betterdaysareatoenailaway

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

I HAVE MOVED

you can find my new stuff @ https://betterdaysareatoenailaway.substack.com/

if Substack doesn’t work out, i’ll be back.

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

CATCH A WAVE #1: CHILLWAVE

This post is the first in a trio about a few connected genres I fucking love, chillwave, synthwave, and vaporwave. 

Chillwave was the first to hit, and hit it big. It’s signature song is “Feel It All Around” by Washed Out. For a while there Ariel Pink was considered the godfather of chillwave, but I’ve never liked him as much, and he’s been such as ass recently that I won’t support him or link to him, even though nobody reads this blog.

“Feel It All Around” went viral immediately upon release and secured Washed Out’s sole member Ernest Greene a two-album deal with Sub Pop. When the song became the theme for Portlandia, Washed Out got even bigger.

I like Portlandia but I do not love the show. To my mind, they shamelessly ripped off Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, right down to hiring the same editor, Doug Lussenhop. After three seasons he jumped ship for the Eric Andre Show, but he’d already left his unmistakable stamp on both shows.

Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around” had made its unmistakable stamp on an infant genre. It’s lyrics read like a mission statement: You’ll feel it all around yourself You’ll know it's yours and no one else

Have you ever felt kinda bowled over by the intense beauty of the world but been incapable of describing both that beauty and how it made you feel? Then this song is for you. It’s yours and no one else’s.

It was weird to me when vaporwave came along and got criticized for essentially taking existing songs and slowing them down so that they had a watery, slow vibe, because that is exactly when Greene did for “Feel It All Around.” 

He didn’t write it. He slowed the song down without changing the key it’s in, and he sang those reverb heavy vocals over the music. The original is a song called “I Want You” by Italian singer Gary Low. All Washed Out did was slow it down and take out the chorus.

Another big chillwave hit is Neon Indian’s “Polish Girl” from Psychic Chasms.

And Memory Tapes’ “Bicycle” from his incredible debut Seek Magic.

By 2010 critics declared chillwave dead, a flash-in-the-pan like witch house. But new artists like Million Young and Keep Shelly In Athens and Small Black showed that the genre was here to stay.

Washed Out’s debut full length was greeted with lukewarm reviews, but I thought it was a lovely album. The title, Within & Without was taken from The Great Gatsby, and the songs were mostly odes to love and intimacy. Greene has recently gotten married, and his album’s front cover made it clear where his mind was.

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Sleep Tight For Me...I’m Gone

Lately I’ve been writing these Better Days Are A Toenail Away™️ posts in Microsoft Word, selecting all and changing the font to Garamond, which is so readable and beautiful, and posting the Word docs, paragraphs by paragraph, inside these Tumblr drafts. It makes things look nice, to my old fashioned sensibilities, but fixing errors is a time-consuming and needlessly convoluted four-step process.

First, I have to copy, then delete the paragraph containing the error. Then I open the doc. and paste the error-ridden paragraph back into Word. After I find and fix the error, I need to save it and copy and paste it back into the post. It's time-consuming because I’m not just copying a paragraph. As you can see from more recent post, what I copied looked more like a photograph of the paragraph, not the words themselves written in Tumblr’s default font Arial. For an example of this, see below. I like the way it looks like old newspaper clippings. I posted an article about how my fent dealer John Smith kept getting robbed, and had resorted to putting a machete in front of his front door as a way of preventing this, a lever of sorts, which is plainly visible in the video I posted,

So today I’ve given up on trying to make my posts look like books or zines, and have given into the Tumblr font, which is about as pretty as a horse with his snout shot off.

There are two much longer posts I’m working on right now, one about Nirvana and one about Soundgarden, respectively, and how both bands were very unlike their public perception, but those posts are taking a lot of work so I’m putting them on the backburner because today is some dumbass corporation’s day where it tries to synthesize mental health and profit and the end result is as baldly capitalist and clumsy as you would expect. 

I’m not gonna name the company, or repeat their stupid fucking slogan. As far as I can tell (which isn't very far), talking about my trauma has never made me feel better. And in fact it has sometimes made me feel worse, because in telling you what hurts and scares me, I’ve given a part of myself away that I can’t get back. When you’re like me, and you’ve lost everything multiple times, sometimes the only form of power you have is how you choose, or do not choose, to tell your story. And in a world where everybody wants to tell “their truth,” silence is power. 

You don’t get to know me, sorry. I’m not gonna hand you my life, both my bad and good experiences, and conclude: “Welp, that’s why I’m so fucked up. Case closed.” 

Honestly, I used to be a little confused, or miffed that my former partner (who is an amazing person btw, in every respect) almost never spoke about some of the traumatic things she’d experienced in her past. I took it as a sign that she either didn’t trust me, or she didn’t think I would be a sympathetic listener, or the mere fact of my gender precluded her from sharing because I couldn’t truly understand what it was she had gone through. It’s not like I ever asked her to talk about it, but I did say, once or twice, “hey if you ever wanna talk about that stuff, I’m around.” She never took me up on it, and I let it go. 

But as I watched her, and saw her life unfold, over the years we spent together, I began to realize I wasn’t exactly in any position to be telling her how to live her life or how to be mentally healthy. After all, she has found success in a number of avenues, both creative and occupational, and I’ve found neither. I'm not saying the fact that she didn't talk much about her trauma is the reason for her success. I'm saying that she's forged a better path through life than I have, and maybe I should take a cue from that.

She never told me what to do, per se. It was more like living by example. But because I’m pretty dense, and a severe addict, our time together actually sorta reminds me now of that Cornell lyric from his first record: She’s going to change the world. But she can’t change me.

I have certainly found that talking about how shitty my life is only makes me feel more shitty, not free, or unburdened, or better. If you wanna talk about your problems, and you find it helpful, more power to you. Just don’t wait for a corporation to tell you it’s okay to not be okay. 

When Chris Cornell died I was so shocked. Of all the grunge icons he seemed the most stable, and he'd survived the rise and fall of two major label rock bands. If anyone had survived the media machine that chewed up and spat out Staley, Cobain, and to a lesser extent Andrew Wood and Shannon Hoon, it was Cornell. He would be the last guy to support hashtag activism like #StarbucksMyLifeSucks. Chris Cornell actually loved to fuck with the best laid plans of corporate rats. Molson once had a few promotional concerts in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, called Molson Canadian Rocks Arctic, with both Hole and Soundgarden playing to a crowd of flown-in grunge fans and bemused locals. But the whole anti-corporate thing grunge was known for actually came through when Courtney Love told the crowd she “use[d] Molson Canadian to douche.” Lol. Here’s a photo of Love arriving in Tuktoyatuk.

Cornell told the same people “so we’re here because of some beer company? Labatt’s?” Both artists’ jabs are funny. Cornell’s was a bit more subtle, but that’s what Cornell was like. 

So today’s post is about Chris Cornell’s suicide, more specifically the media’s reaction to it. For whatever reason, when Cornell died, every single news outlet, from CNN to Fox to CBC, posted “Black Hole Sun,” as if it’s the only song he ever fucking wrote, or – and this is far worse – the only song he wrote that’s worth hearing. The problem with this is more than twofold or threefold. It's fucking hydraheaded. 

Not only is “Black Hole Sun” a mediocre piece of music, it’s a complete misrepresentation of Soundgarden’s sound. 

Now, I’m a huge fan of the A.V. Club series HateSong, in which public figures gleefully talk shit about the one song they hate more than any other song in the world. The Max Bemis (Say Anything) one where he talks about Nirvana’s “Rape Me” as a terrible rewrite of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is terrific, but comedian Anthony Jeselnik’s HateSong takes “Black Hole Sun” apart, and I love it. I think the best line is: I think the more I hear it, the worse it gets. AVC: After the song became a huge hit, Chris Cornell said that he’d written it in about 15 minutes. AJ: I totally believe that. I don’t believe that Soundgarden likes that song. Like, I remember Eminem once said that he knew his song “My Name Is” was going to be a huge hit because the first time he heard it he was annoyed. It’s something about an annoying song that just grabs onto people. But I don’t think that anyone likes “Black Hole Sun.” I’ve never heard of anyone who likes it. I don’t understand why it gets played so much. It’s become a summer jam, and it’s not a summer song at all. Jeselnik is right that Soundgarden didn’t think much of the song. Guitarist Kim Thayil wasn’t kidding when he disparagingly called it the “Dream On” of their live show. And Cornell himself, known for a meticulous approach to his songwriting, had admitted that with “Black Hole Sun”was “probably the closest to me just playing with words for words’ sake, of anything I’ve written. I guess it worked for a lot of people who heard it, but I have no idea how you'd begin to take that one literally.” I mean it’s obvious from the opening lines that Cornell is just playing with words and how they sound: in my eyes/indisposed/in disguises no one knows What songs would have been more appropriate for Cornell’s untimely death? Glad you asked! Cuz there’s like…fucking at least ten that would have been better. I’m not tryna be one of those “the deep album cuts are better maaaaaan,” but with Soundgarden, it happens to be true. With some bands, the single are their best work. With other bands, the singles are the hors d’oeuvres for the entrees. So what deep cuts would have celebrated Cornell’s death a bit better? Well, to begin with, Superunknown’s strange and stately closer “Like Suicide” would have worked, for obvious reasons.

“Tighter and Tighter,” a song that is actually about the moment of death and what it might feel like, is one of my all-time fav Soundgarden songs. Not only is it a creepy and prescient prediction of what Cornell’s death by hanging himself may have felt like, it’s opening line is a good description of the personification of death: Shadow face/Blowing smoke and talking wind

Another sample lyric: “A sucking holy wind will take me from this bed tonight/and bloody wits another hits me and I have to say goodbye/sleep tight for me, I’m gone/and I hope it’s  a sweet ride/here for me tonight/cuz I’m feel I’m going/feel I’m slowing down.” 

The morning after Cornell’s death hit the news my buddy and bandmate James told me that en route to work his phone, which was playing music randomly through his car speakers, landed on “Tighter and Tighter” and he had to pull over because he was tearing up. 

“Fell On Black Days” is another song about depression and mortality. Cornell had the following to say about the song: “Fell on Black Days” was like this ongoing fear I’ve had for years ... It's a feeling that everyone gets. You're happy with your life, everything’s going well, things are exciting—when all of a sudden you realize you’re unhappy in the extreme, to the point of being really, really scared. There's no particular event you can pin the feeling down to, it's just that you realize one day that everything in your life is fucked! 

Now, if that’s not a cogent and even-tempered explanation of suicidal thoughts, what is? Why else would Cornell have admitted to being “really really scared” by his depression unless he knew what that depression could ultimately leasd to? Here’s some lyrics to “Fell on Black Days.” Dig the high literary use of “whomsoever” and “whatsoever.” Whatsoever I’ve feared has come to life Whatsoever I fought off became my life Just when every day seemed to greet me with a smile sunspots have faded and now I’m doing time cuz I fell on black days

Whomsoever I’ve cured I’ve sickened now Whomsoever I’ve cradled...I put you down I’m a searchlight soul they say but I can’t see it in the night I’m only faking when I get it right I sure don’t mind a change but I fell on black days how would I know that this could be my fate?

Eagle-eared listeners might think this version different from the album version. They are right. The rendition in the video was recorded live off the floor @ Bad Animals, the Seattle studio owned by Heart, where Soundgarden would record Down on the Upside. 

“Boot Camp” is a scary meditation about loss of agency that for years was tied with Zeppelin’s “I'm Gonna Crawl” for Creepiest Song to Cap a Discography, until Soundgarden reunited and released King Animal.

“Taree” is about ghost light, influencing events after dying and features Cornell’s most exhausted, convincing “yeah” @ 2:57.

“Applebite” is a Matt Cameron-penned ponderous clunker about Adam’s original expulsion from Eden. Doomy and death-laden.

“Let Me Drown” is a song about letting someone die.

“The Day I Tried To Live” is frequently cited as Soundgarden’s finest achievement, its odd time signature somehow sounds straight, thanks to Matt Cameron’s brilliant time keeping.

“4th of July” is a song about a post apocalyptic urban landscape, where the speaker isn’t sure whether he is seeing fireworks or bombs. 

“Limo Wreck” is a cool death song and has an eerie 9-11 prediction. “Building the towers belongs to the sky/when the whole thing comes crashing down don’t ask me why.” 

ANY of the above songs would have been better than that fucking asinine dirge-like major key fuckaround that has somehow not just become Soundgarden's signature song...but their ONLY song. 

Does nobody remember Johnny Cash covering “Rusty Cage?” 

“Outshined?”

“Burden In My Hand?”

“Blow Up The Outside World?”

Did none of these other songs get stuck in the electric head? (The electric head is Rob Zombie’s term for the technologically advanced culture we have found ourselves enmeshed in, or imprisoned by. It was the subtitle for White Zombie’s 1995 hit album Astro-Creep 2000: Songs of Love, Destruction, and other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head.)

For my money (which ain’t much honey), the song that best fits both Cornell’s artistic integrity and the sad circumstances of his suicide is “Tighter and Tighter.” I once wrote a whole article on the way artists use “yeah” as a placeholder or as a way to convey emotion when words themselves aren’t adequate. Dig that tired, world-weary exhausted “yeah” at 5:35 of “Tighter & Tighter.”

Or the creepy line going into the first chorus: remember this...remember everything’s just black or burning sun. Not that I agree with such a bleak worldview. It’s a writer’s line. And Randy Bachman has said, “when you’re a writer, you’d step over your own mother.” That’s the Cornell I want to remember. Not that he would step over his own mother. By all accounts he was a committed family man. I mean, I want to remember the Cornell who created strange atmospheric sonic worlds, who explored the dark side that sadly, eventually won out. His otherworldly beautiful music is what I choose to remember about Chris Cornell, not his estate tastelessly exploiting “Black Hole Sun” by using a line from the song to title a posthumous Cornell album of covers No One Sings Like You Anymore. Sigh.

First Cornell’s widow said this was “Chris’s last album.” Okay. What about the Soundgarden songs he recorded vocals for before he died? Kim Thayil was pretty diplomatic about it when asked recently. Cornell did record vocal tracks for the follow up to King Animal.

Kim Thayil: “Given our love for Chris, I do not see us reconfiguring without him.”

But he makes it clear in this interview that Cornell’s widow Vicky has those tracks and won’t release them to the band. Maybe because she blames the band for Chris dying that night? She’s not wrong to believe that they would have known, and seen, what kind of shape Cornell was in, at least at the venue, maybe not later at the hotel.

Kim Thayil: “It’s entirely possible that a new Soundgarden album will be released. Certainly. All it would need is to take the audio files that are available. I tighten up the guitars. Ben does the bass. We get the producers we want to make it sound like a Soundgarden record.”

Interviewer: “Is there an obstacle stopping that?”

Kim Thayil: “There shouldn’t be. There really isn’t. Other than the fact that we don’t have those files.”

Interviewer: “They’re not under your auspices?”

Kim Thayil: “Right. It would be ridiculous if [the record wasn’t made]. But these are difficult things. Partnerships and...property.”

You’re just gonna keep those wav files? And why title his covers album Volume 1 if it’s his “last album?”

Oh right. $$$

No one does sing like Cornell, but is “Black Hole Sun” really the best thing he ever did? The best song he ever sang? Should an album of covers be the last thing he gives to the world?

The only honest answer is no.

Sleep tight Chris. You’re gone.

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #soundgarden #chris cornell #suicide

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

THAT SHIMMERING SECOND #1: GALAXIE 500′S “CEREMONY”

https://crashsymbols.bandcamp.com/album/world-class

#shimmeringsecond #betterdaysareatoenailaway #galaxie 500 #power glove #royal trux #dean wareham #dolph lundgren #quentin tarantino #luxury elite

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #willy vlautin #welfare #ontarioworks #richmond fontaine

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Strange Currencies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXVeHjj_odw&list=PL1SFl6kAGpun0eD_J5P_oZ4_U6D2YZhzn

#R.E.M. #reckoning #murmur #reveal #up #new adventures in hi-fi #monster #automatic for the people #out of time #itsamemorykindofsky

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Strange Currencies 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXVeHjj_odw&list=PL1SFl6kAGpun0eD_J5P_oZ4_U6D2YZhzn

#R.E.M. #betterdaysareatoenailaway #bloggin #new adventures in hi-fi #up #monster #automatic for the people #reveal #leaving new york #peter buck #michael stipe #mike mills #bill berry

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Random Review #3: Sleepwalkers (1992) and “Sleep Walk” (1959)

I. Sleepwalkers (1992) I couldn’t sleep last night so I started watching a trashy B-movie penned by Stephen King specifically for the screen called Sleepwalkers (1992). Simply put, the film is an unmitigated disaster. A piece of shit. But it didn’t need to be. That’s what’s so annoying about it. By 1992 King was a grizzled veteran of the silver screen, with more adaptations under his belt than any other author of his cohort. Puzo had the Godfather films (1972 and 1974, respectively), sure, but nothing else. Leonard Gardner had Fat City (1972), a movie I love, but Gardner got sucked into the Hollywood scene of cocaine and hot tub parties and never published another novel, focusing instead on screenplays for shitty TV shows like NYPD Blue. After Demon Seed (1977), a movie I have seen and disliked, nobody would touch Dean Koontz’s stuff with a ten foot pole, which is too bad because The Voice of the Night, a 1980 novel about two young pals, one of whom is a psychopath trying to convince the other to help him commit murder, would make a terrific movie. But Koontz’s adaptations have been uniformly awful. The made-for-TV film starring John C McGinley, 1997′s Intensity, is especially bad. There are exceptions, but Stephen King has been lucky enough to avoid the fate of his peers. Big name directors have tackled his work, from Stanley Kubrick to Brian De Palma. King even does a decent job of acting in Pet Semetary (1989), in his own Maximum Overdrive (1986) and in George Romero’s Creepshow (1982), where he plays a yokel named Jordy Verril who gets infected by a meteorite that causes green weeds to grow all over his body. Many have criticized King’s over-the-top performance in that flick, but for me King perfectly nails the campy and comical tone that Romero was going for. The dissolves in Creepshow literally come right off the pages of comics, so people expecting a subtle Ordinary People-style turn from King had clearly walked into the wrong theatre. Undoubtedly Creepshow succeeds at what it set out to do. I’m not sure Sleepwalkers succeeds though, unless the film’s goal was to get me to like cats even more than I already do. But I already love cats a great deal. Here’s my cat Cookie watching me edit this very blog post. 

And here’s one of my other cats, Church, named after the cat that reanimates and creeps out Louis and Ellie in Pet Sematary. Photo by @ScareAlex.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading if you plan on watching Sleepwalkers and want to find out for yourself what happens.

Stephen King saw many of his novels get adapted in the late 1970s and 80s: Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, and the movie that spawned the 1950s nostalgia industrial complex, Stand By Me, but Sleepwalkers was the first time he wrote a script specifically for the screen rather than adapting a novel that already existed. Maybe that’s why it’s so fucking bad. Stephen King is a novelist, gifted with a novelist’s rich imagination. He’s prone to giving backstories to even the most peripheral characters - think of Joe Chamber’s alcoholic neighbour Gary Pervier in the novel Cujo, who King follows for an unbelievable number of pages as the man stumbles drunkenly around his house spouting his catch phrase “I don’t give a shit,” drills a hole through his phone book so he can hang it from a string beside his phone, complains about his hemorrhoids getting “as big as golfballs” (I’m not joking), and just generally acts like an asshole until a rabid Cujo bounds over, rips his throat out, and he bleeds to death. In the novel Pervier’s death takes more than a few pages, but it makes for fun reading. You hate the man so fucking much that watching him die feels oddly satisfying. In the movie, though, his death occurs pretty quickly, and in a darkened hallway, so it’s hard to see what’s going on aside from Gary’s foot trembling. And Pervier’s “I don’t give a shit” makes sense when he’s drilling a hole in the phone book, not when he’s about to be savagely attacked by a rabid St Bernard. There’s just less room for back story in movies. In a medium that demands pruning and chiseling and the “less is more” dictum, King’s writing takes a marked turn for the worse. King is a prose maximalist, who freely admits to “writing to outrageous lengths” in his novels, listing It, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers as particularly egregious examples of literary logorrhea. He is not especially equipped to write concisely. This weakness is most apparent in Sleepwalkers’ dialogue, which sounds like it was supposed to be snappy and smart, like something Aaron Sorkin would write, but instead comes off like an even worse Tango & Cash, all bad jokes and shitty puns. More on those bad jokes later. First, the plot.

Sleepwalkers is about a boy named Charles and his mother Mary who travel around the United States killing and feeding off the lifeforce of various unfortunate people (if this sounds a little like The True Knot in Doctor Sleep, you’re not wrong. But self-plagiarism is not a crime). Charles and Mary are shapeshifting werewolf-type creatures called werecats, a species with its very own Wikipedia page. Wikipedia confers legitimacy dont’cha know, so lets assume werecats are real beings. According to said page, a werecat, “also written in a hyphenated form as were-cat) is an analogy to ‘werewolf’ for a feline therianthropic creature.” I’m gonna spell it with the hyphen from now on because “werecats” just looks like a typo. Okay? Okay.

Oddly enough, the were-cats in Sleepwalkers are terrified of cats. Actual cats. For the were-cats, cute kittens = kryptonite. When they see a cat or cats plural, this happens to them:

^ That is literally a scene from the movie. Charles is speeding when a cop pulls alongside him and bellows at him to pull over. Ever the rebel, Charles flips the cop the finger. But the cop has a cat named Clovis in his car, and when the cat pops up to have a look at the kid (see below), Charles shapeshifts first into a younger boy, then into whatever the fuck that is in the above screenshot.

Now, the were-cats aversion to normal cats is confusing because one would assume a were-cat to be a more evolved (or perhaps devolved?) version of the typical house kitty. The fact that these were-cats are bipedal alone suggests an advantage over our furry four-legged friends, no? Kinda like if humans were afraid of fucking gorillas. Wait...we are scared of gorillas. And chimpanzees. And all apes really. Okay, maybe the conceit of the film isn’t so silly after all. The film itself, however, is about as silly as a bad horror movie can get. When the policeman gets back to precinct and describes the incident above (”his face turned into a blur”) he is roundly ridiculed because in movies involving the supernatural nobody believes in the supernatural until it confronts them. It’s the law, sorry. Things don’t end well for the cop. Or for the guy who gets murdered when the mom stabs him with...an ear of corn. Yes, an ear of corn. Somehow, the mother is able to jam corn on the cob through a man’s body, without crushing the vegetable or turning it into yellow mash. It’s pretty amazing. Here is a sample of dialog from that scene: Cop About To Die On The Phone to Precinct: There’s blood everywhere! *STAB* Murderous Mother: No vegetables, no dessert. That is actually a line in the movie. “No vegetables, no dessert.” It’s no “let off some steam, Bennett” but it’s close. Told ya I’d get back to the bad jokes. See, Mary and Charles are new in town and therefore seeking to ingratiate themselves by killing everyone who suspects them of being weird, all while avoiding cats as best they can. At one point Charles yanks a man’s hand off and tells him to "keep [his] hands to [him]self," giving the man back his severed bloody hand. Later on Charles starts dating a girl who will gradually - and I do mean gradually - come to realize her boyfriend is not a real person but in fact a were-cat. Eventually our spunky young protagonist - Madchen Amick, who fans of Twin Peaks will recognize as Shelly - and a team of cats led by the adorable Clovis- kill the were-cat shapeshifting things and the sleepy small town (which is named Travis for some reason) goes back to normal, albeit with a slightly diminished population. For those keeping score, that’s Human/Cat Alliance 1, Shapeshifting Were-cats 0. It is clear triumph for the felis catus/people team! Unless we’re going by kill count, in which case it is closer to Human/Cat Alliance 2, Were-cats 26. I arrived at this figure through my own notes but also through a helpful video that takes a comprehensive and complete “carnage count” of all kills in Sleepwalkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmt-DroK6uA

II. Santo & Johnny “Sleep Walk” (1959) Because Sleepwalkers is decidedly not known for its good acting or its well-written screenplay, it is perhaps best known for its liberal and sometimes contrapuntal use of Santo & Johnny’s classic steel guitar song “Sleep Walk,” possibly the most famous (and therefore best) instrumental of the 20th century. Some might say “Sleep Walk” is tied for the #1 spot with “Green Onions” by Booker T & the M.G.’s and/or “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris, but I disagree. The Santo & Johnny song is #1 because of its incalculable influence on all subsequent popular music. 

I’m not saying “Wipe Out” didn't inspire a million imitators, both contemporaneously and even decades later…for example here’s a surf rock instrumental from 1999 called “Giant Cow" by a Toronto band called The Urban Surf Kings. The video was one of the first to be animated using Flash (and it shows):

So there are no shortage of surf rock bands, even now, decades after its emergence from the shores of California to the jukeboxes of Middle America. My old band Sleep for the Nightlife used to regularly play Rancho Relaxo with a surf rock band called the Dildonics, who I liked a great deal. There's even a Danish surf rock band called Baby Woodrose, whose debut album is a favourite of mine. They apparently compete for the title of Denmark’s biggest surf pop band with a group called The Setting Son. When a country that has no surfing culture and no beaches has multiple surf rock bands, it is safe to say the genre has attained international reach. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many bands out there playing Booker T & the M.G.’s inspired instrumental rock. Link Wray’s “Rumble” was released four years before “Green Onions.” But the influence of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is so ubiquitous as to be almost immeasurable. The reason for this is the sheer popularity of the song’s chord progression. If Santo and Johnny hadn’t written it first, somebody else would have, simply because the progression is so beautiful and easy on the ears and resolvable in a satisfying way. Have a listen to “Sleep Walk” first and then let’s check out some songs it directly inspired. 

The chords are C, A minor, F and G. Minor variations sometimes reverse the last two chords, but if it begins with C to A minor, you can bet it’s following the “Sleep Walk” formula, almost as if musicians influenced by the song are in the titular trance. When it comes to playing guitar, Tom Waits once said “your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don’t explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing.” Not only is it comforting to play and/or hear what we already know, studies have shown that our brains actively resist new music, because it takes work to understand the new information and assimilate it into a pattern we are cogent of. It isn’t until the brain recognizes the pattern that it gives us a dopamine rush. I’m not much for Pitchfork anymore, but a recent article they posted does a fine job of discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.

Led Zeppelin’s “D’Yer Maker” uses the “Sleep Walk” riff prominently, anchored by John Bonham and John Paul Jones’ white-boy reggae beat: 

Here it is again with Del Shannon’s classic “Little Town Flirt.” I love Shannon’s falsetto at the end when he goes “you better run and hide now bo-o-oy.”

The Beatles “Happiness is a Warm Gun” uses the Sleep Walk progression, though not for the whole song. It goes into the progression at the bridge at 1:34: 

Tumblr won’t let me embed any more videos, so you’ll to travel to another tab to hear these songs, but Neil Young gets in on the act with his overlooked classic “Winterlong:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV6r66n3TFI On their 1996 EP Interstate 8 Modest Mouse pay direct homage by singing over their own rendition of the original Santo & Johnny version, right down to the weeping steel guitar part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs The vocals are typical wispy whispered indie rock vocals, but I think they work, particularly the two different voices. They titled their version “Sleepwalking (Couples Only Dance Prom Night).”

Dwight Yoakam’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” makes cinematic use of it. This song plays over the credits of one of my all-time favourite movies, 1993′s Red Rock West feat. Nicolas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu3ypuKq8WE

“39″ is my favourite Queen song. I guess now I know why. It uses my fav chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU 

Blink 182 scored their first hit “Dammit” with a minor variation on the Sleep Walk chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ

Midwest beer drinkin bar rockers Connections scored a shoulda-been-a-hit with the fist-pumping “Beat the Sky:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSNRq0n_WYA You’d be hard pressed to find a weaker lead singer than this guy (save for me, natch), but they make it work. This one’s an anthem.

Spoon, who have made a career out of deconstructing rock n’ roll, so that their songs sometimes sound needlessly sparse (especially “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which takes minimalism to its most extreme...just a piano being bashed on staccato-style for four minutes), so it should surprise nobody that they re-arrange the Sleep Walk chords on their classic from Gimme Fiction, “I Summon You:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teXA8N3aF9M I love that opening line: remember the weight of the world was a sound that we used to buy? I think songwriter Britt Daniel is talking about buying albums from the likes of Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, any of those grunge bands with pessimistic worldviews. There are a million more examples. I remember seeing some YouTube video where a trio of gross douchebros keep playing the same progression while singing a bunch of hits over it. I don’t like the smarmy way they do it, making it seem like artists are lazy and deliberately stealing. I don’t think it’s plagiarism to use this progression. And furthermore, tempo and production make all the difference. Take “This Magic Moment” for example. There's a version by Jay & the Americans and one by Ben E King & the Drifters. I’ve never been a fan of those shrieking violins or fiddles that open the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bacBKKgc4Uo The Jay & the Americans version puts the guitar riff way in the forefront, which I like a lot more. The guitar plays the entire progression once before the singing starts and the band joins in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfASw6qoag

Each version has its own distinctive feel. They are pretty much two different songs. Perhaps the most famous use of the Sleep Walk progression is “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, which is one of my favourite songs ever. The guy who chose to let Bobby Hatfield sing this one by himself must have kicked himself afterwards when it became a hit, much bigger than "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiiyq2xrSI0

What can you say about “Unchained Melody” that hasn’t already been said? God, that miraculously strong vocal, the way the strings (and later on, brass horns) are panned way over to the furthest reaches the left speaker while the drums and guitar are way over in the right, with the singing smack dab in the middle creates a kind of distance and sharp clarity that has never been reproduced in popular music, like seeing the skyscrapers of some distant city after an endless stretch of highway. After listening to “Unchained Melody,” one has to wonder: can that progression ever be improved upon? Can any artist write something more haunting, more beautiful, more uplifting than that? The “need your love” crescendo hits so fucking hard, as both the emotional and the sonic climax of the song, which of course is no accident...the strings descending and crashing like a waterfall of sound, it gets me every fucking time. Legend has it that King George II was so moved by the “Hallelujah” section of Handel’s “Messiah” that he stood up, he couldn't help himself, couldn't believe what he was hearing. I get that feeling with all my favourite songs. "1979." "Unchained Melody." "In The Still of the Night." "Digital Bath." "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" "Interstate." "Liar's Tale." “Gimme Shelter.” The list goes on and on. Music is supposed to move us.

King George II stood because he was moved to do so. Music may be our creation, but it isn't our subordinate. All those sci-fi stories warning about technology growing beyond our control aren’t that far-fetched. Music is our creation but its power lies beyond our control. We are subordinate to music, helpless against its power and might, its urgency and vitality and beauty. There have been many times in my life when I have been so obsessed with a particular song that I pretty much want to live inside of it forever. A house of sound. I remember detoxing from heroin and listening to Grimes “Realiti” on repeat for twelve hours. Detoxing from OxyContin and listening to The Beach Boys “Dont Worry Baby” over and over. Or just being young and listening to “Tonight Tonight” over and over and over, tears streaming from my eyes in that way you cry when you’re a kid because you just feel so much and you don’t know what to do with the intensity of those feelings. It is precisely because we are so moved by music that we keep creating it. And in the act of that creation we are free. There are no limits to that freedom, which is why bands time and time again return to the well-worn Sleep Walk chord progression and try to make something new from it. Back in 2006, soon after buying what was then the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I found myself playing the album’s closing track over and over. I loved the chorus and I loved the way it collapses into a lo-fi demo at the very end, stripping away the studio sheen and...not to be too punny, showing its bones (the album title is Show Your Bones). Later on I would realize that the song, called “Turn Into,” uses the Sleep Walk chord progression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqCFoPiwpk

It’s just like, what Waits said, our hands goes to where we are familiar. And so do our ears, which is why jazz often sounds so unpleasant to us upon first listen. Or Captain Beefheart. But it’s worth the effort to discover new stuff, just as it’s worth the effort to try and write it. I recently lamented on this blog that music to me now is more about remembrance than discovery, but I’m still only 35 years old. I’m middle-aged right now (I don’t expect to live past 70, not with the lifestyle I’ve been living). There’s still a whole other half life to find new music and love and leave it for still newer stuff. It’s worth the challenge, that moment of inner resistance we feel when confronted with something new and challenging and strange sounding. The austere demands of adult life, rent and routine, take so much of our time. I still make time for creative pursuits, but I don’t really have much time for discovery, for seeking out new music. But I’ve resolved to start making more time. A few years ago I tried to listen to and like Trout Mask Replica but I couldn’t. I just didn’t get what was going on. It sounded like a bunch of mistakes piled on top of each other. But then a few days ago I was writing while listening to music, as I always do, and YouTube somehow landed on Lick My Decals Off, Baby. I didn’t love what I was hearing but I was intrigued enough to keep going. And now I really like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMnd9dvb3sA&pbjreload=101 Another example I’ll give is the rare Robert Pollard gem “Prom Is Coming.” The first time I heard this song, it sounded like someone who can’t play guitar messing around, but the more I heard it the more I realized there’s a song there. It’s weird and strange, but it’s there. The lyrics are classic Pollard: Disregard injury and race madly out of the universe by sundown. Pollard obviously has a special place in his heart for this track. He named one of his many record labels Prom Is Coming Records and he titled the Boston Spaceships best-of collection Out of the Universe By Sundown. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a Captain Beefheart megafan but I can hear that the man was doing something very strange and, at times, beautiful. And anyway, why should everything be easy? Aren’t some challenges worth meeting for the experience waiting on the other side of comprehension or acceptance? I try to remember this now whenever I’m first confronted with new music, instead of vetoing it right away. Most of my favourite bands I was initially resistant to when I first heard them. Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Heavy Times. All bands I didn’t like at first.  I don’t wanna sleepwalk through life, surrounding myself only with things I have already experienced. I need to stay awake. Because soon enough I’ll be asleep forever. We need to try everything we can before the Big Sleep comes to take us back to the great blankness, the terrible question mark that bookends our lives.

#sleep walk #santo & johnny #neil young #queen #dwight yoakam #led zeppelin #the beatles #betterdaysareatoenailaway

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Out on the Interstate: S’more Thoughts on Neil Young

I don’t have any fentanyl stories today, so I’m writing another Neil Young post. (Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to mention heroin. You’ll see.) I still have a ton of fent stories, don’t worry bout that. I just don’t feel like mining my memory for any right now. Instead, I wanna talk about my favourite Neil Young song ever. It’s called “Interstate.” This performance was recorded at Farm Aid 1985. Young’s backing band at the time were called the International Harvesters, which is a funny joke (International Harvester was a company that manufactured tractors and other agricultural equipment). Young was on a roll in the 80s with clever band names. Later on he would front Neil Young & the Restless. Anyway whoever is playing piano with Young was the perfect choice, plucking individual keys instead of slathering big chords all over the descending minor chord progression. Young’s guitar is tuned to drop D, a favourite tuning of his throughout his career, from “Cinammon Girl” to “World On A String” to “Be the Rain,” and you can hear the low D buzzing throughout, giving the song a raw off-the-cuff feel. Of course, Neil Young is known for his raw performances, especially on albums like Tonight’s the Night, but by the time the 80s rolled around he was making albums with a lot of processing and production like Landing on Water, along with silly genre exercises like Everybody’s Rockin’ and Old Ways. 

Young would eventually be sued by his own record label, Geffen, for making “uncharacteristic music.” David Geffen would eventually apologize to him, but he wasn’t wrong that Young’s early 80s records were a bit of a disaster. This performance, however, shows that Young hadn’t lost a single step when it came to live performance. His vocal is clear and convincing, world weary but still kinda defiant, like all his best songs. And whether those are real or synth strings, they sound great, and really tug at one’s heartstrings. They have the spook, that high lonesome train whistle feel. To my ears, all the best Neil Young songs are haunting and plaintive. There is a loneliness at the heart of most of Young’s best work (ever hear “Albequerque”? Prolly the saddest song to ever mention the eating of ham?) Neil Young doesn’t write carefree party music. Hell, he once recorded an entire album about the death of his friend and former bandmate Danny Whitten - and to a lesser extent, former roadie Bruce Berry who was fired for pawning instruments to buy heroin...told ya I’d find a way to mention the drug ;). What I’m saying is, Young is no stranger to sad songs. As to which song is his saddest, there are many contenders, but as Young’s biographer himself admits, “Interstate is Neil Young’s loneliest song.” I agree.

Young’s longtime producer David Briggs, who knew damn well that “Interstate” was a rare gem, tried to get Young to record it for 1991′s Ragged Glory, but in typical fashion, “[Young] acceded, but perversely,” eschewing the full-band format and recording a solo acoustic version instead. That particular version would eventually see limited release on the vinyl version of Young’s 1996 album Broken Arrow, a forgettable affair that was hammered by critics and disavowed by most members of Crazy Horse. You can find the solo acoustic “Interstate” on YouTube but I’m not gonna post it, simply because it is so freakin’ disappointing. 

I love the line “I can hear a soft voice calling...telling me to bring my guitar home.” In the tradition of the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile,” "Interstate” is one of the all-time great I’m-A-Lonely-Rock-Star-On-Tour song. A more modern version of this idea can be found in Kurt Vile’s unimaginatively titled “On Tour,” a song where Young’s influence can be identified, especially in the way Vile tunes his lower strings to let them buzz, a technique pioneered by Young in the abovementioned song and most prominently in “Bandit.”

Thank God for YouTube, so that you can hear "Interstate” in all its gorgeous majesty. You can hear Young play the same guitar solo he’s been playing his whole career in minor key masterpieces like “Hey Hey My My,” “Like A Hurricane,” “Goin’ Home,” “Be The Rain.” Every time Young returns to it, you can feel the long shadow of his past, echoes of former greatness, the shambolic glory of his band bashing away at the chords, always emphasizing emotional delivery over technical proficiency. It’s a really really beautiful song, a song I treasure, and I hope you like it.

I’m also posting a rare version of “Shots.”

In “Shots,” Neil Young returns to a technique previously used on “Cortez the Killer,” where he switches from a third person omniscient voice describing trauma and violence to a first person voice describing personal emotion. In Zuma’s “Cortez the Killer,” Young spends two or three verses describing the endeavours of genocidal explorer Hernan Cortes, and also the Aztecs: people worked together/they lifted many stones/they carried them to the flatlands/they died along the way/but they built up with their bare hands what we still can’t do today/and I know she’s living there and loves me til this day. Now, that’s not Shelley, but it’s an effective and jarring switch. Young tries it again in “Shots,” and for me, the effect is even better. For whatever reason, maybe his sharp right turn when he became an outspoken Reagan supporter, or maybe because of the Iran-Contra Affair, Young’s lyrics took on a particular preoccupation with crime, border zones, and desert iconography in the 1980s, manifestations of which can be heard in “Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero Part I)” “Rockin’ In the Free World,” “On Broadway,” and “Eldorado,” all songs that ended up on Young’s last album of the 1980s, Freedom. But because of the remarkable internal consistency of Young’s discography, you can also hear such sentiments in one of his first 1980s releases: “Shots.”  Children are lost in the sand, building roads with little hands Trying to join their father's castles together again Will they make it? Hey, who knows where or when old wounds will mend?  Shots ringing all along the borders can be heard  Striking out like a venom in the sky  Cutting through the air faster than a bird in the night  But I'll never use your love, you know I'm not that kind And so if you give your heart to me I promise to you Whatever we do...that I will always be true To jump from depictions of border violence to gooey Hallmark card sentiments shouldn’t work, yet it does. The words might look silly written down, but the sheer conviction they are sung with, and the sheer power of Young’s loon-like vibrato, is what sells them, at least to my ears and heart. I’m not the first to make the loon comparison, Young’s biographer Jimmy McDonough has done so too. Young’s father Scott was the first writer to compare his son’s unique voice to the sound of the loon cry, a very Canadian sound, associated with Muskoka nights in summer, nights often soundtracked by Young’s vast and varied discography.

Disappointingly, the album version of “Shots,” which appeared on 1981′s Re-ac-tor, is pretty fuckin annoying, with its overblown machine gun affects (done by Young on the Synclavier), and Ralph Molina’s incessant marching beat. The song is already called “Shots,” Neil. You didn’t have to add machine gun sound effects. This isn’t audio verite. I’m not gonna post the album version here but you can find it easily. The album iteration has its fans though. Canadian blue-collar rockers The Constantines would cover “Shots” on a vinyl-only release with The Unintended, in which the Cons covered Neil Young and The Unintended covered Gordon Lightfoot. The Cons picked some weird songs, “Shots” among them, and you can tell they are referencing the Re-ac-tor version, not the superior one posted here. I’m not sure why Young slathered so many effects over the album version of “Shots.” The 80s definitely saw him taking his heavier music in an unpalatable direction. The Eldorado EP, in particular, has one of his most savage recordings ever, a song called “Heavy Love” where Young blows his voice out completely by the end of the song in an attempt to sing louder than the savage pulsing thrust of the band (the abovementioned Young & the Restless). The drummer on Eldorado was Chad Cromwell, not Steve Jordan who’d played with Young on his legendary SNL appearance where he played “Rockin in the Free World,” the definitive performance of that song, where Young tore all six strings from his guitar at its denouement. Unfortunately, SNL guards its content as jealously as a rabid guard dog, so I can’t post it. Maybe one day I’ll find a gif. I’ll leave you with two strong cuts from Eldorado. The first is “Heavy Love,” which is obviously a sister song to “Rockin In The Free World,” with its similar sonic texture and E minor riff. Listening is worth it just to hear Young’s voice go to pieces a la “Territorial Pissings” at the end (3:58 if you don’t wanna wait).

And this is the title track “Eldorado,” which ended up on Freedom. Young employs a fingerpicking style redolent of 80s megastars Dire Straits, and he sings of mission bells and senoritas and golden suns rising on runways and Mariachi bands while playing the A minor chord, a chord strongly associated with Mexican music and Mariachi styles. It’s a cool verite approach, one that works much better than the machine gun effects of “Shots,” especially when the gun violence Young has been hinting at the entire song finally explodes in a shower of distortion at 4:40. Have you ever heard something so loud compared to the backing track? I remember showing “Eldorado” to my friend/bandmate James, and I told him to prepare himself for how loud it is. Afterwards, James said, “even though I was ready for it, that scared the shit out of me.” It is so fucking loud. Check it out @ 4:40. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

One last point I’ll make...the Spanish-influenced guitar lick you can hear at 1:06 is really similar to the pre-chorus guitar riff Young plays on “War of Man” from Harvest Moon. I don’t consider stuff like that to be self plagiarism. I think it shows a consistency, but also it’s a way to reward fans for paying attention. Frank Zappa was known to do the same thing, re-introduce little musical nuances he’d recorded years or decades before. It’s cool. It’s what makes a discography live on long after the artist has burnt out or faded away. If you’re interested, here is a wonderful live early version of “Eldorado” titled “Road of Plenty” recorded with Crazy Horse in 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By6_oLYfrYk

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #neil young #interstate #shots #ronald reagan #1980s #re-ac-tor #1981 #David Briggs #Scott Young #ralph molina #synclavier #steve jordan #SNL #bruceberry #danny whitten #heroin

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

RANDOM REVIEW #2: ANY GIVEN SUNDAY (1999)

“This game has got to be about more than winning. You’re part of something.”  Any Given Sunday (1999), directed by Oliver Stone and featuring Jamie Foxx, Dennis Quaid, Cameron Diaz, Al Pacino, LL Cool J, James Woods, and Matthew Modine, is my favourite sports movie of all time. Of all time.

I’m not betraying my favourite sport by saying this. The Mighty Ducks is a kid’s movie. It’s okay, but it’s not a timeless classic. I don’t like the Slap Shot series, Sudden Death is fun but silly, and the Goon movies were a missed opportunity. The only truly good scene in Goon is the diner scene where Liev Schreiber tells Seann William Scott: “Don’t go trying to be a hockey player. You’ll get your heart ripped out.”

  Such is the sad circumstance of the hockey enforcer. They all want to play, not just fight. Here’s a link to a video in which the most feared fighter in the history of the NHL, Bob Probert, explains that he wanted to be “an offensive threat...like Bobby Orr,” not a fighter: https://youtu.be/4sbxejbMH4g?t=118 Heartbreaking. But not unusual.

Donald Brashear, Marty McSorley, Tie Domi, Stu “The Grim Reaper” Grimson, Frazer McLaren: they all had hockey skills. But they were told they had to fight to remain on the roster, so they fought. As Schreiber says in the film: “You know they just want you to bleed, right?”  If the players don’t bleed, they don’t get to stay on the team. So they fight, and they pay dearly for it later. Many former fighters have CTE or other head injuries that make day-to-day life difficult. The makers of Goon should have taken that scene and run with it. I was so disappointed they didn’t, especially given what happened right around the time the film came out, with the tragic suicides of Wade Belak, Derek Boogaard, and Rick Rypien, all enforcers, all dead in a single summer. So Hollywood hasn’t even made a good hockey movie, let alone a great one. Baseball has a shitload of good films, probably because the slower pace of play makes it easier to film. Moneyball has a terrific home run scene, Rookie of the Year does too. Angels in the Outfield was a big favourite of mine when I was a kid, plus all the Major League films, and Bull Durham. 

Football has two good movies: The Program (1993) and Rudy (1993).    

And football has one masterpiece. The one I am writing about today.

A young Oliver Stone trying not to die in Vietnam. ^ Now, I know Stone is laughed at these days, given his nutty conspiracy theories and shitty behaviour and the marked decline in the quality of his films (although 2012’s Savages was underrated). I know Stone is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but do you want a football movie to be subtle? Baseball, sure. It’s a game of fine distinctions, but football? Football is war. And war is about steamrolling the enemy, distinctions be damned, which is why Any Given Sunday is such an amazing sports film. I love the way it shows the dark side of football. In fact, the film is so dark that the NFL withdrew their support and cooperation, forcing Stone to create a fictitious league and team to portray what he wanted to portray.

This is not to say the movie is fresh or original. Quite the opposite. Any Given Sunday has every single sports film cliché you can think of. But precisely because it tries to stuff every single cliché into its runtime, the finished product is not a cliched mess so much as a rich tapestry, a dense cinema verite depiction of the dizzying highs and depressing lows of a professional sports team as it wins, loses, parties, and staggers its way through a difficult season.  Cliché #1: The aging quarterback playing his final year, trying to win one last championship. (Dennis Quaid) 

Sample dialog: Dennis Quaid (lying in a hospital bed severely injured): Don’t give up on me coach. Al Pacino: You’re like a son to me. I’ll never give up on you. ^ I know this sounds awful. But it’s actually fuckin’ great. Cliché #2: The arrogant upstart new player who likes hip hop and won’t respect the old regime. (Jamie Foxx) 

Cliché #3: The walking wounded veteran who could die if he gets hit one more time. Coincidentally, he needs just one more tackle to make his million-dollar bonus for the season. (Lawrence Taylor) 

Cliché #4: The female executive in a man’s world who must assert herself aggressively in order to win the grudging respect of her knuckle-dragging male colleagues (Cameron Diaz). Diaz is fantastic in the role, though she should have had more screen time, given that the main conflict in the film is very much about the new generation, as represented by her and Jamie Foxx, trying to replace the old generation, represented by Al Pacino, Dennis Quaid, Jim Brown, and Lawrence Taylor. Some people think Diaz’s character is too calculating, but here’s the thing: she’s right. Too many sports GMs shell out millions for the player an individual used to be, not the player he presently is. “I am not resigning a 39-year old QB, no matter how good he was,” she tells Pacino’s coach character, and you know what? She’s right. The Leafs’ David Clarkson signing is proof positive of the perils of signing a player based on past performance, not current capability. Diaz’s character is the living embodiment of the question: do you want to win, or do you want to be loyal? Cuz sometimes you can’t do both.

Cliché #5: The team doctor who won’t sacrifice his ethics for the good of the team (Matthew Modine).

Cliché #6: The team doctor who will sacrifice his ethics for the good of the team (James Woods) 

Cliché #7: The grizzled, thrice-divorced coach who has sacrificed everything for his football team, to the detriment of his social and familial life, who must give a stirring speech at some point in the film (Al Pacino…who goes out there and gives the all-time greatest sports movie “we must win this game” speech) 

Cliché #8: The assistant or associate coach who takes a parental interest in his players, playing the good cop to the head coach’s bad cop (former NFL star Jim Brown). 

Best quote: “Who wants to be thinking about blitzes and crossblocks when you’re holding your grandkids in your arms? That’s why I wanna coach high school. Kids don’t know nothing. They just wanna play.” 

Cliché #9: The player who can’t stop doing drugs (L.L. Cool J).

Okay, so the first thing that needs to be talked about is Al Pacino’s legendary locker room speech.  Now, it’s the coach’s job to rile up and inspire the players. But eloquence alone won’t do it. If you use certain big words, you lose them (remember Brian Burke being endlessly mocked by the Toronto media for using the word “truculent?”). The coach must deliver the message in a language the players understand, while still making victory sound lofty and aspirational. This is not an easy thing to accomplish. One of my favourite inspirational lines was spoken by “Iron” Mike Keenan to the New York Rangers before Game 7 against the Vancouver Canucks in 1994. “Win tonight, and we’ll walk together forever.” Oooh that’s gorgeous. But Pacino’s speech is right up there with it. 

“You know, when you get old in life…things get taken from you. That’s parta life. But you only learn that when you start losin’ stuff. You find out…life’s this game of inches. So’s football. In either game – life or football – the margin for error is so small. I mean…one half a step too late or too early and you don’t quite make it…one half second too slow, too fast, you don’t quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They’re in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team, we fight for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches that’s gonna make the fuckin difference between winnin’ and losin’! Between livin’ and dyin’!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_iKg7nutNY  Somehow, against all odds, Any Given Sunday succeeds. It is the Cinderella run of sports movies. You root for the film as you watch it. The dressing room scenes are incredible…the Black players listen to the newest hip hop while a trio of lunkhead white dudes headbang and scream “Hetfield is God.” There is a shower scene where a linebacker, tired of being teased about the size of his penis, tosses his pet alligator into the showers where it terrorizes his tormentors. There is a scene where a halfback has horrible diarrhea, but he’s hooked up to an IV so the doctor (Matthew Modine) has to follow him into the toilet cubicle, crinkling his nose as the player evacuates his bowels. There is a scene where someone loses an eye (the only scene in the film where Stone’s over-the-top approach misses the mark). There are scenes that discuss concussions (which is why the NFL refused to cooperate for the film), where Lawrence Taylor has to sign a waiver absolving the team of responsibility if he is hurt or paralyzed or killed. I wonder how purists and old school football fans reacted to the news that Oliver Stone was making a football film. If they even knew who he was (not totally unlikely…Stone made a string of jingoistic war movies in the 1980s) they probably thought the heavy hands of Oliver would ruin the film, take the poetry out of every play. But the actual football is filmed perfectly. The camera gets nice and low for the tackles. It flies the arcs of perfect spiral passes. It shows the chaos of a defensive line barreling down the field. When Al Pacino asked quarterback Dan Marino (fresh off his own Hollywood experience acting in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective) what it was like to be an NFL QB, Marino said: “Imagine standing on a highway with traffic roaring at you while trying to read Hamlet.” A great explanation. Shoulda made the movie. So the football itself is fabulously done. Much better than what Cameron Crowe did in the few football scenes in Jerry Maguire. The Program had some great football, as did Rudy, but neither come close to the heights of Any Given Sunday. In one of the film’s best scenes, Jamie Foxx insists that his white coaches have routinely placed him in situations where he was doomed to fail or prone to injury, and we believe him because white coaches have been doing that to Black players for decades. Quarterback Doug Williams, who led his Washington Redskins team to a Superbowl victory in 1987, was frequently referred to by even liberal media outlets as a “Black quarterback,” instead of just “quarterback,” as if his skin colour necessitated a qualification. Even now, in 2021, the majority of quarterbacks are white, although the gap is gradually closing. The 2020 season saw the highest number of starting Black quarterbacks, with 10 out of a possible 32.  Quarterback is the most cerebral position on the field, and for a long time there was a racist belief that Black men couldn’t do the job. Foxx’s character is a composite of many of the different Black quarterbacks who came of age in the 1990s, fighting for playing time against white QBs beloved by their fan base, fawned over in hagiographic Sports Illustrated profiles, and protected by the good ol’ boys club of team executives and coaching staff. Foxx’s character isn’t demoted because he can’t play the game. He wins several crucial games for his team en route to the playoffs. He’s demoted because he listens to hip hop in the dressing room, because he recorded a rap song and shot a video for it, and because he’s cocky. Yes, the scene where he asks out Cameron Diaz is sexist, as if her power only comes from her sexuality, not her intelligence and business acumen, but it’s meant to show how overly confident Foxx is, not that he’s a sexist prick. Any Given Sunday isn’t a single issue film. It’s basically an omni-protest piece. It gleefully shows football’s dark side, and there is no director better than Oliver Stone for muck-raking. He’s in full-on investigative journalist mode in Any Given Sunday, showing how and why players play through serious brain injuries. How because they are given opiates, often leading to debilitating addictions (this happens in all contact sports...Colorado Avalanche player Marek Svatos overdosed on heroin a few years after retiring from injuries). As to why, Stone gives two reasons. One, team doctors are paid by the team, not the players, therefore their decisions will benefit the team, not the players. And two, the players themselves are encouraged to underreport injuries and play through them because stats are incentivized. James Woods unethical doctor argues with Modine’s idealistic one because an MRI the latter called for a player to have costs the team $20k. But the player in question, Lawrence Taylor, plays anyway because his contract is stat incentivized and if he makes on more tackle he gets a million dollars. Incentivizing stats leads to players playing hurt. And although I loathe this term, a lazy go-to for film critics, Stone really does give an unflinching account of how this shit happens and why. When Williams is inevitably hurt and lying prone on the field, he woozily warns the paramedics who are placing him on a stretcher to “be careful…I’m worth a million dollars.” It’s tragic, yet you’re happy for him. The film really makes you care about these guys.  Thanks to the smartly written script, the viewer knows that Williams has four kids, and you’re pleased he made his bonus because, in all likelihood, after he retires, his injuries will prevent him from any kind of gainful employment (naturally, they give the TV analyst jobs to retired white players, unless Williams can somehow land the coveted token Black guy gig). Stone is not above fan service, a populist at heart, and he stuffs the film with former and then-current NFL players, a miraculous stunt given the fact that the NFL revoked their cooperation. Personally, I think this was a good thing because it meant Stone didn’t have to compromise (the league wanted editorial say on all issues pertaining to the league…meaning they would have cut the best storyline, which is the playing hurt one). It also meant that they had to rename the team and the league. While I’m sure this took away from the realism for some fans, I’m cool with it. It also allowed the moviemakers to name the team the Sharks, a perfect name for this roving band of predatory capitalist sports executives. In another example of fan service, the call-girl Pacino’s quintessential lonely workaholic character rents a girlfriend experience from is none other than Elizabeth Berkley of Showgirls, who had been unfairly blacklisted after the titular Verhoven/Esterhaz venture, a movie my wife showed me one day while I was dopesick, which I became so transfixed and mesmerized by that I forgot I was. As mentioned above, the only misstep in the film is one of the offshoots of the Playing Hurt arc, where a player loses an eye on the field. Not because he gets poked, but because he gets hit so hard his eye simply falls out. A medic runs onto the field and puts the white globe on ice. Stone cast a player with a glass eye in order to achieve this effect. No CGI! Still, the scene is unconvincing, a tad too over-the-top. But this is Oliver Stone. At least Any Given Sunday’s sole over-the-top moment is a throwaway scene lasting all of thirty seconds. It easily could have been a secondary plot-line in which government officials try to sneak a Cuban football prodigy out of Castro’s communist stronghold but the player is brutally murdered the morning the officials arrive at his apartment to escort him to the private plane. Or else the team GM is revealed to be a massive international cocaine dealer. Or the tight end is one half of a serial killer couple. The film follows its own advice, focusing more on the players growth, particularly Beamon’s (Foxx). The anonymity of the title, Any Given Sunday, elevates the game, not the players. Thank God, the movie doesn’t force Beamon to assimilate into Pacino’s mold. He buys into the team-first philosophy without renouncing his idiosyncratic POV or his fierce individuality. This is a triumph. One of my biggest problems with sports is the flattening effect it can have on creative individuals. Players take media training in order to sound as alike as possible during media interviews, a long row of stoic giants spouting cliches. It’s boring. Which is why media latch onto a loudmouth, even while they scold him for it. All sports are dying for an intelligent mouthpiece who can explain his motivations in a succinct, sound-bite-friendly, manner. Sports are entertainment. As much as I love Sidney Crosby, in my heart I have to go with Alexander Ovechkin because Ovechkin is far more thrilling, both on and off the ice. Unlike almost every other NHL star before him, all of whom were forced to kneel and kiss Don Cherry’s Rock Em Sock Em ring, Ovechkin defiantly told the media he simply did not care about Cherry or Cherry’s disgusting parental reaction to one of Ovie’s more creative goal celebrations (called a “celly” in the biz). On the play in question, Ovechkin scored the goal, then dropped his stick and mimed warming his hands over it, as if his stick were on fire. As cheesy as the celebration appeared to the naked eye, it’s both a funny and accurate notion. Ovechkin was the hottest scorer in the league for many years and his stick was on fire, metaphorically speaking. The only celly I can think of that matches up in terms of creativity and entertainment value came from Teemu Selanne in 1993, who scored a beauty of a goal, threw one of his gloves straight up into the air, then pumped his stick like a shotgun while “shooting” his glove. Of course, Cherry took exception to it. Cherry’s favourite goal celebration features Bobby Orr putting his head down and refraining from raising his hands over his head. Cherry’s idea of an appropriate goal celly is no celly at all. This from a man who claims “we’ve got to sell our game.” But when an arrogant player shows up and he’s not white, he’s in for a shitload of bad press. Foxx’s Beamon illustrates this beautifully when he yells at Pacino after Pacino cuts him for an older QB who has lost four games this season. “Don’t play that racism card with me,” Pacino warns. “Okay…okay…” Foxx nods, “Maybe it’s not racism. Maybe it’s ‘placism’…as in…a brother got to know his place.”

Here is the original theatrical trailer, featuring Garbage’s classic “Push It.”

Above Lawrence Taylor begs Matthew Modine for Cortazone.  There’s also a great scene where Pacino is trying to figure out where he has gone wrong and Diaz just looks at him. “You got old,” she says simply. No enterprise is more cruel to an aging human being than sports. And this movie makes football a big giant corporate machine that chews players up and spits them out, injured and drug addicted, after four or five years. Those who play for a decade are lucky. This is still how the NFL works. And the NHL is increasingly becoming a young man’s game. Experience matters less and less.

When I started watching hockey in the 90s, players regularly competed into their late 30s. Not so anymore. Players peak at 23-24 now, and are often out of the league by age 35. Thornton and Chelois are exceptions, not the rule. After more than two hours, Any Given Sunday finally lurches across the finish line, bravely refusing to give its viewers a traditional happy ending, in the great tradition of underdog sports films like Rocky and Rudy. The bombshell dropped by Pacino’s character at the end feels less surprising than inevitable, but by now the movie has explored so much of professional sports' seedy underbelly that you're glad it's over. The film is great but exhausting. Stone seems to be advancing the notion that the sport itself is pure, but the people in it are corrupt. If money weren’t involved, the game would be played for its own sake.

I agree with this. People playing pond hockey are engaging in wholesome fun, not necessarily practicing to make a professional league. Commerce corrupts the purity of the game, and the extent to which it corrupts is directly proportional to how badly the individual in question needs the commerce. Of course, the sport is highly racialized, with people in positions of authority white, and those being told what to do with their bodies Black.

Any Given Sunday is an important film, but it never sacrifices entertainment for the sake of moralizing. That it pulls off such a strong moralistic stance is a testament to the actors, who are all incredible, and the material, which is among the strongest of Stone’s career.

He never really made a great movie after this one. So check it out sometime.

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #anygivensunday #al pacino #jamie foxx #dennis quaid #james woods #matthew modine #jim brown #lawrence taylor #cameron diaz #ll cool j

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

ARIZONA HIGHWAYS: NOEMS

#noems #noetry #gutter poet #heroin #heroine #love #alexthegreat #betterdaysareatoenailaway #writing

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

HANNAH AND HER STRANGER

Before you ask, yes that blue thing is a tampon applicator. They work better than straws for snorting and smoking heroin/fent.

   Another reason I’ve been staying away from heroin/fent is an incident that occurred during one of the last times I grabbed. Not the time I overdosed, but a few times before that.     I arrived at the motel where my dealer lived and saw that his car was gone. I called him and he said he was half an hour away and would be back asap. Waiting a half hour for heroin is pretty much par for the course, and in fact isn’t a big deal at all compared to other durations I’ve had to endure (I once waited eight hours outside a different dealer’s apartment in January, calling him every ten minutes in a vain attempt to get him to wake up).     I was sitting on the steps of the motel smoking a cigarette when a short blonde woman sauntered over to me and asked, in a broken voice, if I “had a toke.”     I know that a lot of people think “toke” is cannabis nomenclature, and it is, I guess, but when someone who looks a little ragged uses the term, they are more likely referring to crack. Because of the neighbourhood I was in, and the motel I was at, I assumed she was looking for crack, and I was right. I told her I didn’t have any, and that I was waiting for my dealer to get home so I could buy fent. “Can you help me please?” she asked. “I’m really sick.”       Now, those who know me know that it is my general policy to help someone when they ask for it, especially when/if they are dopesick. I only had $10 on me that night, but I’d been good about not asking my dealer for fronts, in fact I hadn’t asked him for a spot for months, so I figured he would probably spot me a point, maybe a point and a half, and I could therefore give half a point to this woman, who was obviously hurting and sick. Never mind that she probably wouldn’t have helped me if the situation were reversed, and never mind that in eight hours she would be right back where she started, sick again, and broke, and needing to find a way to get the money to buy drugs; despite all these incontrovertible facts, my heart went out to her and I decided to help.      While waiting for my dealer to get back, we talked about our respective addictions, and how long we’d been using. She told me her name, which was Hannah (not her real name). She said she’d been doing opiates for five years, and that she preferred actual heroin to fentanyl, because fent sometimes made her ex-boyfriend growl in his sleep, and the growling frightened her. I’ve never heard someone growl in fent-induced sleep, but I have heard cries and screams from fent-induced nightmares. I developed a weird sleep paralysis thing pretty much in tandem with my opiate use, and the nightmares have tapered as my use has declined, so I think the two things are related.     Hannah told me she was a “booster,” which means shoplifter, and I told her I was currently in between jobs and struggling and hadn’t eaten in days. At this she said “I’ll be right back,” and toddled off. I fully expected to never see her again, but she returned ten minutes later with a pack of donuts from the nearby Wal-Mart, and a large Kit Kat bar. She’d “boosted” both items and split them with me. Opiate addicts crave sugar like mad, and we devoured the donuts and the Kit Kat. She was obviously a nice person and I felt good about my decision to help her.      Eventually my dealer made it home (after 45 minutes, not 30), at which point I went into his room and asked him for a front, which he gave to me. Back outside, me and Hannah went behind the motel where I snorted a point of bright blue fent off my journal, using the cellophane from my cigarette pack as a straw, and she smoked the half point I gave her using her crackpipe.      The fent hit almost immediately, within ten seconds or so, and I felt instantly warm and safe and happy. I closed my eyes for about thirty seconds and let the drug do it’s thing. This is the moment drug addicts beg, lie, suffer and steal for…so you might as well enjoy it when it comes. It’s typically only going to happen once a day, and it’s the reason why you struggle, so don’t fight it or guilt yourself in that moment. Otherwise there’s no point to maintaining your addiction.      When I opened my eyes I saw that Hannah was alarmingly messed up. Like…her eyes were almost shut and she was weaving and staggering. She couldn’t speak without slurring and she was drooling. This was not good. She was really really high, in the danger zone of overdosing, and I was the one who’d given her the drugs. I really should have listened to her more. She’d told me she preferred heroin to fent, and although I warned her I’d be getting fent, I don’t know if I told her to be careful. I had assumed she was a veteran opiate user because of her bona fides.      Like me, she had no cellphone (I was using one I’d borrowed), that desperate searching hungry expression, and she was clearly dopesick when she came up to me. Moreover, she talked about heroin with the elan and familiarity of a longtime user. It didn’t even occur to me that half a point might dispatch her. So now I was with somebody who could barely walk, who had no fixed address, and we were miles from any hospital and anyway I didn’t have the money to cab her to one. I was two subway stations away from my Naloxone kit (I hadn’t expected to use at the motel, usually I brought my drugs home and did them there…but I did the fent with Hannah because that’s what drug users do with each other…they use drugs). I touched her shoulder and she looked at me through half-shut eyes.      “Do you need me to call an ambulance?” She shook her head. Fuck, I thought. (To those who think I should have called anyway: She said no, and I had to respect her decision. I had no way of knowing what her previous experiences with police had been like. If she’d lost consciousness I absolutely and without hesitation would have called 911. But she hadn’t given me consent to do so, so I did not do so.)     I took her arm and started walking her slowly down the street. Because she didn’t have a cellphone, I figured there was a good chance she had a few phone numbers memorized. Fortunately, I was right about this. I was able to get her to tell me the number of a friend of hers who lived two minutes away. Hannah’s eyes were now completely closed, and she was leaning on me to the extent that if I’d moved suddenly she would have fallen over. I called the number she gave me and a man answered.      “Hi,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I’m with Hannah and she’s really fucked up. She just smoked some fent and she’s not doing good. I need to get her somewhere where somebody can keep an eye on her. I don’t think she’s overdosing but she’s close.”      “Where are you?” the guy said sharply.      I told him.      “Stay right there!” he ordered.      Thirty seconds later a very large man came huffing and puffing down the street. He was wearing a big baggy jacket and his hands were massive. Watching him approach, I thought for a second he might hit me. (After all, I was the one who’d given Hannah the drugs). But he simply grabbed her and said “put your arms around my neck, babe. Put your arms around my neck.”      Hannah complied, and the man turned and ran off without a word, presumably to his house, carrying Hannah in his arms.      Shaken, I went home and called the number a few hours later, just to check if Hannah was okay.      “She’s fine,” the guy said, and hung up.      Sighing, I called back.     “Dude, what do you want?” the guy snapped.      “Can I just speak to her for a second?”      A sigh.      “Hello?” asked a weak voice.      “Just checking,” I said. “Just needed to hear your voice.”      “Oh okay.”      “Take care, okay? Be safe.”      “Okay.”      Jesus. My policy of helping my fellow drug addicts almost got a girl killed. I knew then that I needed to change my habits, or I’d end up killing myself or someone else. Not one week later I overdosed. The two events so close together has helped keep me clean since, and I hope I can continue this hot streak. I saw Hannah on the subway a few weeks later. If she recognized me, she made no indication. She wasn’t dead though. And neither am I.

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #fentanyl #accidentaloverdose #becareful #besafe #naloxone #hannah #ttc

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Shoulda Been A Hit

     Have you ever heard the Neil Young song, “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks”?      Young’s longtime producer David Briggs (Zuma, Tonight’s the Night...most of Young’s raw stuff) was angry about its dated sound, but I fuckin love it. That gated reverb on the snare drum is definitely an 80s thing...kinda Def Leppard-esque...but I don’t think that necessarily works against it. There’s sooooo much space in the verses, so much echo on Young’s loon-like vocals. Also, I’m not sure, but it sounds like Neil is doing his own backup vocals. I might be wrong, cuz the Crazy Horse guys can really sing (they were even in a 60s doo-wop band called Danny & the Memories...a name I wanna steal for my memoirs), and they apparently played on this album, Life. Briggs, a staunch proponent of raw performance and dry sound, claims that “they ruined [the song]...[”When Your Lonely Heart Breaks”] could have been the ‘I Believe In You’ of the 80s.”      Now, “I Believe In You” is one of Neil Young’s all-time great songs, of course. I love the opening line: “Now that you found yourself losing your mind, are you here again?” And of course that heartbreaking question in the chorus: “am I lying to you when I say I believe in you?”

    I don’t know Neil, you tell me.

    “I Believe In You” belongs in the pantheon of great Neil Young songs where the lyrics are kind of riddle-like. “Tell Me Why” on the same album asks similar questions, and is just as baffling: “is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you’re old enough to repay but young enough to sell?”

   Young apparently stopped playing “Tell Me Why” because he thought the lyrics were incomprehensible, telling biographer Jimmy McDonough “I stopped playin’ it cuz I said to myself, ‘what the fuck am I talkin’ about here?”      But there are no such riddles in “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks.” It’s just a straightforward ballad, and gorgeous too. Not something Neil Young is particularly known for. The vibe of the song reminds me of Sinatra’s torch albums or something. Check it out below. For good measure, “I Believe in You” is there too. After hearing “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks,” “I Believe In You” sounds really twangy, eh? Well, it is the album Young covered “Oh, Lonesome Me” on. It’s gonna have a country sound. You ready for it?

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #whenyourlonelyheartbreaks #ibelieveinyou #neilyoung #davidbriggs

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

Random Review #1: The Parking Lot Movie (2010)

Over a decade ago now I was trawling fastpasstv.ms, which was my go-to site for movies and documentaries I didn’t wanna pay for, when I came across The Parking Lot Movie. I’d seen a lot of docs that particular summer (I was trying to quit drinking...I made it 14 days)...ones like Gasland and Winnebago Man, and fig’d The Parking Lot Movie would be a nice ninety minute slice-of-life chronicling the lives of working youth. Bland and pleasant and inoffensive. 

I was wrong. The Parking Lot Movie made me angry. And it will make you angry if you watch it.

The “plot,” such as it is, concerns a bunch of interchangeable undergrads from the nearby University of Virginia in Charlottesville as they work their extremely easy jobs at a local parking lot. One former employee is James McNew of Yo La Tengo fame. He spends his screentime railing against a former customer who was rude to him. This is the formula for the entire movie. The parking lot attendants are all white dudes, which would be fine I guess if they weren’t such elitist pricks complaining incessantly about the people they feel they are forced to interact with. We are told that the customers are chiefly rich people with SUVs who constantly try to haggle on the price of parking. In the words of one delusional attendant, “it’s not just a parking lot...it’s a battle with humanity.” This rabid self-importance inflates them, makes them heroes in their own eyes. It’s actually kind of amazing to watch how highly these pricks think of themselves.

I would expect nothing less from a bunch of guys who consider a parking lot to be a “battle with humanity.”

^ Nice fedora, parking lot attendant #2. Oh and he’s holding a book! Because he’s educated! Unlike people who need somewhere to park!

At one point in the film a worker gleefully recounts a conversation with a customer who asked why parking was so expensive. His reply: “well, I could explain the tenets of capitalism to you, but you’re subhuman.”

Jesus. Subhuman for haggling? Really?

Wisely, director Meghan Eckman stays well back and lets her subjects dig their own deep holes. By the end of the movie, you can’t stand a single one of them, but I think this is the point. Eckman knows they come off badly and lets them do it. She doesn’t romanticize her subjects, nor does she goad them into acting a little more sympathetic on camera. They are hypocritical, pretentious philosophy majors to the core. 

Nick Sheager of the Village Voice captures such hypocrisy best with his observation that the employees’ “arrogance and navel-gazing more closely aligns them with their despised frat-boy and sorority-girl customers than they might like to imagine.”

Bullseye. They are all the things they profess to hate. There’s a scene where one guitar-slinging attendant cheerfully admits that he hates the polite customers just as much as the impolite ones, a worldview I cannot wrap my head around. You hate nice people with the same intensity as rude people?

Okay. Good luck with that, parking lot attendant #8. The Parking Lot Movie is useful for hate watching, not if you’re the kind of person who needs to like a film’s protagonists. This film has none. Antagonists, all of them.

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #theparkinglotmovie

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

ON OVERDOSING

     I overdosed last year for the third time ever.      My previous two overdoses were intentional. I was trying to die. This was my first accidental overdose. The fentanyl looked fine to me, same bright blue it always was/is. I grabbed shortly after midnight, went home and used around 1am. I snorted a line and smoked an equal amount off a sheet of tinfoil (2 points or less). And that’s all I remember until waking up 15.5 hrs later @ 630PM.I have NO memory of a bad reaction. Not even a 2-3 second “woah, I don’t feel so go…” BLACKNESS. I recall NOTHING at all. This TTC subway map poster on my wall was torn down, suggesting I was in some kind of distress (balance? trying to reach my phone? No idea, but the poster is a gift I treasure from my ex-partner, so I wouldn’t have deliberately torn it down).

     I woke up in my bed fully clothed and on top of the blanket, suggesting I walked over to the bed and lay down. But I have no memory of doing so. I was alone. Not using with anybody.      This OD was very frightening to me because, as a former alcoholic (drunk daily for more than 10 years) and 6-year opiate user (3 years Oxycodone, 3 years heroin), I have NEVER blacked out. Not once. I remember everything, even from the 2 previous ODs. But this time…nothing. At first I thought maybe “hmm…well if I don’t remember anything, maybe I was awake and moving around and just in a fugue state?” (this seemed less scary somehow). I checked my phone. No texts sent, the ones received hadn’t been read. No history in my browser. No posts on Instagram or Twitter. I can only conclude that I was lights out that whole time. From 1AM to 630PM…that’s 15.5 hours. More than two full nights’ sleep. It scared the shit out of me.      I called my drug dealer immediately after waking and told him he may have a bad batch. “Yeah I think so. 3 of my customers died today.”      Not his fault. He didn't know. He would never knowingly sell lethal drugs. He told me I could return the bad fent and he’d give me a diff strain. I was too spooked to even do that. Felt fucked up and weird for several days afterwards.      I’m thinking it was a benzo. Not bragging, but I can take a LOT of opiates. I’m on the highest dose of methadone a single provider can give you in Ontario. You CAN go higher than 120mg, but you need two doctors to sign off on it, a complete physical, and a compelling reason to convince said doctors. I’ve drank 120mg of methadone and used 3 grams of heroin in the same day without feeling sleepy. 3 grams = $600. And benzos have been showing up in fentanyl and heroin with alarming regularity since 2020, probably bcuz border shutdowns have made moving drugs more difficult. (This chart is admittedly from BC, but Ontario is every bit as affected by COVID border shutdowns and lockdowns.)

     Whatever it was, it killed 3 people and if it knocked me out for 15.5 hours, it probably almost killed me. I’m very grateful that it didn’t. I’d been using alone for so long without a problem that it didn’t even occur to me that night that I was in danger.      But that’s how slight the margin for error is with fent. If I’d injected, I have no doubt that I’d be dead right now. Brrrr. Be careful and always have Naloxone and always use with someone else if you can. Your spotter should ALWAYS wait 5-10 mins before doing it, just to make sure YOU aren’t ODing. I know that feels like an eternity when yr dopesick, but it’s better than being dead for eternity. What the fuck would my cat Cookie have done if I’d died?

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #heroin #fentanyl #COVID-19 #lockdown #overdose #accidentaloverdose #narcan

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

On buying heroin during a pandemic

^ I don’t know how to embiggen this photo, so it’s tiny. And maybe it shouldn’t be embiggened. I just posted it because I look healthy in it. I’ve been off heroin for a while now, due to a terrifying close call I’ll write about soon, but I consider the following info up-to-date cuz COVID is still around and I was using during an earlier part of the pandemic. The below was written earlier this year.

Honestly, most heroin users I know are more concerned about overdosing than contracting COVID, and very few users or dealers are taking any precautions at all. I have three heroin dealers, none of whom wear masks. Each of my dealers serve between 100-350 drug users every day, so I am risking catching COVID every single time I buy drugs, which is at least once a day. When I call myself a functioning heroin user, I mean I’ve kept a full-time job I must fit my addiction around. Sometimes this means I'm dopesick at work, sometimes it means I'm high. But not working is not an option, as I require at least one point (0.1 grams = $20) of heroin every day just to not feel sick. To get high and feel good requires at least $30. So, to summarize: Few street level dealers are taking precautions, save for perhaps using antibacterial hand sanitizer more often, and for Heavy Dude and John One dealer I'll call Heavy Dude out by Roncesvalles and Howard Park who serves a more high-end clientele experimented in April with flying a drone down to drug users from his balcony. The drug users would put the cash in a custom-built compartment on top of the drone, then Heavy Dude would fly the drone back, count the cash, and fly the heroin down to the customers. This worked for a little over four days. On the fifth, a pair of desperate drug users who claimed to be ordering a gram ($200) waited for the drone to fly down to them, then grabbed it and ran off, informing Heavy Dude that they would give the drone back if Heavy Dude tossed down TWO grams from his balcony. Not one to take such things lying down, Heavy Dude feigned compliance, asking the two thieves their preferred strain of smack (it's all fentanyl anyway...there is no such thing as pure heroin anymore...it's fent in different colours, white, blue, and purple...the purple is Godsmack, if you know yr Alice in Chains). While the two thieves were discussing their options in hushed tones, two of Heavy Dude's henchmen snuck downstairs, jogged up behind them, and beat the ever living shit out of them. So ended the great COVID-19 drone experiment.  My other dealer who I’ll call John installed a plexiglass covering between him and his customers (he works out of a motel room near Warden Station, and cuts his fentanyl on the desk). He won’t serve you if you’re not wearing a mask. His business has not suffered, and actually ticked up a bit during the CERB months, because people on CERB were making more than whatever ODSP or OW was paying them, but those days are long gone now. But these two dealers are exceptions, rather than the rule. For the most part, since the pandemic started buying heroin/fentanyl has been the same as it ever was. I wear a mask, but a lot of people don’t, and they're making hand-to-hand purchases.

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #COVID-19 #precautions #heroin #fentanyl #overdosing #drones #Roncesvalles #Howard Park

[betterdaysareatoenailaway]

FOUND HOCKEY CARDS VOL 3

Okay, I don’t want to get too emotional about this, but I love Mike Modano. Jeremy Roenick was more exciting, but Modano was more consistent and confident. Roenick was a carpet bomber. Modano went in for the direct hit.

Mike Modano is the all-time highest scoring American hockey player. And it felt like he was on the Stars for 40 fucking years.

In Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, one of my favourite novels, the narrator Theo steals a precious piece of artwork. He almost never takes it out to look at it, but just knowing it’s there gives him a feeling that all is well: “I never took it out...though even when I couldn't see it I liked knowing it was there for the depth and solidity it gave things, the reinforcement to infrastructure, an invisible, bedrock rightness that reassured me just as it was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.”

I sorta felt that way about Modano. He was always down there, playing games in Texas (the North Stars moved to Dallas for the 1993-94 season). It seemed like Mike was always getting dropped off stretchers , or cutting through the neutral zone with his jersey untucked. "I don't know if Mike had his jersey specially cut," said former NHL forward Bill Guerin, Modano's teammate with the United States in international play. "But it always looked like he had a cape on." There was a constancy to his tenure that comforted me. Modano was my whale in Baltic waters.

No matter where I was, no matter what was happening in my life, I could think to myself:

“Water is wet. Air is clear. And Modano plays for the Stars.”

When he spent his last year in a Red Wings uniform I could barely look at him.  Disgraced Leafs coach Mike Babcock scratched Modano for his final three in-season games so that Modano just missed 1500, retiring with 1499 NHL regular season contests. Mike Babcock is such an asshole.

And Mike Modano’s jersey retirement ceremony is the absolute best of its kind I’ve ever seen. Just try to watch it without crying. His family and partner joining him to watch the banner get raised is so poignant and beautiful.

“MIKE...YOUR NUMBER NINE WILL NEVER BE WORN BY ANOTHER STARS PLAYER...AND IT WILL NOW TAKE ITS PLACE IN THE RAFTERS, FOREVER CEMENTING YOUR LEGACY WITH...US!”

“And he’s alone at the top! Mike Modano is America’s greatest scorer!”

In 1499 regular season games, Mike Modano scored 561 goals and made 813 assists for 1374 points. In 176 playoff games, Modano scored 58 goals, made 88 assists for 146 points. In case you didn’t know, those are amazing totals.

This hockey card cataloging thing should give me something to do while I appeal the gov’ts decision to cut off my E.I. payments. They shut mine off without telling me on Nov 24th and I just got the letter informing me YESTERDAY.

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY DANNY FUCK YOU.” - The Ontario Gov’t

#betterdaysareatoenailaway #mike modano #9 #dallas stars #NHL #hockey. #memories