New Not New
In the absence of scarcity, human existence is flattened as the highs stop seeming high by their sheer omni-presence—easily accessible, permanently available. Where all culture is always already available to us, the onus is no longer on us to spend time unlocking the secrets of a certain song or movie. Our ability to instantly switch to alternative forms of entertainment places the obligation on culture to hook us in immediately, without demanding from us any effort, or else. The technological democratization of all art and culture seems not to have freed humanity from it shackles; it seems to have relegated culture to lesser roles. Culture can no longer seek to challenge or complicate when it must compete for the attention of people who have no need or inclination to understand, but expect culture to offer a distraction somewhere between the two extremes: 1) a lazy sort of background pleasure (a streaming service never off), or; 2) sheer gluttony-the binge watch that leads to the next binge watch.
To Walter Benjamin, our need for newness is not new, nor is it natural: it was Paris that taught us to crave new things. The Paris of pre-WWII Paris itself seemed to Benjamin as a place of unreality, where the specifics of the city’s architectural magnificence functioned, individually and as a whole, as what he termed “dreamhouses of the collective" (1992/2002, p.405). Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames [The Ladies’ Paradise] (1883/2008), a novel about the late nineteenth century Parisian invention of the department store, similarly tracks how the scale of department stores required a new sort of advertising, one that made the constant acquisition of new things to come seem as vitally necessary to the shopper (I must have that scarf!) as it was to the store owner.
Both books are ruminations on shopping. But different kinds of shopping. It’s important to maintain a distinction between the objects of analysis: Zola was writing about the emergence of big-tent glamorama shopping such as Le Bon Marché (1838/revamped in 1852), Lafayette (1895), and Printemps (1865), all of which remain.[1] Zola’s is a critique of (in-store promotional) emotion-based advertising, as that which causes consumers to dream only of consumption, as the necessary invention to increase and maintain faster forms of production, and the consequence of a society whose material resources, increasingly, are used to create products whose primary function is to be new, for a time, before being discarded for the next new.
Zola portrays the shop window, and the newly labyrinthine, multi-storied temples overflowing with material temptation, as THE new social force. It is one so powerful it dwarfs patriotism, religion and reason (or subsumes them, warps them in its own service).
The arcades of Benjamin’s time were like the suburban strip malls of our time: they were probably cool when they were super new. Then they just got ragged. If they hang on at all, it’s because of a dollar store, dowdy dry cleaners and some sort of knitting and craft store, maybe a Christian book store, no, that is just me looking out the window to the forlorn shopping complex across the back alley.
The arcades, or passages, were down at the heels. They were no Galeries Lafayette, where polite Paris tilted, that much for sure. “World of particular secret affinities;” Benjamin writes, “palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, champagne bottles, prostheses, and letter writing manuals…,” (Benjamin, 1982/2002, p. 827). Earlier, he includes this description, published in 1854, about the Passage du Caire: “The arcades are sad, gloomy....destined to house lithographer’s studios and binders’ shops, as the adjoining street is destined for the manufacture of straw hats: pedestrians generally avoid them,” (Benjamin, 1982/2002, p.55).
What become of all those things produced by a society that fetishizes the new, as the virtue above all others—things of middling quality, manufactured specifically for their chance to be the new; because the new is a value that can adhere to any product regardless of its quality or provenance, for an increasingly short period of time? What becomes of a society that organizes itself in the pursuit of a quality that is uncaptureable, unfixable by definition? Benjamin turned to Nietzsche’s The Will to Power for his answers (Benjamin, 1982/2002, p. 115[4]). “The world…lives on itself: its excrements are its nourishment.”
We produce, we consume, we discard, we repeat—what Nietzsche discusses as “the eternal return.”
The aimlessness of society is not accidental, but necessary to preserve the conditions created for consumption as cure for all ills: “this notion—that the world intentionally avoids a goal…--must occur to all those who would like to force on the world the capacity for eternal novelty.”
Work never ceases. Production must increase. Resources must be directed from pursuit of the permanent, towards the never-ending new. The pursuit of newness becomes the production of waste as the primary crop of society. The pursuit of the new, paradoxically, prevents the new from happening. A society in pursuit of what can never be accomplished can never move on to the next goal. Frantic production begets first-class advertising to make sure demand goes on growing forever until succumbing repeatedly to temptation becomes an imperative, and any failure to continue consuming comes with consequences: she’s out of style; he’s too poor for a new suit; are they seriously still wearing shoes from fucking Aldo? “[T]he idler must be furnished with sensations, the merchant with customers, and the man in the street with a worldview,” writes Benjamin (1982/2002, p.383). Even when you’re not shopping, you’re still being sold.
Each of the five sections discusses a single record by one of the artists named above in the context of a particular outfit of thrift store clothing and a dance club. It was written in the order below, the chapters are listed alphabetically above, but read them however.
[1] Among the departed department stores, whose buildings remain: Grand Magasins de Louvre (1855-1974) a shop that came and went, and is in the process of coming again (this time as a high luxury shopping destination); and La Samaritaine (1869) (Le louvre de antiquaires, n.d.). Vacant since 2005, La Samaritaine is now being developed as a mixed office/hotel/apartment building with a small retail component. (La samaritaine, n.d.) (See also Ladonne, 2015; Miller, 1981)
[2] All quotes from Nietzsche as cited in Benjamin.
In the absence of scarcity, human existence is flattened as the highs stop seeming high by their sheer omni-presence—easily accessible, permanently available. Where all culture is always already available to us, the onus is no longer on us to spend time unlocking the secrets of a certain song or movie. Our ability to instantly switch to alternative forms of entertainment places the obligation on culture to hook us in immediately, without demanding from us any effort, or else. The technological democratization of all art and culture seems not to have freed humanity from it shackles; it seems to have relegated culture to lesser roles. Culture can no longer seek to challenge or complicate when it must compete for the attention of people who have no need or inclination to understand, but expect culture to offer a distraction somewhere between the two extremes: 1) a lazy sort of background pleasure (a streaming service never off), or; 2) sheer gluttony-the binge watch that leads to the next binge watch.
To Walter Benjamin, our need for newness is not new, nor is it natural: it was Paris that taught us to crave new things. The Paris of pre-WWII Paris itself seemed to Benjamin as a place of unreality, where the specifics of the city’s architectural magnificence functioned, individually and as a whole, as what he termed “dreamhouses of the collective" (1992/2002, p.405). Emile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames [The Ladies’ Paradise] (1883/2008), a novel about the late nineteenth century Parisian invention of the department store, similarly tracks how the scale of department stores required a new sort of advertising, one that made the constant acquisition of new things to come seem as vitally necessary to the shopper (I must have that scarf!) as it was to the store owner.
Both books are ruminations on shopping. But different kinds of shopping. It’s important to maintain a distinction between the objects of analysis: Zola was writing about the emergence of big-tent glamorama shopping such as Le Bon Marché (1838/revamped in 1852), Lafayette (1895), and Printemps (1865), all of which remain.[1] Zola’s is a critique of (in-store promotional) emotion-based advertising, as that which causes consumers to dream only of consumption, as the necessary invention to increase and maintain faster forms of production, and the consequence of a society whose material resources, increasingly, are used to create products whose primary function is to be new, for a time, before being discarded for the next new.
- It was Woman the shops were competing for so fiercely, it was Woman they were continually snaring with their bargains, after dazing her with their displays. They had woken new desires in her weak flesh; they were an immense temptation to which she inevitably yielded, succumbing in the first place to purchases for the house, then seduced by coquetry, finally consumed by desire. By increasing sales tenfold, by making luxury democratic, shops were becoming a terrible agency for spending, ravaging households, working hand in hand with the latest extravagances in fashion, growing every more expensive (1883/2008, p.77).
Zola portrays the shop window, and the newly labyrinthine, multi-storied temples overflowing with material temptation, as THE new social force. It is one so powerful it dwarfs patriotism, religion and reason (or subsumes them, warps them in its own service).
The arcades of Benjamin’s time were like the suburban strip malls of our time: they were probably cool when they were super new. Then they just got ragged. If they hang on at all, it’s because of a dollar store, dowdy dry cleaners and some sort of knitting and craft store, maybe a Christian book store, no, that is just me looking out the window to the forlorn shopping complex across the back alley.
The arcades, or passages, were down at the heels. They were no Galeries Lafayette, where polite Paris tilted, that much for sure. “World of particular secret affinities;” Benjamin writes, “palm tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, champagne bottles, prostheses, and letter writing manuals…,” (Benjamin, 1982/2002, p. 827). Earlier, he includes this description, published in 1854, about the Passage du Caire: “The arcades are sad, gloomy....destined to house lithographer’s studios and binders’ shops, as the adjoining street is destined for the manufacture of straw hats: pedestrians generally avoid them,” (Benjamin, 1982/2002, p.55).
What become of all those things produced by a society that fetishizes the new, as the virtue above all others—things of middling quality, manufactured specifically for their chance to be the new; because the new is a value that can adhere to any product regardless of its quality or provenance, for an increasingly short period of time? What becomes of a society that organizes itself in the pursuit of a quality that is uncaptureable, unfixable by definition? Benjamin turned to Nietzsche’s The Will to Power for his answers (Benjamin, 1982/2002, p. 115[4]). “The world…lives on itself: its excrements are its nourishment.”
We produce, we consume, we discard, we repeat—what Nietzsche discusses as “the eternal return.”
The aimlessness of society is not accidental, but necessary to preserve the conditions created for consumption as cure for all ills: “this notion—that the world intentionally avoids a goal…--must occur to all those who would like to force on the world the capacity for eternal novelty.”
Work never ceases. Production must increase. Resources must be directed from pursuit of the permanent, towards the never-ending new. The pursuit of newness becomes the production of waste as the primary crop of society. The pursuit of the new, paradoxically, prevents the new from happening. A society in pursuit of what can never be accomplished can never move on to the next goal. Frantic production begets first-class advertising to make sure demand goes on growing forever until succumbing repeatedly to temptation becomes an imperative, and any failure to continue consuming comes with consequences: she’s out of style; he’s too poor for a new suit; are they seriously still wearing shoes from fucking Aldo? “[T]he idler must be furnished with sensations, the merchant with customers, and the man in the street with a worldview,” writes Benjamin (1982/2002, p.383). Even when you’re not shopping, you’re still being sold.
Each of the five sections discusses a single record by one of the artists named above in the context of a particular outfit of thrift store clothing and a dance club. It was written in the order below, the chapters are listed alphabetically above, but read them however.
- Club 8 at the discotheque
- Clarence Carter, oh shit
- Al-di-la Martino goes Britpop
- Thin Lizzy and Live Aid
- Jackson Browne and KFC in Paris
[1] Among the departed department stores, whose buildings remain: Grand Magasins de Louvre (1855-1974) a shop that came and went, and is in the process of coming again (this time as a high luxury shopping destination); and La Samaritaine (1869) (Le louvre de antiquaires, n.d.). Vacant since 2005, La Samaritaine is now being developed as a mixed office/hotel/apartment building with a small retail component. (La samaritaine, n.d.) (See also Ladonne, 2015; Miller, 1981)
[2] All quotes from Nietzsche as cited in Benjamin.
The passage (arcade) closest to our apartment the months we lived in Paris was the city's Little India, Passage Brady. Have you also been spoiled by the depth and breadth of East Indian Canadian cuisine and culture? If so, the food on offer on Passage Brady is unlikely to impress you much.
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For the Joy of Cyndi Lauper
(and a brief note on methodology)
I’d gotten in the habit of listening to my physical record collection the same way I listened to the thousands of albums I'd downloaded. For the thrill of the new. For that hit you get when you hear something for the first time. One and done. That probably is a sensible way of listening to music downloaded or streamed: the supply is infinite, why not Get Some! You’ve already paid for it (unless you haven’t, in which case, well played). But it’s a complete misuse of a physical collection. To know an artist’s canon in any sort of meaningful way is to know it over time, to know it in new circumstances, to let it grow with you. Why buy vinyl you do not intend to spin more than twice total ever?
I’d stopped putting in the time. I felt in a sense that I’d done my records a disservice: what is the point of rescuing David Byrne from the ignominy of being the meat in a Nana Moskourri, Englebert Humperdink Salvation Army sandwich, if all you’re going to do is stick him between T-Rex and Tangerine Dream and may heaven have mercy on his soul?
I scrutinized my collection, looking for songs I already knew—but didn’t know particularly well. I was trying to reach the middle point of a spectrum of which Total Newness is one extreme, and Nostalgic Over-Familiarity is the other. I was looking neither for wholly new thrills nor for the repetition of the same thrill I had already experienced too many times. I was equally looking for songs that made me want to play them over and over again. I wanted to dance, walk back to the turntable, lift the lid, lift the stylus, find the right groove, drop it and do it all over again. I wanted sides of records I played so much that I would come to be able to start singing as soon as I saw the cover. I wanted to listen to my records the way they’re meant to be listened to: like the artist and band and producer and all involved put their all into it, like it’s an encapsulation of everything they knew about music—everything they knew about the world—the time they recorded it, and that’s why they recorded it in the first place.
I wanted to take it slow. I wanted to digest a few records at a time. I wanted not to play each record I owned once every two years: instead, I wanted to play five records in heavy rotation at a time, playing them so often they became part of me like The Lord’s Prayer, and The 2 Live Crew’s “We Want Some Pussy” (Campbell, Hobbs, Ross, Wong Won, 1986, track two), the only hip hop song I can recite, all the way through, even now, thank you illicit 1986 mixed tape that also contained The Beastie Boys’ “Girls” (no way did the 1980s’ music industry cultivate misogyny for profit, there’s just no way) (Beastie Boys & Rubin, 1986, track six). A collection becomes a collection not sequentially after acquisition and filing: it becomes a collection with use. A collection unused is intentionally acquired waste.
All songs and records contain within themselves the possibility for reinterpretation. Cultural texts change. Intervals are important. The “you” that returns to a record is not the same “you” that heard it the first time. The first time I heard “Money Changes Everything” on the radio I don’t know for sure. But this one time I know because I keep reliving that scene: it’s become one of those definitive memories of the mundane that collectively comes to summarize a life. I’m in the passenger’s seat of some impossibly older Grade 12 girl’s sedan, summer Sunday night after evening service at West side Alliance, windows down. The night is dark, the air is warm. Regina, 1985: Albert Street cruising—a lot of cars, rusted clunkers lovingly cared for (the boys measure each other by mechanical prowess: it’s a grease monkey’s town), all of them piled high with kids front and back. There's like six of us crammed in the car. I suppose it doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s the first time you hear it or not. That song was released on January 31, 1985. So it was already a few months old that summer, but still hanging on, at least in light night rotation. For sure, I’d heard it before. We all had. That was part of the appeal: this unsolicited, undesired communal outpouring of jouissance, immediately upon the two beat drum pick up. (Lacan, 1992; Barthes, 1975).[1]
Jouissance, to both theorists, is a term used to express, a feeling of bliss (in Barthes, there is an almost orgasmic meaning intended), the difference between pleasure (enjoyed it, moved on) and passion (enjoyed it so much I am a fan for life, and am willing to reorganize my life accordingly). The music I’m writing about here has given me something far more meaningful than simple pleasure. It may seem counter-intuitive for philosophers to beat up so much on pleasure (who doesn’t like pleasure?) but there is a need to try and differentiate between types and degrees of it.
Basic pleasure may be both proof and cause of ideological conformity (to Adorno for sure): the happy subject content to recover from the working day in docile submissiveness, reading a book or watching a show that confirms the correctness of the world as it already exists. Jouissance, a bliss that exceeds pleasure, causes a sort of destabilization. Jouissance is an excess of excitement; it makes a person dream of a better life, and of a world in which all of the sage adults haven’t settled on a 40-hour work week, fast food-bloated bodies, reality tv addled, & technological device-addicted brains as totally normal, the absolute best any society could ever do ever times infinity-ever. The quiet desperation that comes from being told you belong to the freest, luckiest people there is, even as every day you feel trapped, hopeless, ground down by all the quotidian chores that constitute your meaningless existence? Pleasure helps you forget this. Jouissance makes you want to change it.
Even when you know you can’t. Even when, by accepting jouissance as a superior pleasure, you are admitting that all of the customary ways of finding meaning in existence are bullshit: no afterlife, no better society, no teleological purpose, no master plan. Insisting on jouissance is nonetheless, at least, a rejection of newness for the sake of the new. It uncouples pleasure from consumption. A search for jouissance is a personal act of defiance against a world in which the collective energy necessary for change has instead been channeled into the perpetual, conformist pursuit of products that bring pleasure. As De Kessel observes, the futility of jouissance does not detract from its inherent morality: “Even if the enjoyment we strive for may be a vain thing of nothing, it nevertheless supports our desire, and in this way is fundamentally good” (p. 124).
The music heightened the entire experience, elevated it from the mundane. “Money Changes Everything” in that instant made me feel the happiest I’d ever felt. It caused me to wonder why I'd never felt like that before. The song, accidentally, has come to serve as a sort of personal benchmark which I use to measure both music and happiness: 1) Ok, this song is good, but is it "Money Changes Everything" Good? 2) Ok, I am pretty happy but am I "Hanging my head out the window as we pass the Wendy's while screaming lustily into the warm night air, 'I am happy for the first time in my life! The elixir of existence is sweeter than your Slushi!' happy"? Exactly. A second point: the song isn't nostalgic for me. The song makes me happy-that's it, I don't know why. I don’t play this song to re-live the 80s.[2] It is more than just an 80s relic that I drag out sometimes, usually in a neon-lit, ritualistic spirit summoning performed wearing my Duckie outfit, homemade (stick-on) Emilio Estevez mustache, and a pair of Pat Benatar's leather pants.
[1] I think that is the only musicological term I use in this book. I'm not a musicologist. I had to ask a friend, who also had to ask a friend, and after that I decided just it would be easier to highlight in the footnotes that I'm not a musicologist and that while I can play an instrument, the guitar, I am really quite bad at it. My highest achievement is that I can play the intro of The Kings of Convenience' "Homesick." The only thing else I can still play, sort of, is three chords and the truth. I think about music as a fan and a media scholar; not as a musician or as a musicologist.
[2] The 80s were terrible for me. A comment from an Ecuadorean security guard as I, aged 13 and wearing 1980s short short gym shorts, waited to cross the street to get to the soccer field: “Esos son brazos o piernas?” Are those arms or legs?—a typical comment on my lanky skin and bones.
(and a brief note on methodology)
I’d gotten in the habit of listening to my physical record collection the same way I listened to the thousands of albums I'd downloaded. For the thrill of the new. For that hit you get when you hear something for the first time. One and done. That probably is a sensible way of listening to music downloaded or streamed: the supply is infinite, why not Get Some! You’ve already paid for it (unless you haven’t, in which case, well played). But it’s a complete misuse of a physical collection. To know an artist’s canon in any sort of meaningful way is to know it over time, to know it in new circumstances, to let it grow with you. Why buy vinyl you do not intend to spin more than twice total ever?
I’d stopped putting in the time. I felt in a sense that I’d done my records a disservice: what is the point of rescuing David Byrne from the ignominy of being the meat in a Nana Moskourri, Englebert Humperdink Salvation Army sandwich, if all you’re going to do is stick him between T-Rex and Tangerine Dream and may heaven have mercy on his soul?
I scrutinized my collection, looking for songs I already knew—but didn’t know particularly well. I was trying to reach the middle point of a spectrum of which Total Newness is one extreme, and Nostalgic Over-Familiarity is the other. I was looking neither for wholly new thrills nor for the repetition of the same thrill I had already experienced too many times. I was equally looking for songs that made me want to play them over and over again. I wanted to dance, walk back to the turntable, lift the lid, lift the stylus, find the right groove, drop it and do it all over again. I wanted sides of records I played so much that I would come to be able to start singing as soon as I saw the cover. I wanted to listen to my records the way they’re meant to be listened to: like the artist and band and producer and all involved put their all into it, like it’s an encapsulation of everything they knew about music—everything they knew about the world—the time they recorded it, and that’s why they recorded it in the first place.
I wanted to take it slow. I wanted to digest a few records at a time. I wanted not to play each record I owned once every two years: instead, I wanted to play five records in heavy rotation at a time, playing them so often they became part of me like The Lord’s Prayer, and The 2 Live Crew’s “We Want Some Pussy” (Campbell, Hobbs, Ross, Wong Won, 1986, track two), the only hip hop song I can recite, all the way through, even now, thank you illicit 1986 mixed tape that also contained The Beastie Boys’ “Girls” (no way did the 1980s’ music industry cultivate misogyny for profit, there’s just no way) (Beastie Boys & Rubin, 1986, track six). A collection becomes a collection not sequentially after acquisition and filing: it becomes a collection with use. A collection unused is intentionally acquired waste.
All songs and records contain within themselves the possibility for reinterpretation. Cultural texts change. Intervals are important. The “you” that returns to a record is not the same “you” that heard it the first time. The first time I heard “Money Changes Everything” on the radio I don’t know for sure. But this one time I know because I keep reliving that scene: it’s become one of those definitive memories of the mundane that collectively comes to summarize a life. I’m in the passenger’s seat of some impossibly older Grade 12 girl’s sedan, summer Sunday night after evening service at West side Alliance, windows down. The night is dark, the air is warm. Regina, 1985: Albert Street cruising—a lot of cars, rusted clunkers lovingly cared for (the boys measure each other by mechanical prowess: it’s a grease monkey’s town), all of them piled high with kids front and back. There's like six of us crammed in the car. I suppose it doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s the first time you hear it or not. That song was released on January 31, 1985. So it was already a few months old that summer, but still hanging on, at least in light night rotation. For sure, I’d heard it before. We all had. That was part of the appeal: this unsolicited, undesired communal outpouring of jouissance, immediately upon the two beat drum pick up. (Lacan, 1992; Barthes, 1975).[1]
Jouissance, to both theorists, is a term used to express, a feeling of bliss (in Barthes, there is an almost orgasmic meaning intended), the difference between pleasure (enjoyed it, moved on) and passion (enjoyed it so much I am a fan for life, and am willing to reorganize my life accordingly). The music I’m writing about here has given me something far more meaningful than simple pleasure. It may seem counter-intuitive for philosophers to beat up so much on pleasure (who doesn’t like pleasure?) but there is a need to try and differentiate between types and degrees of it.
Basic pleasure may be both proof and cause of ideological conformity (to Adorno for sure): the happy subject content to recover from the working day in docile submissiveness, reading a book or watching a show that confirms the correctness of the world as it already exists. Jouissance, a bliss that exceeds pleasure, causes a sort of destabilization. Jouissance is an excess of excitement; it makes a person dream of a better life, and of a world in which all of the sage adults haven’t settled on a 40-hour work week, fast food-bloated bodies, reality tv addled, & technological device-addicted brains as totally normal, the absolute best any society could ever do ever times infinity-ever. The quiet desperation that comes from being told you belong to the freest, luckiest people there is, even as every day you feel trapped, hopeless, ground down by all the quotidian chores that constitute your meaningless existence? Pleasure helps you forget this. Jouissance makes you want to change it.
Even when you know you can’t. Even when, by accepting jouissance as a superior pleasure, you are admitting that all of the customary ways of finding meaning in existence are bullshit: no afterlife, no better society, no teleological purpose, no master plan. Insisting on jouissance is nonetheless, at least, a rejection of newness for the sake of the new. It uncouples pleasure from consumption. A search for jouissance is a personal act of defiance against a world in which the collective energy necessary for change has instead been channeled into the perpetual, conformist pursuit of products that bring pleasure. As De Kessel observes, the futility of jouissance does not detract from its inherent morality: “Even if the enjoyment we strive for may be a vain thing of nothing, it nevertheless supports our desire, and in this way is fundamentally good” (p. 124).
The music heightened the entire experience, elevated it from the mundane. “Money Changes Everything” in that instant made me feel the happiest I’d ever felt. It caused me to wonder why I'd never felt like that before. The song, accidentally, has come to serve as a sort of personal benchmark which I use to measure both music and happiness: 1) Ok, this song is good, but is it "Money Changes Everything" Good? 2) Ok, I am pretty happy but am I "Hanging my head out the window as we pass the Wendy's while screaming lustily into the warm night air, 'I am happy for the first time in my life! The elixir of existence is sweeter than your Slushi!' happy"? Exactly. A second point: the song isn't nostalgic for me. The song makes me happy-that's it, I don't know why. I don’t play this song to re-live the 80s.[2] It is more than just an 80s relic that I drag out sometimes, usually in a neon-lit, ritualistic spirit summoning performed wearing my Duckie outfit, homemade (stick-on) Emilio Estevez mustache, and a pair of Pat Benatar's leather pants.
[1] I think that is the only musicological term I use in this book. I'm not a musicologist. I had to ask a friend, who also had to ask a friend, and after that I decided just it would be easier to highlight in the footnotes that I'm not a musicologist and that while I can play an instrument, the guitar, I am really quite bad at it. My highest achievement is that I can play the intro of The Kings of Convenience' "Homesick." The only thing else I can still play, sort of, is three chords and the truth. I think about music as a fan and a media scholar; not as a musician or as a musicologist.
[2] The 80s were terrible for me. A comment from an Ecuadorean security guard as I, aged 13 and wearing 1980s short short gym shorts, waited to cross the street to get to the soccer field: “Esos son brazos o piernas?” Are those arms or legs?—a typical comment on my lanky skin and bones.
I have zero nostalgia for any of this. Ok, maybe "Shadows of the night," shit that's a good song, too, like the only time in musical history anyone has ever out-Bonnie Tylered Bonnie Tyler. Martin Collegiate, pictured below, is where I attended Grade 10 in 1985. Regina was so culturally similar to Quito, Ecuador; and the curriculum between a tiny, private evangelical Southern Baptist-accredited, American missionary school and a massive, public school on the wrong side of a prairie town basically identical so the transition could not have gone smoother. Martin was rough. I wore my dress shoes from Le Chateau knowing if all that happened was some heckling it'd be a good day. I got punched in the face at a Much Music video dance party at the hockey arena downtown, by someone I never saw: it was without question the most violent public space I've ever entered. There were fights all over the floor, in the bathrooms, in the bleachers, it was like The Warriors, every gang in the entire city was present and accounted for. South America was safer.
Martin Collegiate in Regina, Saskatchewan. Named after Lieutenant-Colonel, The Hon. Martin Gene Rossiter, For the Dead Olympian Regiment, Welsh Guards. (see Al Martino for more on Martin.)
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A DISCLAIMER
Last year, about halfway through a rough draft, first my eldest cat Monty (who had lived with me in six cities over 20 years) died; then my dad was hospitalized in Victoria. He died a few months later. Our house was for sale that summer, and we were living out of a suitcase at my mother-in-law's. There are gaps in continuity in the writing as a result and the way the tone shifts from slapstick to soul-baring isn't really fixable, so I've decided to preserve it like this instead, an illustrated testament to troubled times. In any case, I teach the importance of DIY in my college classes, even as I've expended way too much intellectual energy in pursuit of some great Knopf, who was supposed to instantly transform me into Lionel Trilling, at the outside Edmund Wilson, listen I'd have settled for Anthony Boucher-a person's gotta eat. The decline of public spaces to which the text frequently alludes is based on my observations and experiences during the nine years I lived in Kelowna and Vernon. I wouldn't have thought of these things had I stayed in Montreal, where I first learned that clothes and street-life and records were worthy and necessary objects of study; and I'm trying not to think about them now because I moved to Vancouver a year ago and I'm happy here. The change in address occurred during the text's composition and this causes a confusion of place in places: I appear to be living in two locations simultaneously, occasionally in the same paragraph. I apologize for that. I've published a modest amount of fiction and non-fiction, most of it in literary or academic journals and magazines you would not read ever unless you were |
looking for a particular story by someone you knew. I've also published a chapter in an academic book (that one I like), and a single book of my own. Really, it's all been a very slight return. The book I published I wish I hadn't. Everything about the process was miserable, the prose most of all. Be careful what you wish for, indeed. I would un-publish it if that was a thing. I find the self-promotion necessary to advance in this technological era personally distasteful and socially detrimental. I find the psychological changes that come from wanting likes and follows super uncomf. I've been off Facebook since, like, 2013. That was the last of any and all social media. The plan sort of worked. I wrote three books these past five years. I tried it out as Wilkie Collins playing banjo, a Victorian ghost story/Deliverance hybrid and those were 400 pages of weird fiction-Island of Dr. Moreau on a B.C. mountain. I wrote a Montreal/Paris novel but it came out as shabby imitation Hammett and that is the good part. So yes, sorry Jonathan Frantzen, terrible advice! I got off the internet, and I still wrote horribly, maybe even worse than before, and that took some doing. I guess the nicest thing I can say about The Oldness of New is that it's the best of a disappointing lot and that is why I am not very good at marketing. Probably five years of tweets would have been the better way to go. Sorry. |
SOSO, like seriously so far away from The Pantheon is what my positioning in this photo here is intending to symbolize (I discuss this blazer in Professor Haul). That pocket square is actually a cat neckerchief. It was too small for any of our cats, but the fit was fine in this pocket.
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My previous DIY project, 21 years ago. The text underneath reads "12 coquettish tracks from Calgary's pop voluptuaries," and good luck trying to explain that to the DJs at CJAY92 because you can't, or at least I couldn't. Ten dollar words and classic rock broheems, it's just not a combination I can endorse.
I've played this over the years for friends in different cities and the response has varied: I've heard people laugh and say, "But, it's so awful." I've heard a lot of praise for "Lover, That's All There is," by The Film Extras, which was the band of Bobby McAlister, who engineered and recorded ten out of the twelve tracks at his home studio. McAlister was Stephen Street to that scene: he had the touch. Mostly, people seem genuinely taken by the Glider songs. Some of the other bands around had a keener nose for the attention of the press, but the single best show I saw in Calgary was Glider at the Night Gallery during the Panacea festival, a couple of years before this compilation came out. They covered The Beatles ("Please, Please Me", I think) out of nowhere, and they got it so right I think even the bartenders were jumping up and down screaming. Calgary indie-pop in the mid 90s, you know? In 1994, the city had three (rivalrous) indiepop bands with the songs to back up their self-belief. All of them would surely have found, as a safe bet, a modest international audience if offered a chance-which was never going to happen. The Canadian recording industry seemed to regard jingle jangle originating from the Canadian prairies as inauthentic, almost unpatriotic. It had no use for it. The A&R reps who came to the shows seemed to believe that the kids were always going to go for Our Moist Lady Mother I Earth Peace, keep the soul sensitive dudebros' hair long and greasy, keep the vocals guttural and sleazy, don't mess with success. Me at 20. I am seated at the Falkland Stampede. Ann, my mom (recently returned from missionary service in Madrid) is seated beside me but we photoshopped her out. She died unexpectedly in 2002; you really cannot know how something like that is going to hit you until it does. Just that, when you get knocked out of the saddle like that, it's not, as it turns out (ahem), very pretty at all. |
I get knocked down! And...I stay down. Because I probably have a concussion. That shirt right there, that's the dream. Skip ahead to the Thin Lizzy section for more on vintage Western menswear and tips for successful stampeding. Dance Craze: Intense Twist