On the end

As you may have noticed, this blog is no longer active. I hope you enjoyed reading it; I certainly enjoyed writing it.

On the oboe busker

The buskers at Eglinton subway station almost always impress me. There’s the duo who dress up like characters from O Brother Where Art Thou? and do bluegrass and country songs; the black man with sunglasses who freely plays soulful alto sax solos; the African marimba man who is never without a smile; and the old Chinese man whose melancholy musical laments on what I think is an erhu always blend nicely with whatever melancholy indie rock I’m playing on my headphones.

Then there’s the oboe guy. Prior to today, I’d caught his act twice and on both occasions, he seemed to be doing nothing but tuning. While the oboe is a bizarre instrument to busk with, I didn’t feel he was offering enough.

Today, however, I caught him just as he completed the looped bass line (he’s got some electronic looping thingy) and started laying down a melody. I recognized it immediately but couldn’t place it. Mingus? Miles? Coltrane?

Then the lyrics popped into my head:

It's all good girl turn me on
'Til the early morn'
Let's get it on
Let's get it on 'til the early morn'
Girl it's all good just turn me on

I was impressed.

On picking a side

When it comes to club-level soccer, I have never been able to support any specific team.

I don’t have this problem with the international game. All four of my grandparents were born in Italy. So was my father. When the World Cup comes around every four years, I bleed Azzurri blue.

Unfortunately, geographic ties don’t provide any basis for club support (other than the fact that I want to cheer for an Italian club). My mother’s side of the family comes from a small town in Abbruzzo called Roccamorice. The closest major city is Pescara, which has a team that’s middling in Serie C1. My father is from Bari, the tenth largest city in Italy. That club is struggling in Serie B.

For a lot of Italians, club allegiances are passed on from generation to generation, but my papa has never followed soccer closely enough to have an allegiance to pass on.

A few months ago, I had an e-mail discussion with some friends about this subject. At the time, I suggested throwing my support behind AC Milan. Some of my favourite players (Cafu, Kaka, Andrea Pirlo, Gennaro Gattuso) suit up in the red and black, and the team is usually a serious contender for both the Scudetto and the Champions League. My main gripes with the side are owner Silvio Berlusconi (the right-wing media baron and former Prime Minister of Italy) and dreadful Brazilian goalie Dida. As a keeper myself, I just can’t support a team with such a poor stopper. (There’s also the fact that Milan have been awfully inconsistent in Serie A this season—though to not choose a team because they’re struggling would kind of defeat the thick-and-thin mentality of true fandom.)

I have always disliked Inter for no rational reason besides the fact that the hardcore supporters have right-wing allegiances. From some recent reading, I’ve gathered that a lot of intellectual, left-wing types also support the club (my cousin Michele being one of them), but then there’s the disturbing fact that Marco Materazzi is one of their star players. (When it comes to the World Cup, I have no problem with Materazzi’s antics, so long as they help Italy win. In the club world, I’m far less tolerant of his shenanigans.) I feel like Juventus is the kind of team you need to support your whole life and I haven’t done that (although keeper Gianluigi Buffon is probably my favourite player in the world right now—you gotta love those winter toques he’s been sporting lately). Earlier this season, I flirted with the possibility of supporting Roma, but while I enjoy watching them play, I don’t feel a bond with the squad.

For a brief moment late last year, I was seriously considering supporting Atalanta. After viewing a documentary about Italian Ultras that prominently features the Atalanta group, I found it unbelievably hilarious that people could be so passionate about this unstoried side and decided to join their brigade of hopeless fanatics in spirit. Later, I realized that their games don’t appear on Canadian television enough to make support worthwhile. I’m faced with a similar problem with regards to teams like Fiorentina, Udinese and Sampdoria—why support a team when I can only see, at best, five to ten of their games a season?

And so at the end of it all, I’ve decided to remain a proud neutral. I cheer not for a specific team, but for fairness, hard work, quality play, and exciting matches.

P.S. Go Pescara and Bari!

Favourite albums in of the year

Released in 2007:

1. The National-Boxer
2. LCD Soundsystem-Sound of Silver
3. Spiritualized-Acoustic Mainlines (live bootleg)
4. Panda Bear-Person Pitch
5. Wilco-Sky Blue Sky
6. Grizzly Bear-Friend EP
7. Radiohead-In Rainbows
8. The Besnard Lakes-We Are the Dark Horse
9. Deerhoof-friend opportunity
10. Caribou-Andorra

First time heard in 2007 (but released earlier):

1. Staples Singers-Uncloudy Day
2. The National-Alligator
3. Grizzly Bear-Yellow House
4. Jeff Tweedy-Sunken Treasure: Live in the Pacific Northwest
5. Dr. John-The Sun, the Moon, the Herbs
6. Mike Oldfield-Tubular Bells
7. Ryan Adams-Heartbreaker
8. Can-Ege Bamyasi
9. Joel Plaskett-La De Da
10. Grizzly Bear-Horn of Plenty

Brazilian soccer stars and Led Zeppelin

This is from an essay comparing AC Milan and Barcelona, found on a blog I discovered this morning called Treasons, Stratagems & Spoils:

"Barca's lush, spread-out, unpredictable spontaneity and pace contrasts markedly with Milan's engineered, stately, textbook precision. If you want a reductionist argument, look at their figurehead Brazilians: Ronaldinho is pretty much the Jimmy Page to Kaka's John Paul Jones in the flair stakes."

On a Beatles ban

Yesterday, in the guise of making excuses for a lack of recent updates, Jordan Timm at Taste Police, made the case for a five-year, global moratorium on music by The Beatles.

Can we have any perspective on this music when we're saturated with it? How can I really appreciate "A Day In The Life" or "Saw Her Standing There" when my brain switches off upon hearing them, because I've been beaten over the head with them so often? I know the words, I know every note by heart, and so I don't listen anymore. My brain absently sketches in the song for me. Greatest rock'n'roll band ever? I don't know! I don't even know how to hear them anymore. Blame a combination of the Boomer cultural hegemony and a society that abhors an aural vacuum.

Jordan follows with an anecdote about a recent viewing of the re-released Help!, where, after nodding off ten minutes into film, he awoke to the opening bars of “Ticket to Ride” and found himself enthralled by the melancholy Lennon classic.

I don't have the technical vocabulary to describe what's happening musically at the start of this song, with that chiming six-note guitar figure and the drumming and the harmonies, but I loved it. For once, it all sounded fresh and beguiling–when I was disoriented, on my way out of a nap. Which sucks. To appreciate this song properly for the first time in about 15 years, I had to sneak up on it.

Jordan’s observation reminded me of the essay on The Beatles’ “Rain” in Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs. In a culture oversaturated by The Beatles, Hornby writes that through this psychedelic B-side, he is able to hear The Beatles in a new and fresh way, giving him a fleeting sense of what it was like to hear them for the first time.

If you can hear Dylan and the Beatles being unmistakably themselves at their peak — but unmistakably themselves in a way we haven’t heard a thousand, a million times before — then suddenly you get a small but thrilling flash of their spirit.

I don’t have the book with me (I found that quote online), but I remember Hornby’s ending, where he expresses certainty that his excitement about “Rain” would soon pass. This struck me as being one of the truest things I'd ever read about the band, and pop music in general.

Whether a half-decade ban of The Beatles music would actually allow me to hear the Fab Four in a new way, I’m not sure. The Beatles were a huge part of my childhood, a big part of teenage years and a medium part of my early twenties. One of my sisters has a wall unit of collected Beatles memorabilia, from magazines to lunch boxes to buttons to terrible live bootlegs. The other sister painted the Yellow Submarine cartoon versions of John, Paul, George and Ringo on her wall. I’ve seen The Beatles Anthology a least a half dozen times and have read countless biographies on the band and its individual members. I’ve played Beatles covers. I’ve listened to the albums sober, drunk, and high, on headphones and on speakers, on the radio and on vinyl and on CD.

I’ve had similar experiences to the ones described by Jordan and Hornby, moments when, suddenly and strangely, a Lennon/McCartney composition fills my brain and my body with the kind of excitement that’s more likely to come from the discovery of a new artist I’ve been longing to listen to all my life than from a dead band I've heard a thousand times before. There’s nothing that’s going for me at the moment, but my ears are always open. And who knows? Maybe this time it will be a Ringo song.

On No Country For Old Men

My thoughts on the film, as told by Anthony Lane of The New Yorker.