The 2014 PFG Playlist

Let’s ignore for the moment that you could count on both hands the number of posts between the 2013 and 2014 editions of this list. I wrote a book, people!

The last time I drafted my annual list of favourite songs, I was surprised to find that there were actually tracks that I had to leave off to keep it at ten, the first time in recent memory that had happened.

Yeeeeeaaaah. Didn’t really have that problem this year.

While I still ended up with more than ten songs (opting to scrap my self-imposed limit this year), my sense of disconnect and indifference with the current musical landscape returned more ferociously than before, for a few reasons, chief among them my two-footed jump into record collecting.

Devoting so much of my extracurricular efforts to educating myself on what vinyl’s worth my time turned my musical attentions backwards. I refocused on the things I always loved and started self-directed studies in the jazz and soul records that formed the foundations that built hip-hop; it’s an endeavour that’s proven rather labour-intensive. Turns out there’s a shit load of music that’s been produced in the last sixty years, who knew? But I still try to stay out here.

If there’s any thematic unity among 2014’s selections, it would be a sudden surge of female artists onto the list in the year’s latter half and the abrupt end of my brief flirtation with guitars, following Deafheaven’s surprising appearance last year.

I was saying to a friend last weekend, and I’m aware of how arrogant this sounds, but I really feel like after a certain point, you just start to get bored with the sounds that things like six strings through distortion pedals can produce. The kids at my job are getting their lives over Ty Segall and King Tuff, and I just caaaaan’t. Because all that music makes me want to do is listen to Dinosaur Jr or like, I don’t know, The Cave-In. Or Hot Water Music. Or Quicksand. Or any of the dozens of rock bands I was into at their age that they would undoubtedly find wack as hell.

Look at  it this way: back when I was playing in the band, our mandate always seemed to be that we were trying to play as loudly as possible to punch through to some sort of transcendent emotion, and personally, I don’t feel like we ever fully pulled it off because we were limited not only by our skill set but by the instruments we were using. I find that synthesizers and software are twanging that note in my soul more lately, and 2014 was the year I fully accepted them into my life.

Not that anyone cares nearly two weeks into the year, but I’ve already come this far, so let’s get this over with, in no particular order.

Christmastime is Here: Redux

I must be the only person who looks forward to a vacation so he can…work. Just, you know, work on the things he wants to do and enjoys instead of the things he’s mandated to do by financial and fiduciary responsibilities.

I’m writing this from my parents’ kitchen table near Windsor, Ontario. The last time I was here, in June, I was working through the first draft of the book. That was rarely a cheery process, so I cherish the opportunity to visit and just…be. I’ve made no plans with friends, nor do I intend to. I kind of just want to hang out with the fam jam, pet some dogs, eat snickerdoodles, pilfer their record collection (see results on Instagram) and recharge the batteries before heading back to Toronto and researching more ways to make rice and black-eyed peas (meal of champions).

This time last year I took a moment to walk y’all through the holiday music I actually enjoyed, those songs that add comfort and meaning to my holiday season. Since I’m in such a good mood today, it’s a perfect time to look at the songs I cannot stand, the ones that make me burp peppermint-tinged vomit into the back of my throat. I’m only working with those songs admitted to the canon; there are countless atrocities buried in the holiday albums of pop acts from today and yesteryear (looking at you, “Funky, Funky Christmas“) but I want to discuss the mediocrity that’s somehow slipped through the cracks of common sense and become standards.

Jingle Bells

In last year’s post I mentioned that “Jingle Bells” is no one’s favourite holiday song, and the practice of adding a few tinkles of the melody on the outro of your version of “The Christmas Song” or “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is pandering and repellent.

Look, “Jingle Bells” is fine when you’re a kid and you’re commenting on the odour of certain superheroes and their egg-laying abilities, but there’s no way to save this song for anyone past the age of 11, not that it’s stopped crooners of the past sixty years from trying, and no one fails more spectacularly than Barbra. My mother plays this record every year and I will cast no shade to “I Wonder as I Wander,” but this scat-tacular rendition of “Jingle Bells” is a sewing needle in my ear.

Baby It’s Cold Outside

“Say, what’s in this drink?”
“The answer is no.”
“What’s the sense in hurting my pride?”

Nuff said.

All I Want for Christmas is You

Okay, just—*ducks tomato* will you just *dodges cup full of piss* just wait a minute, damn it!

It’s not a bad song. I might even go as far to say that I actively like it, I’m bouncing in my seat as I listen to it. The issue is, I don’t know that I consider it a Christmas song, or just a pop song wearing a Santa hat, and maybe that’s what makes it exceptional in the first place, but I don’t think it deserves its honour as the last song to enter the all-time canon of holiday classics. But I swear, the fervor that this song inspires in you people, the nuclear rage that can erupt at the slightest criticism of it, is unreal.  It’s good, I will give you that. It’s just not as good as y’all think it is, and not as good as any of the songs I mentioned last year.

I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas

I mean, do I really have to? Sure, it’s for the kids, fine, whatever, if the day ever comes when I’m blessed to loose some spawn on the world I’ll grit my teeth and put this song on repeat, too. But I know grown adults who still hold it down for Gayla Peevey, think it’s adorable. Get your lives together, people. And this is me saying that.

This Christmas (by Chris Brown)

This is not an indictment of the Donny Hathaway song, this is an indictment on the need for anyone [especially the above…individual] to cover it. Stop. Erase the tapes. You have nothing, absolutely nothing to add to the original. As a friend once said, “I know God is good because He brought us Donny.” Anyone thinking they need to trot their flat-ass voice all over the perfection of the original needs to sit down, pour a glass of egg nog and think about their choices.

So those are the songs I’ll be avoiding this year like a kiss from your auntie with the beef smell. Let me know how wrong I am or what I missed in the comments when you’re hiding from family in the bathroom this week.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all y’all who take ten minutes out of your day to read the junk I throw up here. I appreciate it more than I’ll ever let on.

“So, how’s the book going?”

It’s a reasonable question. It’s about the halfway mark of this adventure I’ve been on. I’ve read a pile of books, a stack of articles, reached out to and spoken with amazing, brilliant people, I’ve listened to Donuts and the records used to create it at least 75 times front to back [and that’s likely a conservative estimate].  So I can certainly understand why people ask.

Doesn’t mean I have any fucking clue how to formulate an answer.

But I try. People are being polite, taking an interest, and I’d like them to pay for the thing when it comes out, even if they have no intention to read it and buy it out of courtesy. I’ll take it. The popular answer, as in the one I go back to again and again is the ‘oil tanker’ response.

See, oil tankers actually consist of eight to twelve smaller tanks within the ship. Keeps the cargo from slooshing around too much, which could compromise the ship’s balance; less movement = more stability. My brain currently feels like an oil tanker with a single tank: production techniques, Soren Kierkegaard, the Kubler-Ross scale, Albert Camus, different approaches and opinions on late style, Roland Barthes, the epidemiology of lupus; all these things are just rolling around clumsily from one end of my brain to the other. I’ve given numerous lengthy and sensible ideas to the showerhead as I prepare to face each day, but this hasn’t translated into as many words on paper as I would like.

Put it another way: late last year the webcomic Toothpaste for Dinner put up a single panel gag called ‘The Creative Process.’

That seems accurate. We’re well into the ‘Fuck off’ segment of the program, far enough from deadline that panic isn’t on my back yet, but it’s waving at me from just over the horizon, a box of tissues in its twitchy hands.

And that’s fine, because I know it’ll get done. The structure of the thing, what I wanted it to accomplish, has been loosely in place since I began, a requirement of the proposal. Scenes, fragments, caveats and addenda are floating to the surface with more regularity than they once were; you can’t have all that material swishing around in your brain without something coagulating into something usable eventually. It will get done. It might have more academic meandering than the heads will want, and not enough for the theory kids, and maybe it gets savaged on Goodreads and the Stones Throw Message Board, but it’ll get done. If you’ve been with me a while, friends, you know that’ll probably end up the most surprising victory of all.

So keep asking the question. It’s good, it keeps me focused. Just don’t expect me to have an easy answer for you.

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?

Thirty Days of Stories: Day Ten

Title: Newlywed

Author: Banana Yoshimoto

Appears in: Lizard [1995]

Premise: A newlywed man who can’t bring himself to go home after a night of boozing encounters a strange being on the commuter train out of Tokyo.

Thoughts: And here we are, the story that threw the whole enterprise off the rails with a severity I never would have expected.  It didn’t occur to me when I started this that any of the stories I read might be…useless to the experiment.  This should not have been surprising to me, but it was. I read three stories in this collection, and while all of them were….fiiiine…..none of them inspired anything in me like the other nine stories I’d read so far.

And that, coupled with people’s unexpected re-discovery of something I wrote years ago that started getting unexpected praise, knocked me back down into the vortex of the “internal decathlon” pictured below.

(Artwork by Grant Snyder)

There is no reason for this.  I’m working on it, that’s all I can say right now. Serious this time. It’s a process.

So what was the problem with Lady Banana?  The first problem isn’t necessarily even her fault, and it’s a reality of reading Japanese authors in translation that I caution customers about all the time.  Japanese translations into English can read very plainspoken-bordering-on-boring; there’s a lot of telling, not showing [that cardinal sin of every creative writing class].  Newlywed definitely suffered from that problem. The narrator is always telling you how he’s feeling, it’s all blabby blab blab: for a story with a supernatural being in it, it felt really frigging plain. 

To be fair, the book takes care to note that Newlywed originally appeared as a series of serialized posters on Japanese commuter trains, like those ads you sometimes see on buses with poetry on them, something to bring some culture to the lowly public transit rider.  I’d like to think that fact contributed to the issues I had with the story, but I found Helix, another story from the collection, to have the same sort of dispassionate prose.  Maybe it’s just something in the Japanese character I’m unaccustomed to, and is actually something Yoshimoto captures brilliantly.  Still doesn’t make for a captivating read.

Lesson: Plain is boring, and deceptively hard to do.  Just because you write plain sentences doesn’t make you Hemingway.

Favourite line [or what passes for one]: “I’ve been watching this city long enough to know that it’s full of people like you, who left their hometowns and came here from other places. When I meet people who are transplants from other places, I know I have to use the language of people who never feel quite at home in this big city.”

Thirty Days of Stories: Day Five

Title: The Fuck Machine

Author: Charles Bukowski

Appears in: The Most Beautiful Woman in Town [1983]

Premise: A pair of drunks have sex with the titular ‘fuck machine,’ built by a German scientist living in the apartments above their local bar.

Thoughts: Ohhhh, Bukowski.  Working in a bookstore as long as I have, I can always tell when a certain style of customer slows their pace in front of the poetry section, they’re looking for Buk.  It’s pretty obvious. And it’s understandable, in its way: when I first read him in undergrad, I was deliriously shocked and amazed by the filth, promptly buying as many of his books as I could find.  Then you start to realize, he’s really writing about the same thing over and over [can anyone pull from memory the details of any of his novels?  I only read Women and I can’t remember a single fact about it]. Only the most salacious parts of his short stories have stuck with me. I remember when I first got online with any sort of regularity, I started digging for audio recordings of authors I liked, and was horrified when I listened to Bukowski reading. I expected to hear a haggard, sandpapery voice like Tom Waits drinking chlorine. Instead, I got Snagglepuss.

DO NOT WANT.

Anyway. The Buk’s the perfect candidate for this experiment, so I dug into the books I’d kept of his and tried to find the most offensive title I could.  I think I succeeded.

The thing about Bukowski is he always reads like he just wrote down the first thing that came into his head.  I know if he was any sort of writer he must have considered the things I’ve already noted in the previous four stories, but that never comes across.  The narrator [presumably his literary alter-ego Hank Chinanski, but never named in the story], Indian Mike, Petey the Owl who tries to pay the bar patrons to blow them, nobody gets any sort of description, or defining character trait [well, I guess Petey does, but it’s pretty one note].

Thing is, buried within all the drinking and filth and robot fucking, Bukowski throws out the seeds of ideas larger and better than the story he’s telling.  As the narrator and Indian Mike wait for Von Brashlitz to ready the machine, he mentions how when he was still in Germany, after it became clear the Axis would lose, the real battle became over how many German scientists each conquering nation could claim: Russia or America.  Whoever had the most, they’d be the ones to reach the moon first, they would reap the benefits of technology, etc.

It’s a throwaway sentence, immediately followed by the narrator informing him that “I’m still not going to stick my dick, my poor little dick into that hunk of sheetmetal or whatever it is!”

ASIDE: I’m finishing this entry at work, and was talking about the story with one of the young ladies I work with.
“It’s called ‘The Fuck Machine,’ guess what it’s about,” I said.
“A…fuck machine?” she said. “Like, a tube of some sort?”
“No, no. A fully functional robot named Tanya built by a German scientist after the war.”
“Can women use it, too?”
“Of course not.  Bukowski never cared about women.”

It was an interesting moment, because it honestly hadn’t occured to me how fully Bukowski fails any woman so unfortunate to read him. A topic for a million grad papers. End aside.

But, there’s something to be said for Buk’s discipline.  The guy really had no internal filter. Whatever idea he had, he made it into a story or a poem. Whatever awful thing happened to him, whatever depravity he engaged in, he used it as fuel for art, and that’s certainly preferable to the quadriplegia my creative self has been suffering from for three years.

Lesson: Sometimes, the act of finishing is worth more than the strength of the premise; don’t disqualify an idea without giving it a dry run first.

Favourite line: “20 bucks to fuck a machine?”
“he’s outdone whatever Created us. you’ll see.”
“Petey the Owl will blow me for a buck.”
“Petey the Owl is o.k. but he ain’t no invention that beats the gods.” 

Shots Fired, Part Two

For three and a half years, I was fortunate enough to have someone pay me actual money to take words from my feeble little brain, organize them into sentences they then would print in a newspaper or post online.

And I still never called myself a ‘writer’.

I have a problem with self-labelers.  I have a problem with people who give themselves titles they haven’t deserved yet.  You might do these things, but that doesn’t make you the thing you say you are. If you write, you aren’t necessarily a writer. If you play music, you aren’t a musician, and if you paint, you aren’t a painter, if you take pictures, you aren’t a photographer.

I’ve seen this discussion a million different places, with most people opting to soothe the battered egos of the aspiring artist, essentially letting them off the hook and telling them, ‘If you need to say you’re a writer to get your ass in the chair, then fine you’re a writer,’ or, ‘if you write everyday, you’re a writer.’

Um, no.

I might shoot some free throws at the hoop over the garage, it doesn’t mean I’m a basketball player.  The title denotes a level of professionalism, and if you haven’t earned it, I don’t think you should have it, is all. I am clearly the odd one out here, judging by the proliferation and popularity of sites like Redbubble.

The problem with Redbubble [or Deviantart, or Livejournal or hell, even WordPress] is this: Yes, there is good quality, there’s the stuff that gets posted to the main page or gets picked up and reposted somewhere and goes viral.  And then there are millions of contributions that exist only in the profile of one poster and his or her followers.  They post a shitty poem or drawing and sit back for the accolades to come in from people as amateurish as they are.  The cost for these compliments is to offer equally vapid and thoughtless [meaning without thought] compliments to them in return, creating this vacuum of sycophancy and mediocrity that I just don’t have the time for, not anymore.

See friends, back in the heady days of 56 K we had forums: awful places with awkward interfaces, but they were the first way most of us started using the Internet to connect with people from across the world, and if you were a writer a quick browse through Yahoo’s category listing could give you some poetry magazines.  This is how I found VOiCE.  VOiCE was a zine published out of Indianapolis which never took my submissions probably because I wasn’t quite miserable enough and didn’t listen to enough industrial music </sourgrapes>. But they had a forum and a dedicated group of people who would read whatever went up and sometimes offer criticism but most times just offered support.  You know what constant support gets you?  Shitty poetry, that’s what.

But it was the order of the day, and I just wanted to fit in, so I’d leave two-word niceties on most people’s work so they’d repay in kind when I posted, or at least go easy on me because I was a nice guy.  For the most part it worked, but one day one guy wouldn’t let me off the hook, asking me why I always heaped compliments on work that was inferior to my own.  It’s still the kindest thing a stranger has ever said to me, and an endorsement I’ve never forgotten, one that shook me out of the coma of cheap flattery I’d been in.  I stopped posting not too long after.  A quick check of the web address reveals an aborted attempt to relaunch the site as an archival blog, choked with spam comments.

This is an epiphany most Redbubble seem content to live without.  They enjoy their complacency, so good on them for it, I guess.

So keep on throwing up first drafts with no revision and call yourself a writer. But you ain’t fooling me, friends. I respect the art too much to toss the title around so frivolously.

Shots Fired, Part One

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how in contemporary life, the idea of a generation gap has been abandoned and replaced with a sort of  generational turf war, with everyone staking out their importance to the culture, from the boomers clutching to relevance with their ossifying fingers [seriously, Zoomer Magazine? That’s just sad. Almost as sad as the word ‘Zoomer’], to the millennials storming the cultural castle, doe eyed and sparkly smiled with Blackberrys strapped to their faces and laptops displaying non-profit social media strategies.

And then there’s us. The X’ers, fulfilling our pitiful prophecy and squandering our moment, intergenerational seat warmers for the next batch of 20-somethings to ride the waves of the Internet onto the stage of global change.

For the most part, I accept this.  I understand the things I do and try to create would probably have more sexy pertinence if they came out of the mouth of a 22-year-old, but I’ve kind of always been this way, I think my disposition was just waiting for my body to catch up.  But what I have a hard time accepting lately is the bad rap my generation gets us lazy slackers, while the group coming up behind us gets painted as sunshiney, optimistic futurists when they’re the ones who fly the flag of apathy more succinctly than we ever did, with the adoption of one horrible, awful neologism:

A scourge, to be stomped out at the earliest opportunity.

Now, look: I’ve been a conductor on the Meh-Train before, just like everyone else, believing its phonetic economy conveyed a certain disaffected cool.  But I was wrong, and it took writer/comedian/PC John Hodgman to reveal these facts.

Hodgman took to his Twitter in 2009 and succinctly dissected everything that is wrong with ‘Meh’:

Did I ever tell you people how much I hate the word “meh”? Nothing announces “I have missed the point” more than that word. It is the essence of blinkered Internet malcontentism. And a rejection of joy. Also: 12 hive mehs in the replies SO FAR.  By definition, it may mean disinterest (although simple silence would be a more damning and sincere response, in that case).  But in use, it almost universally seems to signal: I am just interested enough to make one last joyless, nitpicky swipe and then disappear.

And he’s completely right.  ‘Meh’ isn’t cool, it’s just lazy.  It’s shorthand for stupid dismissal without trying to engage the thing you think should be dismissed.  And the best part is that you can’t even pin this one on us.

Wikipedia [which must be true] tells us that the word’s origins, like many wonderful contributions to culture,  can be traced back to two 1994 episodes of The Simpsons, and explicitly spelled out in a 2001 episode.   But it took seven more years to reach critical mass, becoming an official dictionary in 2008.  So even though the word originates in my generation, it’s prominence is due to its overwhelming use by the one that followed us.  Those life-loving, future-forward millennials who pepper their conversations with it because they think whatever’s the target of its employment is beneath their of-the-moment importance.  But it’s a lie.

So down with ‘meh’! Snark is unfortunate enough as it is [I say this as a man who fiends for it with crackhead-like desperation] but is you need to, at least step your snark game up.  Give the cause of your irritation the full weight of the intelligence you think you have.

And before you do, leaving ‘meh’ in the comments would be a textbook example of a missed  opportunity.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Clever Headline

In which the author embarks on a three-tiered discussion of the recent conclusion of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series, and feature film adaptation.

TIER THE FIRST

Image: Martin Ansin

When you live in Windsor, Ontario, Scott Pilgrim is a somewhat fun if confusinglittle book by the guy who uglied up Hopeless Savages: Ground Zero [okay fine, it’s not that bad, but after Christine Norrie and Chynna Clugston’s work on the previous series, O’Malley can be pretty jarring].

But when you move to Toronto, Scott Pilgrim becomes somethingelse entirely, especially when you find out you work with the guy who married Wallace Wells. They love Scott Pilgrim up here. It’s almost totemic, a piece of art that celebrates and justifies everything from indie comics to video games to manga fandom to living in Toronto. Me being me, I did not react well to this enthusiasm.

Minor spoilers after the jump.

Some Final Words on Banksy

He likes getting scratched behind the ears. The dog does, too.

Thanks to the benevolence of some kind folks on Twitter I was able to scoot downtown today to get a look at the remaining Banksy piece here in Toronto I hadn’t found.  It’s probably my favourite of the batch, given the colour.  A little irritating to see how close I had been to it during my initial search on Monday; basically walked right past it.

For his part, Banksy has been continuing his North American travels, hitting up Detroit and Boston so far, with more to come no doubt.  To those of us who are fans, I found this post on Wooster Collective summed up the sentiment, echoing what I wrote the other day:

It’s been amazing to see how Banksy’s road trip across North America has completely energized local communities…For us, Banksy has given people a new reason to get out of their homes, explore their cities on a scavenger hunt trying to find pieces that have been put up in both heavily trafficked areas as well as those off the beaten path. [Source]

Exactly.  But if there’s one thing I’ve noticed since moving to Toronto, this city might love hockey, but they might love hating even more.

Tuesday morning word trickled in that the ‘Will Work for Idiots’ piece had been sloppily gone over by local tagger Manr.  Now, see…sigh.

The argument goes, ‘live by the can, die by the can.’ You’d like to believe most writers work under a code, and will refrain from flagrantly going up over someone who got there first. But the game is the game, and people will go over to claim a prime piece of real estate.  One piece of vandalism cannot be celebrated over another. Manr had every right to paint that alley as Banksy did.

But see, Manr wanted to make a statement.  He didn’t care if it was good, he just wanted to get himself over on Banksy.  Don’t think it’s a mistake that you can still see the original piece under that weak throw up. That’s the whole point. He wants all the Banksy fans, all the people who don’t give a shit about street art any other day of the week, to see his name. I can certainly understand that logic, I’d probably be pissed if no one in my city cared about the thing I dedicated my life to, but the second some crossover celebrity hits town, it’s all anyone can talk about. But what Manr did was just lazy.  And he’s got every right to be lazy, and I’ve got every right to think he’s a douche because of it.

That said, I think the alternative misses the point as well. I mean, props to the owners of that pub for recognizing what they had on the back of their building, but  it’s still altering the original environment of the work, and I just think graf should respected but not protected.

And Torontoist, I know you had people arguing for the reveal of the locations, but you should know I would not have had the amazing day I had on Monday if I had just gone to points on a map. I wouldn’t have talked to the people I did, I wouldn’t have seen the neighbourhoods and parts of the city I did.  And that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?