing the album*.

Aw, dammit. I thought. He’s on his art school bullshit again. I can’t lie, Donald. I’d been concerned. You first hinted at restlessness on the ROYALTY mixtape, so news that you were leaving Community (where I first became a fan) was disappointing, but not surprising. But that short film you made last summer (which I admit I didn’t even watch) caused some eyebrow arching, and then there were your Instagram notes last month. So when you strolled up without a word, I started to wonder if I was willing to hang with where you were going.

By the time I left Bellwoods, though, I was back on board, not from anything you did, per se, but from what the crowd did.

Toronto is…we can be a weird town. Superior yet love-starved. Many in that park seemed to think they’d be getting a concert of some sort, despite your earlier tweet to the contrary. A few climbed nearby trees to catch a glimpse of you. When you’d played what you wanted to, you stood up and answered questions from the crowd for half an hour. When a second person asked you if you were going to do any stand-up, a few of us groaned and you chuckled and mentioned someone had already asked that and moved on to the next question.

“Uhh, okay?  Thank you? For not answering my question? Appreciate it!” the guy hollered. And all I could think was Wowww, you know what?  Fuck you, guy. He owes you nothing. And that was when it all sort of clicked in for me. You don’t owe me anything either. If I’m sad the antics of Troy and Abed will be shortened this year, tough shit for me. Would I really turn down the chance to run the ship at my own show if given your choice?  No, I wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else.

As for the ‘cry for help.’ Instagram notes, I watched your Breakfast Club interview where you explained that part of what inspired it was just feeling alone and lost, like damn near every other twentysomething butting their heads against the promises of history.

“Everybody stunts on Instagram. Nobody shows their buddy’s funeral, nobody wants to be vulnerable. People thought I was crazy because I was honest. That was it,” you said.

That honesty is what always drew me to your music, that willingness to admit fear that always causes “real heads” to get their backs up and start calling people “soft.”  Like Kanye said, “We’re all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it.” He was never supposed to be the last.

When I was in journalism school my second writing course was on various styles of column writing, personal essays, shit like that.  For my first workshop submission, I wrote about something extremely personal that was going on with my family. I was older than most of my classmates, who I’d only known for five months by then. You could feel the air getting sucked out of the room as they read it. But I just threw it all out there because I couldn’t stand the idea of restraint, felt like all of our work work would suffer if we weren’t willing to go all the way with it. I’ve grown somewhat more diplomatic in how I deploy the truth in the subsequent years, but I still believe what I did in that class: that any art that means anything has to leave it all on the table. Your willingness to do that, rawer than how Kanye or Drake or even Eminem do it, is unlike anything I’ve heard in hip-hop, and is still so exciting to me. It’s like being 12 years old and listening to De La Soul is Dead for the first time, just being enthralled and anxious and confused all at once.

So what I guess I’m trying to say is do your damn thing, Donald, whatever that thing might be. If you want to write, write. If you want to make music, make music. I might not love everything you do, but you’ll always make it worthwhile to check in.

Best,

Jordan

ps: That “rainbow, sunshine” song? The one that sounded like Jhené Aiko sung a hook?  It’s a goddamn monster.

*Because the Internet, out Dec. 10.

 

Coming Down

This will be a story about two things, poorly organized.

It’s been about two weeks since I gave my manuscript the final read through and sent it off to my editors. My eyes stung, my body reeked, my brain frayed on sugar and caffeine overdose. Almost bankrupt from the work shifts I’d given away to write it. Two weeks on my finances are still kind of dicey. It could be another six to eight months before I see a dime from the thing, if not more. It’s almost enough to make a man wonder why he bothers.

Almost.

People have constantly asked me throughout this process, But aren’t you excited?! I am but I’m not. The 18 months I proposed, researched and wrote this book were a time of intense personal loss, on a few different levels, not the least of which was the breakdown of my six-year relationship, compounded by the loss of the woman who saw me through that breakup and made sure I stayed above water. There are lessons of self-sufficiency to be found there, I’m sure, but I don’t care to excavate them today. Suffice to say, I learned the hard way what most writers already know: any project may turn into a collaborative process, but in the thick of it, it’s just you, the screen and the words. And in my case, a dead man.

That’s been the strangest part of all this, now that I’m “over the mountain,” as it were.  I spent large portions of every day with this guy in my head, listening to his music, researching his life, reading what people who knew him had to say. I don’t need to do that anymore. I need to let him go. And I’ve started to, but I kind of already miss him.

After I mailed the draft in, I got nine hours of sleep, went to work for a quick shift and tended to the business of cleaning my sty of an apartment after weeks of neglect. I had Songza on for accompaniment, I think it was an 80’s party playlist. Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” came on. I was hungry, so I took a moment to eat some yogurt and take stock of what I’d done and what still needed cleaning. And I don’t know, something about the breeze coming in my window, realizing I’d gotten enough of my life back to actually clean the house, Joe Jackson reminding me we’re all young but getting old before our time… I felt something resembling pride in my accomplishment. It didn’t matter who was supposed to be there when I finished,the point was finishing.

Details have trickled in over the last couple of weeks. A cover design, a release date, a listing on the publisher site [you can find all these details on the recently redesigned page for the book, just click ’33 1/3 Donuts’ above]. Currently my editor’s looking at the manuscript, she’ll send it back to me hacked to shit with ideas on how to make it better, I will spend a month rewriting based on her suggestions and then my tiny little hype machine will kick into high gear, and I’ll really be in trouble, because eventually someone’s going to ask the [reasonable] question, “Who the fuck is this guy, and why does he get to write about Dilla?!” And I don’t have an answer. I’m told most creative types, especially writers, live with the anxiety that we’re all just frauds and one day someone will realize it and tell the world.

Neil Gaiman has lived with this anxiety. Despite winning multiple awards for his writing, building a career that’s endured over 30 years and proving he can write everything from films to children’s books to comics and radio plays, he still worries that one day someone will knock on his door, confiscate his notepads and force him to get a real job.  He discussed this fear in a speech he made to the 2012 graduating class at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts. He put everything he knew about trying to build a career in the arts into those 20 minutes, and of course it went viral online, eventually being collected in a slim volume designed by Chip Kidd called Fantastic Mistakes. Knowing Gaiman was stopping in Toronto as part of his “Last Signing Tour” a mere five days after my draft day, the speech, with its dedication to everyone wondering “Now what?” [which I most certainly was] it seemed like a suitable item for him to sign [since I’d forgotten to bring my copy of Sandman #1 back from my parents’ house].

The first time I met Gaiman, I told him about being 10 or 11 years old and stumbling across an interview of his on the old TVOntatio show Prisoners of Gravity, and how I thought he was the coolest guy I’d ever seen, and started reading Sandman shortly afterward. His stories changed my life; where books like Dark Knight Returns or Arkham Asylum left a marked impression on me, Sandman didn’t have any of the nihilism those books did, there was always a humanity and optimism in them, something that spoke to me then like it spoke to me in his latest book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (no lie, my favourite thing of his in years. No shots, just personal taste). Four years ago, he’d seemed genuinely touched by the story, looked up and smiled, then shook my hand, something I hadn’t seen him do much with the other people in line.

When I saw him a couple weeks ago, he was personable, if a little weary, and I launched into an off the cuff monologue about why I was having him sign the speech, and my book coming out, and how I took the advice to ‘make good art” very seriously, considering the circumstances surrounding my book’s inception (great fun watching his publicist try to piece that one together, as the woman I used to date was standing next to me in line). And for the second consecutive time, he paused, looked up at me and offered his hand, pen still threaded in his fingers. I think this means we’re best friends now.

Last Holiday I was speaking with a friend who’d recently separated from her husband and told her that for the first time in my life, I really didn’t know what the next 12 months were going to hold, for any of us. Most of the time, we go through our lives with at least a small degree of certainty: X and Y will remain married, you will live in this certain city, work at this certain job, etc. At the end of 2012, I couldn’t speak to any of that. Relationships were ending, careers were changing, people were moving. I had no idea what the gameboard was going to look like a year from then. Almost 3/4 through this year, I have even less of an idea. The book’s in, it could be the start of the career I’ve always wanted, or it could be some footnote on my life, a cool thing I did once.I probably don’t need to know that right now, which is rare for me, and extremely liberating. All I need to know right now is that trying to make good art and trusting my instincts is what got me here, and continuing to do the same is what will see me through.

You can read or watch the “Make Good Art’ speech here.

One Step Inside

A couple of weeks ago I got the following text from the lovely and talented Joyce Vogler, who I used to work with at the store and is now studying art and being generally wonderful at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.

If that ain’t a dream assignment, I don’t know what is.  Here’s a young woman, seeking to actively engage in the art of rap and culture of hip-hop [“good stuff from the 90’s,” specifically] .  I grabbed my weathered copy of Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists off of the shelf, just to make sure I wouldn’t gloss over anything in my enthusiasm.  It was an intro-level playlist, I admit, but illustrated some of the best the music’s had to offer over the last thirty-plus years.  The whole exercise was a pleasurable one, reminding me what I loved about the music I’ve dedicated so much thought and energy to.

And then, this.

Sometime this morning a video of Lil Reese, an 18-year-old rapper from Chicago signed to Def Jam and a crewmate of Chief Keef [he who does not like] started exploding the rap webs.  In the video, Reese appears to be arguing with a young woman [the mother of his child, according to some reports] who asks him to leave her home [though it’s unclear whose home it is]. He pokes her, she smacks his hand away. He shoves her, she rushes up in his face, where he proceeds to unload on her with punches.  Once she’s knocked down, he continues to kick and stomp at her head while her friends scream in the background.  As onlookers do nothing and the cell phone cameraman keeps it all in the shot.

I’m not running a news site here, so I’m not going to post the video because frankly I don’t want it here in my ‘house,’ but it’s on Miss Info’s site [with the appropriate tone] for anyone who wants to see it.

Forgetting for a moment that the kid beat the shit out of a woman, adding a layer of awesome sauce to this whole disgusting mess is Reese’s complete and utter lack of remorse, or even awareness about his actions, tweeting: The haters tryna see a mf Dwn lol Dey gotta b broke and bored wanna upload sum shit from years ago damnn we winnin it’s 2 late… #3hunna  [Note: the tweet seems to have been deleted in the hour I’ve been working on this post].

What are we to make of this, then?  If Joyce chooses to continue her studies in the culture, how do I explain/defend this?  Does it have to be?

Look, I’m a rap fan since nine-years-old, I’ve had plenty of practice navigating the thorny dialogue about violence and misogyny in the music, but I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t for a moment believe the reprehensible actions of a foolish kid speak for or should reflect on the culture as a whole. As some have pointed out, back in August Pitchfork reported cops charged John Paul Pitts, the frontman of something called Surfer Blood with domestic battery and no one started pointing the finger at indie rock as the culprit.

But. But. I also don’t think there were a crew of plaid-shirted, knitcaps on Twitter  defending Pitts’s actions. But check out the search results on Twitter for him, or even in Info’s comment thread on the original story.  You’ll see a surprising amount of people looking to defend or justify kicking a woman in the face. Repeatedly. One person doesn’t reflect the culture as a whole, no, but when a surprisingly large segment of the culture seems to empathize…the tried and true argument starts to show its cracks.

How odd that this hits the same week Kendrick Lamar’s much hyped major-label debut good kid, m.A.A.d. city hits the shelves, to near universal acclaim, due in no small part to his portrayal of a kid trying to avoid the street life who can’t avoid the drugs, guns and botched home invasions that run throughout it, whether he’s personally involved with it or not.  It should be a good week for hip-hop, but I can’t help but wonder if for every Kendrick, Childish Gambino, or Big Sean, there are a dozen regional acts owning the streets [and thus, the culture’s conversation] that saw that video on World Star and went, ‘yeah, I get that.’

Almost twenty years ago Tupac Shakur, no stranger to explosive outbursts of violence himself, released a song with the following lyrics:

And since we all came from a woman
got our name from a woman and our game from a woman,
I wonder why we take from our women,
why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it’s time to kill for our women
time to heal our women, be real to our women.
And if we don’t we’ll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies, that make the babies.

That complexity, that contradictory nature, that the same dude who was spitting on reporters and flipping the bird from an ambulance gurney following a shooting could still write lyrics pleading for better treatment of women is what made him such a compelling artist.  And without that flipside to the rapper posturing, what are we left with?  And how much longer will it stay something I want to be a part of?

The PFG Social Club: Refused @ The Sound Academy, 7.23.2012

I wouldn’t blame you if you had to double take at that title, friends. When have I ever given you the impression that anything other than the boom-bap has a place in my heart?  But it was not always that way friends.

To this day, there are only two albums I have ever purchased essentially “sound unheard.”  I just bought them because I read a good review in a magazine or heard something about them.

1. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…
2. Refused’s The Shape of Punk to Come.

And both of those albums have never fully left my rotation in the fifteen-plus years I’ve owned them. Given the band’s unwavering…uh, refusal to reunite, I’d resolved myself to the fact that Refused were just one of those acts I’d have to mis out on and enjoy their music in retrospect.

However, as I continue to learn, friends, age changes a man, and the lads in Refused reached a point in their lives when maybe, perhaps, it was time to acknowledge that there continue to be thousands of people who adore and are inspired by that last album, and to just suck it up and accept that people love them and would kill to see them play live again.  As they said in the official statement announcing the reunion:

We never did “The shape of punk to come” justice back when it came out, too tangled up in petty internal bickering to really focus on the job. And suddenly there’s this possibility to do it like it was intended. We wanna do it over, do it right. For the people who’ve kept the music alive through the years, but also for our own sakes.

We feel that you deserve it and we hope the feeling is mutual. [via]

So there was never any doubt that I was going to be at one of their two dates here in Toronto.   The show itself was phenomenal, the band was whipcrack tight and played all of the songs from TSOPTC that I would have wanted to hear, and some I never thought I would [Tannhauer/Derive as a show closer?  Really?! Amazing] as well as earlier tracks that I admit I didn’t know but sounded awesome.  For me, my love of Refused starts and ends with that last album.

But I can still feel your confusion, friends.  How does a Swedish punk band work its way into the heart of a lifelong, dyed in the wool hip-hop fan?  Because The Shape of Punk to Come is a deliberate attempt to disseminate revolutionary ideas while putting back into the music all the things that decades of self-seriousness and mainstream co-opting took out of it:  Fun. Sex. Danceability.  I knew it the first time I heard album opener ‘Worms of the Senses/Faculties of the Skull‘ and heard frontman Dennis Lyxzen yelp, ‘One mooore time, OW!‘ like the Godfather of Soul calling to the band for hits. The Shape of Punk to Come is, without question, the blackest punk record ever made.  If I ever doubted it, watching Lyxzen mash-potato his way across the stage, swing his microphone and do the old ‘Mic Stand Kick‘ move as his band bludgeoned the crowd with six-stringed ferocity, of course this would be one of my favourite albums.  The best moment I had during that entire show, one of those ‘this is something I will need to cross of my life list’ moments was being able to shout Woooo! during ‘New Noise.’ Rare and wonderful indeed is the punk song that demands that of you.

Check out a clip of the band ripping apart “Refused Are Fuckin’ Dead” below. Forgive the glass wall that cuts through the shot but well, Daddy doesn’t do general admission anymore.

Jump On It

Remember that time I saw Magic Mike and loved it?

On That Grown Man Steez

In recent posts on Drake and Kendrick Lamar I’ve pointed to the generational aspect of this hip-hop game. Like most pop culture, hip-hop is a culture that prioritizes youth, something that’s created a pretty sharp schism between the kids today and their predecessors.  For every annual batch of XXL Freshmen there’s another crew of retirees riding off into the sunset or putting out another underground mixtape in the hopes that it will help put them back on.  It’s a young man’s game, and while someone like Jay-Z can still move records as he moves into his 40’s, he’s the exception: for every Hova, there are two dozen Whodinis, Erick Sermons and Positive K’s littering the hip-hop freeway [Freeways too, for that matter].

What to do then, when the game’s passed you by?  That’s the subject of ‘Adult Rappers,’ a new documentary from former Def Jux signee and Hangar 18 member Paul Iannacchino, Jr.  Featuring with interviews from artists like Jarobi from A Tribe Called Quest, R.A. the Rugged Man, J-Zone and the Artist Formerly Known as Hot Karl, Jensen Karp, the doc looks like it’ll provide a complimentary contrast to Ice T’s upcoming doc celebrating all things hip-hop ‘Something From Nothing.’ The rap game can bring unmeasured joy and sometimes wealth to artists and audiences, but as Iannacchino notes on his film’s Kickstarter page, the game is also, “cruel, cruel bitch with little to give but heartache, bad credit and chronic wanderlust.”

Iannacchino’s Kickstarter for the project met its finding goals earlier today, but if you’re of the generous persuasion, the page will be open until tomorrow morning.  You can peep the trailer there, too, since WordPress won’t let me embed iframe widgets. [H/T Ego Trip]

Speaking Softly: On ‘Quiet,’ by Susan Cain

During my brief and infrequent stints in an office environment, the one criticism consistently lobbed at me by managers and superiors was my perceived unwillingness to engage with people, to favor email over face-to-face communication, for vocalizing my ideas in the casual debriefing we would have after meetings. I was told, explicitly and implicitly, that my preferred method of conducting myself was something I needed to “get over,” and with no small amount of time and difficulty, I did to an extent. But the second my boss presented me with a request for information from somewhere in the company I’d never dealt with before, I would sit at my desk and have to psych myself up for something as simple as an email, then pore over every word, read the thing out loud to ensure the information was related clearly, then get irritated when my carefully constructed email would snag a two-line reply.

How lovely, then, to come across a book arguing that not only is it okay to be how I am, sometimes it’s even preferable.

Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking isn’t a 300-page excuse for the introverted to retreatfurther into themselves, rather it’s an indictment of a certain type of Western worldview that puts a premium on the dynamic, go-getter extroverted types at the expense of the more reserved among us who would prefer to make decisions more slowly.  Cain travels everywhere from the Harvard Business School to Cupertino, California to an Anthony Robbins Seminar, marveling at how sharp the dichotomy is between introverts and extroverts really is, and how painful the struggle is for introverts trying to fake it in a world that doesn’t value them or what they can contribute [like the guy at the Harvard Business School who pulls great grades but feels he’s wasting his education because he can’t muster the energy to attend the multiple social outings he was expected to attend every week].

The worlds of business and education come under the harshest scrutiny from Cain, with their unrelenting emphasis on forced collaborations that sometimes do more to stifle innovation than encourage it.  I mean, I was a low rung on the ladder when I was in the office, my busiest day might have involved three meetings at the most.  That’s still at least three hours of the day that I’m not working, at least not under my definition of the word.  I can only imagine what it’s like for people who are actually busy there.

But, the book doesn’t let introverts off the hook, examining the ways in which they can stretch themselves into pretend extroverts to better make their way in the world. It can be done, but it’s important to note, and the book does so frequently, that it really only works when introverts believe fully and passionately about the things they are stretching themselves for: I was able to finally start speaking up in meetings because I fully cared about the ideas we were sharing; I can talk to someone I’ve never met at the bookstore for fifteen minutes or more because I’m passionate about books and reading and want to help a stranger in their reading experience.

While I adored the book, I found I enjoyed it the most when I was able to most recognize my experience in it; when Cain wrote about things like the science of introversion and extroversion or how to encourage introverted kids [subjects I agree the book needed to address] I found myself skimming ahead.

All told, Quiet was a fantastic read, and pretty mandatory for anyone who’s ever been made to feel like there’s something wrong with them because their idea of an amazing Friday night involves a pizza and a movie at home more than a house party crammed with people.

For the interested but lazy, check out Cain’s 16-point ‘Quiet Manifesto,’ [taken from her website] as well as her recent TED Talk on the subject.

1. There’s a word for “people who are in their heads too much”: thinkers.

2. Our culture rightly admires risk-takers, but we need our “heed-takers” more than ever.

3. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.

4. Texting is popular because in an overly extroverted society, everyone craves asynchronyous, non-F2F communication.

5. We teach kids in group classrooms not because this is the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with the children while all the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the model.

6. The next generation of quiet kids can and should be raised to know their own strength.

7. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend-extrovert. There’s always time to be quiet later.

8. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is the key to finding work you love and work that matters.

9. Everyone shines, given the right lighting. For some, it’s a Broadway spotlight, for others, a lamplit desk.

10. Rule of thumb for networking events: one genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.

11. It’s OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.

12. “Quiet leadership” is not an oxymoron.

13. The universal longing for heaven is not about immortality so much as the wish for a world in which everyone is always kind.

14. If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been.

15. Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.

16. “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” – Gandhi

The PFG Social Club: Mike Doughty at the Drake Underground

As someone with no shortage of fandoms and cultural obsessions I always find it fascinating to witness someone else’s, the level of devotion that can be summoned up from someone who usually exists outside the normal arenas of fandom.

Take The Lady. When we first met, one of the things I found interesting about her was her love of the largely-forgotten jazz-hop quartet Soul Coughing and subsequent solo career of frontman Mike Doughty.  This is no casual enjoyment; we’re talking multiple bootleg concert recordings, autographed setlist pinned to the fridge with a magnet, a drawer full of t-shirts, worked as the mailing list facilitator at a show in Michigan just to speak to him before showtime levels of devotion. There’s a scene in the movie “Knocked Up” where Paul Rudd comments to Seth Rogen that he wished he liked anything as much as his kids like bubbles; I wish I liked anything as much as The Lady likes Mike Doughty.

Last night we hit the Drake Underground for her eighth Doughty performace and my fifth.

Doughty’s on the road to not just to promote his latest album Yes and Also Yes, but also his recently published memoir The Book of Drugs, so readings from the book were sprinkled throughout the performance.  In addition to all that, Doughty took questions from the crowd, some submitted before the show, but most shouted out by the small but devoted crowd in attendance.

Doughty’s career path has been turbulent to say the least. He founded Soul Coughing in his early twenties, envisioning it as the loudest live rap band in the industry, and recruited a trio of musicians much older than him that he knew from his days as a doorman at The Knitting Factory in New York. They got signed, put out three albums that are still beloved by many today, and had one radio hit with ‘Circles,’ from their final album.

Conditions within the band began to deteriorate and Doughty ended up strung out on heroin. He broke the band up, got cleaned up, threw an acoustic guitar in how car and started traveling the country playing solo shows and making music that sounded nothing like Soul Coughing, culminating in the release of his first proper solo record, Haughty Melodic.

This is the time in his life the memoir recounts, and the time he wanted to talk about at the show last night, explicitly stating he was only interested in answering ‘gnarly questions about Soul Coughing.’

The lesson learned is: Don’t hold your breath for SC to join in with the 90’s rock reunion trend, as Doughty cannot put enough distance between himself and the other three. And not without reason; this isn’t the petulant stubbornness of some musician harboring a personal grudge, there is serious hurt and damage there.

“I grew up in an abusive family, I was going to find those people again,” Doughty said of his former bandmates, specifically
recounting bizarre moments where Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg [though Doughty refused to refer to him or any of his former bandmates by name] tried to pin overseas long distance calls on him while on tour, or replying to fan emails claiming Doughty didn’t know how to tune his own guitar among other assorted backstabbers, in addition to the other members’ tenacious legal claims towards publishing on songs they had nothing to do with, like the track he collaborated on with the DJ BT, which Doughty alleges contains a verse from an a song he brought to his bandmates who rejected it, yet sued for publishing when it showed up on the BT song.

“It’s unfortunate when I meet Soul Coughing fans, because I’m not one,” said Doughty, likening listening to Soul Coughing to what most people feel when they listen to Nickelback.

“Do you think any of your songs were improved by what the other three brought to them?” asked The Lady from the crowd.

“Not a one,” said Doughty, without any hesitation, though he did concede that he did have a sort of detached satisfaction towards some of them.

For me, it was a night probably better suited to my level of fandom than The Lady’s. Aside from three songs from the new album he didn’t play any songs newer than the material on Haughty Melodic, and spent half the night dishing on his old band, and I’ll always be a sucker for band gossip of any sort. For her, these were stories and facts she already knew, but for someone like me who was hearing them for the first time, it was an altogether engrossing night of music, literature and, in its way, catharsis.

And, as with so many other things this I seem to encounter lately, there was a moment of the show custom-fitted to my February-fueled creative meltdown.  Someone asked Doughty why this was the right time to write the book. He said the primary reason was someone called his bluff, having heard him muse that he should write one enough times that they finally gave him some money and told him to go do it.  He said the hardest part of most creative endeavours, and the key to creative anxiety, is simple:

“If you put things out there, you lose the luxury of considering yourself an undiscovered genius.”

Yow.  Yeah, I thought about that a lot the rest of the night.

Near the end of the show, Doughty let the crowd know he was A-OK with stealing music, encouraging those in attendance to buy the album if they could, and pass copies along to as many friends as possible, since he believes Napster saved his career in the late 90’s, as he toured the country selling copies of an album his label didn’t want.  Of all the songs from that first album, he credited this one for keeping his momentum going during that shaky time. It’s also a song I downloaded from Napster in the late 90’s.  Full circle, that.  Watch his performance of that song, a cover of ‘Real Love’ by Mary J. Blige, below.

The Book of Drugs is available in finer bookstores now.

The PFG Book Club: The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta

It's the end of the world. How do you feel?

After reading Tom Perrotta’s “Little Children,” a couple of years back, I promptly threw a Staff Pick sticker on it and probably hand sold 20 copies of it over the next six months [you owe me a beer, Perrotta].  I have yet to read the book that came after it [The Abstinence Teacher], but his most recent offering shot to the top of my queue based on the uniqueness of its premise.  Well, unique for him anyway.

On October 14, three years before the events of the novel, millions of people disappear from the face of the earth. Poof! Gone. No explanation, they just…aren’t there anymore.  The media calls it the Sudden Departure. Perrotta has always been a writer concerned with how people relate to each other. In The Leftovers, he zeroes in on the residents of Mapleton, a small American city, specifically  the Garvey family.  All of the Garveys react to the disappearances in a different way: son Tom vanishes after dropping out of college and falling in with a self-styled spiritual healer named Holy Wayne; mother Laurie abandons her family and joins the Guilty Remnant, a cult whose members take a vow of silence and wander the streets in all white robes, smoking cigarettes and surveying the other citizens of Mapleton to make sure they never forget the Sudden Departure, and remember it could just as easily happen again.  Father [and Mapleton mayor] Kevin and daughter Jill are left behind, pun intended, to try to figure out how to live in a world where people can disappear on you just as easily when they’re still on the planet.

Perrotta’s strength has always lied with his gift for character.  Even bit players who wander the streets of Mapleton pop off the page, like the Evangelical Minister who can’t believe he wasn’t among the departed after devoting his life to God.  He wanders the streets of Mapleton distributing a tabloid newsletter disparaging the reputations of the missing as adulterers or thieves. And it always feels real, it always makes perfect sense that these people would react that way.  As a reader, you understand why Laurie would walk out on her family to join the Guilty Remnant, you feel how difficult the decision is for her, and empathize with her struggle to reconcile with what the ultimate goals of the group are revealed to be.  If I had one gripe, it’s only that I found Tom’s story to be the weakest narratively.  His road trip across America with one of Holy Wayne’s child brides after his arrest on sex charges is well written, but serves more as a plot lever to get pulled so other things can happen to more interesting characters.

This is no Cormac McCarthy-esque apocalypse, no rotisserie babies here. In his version of the apocalypse, society doesn’t collapse, even if people do.  Perrotta’s one of the soundest craftsmen I’ve ever read [a long-held belief], his sentences flow with such a restrained, natural ease, he never feels the need to intentionally wow a reader. Yet then you come across one of his similes or metaphors that reveal just how good he is.

I’m making a big deal out of this book because I’m afraid it’ll dip under the radar if I don’t. The publishing publicity machine can be such a cyclone of teen dystopia and pop poli-sci that when a book comes out that’s just a great, solidly written, thoughtful and entertaining novel comes out, it can totally be lost in the noise.  Two months, it’s shuffled off the new release tables in the bookstores never to be seen again.  With word that HBO’s developing The Leftovers as a series, that seems less likely, but I still  plan on fighting for this book with everyone I speak to. It’s just that good.  Read it now so you can brag when the show hits.

The PFG Social Club: Death Cab for Cutie at the Molson Ampitheatre

Skinny Ben Gibbard, you still scare the hell out of me.

Considering how hip-hop heavy these proceedings get, regular readers may find it surprising that I would even be at a Death Cab for Cutie show last Friday, let alone to learn they’re one of my favourite bands. I can tell you why, but it’ll take a few paragraphs, and it occurred to me recently that maybe, friends, you don’t want to hear my whole life story before I tell you whether whatever event I attended was good or not. So for those people:

The Death Cab show last Friday was fantastic.

If you want to hang, I’ll be behind the cut.

The PFG Social Club Presents: The Hip-Hoppingest Canada Day Ever!

Asking Shad where he got that ill 'Ehlife' shirt.

But of course, you might already know some of this if you check out PFG Express.  You  do check out PFGX don’t you?  You really should.

As previously mentioned in these pages, I don’t really do heat, and outdoors, and the sweltering masses.  What I will do, however, is free.  So when Shad says he’s giving a free outdoor show as part of the Toronto Jazz Fest, I sort of need to be there.

Regular readers and listeners of RadioPFG [you do listen to Radio PFG don’t you?] will remember how quickly Mr. Kabango won my heart after I saw the video for Yaa I Get It and heard him chew the mic for for almost four minutes with no hook.  It was all love after that.  

I’d dragged my heels on seeing him live since I knew he liked playing with a band, and I’m sort of lukewarm to rap acts playing with live musicians, since sometimes even the best bands lack the sort of urgency I get from the actual sampled recordings.  But credit where due, Shad’s trio were on point, and the soundman in Metro Square knew how to punch the drums and bass to an proper level of kick.  They worked surprisingly well on most songs,but Shad didn’t try to shoehorn the band into every song if it wasn’t best for the song.

Maybe it was the weather, the festive patriotism in the air, but Shad put on one of the best shows I’ve ever seen, by anyone.  Because even when he was playing a melancholic song like Telephone, he’s so damn charismatic, so happy to be practicing his artform, he makes the audience want to follow him wherever he wants to go.  His show brought it back to the essence of what hip-hop is supposed to be: he cold rocked the party.  Song after song got the heads bobbing, even when he spit rhymes no one knew, he was doing it over familiar instrumentals, like when he went on in ‘Close To Me’ by The Cure.  Just because.

Should have kept the film running.  He did ‘Creep’ by TLC after that.

Fittingly, he closed with the broke ass anthem ‘The Old Prince Still Lives at Home’, since we were all at a free show anyway. As he told the crowd, ‘It’s that stay-at-home swag.’

All told, he may have gone for less than an hour, but he just killed it.  You know it’s a good show if I feel the need to elbow through a crowd to tell the guy.  If you ever get the chance to see dude rock a crowd, just go, he will not disappoint.

Oddly enough, the show was not the last time I saw Shad on Canada Day, as he swung by Roots drummer Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s DJ set at Revival later that night.

I’ve seen Questo spin before, and while that was like attending a master’s course in hip-hop musicology, I was relieved to hear him announce he was our ‘Human iPod,’ and wanted the crowd to get dancing. And that’s what we did for the next three hours, although I will admit he seemed to go off on a late-70s/early-80s R n”B tangent that lost part of the crowd for awhile.  Nothing a little Katrina and the Waves couldn’t fix. At one point a speaker caught on fire, causing the usually unflappable Thompson to exclaim, ‘That’s never happened before! We blew the speakers out!’ with a laugh.

But you know it ain’t a party until some clown-ass sucker has to ruin everyone’s good time, and no exception here. We endured the obnoxiously quartet of broads humping each other all night only to have the set came to abrupt close just before 3:00 a.m. when some fool tossed a bottle of Evian at the stage, splashing Quest’s gear in the process.  Genuinely upset, Thompson lamented the TB of music he keeps on laptop, then told the crowd that was it.  A tweet the next day let everyone know how that worked out.

Computer officially destroyed. Hope whoever threw that water last night feels satisfied in Toronto. Gig ruined.

— Questlove Gomez (@questlove) July 3, 2011

A sour end to what was one of the best days I’ve had in a long time, and that’s not even mentioning catching Melissa McLelland and Esthero at Harbourfront, or doing an impromptu rendition of Shimmy Shimmy Ya with some Hip Hop Karaoke regulars for a crowd of families and children.  A little something for everyone, friends.

I just don’t know where you kids get the energy.

The PFG Social Club: The Pharcyde @ NXNE 2011

Grown folk music for the young at heart.

I was recently out at a pub in The Annex neighbourhood of  Toronto with some coworkers having a chat with one of the young’uns.  She was surprised to learn I’m as old as I am.

“You’re thirty-three!?  How’s that working for you?” she asked, displaying the typical skills for tact shared by many 20-year-old women.
“You know what’s awesome about getting older?” I said, “You stop caring about a lot of dumb shit.  You hit this age, you have a clearer understanding of what you will and will not tolerate.”

Among the lists of thing I don’t tolerate in my early middle age.

1. General admission concerts.
2. Outdoor  general admission concerts.
3. Getting weed smoke blown all over me at outdoor general admission concerts.
4. Getting weed smoke blown all over me at outdoor general admission concerts by mooky frat boys  who stop blowing only to swap stories about getting their dicks wet.

I would never endure any of these things under normal circumstances.  But Sunday night was not a normal circumstance.  Sunday night was The Pharcyde.

The Dissenter’s Notebook: Nuit Blanche

Your Assertion is Being Challenged. Also: Future Book Jacket Photo

Oh, sorry, I meant Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.  I had no intention of going, friends.  Too many people, for one: anything worth looking at is woefully overpopulated [a lesson learned trying to get a peek at the Dumpster Hotel a few years ago].  For two, I was working til 11.00 pm and had to be back at 9.45 the next morning, so it didn’t leave a lot of time to experience the annual ‘all night art thing,’ as they call it.  But I had a moment as I got ready for work that afternoon, reading the TO Twitterati and blogs start to get amped up for it. I turned to the Lady and asked if she had any interest in going.  She said she kind of did.

“Then eff it!” I declared. “I live in the best city in Canada, dammit, and how many times do I intentionally skip things because I’m tired or because I’m working and because I take it for granted that I live here and something else cool will come along next weekend.  Eff that!  The whole city’s going out for this, and I’m going to miss it so I can come home, watch SNL and get a good night’s sleep? I’ll sleep when I’m dead, dammit. We’re going!”

So we made plans to meet at Sneaky Dee’s for a few drinks and some nachos before heading out into the streets with the rest of the city to see what we could find.

Lesson learned: I’m not much interested in hanging out with the whole city, am very interested in hanging out with my friends, and that an all night art thing is not necessary for that to occur.  Actually, its absence is preferable.

Nuit Blanche has become pretty bloated in the last few years, with over a million people descending on the city’s downtown core from Yorkville to the Distillery District to West Queen West.  If you don’t have a plan, you’re kind of screwed.  We did not have a plan.  Everything we might have wanted to check out was either too far from us [mourning your own death at St Clair West] or too high-profile and swamped with people [the Dune project in Lower Bay Station].  The all-night TTC service, much touted though it was, totally shit the bed the one time we tried to use it, with a northbound train pulling into Dundas after a ten minute wait, bursting with people while the car we ended positioned near was unlit and out of service.  We had to wait another seven minutes for the next train.

Really though, it comes down to the number of attendees along with the quality and locations of the installations.  Was there really nothing in Kensington this year? Someone tell me I’m wrong about that.  We walked from College/Bathurst to Queen/Spadina and didn’t encounter one thing connected with the event, aside from some lovely people inviting us to have some free popcorn and check out the Toronto Underground Cinema [verdict: nice space, though I wasn’t about to watch a short black and white silent film about undersea crabs].  And once we hit Queen West, the thing turned into one giant pub crawl, with drunk and stoned revelers wandering into the streets never quite understanding that only Yonge was the only road closed to traffic.  What we did walk by was underwhelming: a lot of things on fire, Daniel Lanois’s  nightlong jam session at Nathan Phillips Square, and some guys sitting on a couch doing nothing while a video montage set to Kraftwerk flashed behind them.  From the reports the next morning, a lot of the events lost steam or flat-out shut down long before sunrise, so who knows how things looked around 8.00 or 9.00 in the evening.  But it sort of betrays the event to look one way during primetime and another in the later hours.

And then, the people.  I saw enough snotty tweets blaming tourists and 905’ers for less than stellar experiences during the event, but if you a bad time, you probably need look no further than your beloved 416’ers. The weed smoke, the energy drink cans littering the sidewalks, the domestic arguments breaking out every block and a half, that was all us.  Don’t put that on the suburbs.

When we finally got on a streetcar home, the Lady remarked that we while it was nice being out and about, we probably would have had a better time had we stayed at Dee’s splitting pitchers.  I said no, we definitely would have had more fun.  After living here long enough, you realize of all the annual events that get hyped to the moon by tastemakers and such, you should check them all out, but there are a lot that you don’t need to do more than once [Word On The Street got the axe this year under that very logic]. Can’t say for sure we won’t try it again next year, but if we’re having that much fun at the bar, it’d take a lot more than Nuit Blanche to remove us from it.

Remembering Satoshi Kon

Thank You. Rest in Peace.

I haven’t purchased anime in about two years, but the last time I did was when I found the final three discs of a show called Paranoia Agent on clearance [Geneon had closed its anime distribution by then, I think] and the only reason I bought them is because it was only a 13-episode show and helmed by Satoshi Kon.

A lot of anime is garbage. Can we admit this honestly? Even the ‘good’ titles are often rehashes of familiar scifi and fantasy tropes. But occasionally something comes out that actually makes use of the freedom allowed by the medium of animation to create something well above a pandering cartoon.

Perfect Blue is one of those films. Kon’s first movie is a psychological thriller about a former pop idol who wants to make it as an actress and finds herself stalked by one of her former fans who isn’t pleased with her more adult career choices. The movie displays the start of Kon’s fascinations with the dichotomies of truth and identity, the utter obliteration of what is real and what isn’t, looping back to the same spot again and again, revealing that what you just watched didn’t actually happen [or did it]. It blew me away when I first saw it, and is so much more than the gruesome cover artwork of an icepick-wielding Mima spattered with blood. Yes, there is murder. Yes, there is a rape [or rather, the filming of a rape scene for a movie, a moment which totally freaked a friend out when she saw it for the first time]. But it is a skillfully plotted thriller worth multiple viewings, and a knockout win for a first-time director. Kon joined the Miyazakis and Watanabes on my list of anime makers I would always keep up on, names that would always get me to stop and look at the box.

Kon passed away this week from pancreatic cancer, in the middle of his most recent project. My first thought was that I was a fool for not seeing his most recent work, 2006’s Paprika. But I think now it’s a good thing. It means I’ll have two more hours where I can be wowed by the man’s genius, two more hours to press STOP on the remote and say, ‘What the hell was that?’ in the best possible way. Seeing as it’s based in dreams, knowing Kon, it’ll probably make at least 2/3 of Inception look like a student film. I can’t wait to rent it.

And just because I always thought it was so brilliantly unsettling, I’m throwing in the opening credits to Paranoia Agent, the show I bought years ago, about people who fall into utter despair, only to be smacked in the face with a baseball bat by a boy in golden rollerblades.

Just keep laughing, even as the world ends around you. Primetime viewing in Japan, that.

We lost a good one this time, and at 46, way too young.