Saturday, June 7th, 2003
Another afternoon, another couple apartments looked at. The first had a lot going for it – great location, second floor with lots of light, reasonable price if you consider it included hydro, heat, cable, A/C, laundry… what it didn’t have was space. No closets, and the rooms would have been barely big enough to fit the furniture I currently own. That just wouldn’t have worked – I wanted to come up with a way, but there wasn’t one. So moving on – the second place also had a lot going for it. Nice and bright, large rooms, hardwood floors, all inclusive. What it didn’t have was a door. When the lady on the phone said ‘no separate entrance’, I thought that meant, well, a shared front door. This place was quite literally the upstairs of a house. No separation. Sorry, I can’t work with that. Cross that one off the list.
I am wondering if maybe I am asking for too much. Granted, my target neighbourhood is pretty specific, but that’s more out of practicality than pickiness. If I were to define a really broad area, I would be overwhelmed with the sheer number of ads in the Star classifieds. All I want is for someone to come up to me and say, “here’s this great cheap one-bedroom apartment with lots of light and a reasonable amount of space. And the girl who lives downstairs is single and hot and digs geeks”. Is that so much to ask? I think a large part of the frustration is being entirely on my on this (which is the point of moving out by myself, I know, check the logic at the door) and the fact that I hate being left to my own devices which is ironic because I do most everything on my own anyway.
I went by the Bloor to try and get tickets early for Just An American Boy, only to find that since NXNE is presenting it, the theatre won’t know till just before showtime how many tickets they have to sell. Screw that, I can wait till the film is actually finished and gets a proper release. Of course, that means half of my evening’s activities are toast. Maybe I will still go to the ElMo to catch a couple bands, though I could just as easily sit at home surrounded by magazines and comics and CDs and sulk. I am a rock, I am an island.
Ever wanted to make your own bleepy-bloopy synth sounds? Check out this free software synthesizer. I imagine it’d work even better with a MIDI keyboard/controller, but it’s pretty cool to just spin knobs, hit filters, smack random keys on the keyboard to generate tones and voila – you’re Thom Yorke (less the droopy eye). It’s available for Windows AND Mac. You can’t beat that with a stick.
np – Fruit Bats / Mouthfuls
Friday, June 6th, 2003
This is turning out to be quite the week of movies for me. Four so far, and five if I catch Just An American Boy tomorrow night. Tonight was Lost In La Mancha, the documentary about Terry Gilliam’s doomed attempt to make Don Quixote into a film. I’ve always liked Gilliam’s work – even when it doesn’t quite do it on a narrative level, such as Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, it’s still visually satisfying, and when it does work on every front – see Twelve Monkeys or The Fisher King – then it’s just spectacular. The Man Who Killed Don Quioxte, as the film would have been titled, is troubled from the get-go. There are tight budgetary restrictions and issues with actor contracts and timing, but as glimpses of Gilliam’s ultimate vision come into view during pre-production, you can’t help but become excited about the work unfolding before you, egged on all the while by Gilliam’s exuberance and enthusiasm.
By the time production begins, however, things quickly come undone. The first day of filming is interrupted by the roar of passing F-16s from the NATO bombing range next to the shoot. An intense thunder and hailstorm wipes out another day of shooting and washes equipment away. Star Jean Rochefort comes down with a double hernia and is unable to ride a horse. After a single week of shooting, almost everything that can possibly go wrong has, and Gilliam is at the end of his tether. To see the man, who has so much invested in this film professionally and personally, try to bail water from the sinking ship is just tragic. The parallels made earlier on with Gilliam’s previous professional albatross, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen (which I LIKED!) seem awful prophetic by the time they pull the plug.
It’s all a terrible pity, because from what little of the movie they managed to film and you get to see, it looks like it could have been spectacular. Gilliam is still trying to get the film made, so hopefully someday there will be a proper film to which Lost In La Mancha would be a fitting companion piece. In the meantime, however, I feel like I should read Cervantes’ original work, even though it’s a massive read – after all, it’s not as though I can just see the movie.
np – Bedhead / Beheaded
Friday, June 6th, 2003
So I took today off – though since we only do half days on Fridays, it was only a morning off. The point is, I got to sleep in, get a haircut, listen to loud music and play guitar instead of going into work. And no, I didn’t spend such a gorgeous day inside – the afternoon was spent raiding the library for comic books and riding around Little Italy looking for houses with ‘apartment for rent’ signs. Surprisingly, I got about a half-dozen phone numbers. Will anything come of them? We’ll find out tomorrow.
The Delagdos discuss their new album and do a post-mortem of the recent North American tour.
np – Space Elevator / Space Elevator
Thursday, June 5th, 2003
There will be no NXNE club crawls for me this year. I was looking at the $24 price tag on a wristband whilst at Soundscapes this afternoon, and figured there was no way I was going to get $24 worth of shows out of the thing. First off, I am just exhausted right now – going out tonight didn’t seem like a very appealing idea. There’s not much playing tomorrow that I want to see, and I already have a reasonably busy evening planned (Toshack Highway and Sianspheric in-store at Soundscapes, followed by Lost In La Mancha at the Bloor). Saturday I do want to go see The Salteens and Sekiden at the ElMo, but for one show I can just pay the cover. A wristband just was not economically viable.
Picked up the single for Radiohead’s There There. The title track is terrific, the b-sides are pretty much throwaways. I remember a day when some of Radiohead’s best tunes were the b-sides. No longer, I guess. But it only cost me $3.99 and has whetted my appetite for the new album out on Tuesday.
Mark Eitzel talks about his new live-in-Greece album The Ugly American here.
While I haven’t paid much attention to the Manics lately, I am interested in their forthcoming double-CD of b-sides, rarities and covers entitled Lipstick Traces (A Secret History Of The Manic Street Preachers). No word on a North American release, but it’s released in the UK on July 14.
np – Pavement / Brighten The Corners
Thursday, June 5th, 2003
You can find anything on eBay – even poltergeists in a jar.
The Pianist is really a remarkable, heartbreaking and utterly affecting film. Go see it, that’s all I have to say.
It’s only coincidence, but I found it interesting that two films I see on consecutive nights (You Can Count On Me and The Pianist would both feature Bach’s “Cello Suite No.1 In G: I. Prelude (Moderato)” prominantly. Which is fine, it’s a beautiful piece (and I’m not a classical music geek at all – I had to do a fair bit of digging online to find out exactly what the piece was. Doing a google search on “That cello piece from that movie” doesn’t get you very far).
Some concert news of interest (to me, anyway). Billy Bragg plays the El Mocambo on July 11. Billy Bragg in a small club? I don’t think I can miss that, I really don’t. And The Jayhawks have been added to the Blue Rodeo show at the Molson Amphitheatre on August 21, along with Kathleen Edwards. That also is looking mighty appealing.
I don’t think that it’s out of line to say that Field Day is officially a giant farce. Giant – hey, that’s a pun, cause instead of Long Island, it’s now taking place on a single day at Giant’s Stadium in New Jersey. Oh, and they don’t know the lineup yet. And your tickets for the Calverton shows are no good, you have to buy new ones. And you can’t camp. And at the end of the show, you will be assaulted in the parking lot by angry renegade Whack-A-Moles looking for revenge. What a crock of shit.
NXNE starts tonight, and I still have to get a wristband, but I am definitely probably possibly maybe going to be going to a bunch of shows. Or some. The official guide is out in today’s NOW, so I can properly pick out which shows I will grace with my presence and which ones I won’t.
I was commenting to Kyle the other day that Metacritic hadn’t posted any ratings for the new Pernice Brothers, even though it’d been out for a couple weeks – we figured maybe it was too low-profile and had slipped under the radar. Well we were wrong – it’s currently the #1 record for 2003 with a whopping 91%. That’ll no doubt come down as more reviews roll in, but it’s still a pretty fine showing for a pretty damn fine record. And the US release of Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People debuts at #4 with a 90% rating.
It’s kind of sad that I’m following charts like this. It really doesn’t matter to anyone, I suppose, but it gives me something to blather about.
np – The Posies / Amazing Disgrace
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