Oh My

I'm a bit of a slacker.

Posting dehydration.

Creative drought.

Motivational wasteland.

More writing, less working.


Must...

Have...

#32, rice on both sides...

Marathon work month.

Wild times.

VIP seating a in a place with no (or very few) seats.

How did we get home? Speak of it no more.

Hi.

and Bye.

40 shows later

They played it again.

Over the Hill

Sometimes a band releases a late-career album that is magnificent.
A strong coda featuring all the wisdom, technique and workings of the world they observe.

Much has been spoken of the freshness of a band's first album and the potential for a second album to be mediocre. Usually the third album is where a band gets their identity and morphs into whatever they are going to be for a long time.
Examples: Keane, Band of Horses, Arcade Fire, Radiohead
If the Arcade Fire never did another thing after "The Suburbs" they could go out into the world knowing that they had achieved a fantastic string of success, going out on a high note.

Recently the band James has released a fantastic double EP called The Night Before/The Morning After. The Night Before is mostly electric. Lush instrumentation with keyboards and much production. The Morning After is generally acoustic, featuring lots of acoustic guitars and slower songs.
This pair of records would serve as a perfect finale for one of the best bands of the 80s/90s to slam the door on their career. Remember "Laid"? a good song, a good album but nowhere near their best. (produced by Brian Eno though- that's pretty cool)

And then there's the bands that keep releasing albums when they are far beyond their creative peak: New Order, The Cure, U2 (yeah, I'm looking at you, Bono.)

I hope that every band can go out on as strong a note as James- The final song on their album is called 'All My Letters'
Slam the door, walk on with your heads held high. But not before you play Salt Lake City on October 5.

Blah

Blah

Oh Canada

Good Day everyone from the Great White North, eh.
Homeland of my little buddy Ink.
I'm here for 3 days. A lovely city, Toronto.
Here's some photodocumentation:
Lunch

Baggage

Sleepy Pillow

Customs Form

Customs Checkpoint

That's Canada Out There

Descending to the checkpoint, no cameras allowed

CN Tower and SkyDome

Flag, Union Station and Air Canada Center

Do you like Rush eh?

Coinage and Cabbage

Survival of the Fittest

By request, I am going to pontificate on this for a while.

I think that most people are under the impression that Charles Darwin coined the phrase, but in fact he didn't. Darwin's phrase was 'Natural Selection.'
The 'Survival of the Fittest' was first uttered by British philosopher Herbert Spencer. Also contrary to popular opinion, he didn't intend it to refer to physical fitness at all.

I find this confusion a good representation of the near perpetual state of cluelessness I witness in many people. Wake up! Do a bit of research and enlighten yourself.
Stop going through life charging ahead as if you know all the answers. Slow down, back up, watch and learn for a few seconds. You'll likely notice that things aren't at all how you imagine them.

A paragraph applying the survival of the fittest to my life, as I'm only qualified to comment on my world, not on that of anyone else.
Now I'm not the fittest at anything, but I somehow survive. Why? As far as I can tell, I'm not particularly good at anything. Jack of all Trades, Master of None (as long as we are talking in huge cliches)
I can't run for crap, I am not nearly as strong as you might think. My strongest quality isn't my stubbornness, it's my skepticism.
So here I rumble through life, with all the grace of a charging water buffalo in Ikea. Always getting to my objective, but with a huge amount of collateral damage.
The only way I get what I want or need is by being crafty, by out thinking my opponents, running mental circles around a poorly armed adversary seems to be my forte.

So many people have settled for a life so mediocre that they aren't willing to advance themselves beyond their disastrous decisions and actually survive, therefore they don't.

And ultimately nobody survives. We're all worm food eventually. After a few minutes our legacy dims and the survivors move on.... as we fade behind the dustcloud of a never-ending forward motion.

Stripes

Tiger Stripes

White Stripes


Red Stripes

Stripes

Fac 51

Happy Birthday

My baby Jon, is 16 today.