2014 Top Five

Hey. Long time, no see. I know I vanished without a trace half a year ago and made it sound like I might never be back, but I couldn't just let the year end without counting down my annual top ten albums. It's a tradition that outweighs any practical concerns like lack of time or audience.

There's only one problem this year, though. You might've guessed it from the title of this post. I haven't heard enough 2014 albums to make a list of the ten best.

Well, that's not exactly true. I listened to exactly ten new albums this year. But it seems kind of misleading to just list them as the ten best. Right?

The question is, why so few records heard? Either things are looking very poor for new music or I'm getting too old to keep up with what's current. I'm not sure which scenario I hope is the case.

I should mention that, in preparation for this list, I did go and check out a bunch of tracks from other artists being celebrated all over the place. But none of them compelled me to investigate further. However, that could still have more to do with my own advanced age than with the current state of popular music.

Anyway, here are my top five picks from the ten new albums I heard in their entirety this year. These ones all managed to make their way through the layers of dead or dying skin cells and into my stagnant bloodstream to produce that familiar tingly sensation in my withered, slowly failing heart.

Beck - Morning Phase

Caribou - Our Love

Cousins - The Halls of Wickwire

Angel Olsen - Burn Your Fire for No Witness

Sevendeaths - Concreté Misery

I would also like to mention that Impatto Sonoro, an Italian music webzine, chose one of my own solo songs for their best-of-2014 playlist. How they ever heard about my Bandcamp-only release in the first place is anyone's guess, but I'm incredibly flattered. Check it out! (I'm 23rd down the list.)

And finally, for the sake of posterity, here's my resolution for 2015, written to myself on Christmas night after ingesting certain substances both intoxicating and illuminating:

This need for validation is so limiting. And all-consuming. It's addictive. No wonder Facebook and Twitter and the like have taken over our lives so successfully. Please jettison it, as soon as possible. Waste of energy. If you want to share something with someone, do it out of generosity. Not out of a need to feel like you exist, as judged by others. You know you exist. That's all that matters.

Happy new year!

Time for a Change

Yeah, I guess maybe I'm done with this here blog. At least for now. Might start another one; I'll let you know. Many thanks, gentle readers.

Score One for the Dark Guys

This video just came out and it makes me really happy. It's a song by one of my favourite local bands, Monomyth. They recently got signed to Mint Records, so now they get to make cool promotional videos for their fun, catchy songs. My bandmate Josh Salter is one of the members of Monomyth, so that makes me extra happy.

But what makes me happiest about this video is that it's directed by weirdo/outsider advocate Seth Smith and stars weirdo/outsider Matthew Grimson. Matthew's a dear friend of mine and an all around genius, so it's great to see him doing his freaked out thing in such a public forum. Now if only people would listen to his songs...

Everything Looks Better in Black and White

I rented Visitors on DVD last week, knowing nothing about it except that it was the fourth instalment in Godfrey Reggio's "Quatsi" series. Koyaanisqatsi, his first, made a huge impact on me when PBS aired it in 1985. I'd never been so moved to question the prison of our modern human culture before, nor had I ever heard the beautiful, repetitive music of Philip Glass.

Now an experienced culture-hater and Glass-lover, I wondered how Reggio's latest film would affect me. The third one, Naqoyqatsi, had been pretty ugly and disappointing, or at least that's how I remember its computer-generated weirdness. But Visitors ended up amazing and hypnotizing me with its surprising simplicity.

For one thing, I had no idea it would all be in black and white. For another, almost the whole film is images of human faces in super slooooow motion. Sounds potentially very dull, I know. But the slowness really makes you pay attention to the minutest of movements and expressions, until humans seem creepily beautiful and endlessly fascinating. As in Koyaanisqatsi, the simple act of distorting time causes you to wonder again and again, "How have I gone this long and missed all this?"

The music is really good, too. There's the usual Philip Glass arpeggiation, but it's slow and varied, rich and beautiful, never veering into the intentionally irritating zone that some of the original film's soundtrack occupied. Quite haunting, really. And then there's the quality of the black and white.

I don't know anything about the special camera that was used to film this movie, but the depth of tone is  truly astounding. It's really what gives the whole viewing experience such a special, eerie quality. All the shadows are a really rich black, and the midtones are darker than usual too. The highlights, on the other hand, are plenty light, yet you don't feel like there's too much contrast. Instead, things (mostly faces) seem to step out of the darkness into a soft, painterly light like Vermeer subjects without their hues. There's maybe a slight purple cast, humanizing things subtly.

When the film was over, I got kind of obsessed with the possibilities of monochromaticity. All my Instagram posts for the next week became about testing the limits of black and white, trying to capture a similarly dark romanticism. I guess those Sable Island horses probably had something to do with this obsession too, now that I think of it. Anyway, here's what I've gotten so far.

Down the Garden Path

Been awhile. Sorry. I suddenly have nothing to say. Here's a diversion while I try to come up with something meatier. It's a fun little weird grammar-quiz/word-game/puzzle-thingy I wrote for a website my friend in Toronto edits. Keep it to yourself, though, because it hasn't actually been published yet.

The Edge of Nonsense
Ever start reading a straightforward-seeming sentence and suddenly find yourself scratching your head in confusion? You're not alone. The following "garden path" sentences will have you second- and third-guessing how you thought English worked. They're all punctuated properly and make grammatical sense, but it might take you a few passes to figure out how. Hit the Huh? button [it'll be a button on the actual website —ed.] when you think a) you've understood, or b) you're so lost you can't remember words how go.

1. The dog walked by the mailman barked.

Huh?
No barking civil servants are needed to make sense of this weird sentence. The trick is that everything but the final word is the subject. So, the thing that barked is the dog that was walked by the mailman. Implausible, you say? I figure there's gotta be at least one mailman out there who owns a dog. Right?

2. The club admitted a new member was bribed.

Huh?
I'm glad that club confessed to bribing a new member. It doesn't legitimate their recruiting methods, but their acknowledgment of wrongdoing will be taken into account by the court.

3. Many fish the river.

Huh?
Many fish live in rivers. Probably even more do not. But this sentence is not about any of those fish. It's about a popular waterway and the many anglers who try their luck in it.

4. Fall in love with a friend is vibrant.

Huh?
By now, I'm assuming either you're loving these or you've moved on to something more immediately gratifying elsewhere on the internet. Probably involving cats. If you're still with us, here's a nice poetic image for you: fall is vibrant when you're in love with a friend.

5. When army camps are civilians ever jealous.

Huh?
And why shouldn't those civilians be jealous? Maybe they'd like to camp too. Why should army have all the fun?

6. If bananas don't advertise it.

Huh?
This is just a bit of advice you can take or leave as you see fit. Keep your craziness to yourself. It only makes others uncomfortable. If you're perfectly sane, go ahead, act however you want. I'm sure you'll be accepted and probably make lots of friends. But if less than 100% there, you might want to watch that you're not broadcasting your mental state too loudly. In other words, if bananas… Am I over-explaining this?

7. Sparrows called from the treetops seldom reply.

Huh?
Sparrows THAT ARE called… Those sparrows can see that you're not one of them. They're not dumb, you know. Now get out of that tree and stop advertising how bananas you are.

8. Fruit flies like nesting chickens dance.

Huh?
From sparrows to dancing chickens! OK, this is probably the trickiest one here. Are you ready? Fruit is to flying as nesting chickens are to dancing. I.e., it doesn't do it. My profoundest apologies.

9. Bosses can corrupt or lazy employees.

Huh?
I guess this one's pretty hard too. Replace the word “can” with “fire” and it will all be clear. You really are a good pal to have stuck around this long. And have I told you how great you look in that sweater?

10. Drowning swimmers can be helped and is wrong.

Huh?
This sentence is much easier to understand if you reverse the terms on either side of the “and”: Drowning swimmers is wrong and can be helped. Tempting, sure, but there's really no defense for it.

Assuming you got this far without causing yourself or anyone else bodily harm, congratulations on being a bona fide linguistics nerd. And if you understood all the sentences without any help, congratulations on being Noam Chomsky!

Method

Collect all unfulfilled desires,
however ludicrous, banal,
perverse, or painful.
Place on glass slides,
one by one, neatly stacked.
Squeeze together tightly.
There should be no air bubbles.
Then hold in front of a high window
on a moonlit night
for many hours until
the colourful projection,
dark and rich on your bare floor,
exactly resembles the sound
of the distant coyotes.

Wild, Wild Horses

Alison and I went to see a beautiful and amazing photography exhibit at the Museum of Natural History on Saturday for her birthday. The show is around 30 or 40 very large black-and-whites of the wild horses on Sable Island, by photographer Roberto Dutesco. You can see the full collection on his website. These are some of my favourites.

He's really gotten both the complex relationships among the community and the magnificent character of its individual members. And so many moods! Serene, lonely, unbridled, courageous, threatening, content, serious, playful...

I just couldn't stop looking at them — so much mystery and beauty and strength and tenderness. It's an austere portrait of 400 animals surviving alone and fitting naturally into a weird, alien landscape in which they never originally belonged, and now they're part of that landscape's weirdness. I feel like that's a theme most of us can relate to.

This Be the Passage

I'm afraid I have to quote some more from A Death in the Family. I hope you won't mind too much. It's just that I got to the exact midpoint of the book on my lunch today, and there, just as literature teachers tell you it's supposed to, an important turning point happened.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, the author/narrator/protagonist, comes to reflect on the book he is in the process of writing at this point in this book he has already written, and on his reasons for writing in general. It turns out to be an attempt at relief from the feeling that everything that can happen in the world is already understood. This feeling is completely wrong, he recognizes, and is caused by the fact that the world we live in is mostly one of our own creation, in our own minds, composed of linguistic categories like concepts and beliefs and ideas. There is always a tension between one's feeling that one already understands everything and one's longing to escape the world that produces and validates that feeling — a tension he is compelled to ease by writing about it.

What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do — what on earth do I know? — was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, because like this I would undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't; something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is outmoded and furthermore romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before…

Reading this at the large staff table while eating my lentil soup, I suddenly gasped with astonishment at the sharp, insightful, but ultimately impotent self-awareness going on here. Someone else at the table asked me if I was still enjoying the book, and all I could do was nod sweatily. What I was reading was exactly what it's our project at the magazine to point people towards and help guide them through. Yet it was being framed in such a psychological/literary rather than moral/spiritual way, I didn't feel capable of talking about it without alienating the other lunchers.

And then came the best description of a mystical experience I think I've ever read:

The last time I experienced this was on a commuter train between Stockholm and Gnesta a few months earlier. The scene outside the window was a sea of whiteness, the sky was grey and damp, we were going through an industrial area, empty railway carriages, gas tanks, factories, everything was white and grey, and the sun was setting in the west, the red rays fading into the mist, and the train in which I was travelling was not one of the rickety old run-down units that usually serviced this route, but brand new, polished and shiny, the seat was new, it smelt new, the doors in front of me opened and closed without friction, and I wasn't thinking of anything in particular, just staring at the burning red ball in the sky and the pleasure that suffused me was so sharp and came with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from pain. What I experienced seemed to me to be of enormous significance. Enormous significance. When the moment had passed the feeling of significance did not diminish, but all of a sudden it became hard to place: exactly what was significant? And why? A train, an industrial area, sun, mist?

So honest and perceptive. I really think he came close here to fulfilling his mission of fighting fiction with fiction. I hope he felt as much relief from getting that out in words as I felt from the recognition that profound yet ineffable glimpses of reality are not just one's own private delusions. They are there to be had and sometimes maybe even effed.

Favourite Song of All Time of the Day

In the toilet paper aisle of the grocery store today I noticed they were playing a Big Star song over the PA. I was pleasantly surprised. There's been a lot of fairly obscure but undeniably good music popping up in there lately, and I'm not sure why.

For instance, a couple of days ago I was reaching for a big bag of Que Pasa corn chips when James Brown's "Get on the Good Foot" started up, with its shouted intro: "Que pasa, people, que pasa — hit me!" That one had my head reeling for awhile, even as I found myself doing the funky chicken toward the checkout.

But the song today was one I couldn't quite place. It was definitely Big Star, but a tune I was barely familiar with. One refrain sounded melodically like the repeated lines, "All I want to do / is to spend some time with you" in Chris Bell's "You and Your Sister." However, this song was a much more upbeat, driving rock number.

It got stuck in my head as I walked home with 24 rolls of 100% post-consumer recycled toilet paper under my arm. As soon as I got back, I set down my bulky load and listened to every Big Star song I considered myself less familiar with. Mostly Third/Sister Lovers stuff. But that stuff was all messed up and sad, whereas this song was catchy and feel-good. Then I listened to all the other songs from all three albums, to make sure I wasn't overlooking something I thought I knew.

I wasn't. There was a live album and a collection of oddities I didn't know well, though... Maybe it was in there somewhere? Skipped through that stuff on Grooveshark as fast as I could. Still couldn't find the song I'd heard in the store.

Then I started thinking it might be an Alex Chilton solo recording. Or, wait! Possibly a non-"You-and-Your-Sister" song from Chris Bell's solo album the genius of which I'd missed in the shadows of "I Am the Cosmos" and "Y&YS" itself. I began going through that album carefully, track by gorgeous track.

I hope you're not thinking at this point that there's going to be some satisfying reveal at the end of this story, because I never did figure out what the song was. Maybe it's not even Big Star, after all; could be some other powerpop band completely ripping them off, down to the brittle Fender guitar tones. Frankly, I don't really care anymore.*



No, the end of this story is that I got so completely wrapped up in "You and Your Sister" that I couldn't stop listening to it and decided to forget all about that other, inferior song. "Y&YS" is so heartbreakingly good it gives me goosebumps, especially when the second verse starts and Alex Chilton comes in underneath with the lower harmony. And that ghostly "Your looooove won't be leaving" in the bridge leaves me breathless every time.

Maybe Chris Bell really was the cosmos, as his album title ludicrously boasted. Right now I'd believe it. That title track has always slain me, but today all my tears are devoted to its beautiful B-side.

Good thing I've got lots of tissue on hand.

* Disclaimer: OK, I actually do still care, quite a lot. If anyone has any ideas about what that song might have been, please let me know.

Unexpected Religious Experience

Oh my god, this book I'm reading is one of those ones that are so good you wish another person were always reading it over your shoulder, just so you could look up at them and say, "Ah? Ah?" It wants to be read aloud to someone you love. I can't stop telling everyone I run into about it.

The book is A Death in the Family, the first in Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-part autobiographical novel, My Struggle. It's so intensely personal in detail and deeply relatable in unguarded psychological insight, I never want to put it down.

Yesterday evening I went to see ambient electronic musician Tim Hecker play in a church, and I brought the book with me, as I was by myself. My friend Meg showed up after awhile and sat beside me while I was in the middle of enjoying the passage below like a very rich meal, and I almost didn't want her around. Of course I was quickly happy to have her company and hear about the Low concert in the same venue the night before (both shows part of local annual weirdo music festival the Obey Convention), but when she first sat down I admit to being a little disappointed.

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness, and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape. Time is slipping away from me, running through my fingers like sand while I… do what? Clean floors, wash clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shopping, play with the children in the play areas, bring them home, undress them, bath them, look after them until it is bedtime, tuck them in, hang some clothes to dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wipe tables, chairs and cupboards. It is a struggle, and even though it is not heroic, I am up against a superior force, for no matter how much housework I do the rooms are littered with mess and junk, and the children, who are taken care of every waking minute, are more stubborn than I have ever known children to be; at times it is nothing less than bedlam here, perhaps we have never managed to find the necessary balance between distance and intimacy, which of course becomes increasingly important the more personality there is involved. And there is quite a bit of that here. When Vanja was around eight months old she began to have violent outbursts, like fits at times, and for a while it was impossible to reach her, she just screamed and screamed. All we could do was hold her until it had subsided. It is not easy to say what caused it, but it often occurred when she had had a great many impressions to absorb, such as when we had driven to her grandmother's in the country outside Stockholm, when she had spent too much time with other children, or we had been in town all day. Then, inconsolable and completely beside herself, she could scream at the top of her voice. Sensitivity and strength of will are not a simple combination. And matters were not made any easier when Heidi was born. I wish I could say I took everything in my stride, but sad to say such was not the case because my anger and my feelings too were aroused in these situations, which then escalated, frequently in full public view: it was not unknown for me in my fury to snatch her up from the floor in one of the Stockholm malls, sling her over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes and carry her through town kicking and punching and howling as if possessed. Sometimes I reacted to her howls by shouting back, throwing her down on the bed and holding her tight until it passed, whatever it was that was tormenting her. She was not very old before she found out exactly what drove me wild, namely a particular variety of scream, not crying or sobbing or hysteria but focused, aggressive screams, regardless of the situation, that could make me totally lose control, jump up and rush over to the poor girl, who was then shouted at or shaken until the screams turned to tears and her body went limp and she could at last be comforted.

Maybe I'm finding this stuff so compelling because my own grandmother died last weekend and it's got me thinking a lot about family relations and how we invent, react to, and manipulate each other's characters, for better and worse. And that's all tying in with the other book I just finished, which I quoted from a few posts ago, Under Saturn's Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, by James Hollis. That one's a Jungian account of men's inability to guide each other or themselves from childhood into a healthy adulthood, and their subsequent hurting of each other and of course women. Fairly bleak stuff, with a nod to some proposed solutions at the very end.

In any case, when the music finally started up, I was in an extremely receptive state. Meg left the pew to watch from the balcony, so I was left on my own again. The notes and textures Tim Hecker coaxed from a variety of gadgets on a table in front of him immediately struck me as some of the most beautiful and thoughtful sounds I'd ever heard. I found myself grinning uncontrollably five minutes into his set.



It got very loud very quickly, and I let the sound affect me bodily with its intense vibrations, as well as artistically and emotionally. I soon found myself in a kind of altered state, ecstatic one minute, on the verge of vomiting the next. My body swayed uncontrollably, my mouth opened to catch more of the sound, which became really quite deafening. All the cavities in my head opened up. I started to sweat. The concept of myself as a separate entity began to lose meaning as my heart beat faster and faster, becoming a pleasantly aching hole in the middle of my chest, like the feeling of being in love.

The whole experience left me shaky and out of breath afterwards. I felt like I was seeing things differently, more clearly. Other people all seemed worthy of great sympathy in their silly, awful, relentless personal struggles. I now saw the appeal of those ecstatic worship sessions where Christian ministers whip the congregation into a frenzy of physical, prelinguistic worship. Also the danger, of course, but that has always been apparent.

Anyway, so read some Knausgaard if you get the chance, I guess is what I'm saying.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

I got something here for you but didn't get it into the mail in time. I'll have to give it to you when I see you next weekend! Hope you have a great day. Take it easy on poor Tubby.

Spring Is Finally Here

Hope it cheers me up soon...

Always Crashing in the Same Car

If daily life is a school wherein we learn how best to navigate daily life, there's something suspect about the whole setup, beyond its absurdly self-justifying nature. At least, for me there is. Why do I have to relearn the same lessons every day? When can I write the final exam and move on to the next grade? Is it like this for you too?

It often feels like I'm making progress on the big question of how one should live one's life. In, fact over the course of a day, I think I probably am. But then the next day, the very same truths will pop up again in response to new stumbling blocks, and I'll think, "Oh yeah, right!"

I guess it's a positive thing that the answers I keep bumping into are at least consistent. If they kept changing and contradicting themselves, it wouldn't be even logically possible to make any headway. So I shouldn't complain.

But why can't I just remember them, once learned, and go around directly applying them? Life would get easier and easier and I would make the world a better and better place for others. And then those others could pass the lessons on to later generations, who would be immediately ready to learn more advanced ones, and humans would fulfill their tremendous potential, and God would have to look at our species and write, "Nice job. A+" on our cosmic report card. Instead, individual life is a Groundhog Day of spiritual déja vu, as the world slowly destroys itself. Seems unfair.

I even think I may have written a blog post about this very phenomenon before.

Anyway, here are some of the simple truths I'm constantly forgetting and then remembering again. What are some of yours?

1. No one is an enemy unless you make them one.
2. Especially not yourself.
3. Stop trying so hard.
4. It's not necessary or even a good idea to believe your own thoughts.
5. The past and the future are examples of thoughts.
6. Slow down.
7. The right time to make up your mind about someone is never.
8. Judging that something is beautiful is not the same as seeing beauty.
9. Sunshine and the smell of grass will answer all important questions.
10. Life is but a dream.

Happy Mother's Day

One's mother incarnates and models the archetype of life. Though fathers contribute their chromosomal heritage, the mother is the place of origin, locus of parturition and omphalos of our world. Such "torrents of ancestry" are entrusted to the fragile vessel of a single person, a woman, who phenomenologically communicates the mystery of life itself and who, in the specific relationship between mother and child, embodies all sorts of messages about our relationship to the life force. The mother's biochemistry in utero, the treatment of the child by his mother, her affirmations or denials of his personhood, are primal messages to boys about their own being.

Just as human life emerged from the primordial seas, so we emerged from umbilical waters. How we are related to those origins and how we are to comprehend ourselves and our place in the cosmos are initially construed through the mother-child encounter. Not only do we share most of our early, formative days and years with her — the more so if fathers are distant or not there at all — but her role is replicated by teachers and other caretakers who in our culture are still primarily female. Hence the major influx of information men receive about themselves, and what life is about, comes from woman.

— James Hollis, Under Saturn's Shadow: 

The Wounding and Healing of Men

Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit 

     of the rest,

You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

— Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric

Post #666

Desiree
My love for you is not a noble love:
It rides on sorrow — loud, distracting, real
In all but root — and takes advantage of
A loneliness too permanent to feel.

Phonetography

Spring is finally upon us. Feeling inspired by all the colour and shadows, I've been taking more pictures with my phone lately.

I've also been experimenting with an Instagram technique I thought I had invented: the double filter. I sneakily delete the photo from Instagram right after uploading it, then apply more filtering to the saved result. Of course, it turns out everybody already knows this trick, and they've in fact come up with smarter ways to do it that don't involve scrambling to delete your first post before it can be accidentally "liked."

But anyway, I think I've gotten some pretty cool stuff this way. Check out these chronologically arranged babies:

Tonight at Gus'

Now with new songs!

Happy Birthday, Duke Ellington!

A hundred and fifteen years young.

Whistle While You Work for the Weekend

I have a questionable habit of relating everything that happens in my life to some song lyric or other. Got it from my mom. Sometimes it's funny to realize that what I'm going around whistling or singing loudly is a narration of exactly what I'm doing. Other times I realize to my horror and embarrassment that I'm broadcasting an opinion that should really be kept to myself. But mostly it's just annoying as heck, for me and everybody else.

However, this weekend I ended up with some pretty great ear worms entertaining me while I took care of a few otherwise tedious chores. Maybe they'll help you if you have some tedium of your own.

First I gathered my laundry together and threw it in the wash. That didn't take much time, but long enough to think about laundromats and sing a few rounds of this.



Next, I had to run some errands around town on my bike. I could've gone forever with this tune stuck in my head.



When I got home, I finally got around to doing my income tax. I wasn't too happy in the end when it cost me $1,800 (keep up the good work, Stephen Harper!), but the phrase "tax deduction" kept this one egging me on for the full two hours it took.



Then it was time to clean the bathroom. I thought the tub and toilet would wear out my positivity for sure, but luckily there was some pink mould in the shower stall that needed taking care of. That of course brought the lovely Nick Drake to mind, who serenaded me well into the evening.



Hope your weekend's as productive and musical!

A Very Short Story

Here's a sneak preview of a story I wrote for my friend KC's monthly coffee newsletter, Concrete News. It'll show up in print in a month or two. I was given a maximum of 100 words for the "Writer's Block" section. I've cheated a little, at 101. If you see a word that can be subtracted, let me know.

Abe and Mrs. Hogg

Abraham Vigoda was nine. His teachers found his name hilarious because of some old actor or whatever. Abe’s family didn't have a TV. It wasn’t funny to him.

Once appointed superintendent of the school board, Abe closed Hemlock Elementary. The ex-teachers hated his guts.

Except one day Sobey’s cashier Mrs. Hogg called him her star pupil. Abe was surprised, then remembered her not laughing at him.

His wife didn’t understand the story's full import. How could she? They watched their kid eat the custard things Abe bought.

After she died, Abe realized Mrs. Hogg must not have had a TV either.

Vinyl Lament

Aaah! Just realized I'm going to miss Record Store Day on Saturday, as I'll be flying to Ontario to visit my family. Of course, I'll be happy to see the fam, but I do always enjoy RSD in Halifax. Seems like there's gonna be some cool stuff going on here too… Oh, well. Maybe someone will have opened a record store in Markham since I lived there in 1987. Probably not.

The Meaning of Life

Had this email exchange with an old friend last week. We hadn't talked in years, so of course there were many catching-up details to be shared, which naturally led to a general discussion about life's ultimate meaning. I swear she started it. In the middle of her last email was this paragraph:

I've realized or decided that life has no meaning. We live and we die. I have no need to make a mark or leave a legacy. We're all ephemeral, transient bags of water animated by electricity. I'm good with that. We're all part of everything, together. Why people have to fuck it up so much during the short time we're here is a sad mystery, assigning meaning where there is none feeds the ego. I assume no physicists believe in god.

That kind of stuff is like a bag of candy to me, so I jumped on the invitation to go to Philosophy Town with it. Possibly it wasn't the kind of sympathetic response she was looking for. But I felt like the process of writing it clarified some of my own "mystical atheist" thoughts on the matter. If you're interested, here's what I said. I've left it unitalicized, because it's quite long and that would be just one level of annoying too many:

As for life having no meaning... I think I know what you mean, but I think I don't exactly agree. Or, rather, there are three distinct things I think you might mean, each of which I do agree with, but maybe not in quite the same way as you:

1. Life has no intrinsic meaning, only meanings we arbitrarily assign it.

Sure. Yes. That seems obviously true to me.

However, I wouldn't then go on to say it therefore has no meaning. Because nothing has "intrinsic meaning," whatever that might be. All meaning is relative to some community that has decided upon it arbitrarily, but that doesn't make it any less valid.

The word "cookie," e.g, has been agreed to refer to a certain kind of baked good. There's nothing about the sound of the word or the way it looks written on a piece of paper that makes it inherently suitable for that purpose, but we can still use it to express hunger or generosity without necessarily feeding anyone's egos.

2. OK, but that's just a different use of the word "meaning" from what I'm saying here, which is something more like "point" or "purpose." Because we are all randomly evolved combinations of physical stuff with no designer, no one can claim knowledge of some ultimate purpose to our existence.

Again, I agree with that statement as far as it goes, but would add that the lack of an inarguable, universally valid reason for human life doesn't imply anything wrong with creating our own reasons for living.

We may be bags of water animated by electricty, but we are not JUST bags of water animated by electricity. We also happen to be the only such bags of water that have developed communicatively rich language. We're the species that makes ideas stand for things and words stand for ideas and things stand for words with next to no effort. It's in our nature to go around creating meaning and stories that make our lives make sense to us. There's no point in saying we shouldn't do that, because it's behind every decision we make, every thought we think, and every opinion we opine.

To put it another way, in order to be "good with" or "not good with" the transient and comically physical nature of human existence, you have to first believe in meaning of some kind. Otherwise, the whole judgment is a non-starter.

3. Thoughts, opinions, judgments — yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting we get away from. Our obsessive need to see meaning everywhere is precisely what makes us so neurotic, so we need to learn to cut it out when it's not appropriate. Look at this planet, for Pete's sake! We're making a giant mess of it, killing ourselves and everything else along the way, all for the sake of some stupid ideas and preferences we've dreamed up just to make our lives more interesting or sensible. Life isn't supposed to be interesting or make sense! Other species don't do that, and they seem to get along fine. Oh sure, sometimes they eat each other, and I wouldn't exactly argue that they're better artists or moralists or truth-seekers or whatever than we are. But they also don't figure out ways to short-sightedly annihilate each other and their surroundings, just so they can feel a little more comfortable and smug during their individual lifetimes. Come on!

OK, yeah, I'm pretty much with you on this one. And the whole God-as-something-you-need-to-decide-whether-you-believe-in-or-not I also can't get behind. We do need to get over ourselves and stop clinging to the beliefs and stories we identify with so strongly that we're willing to commit violence to ourselves and the beautifully balanced chaos from which we've sprung in order to protect them.

However… I feel like the letting-go and acceptance-of-reality-as-it-is that are called for here are what religion, and even the mystical concept "God," are supposed to be about. Forget about belief or disbelief in certain narratives. Those are not useful concepts. But if one can manage, at least temporarily, to take on the attitude that there are mysterious forces beyond our understanding, behind everything we think we know, including our sense of ourselves, and that those forces furthermore express themselves through each of us and in turn are witnessed by each of us in a pre-causal, atemporal kind of flow that, when we are lucky enough to tune into it, feels like nothing so much as unconditional love, well, that's a very powerful stance to be able to take.

I guess I'm saying that your "We're all part of everything, together" is not incompatible with a physicist experiencing something that she might decide to call "God." We don't need God as a concept that explains how things work — we have science for that. But science doesn't tell us anything about how to enjoy the world as given. If anything, it just makes up more and more stories about that world, till we can't look at anything directly anymore because we're too busy trying to understand and control it. What we need now to balance that perpetual discomfort is a willingness to experience complete mystery behind the complete understanding. It's not a matter of belief, but of openness to possibility.

So, if you're saying life has no meaning and therefore is pointless and therefore it doesn't matter what people do just as long as they keep their stupid stories to themselves, I respectfully disagree. But if, by "Life has no meaning," you mean to celebrate the infinity of possibilities presented to us at every moment when we can manage to let go of our stories, fears, desires, beliefs, and preconceptions and just live, I'm with ya, sister!

Interesting Sentences from Books I'm Reading

"Music… is not simply a distraction or a pastime, but a core element of our identity as a species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next."

—Daniel J. Levitin, The World in Six Songs:

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

"Unless I can combine poetry with recorded noise, have I any right to be?"

—Morissey, Autobiography

"[T]hough we may tell ourselves that we are royally pushing analogies around from the heights of our conscious thrones, the truth is otherwise: we are really at the mercy of our own seething myriads of unconscious analogies, much as a powerful ruler is really responding to the collective will of their people, because if they were regularly going against their people, they would soon be dethroned."

—Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences:

Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking

"Science can always explain, qua mathematical eccentricities, that and how a strange thing happens, but can it explain anything about the why?"

—Erik Fosnes Hansen, Tales of Protection (Nadia Christensen, transl.)

"Lionel was there, a great white shape, leaning on the open door with his brow pressed to his raised wrist, panting huskily, and giving off a faint grey steam in his purple singlet (the lift was misbehaving, and the flat was on the thirty-third floor—but then again Lionel could give off steam while dozing in bed on a quiet afternoon)."

—Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo

"And anyway I show up at that party they had for homecoming week in first year and I start making out with the poster of Van Morrison, like I've pinned poor Van against the wall and am sexually assaulting him, and you guys are like Oh my god that's the guy from the freshman mixer who chugged all the purple Jesus right out of the barrel and then vomited into the barrel and then started chugging that, who in Christ's name let him in?"

—Lynn Coady, The Antagonist

"Then they leave the area, a little sick at what they have done, especially the orange, who several times becomes so distraught it stops rolling altogether, and must be picked up and hurled down the path by Jim the penisless man, who, turns out, has a very good arm."

—George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation

His world had vanished long before he entered it.

I went to see the latest Wes Anderson movie a couple of times in the last week. If you haven't seen it, you'll be happy to learn that it's the good kind of Wes Anderson movie — the kind where real adult concerns lie behind the whimsical little episodes in a whimsical little world, provoking some genuine and well-earned emotion. As in The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited, and as not so much in The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Moonrise Kingdom, the quirky art direction and fast-paced witticisms in The Grand Budapest Hotel serve deeper, darker themes.

The majority of the film's action takes place between the wars in a fictional eastern European country whose historic culture is threatened by a new cynical barbarism, as represented by barely fictional Nazis called the "Zig Zag Division." Monsieur Gustave, the protagonist, is a tragicomic dandy struggling to preserve an already lost world of foppish etiquette and aristocratic kindness, à la Grand Illusion. Though it's fast-paced and zany, the story manages to feel like a Sebaldian meditation on cruelty and decay. Time marches ruthlessly, destructively forward, and if we want to imagine a better world, our best bet is to listen to the tragic stories of our elders.

Nostalgia is a theme that comes up a lot for Wes Anderson. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that most of his movies are about neurotically nostalgic people in meticulously controlled environments. They dislike the world as it is, so they create their own little worlds and maintain them according to the values of bygone days.

The feeling created is somewhere between cozy and claustrophobic, like when children make a closet into a "fort" and bring all their belongings into it. Max Fischer makes the insular life of private school bearable by starting up old-fashioned clubs that modern high school students are no longer interested in. The adult Tenenbaum children dress in their childhood clothes and each have their own room where they surround themselves with the achievements of their youth. Steve Zissou lives on (or rather, in) a Jacques-Cousteau-like exploratory ship where everything is branded in a seventies style. The Whitman brothers try to rekindle their family bonds in a train compartment. Mr. Fox lives in a tunnel under a tree and refuses to grow up. Sam Shakusky is a boy scout camping on an island.

One gets the sense that this is Anderson's own M.O. The films themselves revel in obsessive detail and old-fashioned techniques, presenting themselves as children's stories for adults. In the lighter ones, the director allows his nostalgia free reign, and we get a comforting, sentimental adventure. The characters may lose their control to outside forces temporarily, but it is regained and order restored with no major change in outlook.

On the other hand, when the protagonists' backward-looking need for control is shown not to be a workable characteristic, some real depth is achieved. When, as in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the fastidious world-making of a character is no match for the chaotic forces of nature (either human nature or nature nature), we feel that something real has been lost, and something learned in exchange. The director turns out not to be such a naïf after all, and we leave the theatre a little wiser.