Para More

Last night I had a dream that I was both in Paramore and opening for Paramore. As in Paramore and its entire repertoire existed twice in one universe. No one noticed.

If that’s not a telling commentary on the music industry, I don’t know what is.

Tags: dreams, music, paramore

Majoring in humanities: Not a great idea

John sent me this an hour ago. As I sift through listings on Work In Culture, edit my Monster.com profile to match my LinkedIn profile, find adds on Craiglist for semi-nude male gay nightclub bartenders (legitimately awesome sounding job opportunity but I’m neither gay nor male) and generally lament how the visa restrictions that prevented me from working in high school are now crippling my employment prospects (despite a pretty sweet GPA at a pretty sweet institution) I cannot tell you how much this wee little entrepreneur has brought hope to my wretched, dark, unemployed world. So thank you, good sir, for suggesting that maybe, maybe, all I have to do is construct a cardboard cut out of myself, throw down with some Dr. Seuss books and get all-guerilla on the city of Toronto’s ass to save myself from eating cat food in a Chinatown basement for the rest of my life.

Tags: employment, university

Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down

Okay, wow. Its been a while. I can’t believe my last post was in February and about peanut butter. That’s an incredibly sad, yet fairly accurate metaphor for the last 3 (I was about to write 6, it feels that long) months of my life. If I wasn’t trying to read the entire Leviathan in one night, I was sifting through Scholars Portal (quite possibly the most useless resource of all time) for reception studies on British imperial epics (fun fact: they don’t exist) all while developing a $100 a week Rockstar habit (words of wisdom: Recovery is non-carbonated, so you can chug it faster than your standard energy drink, but Burner has 40g more caffeine per serving.) Three times in one week I went to sleep at 7AM and got up at 8. No wonder the only thing I could handle contemplating was the poor design of a Kraft jar.

I did, however, survive my third year at the University of Toronto, mostly (physically) unscathed (my jaw now locks up from never-before-experienced stress related teeth grinding, no big) and with pretty f-ing good grades.

When I was applying to universities, I polled everyone I knew (and many a stranger on the internet) on whether they liked the school they went to. I’ve thought a lot about how I’d answer this question if anyone ever asked me if I liked U of T (I can’t imagine why this would ever come up, but three years of liberal arts has somehow naturalized the act of answering questions nobody cares about.) I’ve come to the following conclusion:

Going to U of T is like dating a guy who tells you he loves you, then doesn’t call you for two months, then shows up with flowers and says “baby, I’m sorry.” Its a complete and utter mindfuck. When its great, its great. Courses are interesting, Profs are amazing and you don’t remember how Robarts only ever has one copy of a book 300 people need for an assignment. Then one day you wake up and realize 90% of the articles in the online database are linked to nothing, your TA can’t even make sense of the topics for your 12 page final essay and your library was intentionally built in the shape of a peacock, the great pretentious asshole of the animal kingdom and you can’t help but take this as a sign. Those are the days you wish Rockstar could eat through your internal organs, or that you had just gone to Ryerson.

I think you have to be a masochist to go here. At least for Arts & Sciences. I mean the University of Toronto name is not exactly going to carry my humanities degree a hell of a lot farther. The only logical explanation is some sense of sick pleasure. I’ve heard so many people say they wanted to “beat U of T.” Like all the suffering will be worth it once we graduate and we can say “fuck you, we won.” Or as my roommate described it “After I get my degree, I just want to take a big shit on Con Hall.”

Tags: employment, university

The Peanut Butter Solution

Honestly, why would you package something spreadable in a container taller than a knife. I am so tired of having to stick my entire damn hand in there to get shit out. Memo to Kraft – take a note from cream cheese and put that shit in a shallower vessel, so for once I can not end up smearing peanut butter all over my counter and putting anyone who enters my door at risk of anaphylactic shock.

Tags: rants

Sounds Like a Joke but its Not

Good Charlotte’s new album is called Cardiology, and they described it as sounding “a lot like Blink-182.”

Tags: good charlotte, music

Highschoolers in Toronto Round II

I’m officially a jaded city-dwelling university student. The longer I live here and the older I get the more high school students and non-Torontonians seem to stick out. And nothing proves you’re bitter more than when people’s enjoyment of things you don’t even notice anymore becomes irritating.

A couple months ago I was in Kensington looking for hipster sunglasses to wear to the Scotty Dynamo show when I saw a bunch of high schoolers there on a field trip. I must have been wandering around for close to a couple hours, and not once did I see them step away from one of the shitty stalls with the piles of colored wayfarers. Zero exploration. Not even to a smoke shop, which I would think would be pretty fascinating for a suburban teenager, I mean I remember walking around Queen Street when I was sixteen and being freaked out by Friendly Stranger (and moreso The Condom Shack.) They didn’t even go to another plastic Taiwanese sunglass shack, the existence of the one shack was enough to amuse them for 2 whole hours.

Today watched a bunch of high school scenesters (can you be a scenester past 18 anyway?) freak out over the fact you can legally cross at Yonge & Dundas diagonally. I mean it, it was like Craig Owens floated down from the sky and offered to autograph their neon Nike high tops. They were that amused. They were standing in the middle of the intersection dancing around, so overcome with joy that they all forgot they were standing on a road and 30 seconds later were in front of several lanes of oncoming traffic.

Tags: rants, toronto

Meet my new adopted Asian child.

Tags: cute

The Reason I love George Stroumboulopoulos

I was watching Jay Leno the other night and it really made me realize just how good George Stroumboulopoulos is at his job. Granted, Jay Leno will never be known as a good interviewer, nor does he host the same kind of program, but he couldn’t even keep up with Megan Fox. She says something about how she started modeling when she was fourteen or fifteen, and Leno’s next question is “so when did you start modeling?” Sweet Jesus Leno, what are they paying you for? Can you at least stay present? After that incident, all I notice is how detached every other interviewer is. I used to hate the set of The Hour and how Strombo would always lean towards his guest to the point where when they cut to the guest’s response, the corner of his head would be in the frame. I found it gimmicky, like they were visually saying look at what an effort Strombo is making to connect with his guest, but now it doesn’t seem so irritating, because weird posture or not, at least he’s ENGAGED. He is PAYING ATTENTION and asking RELEVANT QUESTIONS. Granted the testament to his skill is how easy he makes it look, but shouldn’t those two things be the bare minimum for someone who gets paid to interview someone else?

The problem is no one’s allowed to have opinions anymore. The media is just one big circle jerk, the shows need celebrities, and the celebrities need the shows, but they aren’t going to go on the shows if they aren’t going to come out looking good. So no one is allowed to ask anything but the most benign questions, because God forbid someone who is being payed millions of dollars to do something, have to justify why they’re there and someone else is not.

Obviously celebrities/politicians/whatever and the press have conflicting objectives, but that’s just the nature of things. I remember watching an episode of Disband where they school Dean Lickyer (I think) on the media, telling them the success of the interview is based on how many times they can drop their album release date in the span of five minutes. The same thing happens at the White House, the press corps literally has a meeting every morning and defines the key issue of the day, then tries to push that issue as hard as physically possible while avoiding the others. The difference is the news media will pry as hard as they can, while Sarah Taylor just stands there in leggings.

Its a damn shame, because the whole reason I used to watch Much over MTV (US) and television in general, is because I wanted to know other peoples opinions. I liked certain hosts and liked hearing what they had to say, even if I didn’t always agree with them. I mean even if George Stroumboulopoulos wasn’t explicitly bashing Good Charlotte, you knew he had an opinion. Today with music journalism you might as well just subscribe to an RSS feed and be done with it, because everything is just the same sanitized press release.

Tags: george stroumboulopoulos, much music, music television, strombo, television

Guy LaFleur

I just got back from watching The Rocket in Quebec Cinema. Well we have fourteen minutes left, but I can’t imagine it will redeem itself in that little time, so let’s just continue.

I was cringing throughout the past two hours.

Yes. Quebec loves the Habs and Toronto loves the Leafs and if my experience watching the season opener, where the (alcohol fueled) shit-talking escalated to physical violence, was an indicator of anything, these opinions are held very strongly.

The film was made in Quebec. Obviously its going to be imbued with some nationalist sentiment. I can even see why they’d want to use the Canadiens struggle in an English speaking league as an allegory for Quebec’s oppression by Anglo Canada (honestly I think its more Anglo business owners, not Anglo Canada, but whatever.) But for the love of God the duality was taken to a ridiculous level. I’m sure you can make the case that Richard’s Quebecois identity made him a better hockey player (how coming from a poor Quebec town made him hard working, whatever) but he was not a good hockey player because he’s from Quebec. I mean dear God, look at half the NHL.

What’s more is the filmmakers depicted him as just so damn melancholy throughout the film. I mean sweet Jesus, Charles Binamé, are you really saying you believe Maurice Richard was just so depressed about being kept down by whitey that he couldn’t even crack a smile when he broke Malone’s record? Because that’s what happened in the film. I mean they broke the relationship between Anglophones and Francophones into causality. There were so many scenes that went like this:

Random English-speaking hockey player: You damn dirty Frenchman!
Announcer: HOLY SHIT MAURICE RICHARD JUST SCORED 21 GOALS.

A player would refer to him as “pea soup” and Richard would suddenly gain the power of 10,000 men. No doubt Maurice Richard’s crusade to change the league was positive, but to make it seem like everything bad that was happening to him was solely because he was from Quebec, and that none of the discrimination was happening to anyone else, is ridiculous. Honestly, the way I see it, is just like public figures give away any ability to sue for libel, you’ve got to figure getting chirped, and that someone might go after race as part of that overall chirping strategy, is part of the game. I guess what bothered me is not so much that he fought against racism (I mean honestly, who the fuck is pro-racism?) but that he expressed such shock every time someone made a racist comment. Like who the fuck are you? Have you never played sports before?

Then there’s this whole thing where Richard gives an interview in English and his English is bad, and the paper calls him stupid. As if this doesn’t happen to every non-English speaker in a public position. Alex Ovechkin looks positively retarded in every interview he gives. Maybe this is because of his lack of English fluency, maybe its not (I mean Sidney Crosby doesn’t seem any more intelligent,) I don’t know. You want to give an interview in French, fine. One of the characters says it himself! “If they talk to us in English, we respond in English.” Then why not stop. I’m Anglo-Canadian, you want to have them dub that shit, fine by me. Give me some subtitles, I don’t care. Just stop acting like its somehow an act to keep the French down, and start blaming the networks, or yourselves, or the whole lazy non-reading North American culture.

Or at least don’t reveal your own hypocrisy. In one scene Richard writes an article disparaging the league’s commissioner in French. Cut to the commissioner holding up the paper yelling “Damnit! Get me someone who reads French!” like an idiot. How can you mock Anglophones for not being able to speak French, then turn around and say our inability to speak English should have absolutely no effect on your perception of us whatsoever?

Ugh. I mean obviously its hard for me, coming from a position where I’ve never seen Quebeckers being treated as second-class citizens and where everyone I knows feelings towards Quebec have at worst, been neutral, its hard to grasp what the gravity of the situation must have been at the time, but my GOD, reducing Quebec’s entire struggle to the binary between French and English, and Anglo-North America and Quebec, and the extent to which Binamé sought to make that relationship clear, was fucking ridiculous.

Tags: film, rants

Fake Plastic Trees

Just came back from the Rainforest Café, the site of Alyssa’s/everyone’s birthday extravaganza. Apparently everyone in my family is born in November. Holy fuck I hate the Rainforest Café. I’m shameless in my love of theme restaurants, theme parks, theme parties, anything where you or your waitress has to dress up in the presence of animatronic monkeys, but the Rainforest Café fucking sucks. Why should I (really my uncle) have to pay $13 for some limp dick chicken sandwich that doesn’t come with fries, and for my thirty-something safari gear clad server to fuck up 9 out of 10 orders (Alex is five and had a children’s pizza on a little plastic plate, the only reason she was capable of matching the two, I’m quite sure.) Seriously its no wonder they are (were?) nearly bankrupt. And don’t give me any shit, Rainforest Café, about how price gauging is necessary to upkeep your plastic jungle. That robotic crocodile and all those Michael’s Craft Super Store vines are a one time purchase, and those matching polyester Steve Irwin bermuda shorts and button ups cannot be that expensive.

 

Tags: nerdy shit, things i ate