I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: Odds-nest (1996).

My friend Amber from Vancouver copied this disc onto cassette for me sometime around when it came out.   I had heard “Heterosexual Man” when it was a minor novelty hit in the early 90s, but Amber wanted me to hear more from this Vancouver band.

Since the Odds dissolved, Craig Northey has become a proficient soundtrack man (Corner Gas, Kids in the Hall, and much more). But back in the 90s, Northey was simply put, a great pop songwriter (his bandmate Steven Drake was no slouch either).

“Someone Who’s Cool” is a fantastic song that should have been huge: powerful pop with a hint of 90’s rock added to keep it from being treacly.  And, of course, Northey’s voice is great.  There’s nothing particularly notable about it: it’s not whiny or deep or twangy or anything, it’s just a good singing voice (which is kind of unusual these days).

“Make You Mad” and “Hurt Me” have really catchy opening guitar riffs (and are a bit heavier than “Cool,” and yet they feature choruses that are full of harmonies and sing alongs.

“Tears & Laughter” has a jagged, wild guitar sound that, while not overtly heavy or anything, really rocks on this disc. “Nothing Beautiful” should have been a huge indie rock hit, but maybe it was too polished for indie cred.  It’s a great minor key song with, yes, a very catchy chorus.

This was the final Odds record.  It’s a solid collection of songs.  Of course, the band has recently sort of reunited as the New Odds, so we’ve not heard the last from them.

[READ: September 11, 2010] “My Kushy New Job”

This article sees Wells Tower heading off to Amsterdam for a crash course in learning to sell drugs.  He is assigned a two-week job as a dealer in a Dutch coffeeshop.

I’ve been to Amsterdam and I checked out a coffeeshop while I was there, but this article provides more information than I ever knew about them (and suggests that they are trying to spruce up their image since then). It seems that the selling of pot in Amsterdam is still a nebulous area, legally.

Shops can only have a certain amount of supply on hand (which means that most stores have offsite premises where they keep their extra stash; they house more than the legal amount and are therefore illegal.  And, technically, the people who transport the stash from offsite to onsite can be arrested up until the moment they enter the shop.  Customers can only by a small amount at time and, strangely enough, coffeshops cannot advertise (more on this later).

Tower finds the whole experience to be far less “woah, cool man” than everyone who hears about the job thinks it will be.  First, he finds that the buyers are really intense (and don’t appreciate how long it takes him to measure a gram of hash).  But by the end, he finds most of them to be simply rude and a little dead inside.

But the most interesting thing about the article is the way he compares Amsterdam’s laws to the ever-evolving laws of American marijuana usage.  He argues that Amerstam’s laws are a hodge podge of things constructed as needed, with the government always threatening to arrest people when it’s convenient.  On the other hand,the American laws, constructed as they are for medical reasons, have the possibility of being more sane and more sensible once the drug is eventually legalized.  This paragraph summed it up rather nicely

America, via the sturdier Trojan horse of medical marijuana, looks poised to chart a wiser course, through policies that more closely resemble full legalization than “tolerance.” While Dutch dollars still flow to Baltic thugs, states like Michigan license small-time growers to provide for certified “patients.” American legalization would also almost certainly include FDA regulation and chemical analysis of the product for sale. Holland’s prohibition against advertising cannabis also forbids coffee shops from posting a weed strain’s chemical profile (i.e., the levels of painkilling chemicals versus those that fuck you up), useful information for both the medical patient and the tourist who wishes not to pass out on the bar.

And even though he himself is not a fan of weed (it makes him very paranoid and self-critical) he has this to say to those who fear that legalized pot will lead to chaos:

In the past week, I’ve witnessed no fights, seen no weapons flashed, no examples of hopeless marijuana addiction, nothing more upsetting than some forced exposure to Steely Dan and a college kid who slipped off his stool to be caught in the arms of a friendly professional. Any bartender in America probably deals with more trying situations in thirty minutes than I’ve confronted in almost forty hours behind the hash counter. To the American reactionaries still frantically piling policy sandbags against the fissured dike of American cannabis laws, I would like to say this: I have now lived a week in our future world of (approximately) legalized dope, and it is every bit as perilous as the world of legalized pencils.

And of course, it’s all written with Tower’s excellent writing style.  So pro or not, it’s an interesting insider look at the drug trade.  The article is available here.