SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS–Fall Nationals The Horseshoe Tavern Toronto, ON. Night 1 of 13 (November 10, 2003).
This was the 1st night of their 13 night Fall Nationals run at the Horseshoe. Rheostatics Live has recordings of nights 1, 3, 4, 5 and 7.
The sound quality of this show is great, although it’s quite disconcerting how quiet it is between songs—must be soundboard with no audience pick up at all.
Dave chats with the crowd of course: “Always exciting on opening night—a tingle in the air. We’re basking in the glow of David Miller’s victory tonight even if he doesn’t know the words to “Born to Run.”
David Raymond Miller is the president and CEO of WWF-Canada, the Canadian division of the international World Wildlife Fund. A former politician, Miller was the 63rd Mayor of Toronto from 2003 to 2010. He entered politics as a member of the New Democratic Party, although his mayoral campaign and terms in office were without any formal party affiliation. He did not renew his party membership in 2007. After declining poll numbers, Miller announced on September 25, 2009, that he would not seek a third term as mayor in the 2010 election, citing family reasons. He was replaced by Rob frickin Ford.
They play a lot of songs from their not yet released album (not until 2004, in fact) 2067.
They open with “The Tarleks” which is follows by 2001’s “Song of the Garden” and then back to 2067 with “I Dig Music.” The new songs sound similar to the release but perhaps the words might not be solidified yet—there’s also no “too fucking bad” in “I Dig Music.”
Tim’s “In It Now” comes next with that cool opening riff. It segues into one of my favorite Tim-sung songs “Marginalized” also from 2067. I love the drums, the guitar riff, everything about it—although they are off-key as they start.
Dave says, “We’re surprising ourselves a little by playing new stuff. But when Martin asks for requests and people say “Saskatchewan” Martin starts playing it (see, the squeaky wheel…).
“Fan letter for Ozzy Osbourne” (also from 2067) it sounds a bit more spare and sad (with no wailing vocal at the end). It’s followed by “a very old song we wrote in 1989, I think, but it still applies on this special occasion.” He says it’s called “You can’t go back to Woodstock baby you were just 2 years old you, you weren’t even born.”
There’s a quiet “In This Town” that’s followed by a lengthy “When Winter Comes.” This song features a remarkably pedestrian guitar solo (sloppy and very un-Martin like).
Dave says they were recording audio commentary from a show two years ago (for what? is this available somewhere?). He says that night wasn’t a very good patter night. Good music night, though.
Tim says, “So we overdubbed good stage banter. … Till I sparked up a fattie and giggled like a moron.”
Martin: “till you sparked up a fattie and the ridiculousness of the situation became glaringly apparent.”
Dave: “Martin I can’t believe you just said ‘sparked up a fattie.'”
Martin: “The times they are a-changing.”
Martin introduces “Aliens” by saying “This would be a b-minor chord. The whole thing seems a little weird–Martin does some odd voices and weird guitar noises—it almost sounds out of tune or like it’s just the wrong guitar.
Back to a new song with “Polar Bears and Trees” and they have fun chanting the “hey hey ho ho” section.
Dave calms things down with some details: We got some stuff planned over the next 13 days. Lucky 13. Thursday there’s going to be 25 guest vocalists. We’re gonna mail it in, basically. And then on Saturday we have “Tim Vebron and the Rheostars.” According to a review, this “band” is a goof: “Martin was wearing a lei and suspenders, MPW looked like an extra from THX1138.” You can also get a pass to all 13 shows for $75. For some good old live live Canadian shield rock.
Dave asks, “Tim did you get a contact high during aliens? Some wise acre lit a marijuana cigarette.” Tim: “It’s just kicking in now. I’m hungry.”
“PIN” sound great although in “Legal Age Life,” the sound drops out at 58 seconds and comes back on at 1:35. During the song, Dave shouts G and they shift to “Crocodile Rock.” It kind of clunkily falls back in to “LAL,” but it’s fun to see them jamming and exploring a bit.
Dave says “Crocodile Rock” was a very complicate dance, but it didn’t catch on. I think the dance involved implements didn’t it. Tongs?”
“Stolen Car” starts quietly but builds and builds to a noisy climactic guitar solo. Its pretty exciting.
During the encore break there’s repeated chants for “Horses. Horses.”
You can hear Dave say, “‘Soul Glue?’ We’re not going to do that tonight, we’re going to say it for a special occasion.” The audience member shouts, “the hell with you.” Dave: “Ok, bye. Yes I am going to hell.”
What song do you think cleans the palate for the song to come after it—A sherbet?
There’s some amusing commentary between Dace and the audience. And then a little more local politics: “Did you think that was good speech by David Miller? I didn’t. I don’t want to be a bad guy coz it’s his night but…” Then Dave imagines a “David Miller ascension-to-power film starring Ed Begley Jr.”
The encore includes a rollicking “Satan is the Whistler” followed by a solid cover of The Clash’s “London Calling.” Tim’s a little sloppy on the bass, but the guitar sound is perfect and Dave’s got the vocal sound just right. As they leave you can still here that guy calling for “Horses.”
[READ: July 1, 2016] What If We’re Wrong?
I have enjoyed a lot of the essays I’ve read by Klosterman. But I’ve never read one of his books before. I saw him on Seth Meyers one night and this book sounded cool. And then I saw it at work, so I grabbed it .
Klosterman is clever and funny and this book is clever and funny. Although I found it a little long–every section of the book felt like it could have been shorter and it wouldn’t have lost any impact. However, I loved the premise and I loved all of the examples. I just got a little tired of each section before it ended.
So what is this book (with the upside down cover) about? Well, as the blurb says, our cultural is pretty causally certain about things. No matter how many times we are wrong, we know exactly how things are going to go. Until they do not go that way any more. “What once seemed inevitable eventually becomes absurd.” So what will people think of 2015/16 in 100 years? And while some things seem like they may be obvious about how tastes change, he also wonders if our ideas about gravity will change.
This came out before the horrors of the 2016 election and I read it before them, so the whole premise of the book is even more magnified.
Klosterman interviews (but not really, he mostly just throws in a few quotes from people) a bunch of knowledgeable folks–George Saunders, David Byrne, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Junot Diaz, Brian Greene. And he tries to discover if people think the future is easy to know.
Klosterman is funny r though most of the book, especially in the introduction which begins: “I’ve spent most of my life being wrong. Not about everything. Just about most things.” He says he thinks of himself as skeptical, and yet there are some things that are hard to doubt. Like gravity.
So when he talks to Brian Greene a theoretical physicist at Colombia (who wrote Icarus at the Edge of Time and appeared on The Big Bang Theory). It seems surprising but maybe it isn’t that he says “there is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years.” He says that for two hundred years, Isaac Newton was right. And then Einstein came along and change things. Quantum mechanics might have an effect on how we perceive gravity. And if you go back even further, Aristotle also had an opinion on gravity–one which we now consider laughable, but which was accepted for centuries.
Klosterman contextualizes his ideas for this book by saying that when he was younger, he used to love to read a book called The Book of Predictions. Obviously, many if not most things from the book are wrong. He marvels that some things were right at all, but even more he marvels at how some things were so very wrong. In 1980 no one ever predicted that the US and the Soviet Union would not be at perpetual war. (Asterisk for the trump election). And no one predicted there would be widespread cellphone use (someone even tried to predict the number of long distance calls in the future US). So its not just that people were wrong, they couldn’t even conceive of the future.
So Klosterman begins with my two favorite pop culture topics–books and music. He talks about how Moby Dick was hated in its day and is now considered a masterpiece. Even those who hate it now acknowledge that it’s a masterpiece.
Junot Diaz says that the list of 100 best books in 100 years will never be as mono-cultural as it is now. Our criteria now is weighted toward white male middle classness. But in 100 years the “best writer” will probably be someone we’d never expect. Someone who is writing right now and is under-appreciated. Klosterman goes through many examples to find this mythical persona and it’s quite insightful to see how he investigates it.
He does the same with rock n roll. He says that as far as classical music goes, we have more or less reduced whole periods of classical music to a few composers–Bach, Beethoven, whichever. Isn’t it likely that in 100 or 200 years rock music will be similarly reduced to one or two people. And he wonders if rock will be considered Elvis (physical sexiness and not necessarily writing your own music ) or Dylan, (intellectual lyricism instead of perfect singing voice). When we are dead, obscure bands will pretty much drop away, so in 100 years, who will survive? It’s an interesting thought experiment. There’s also a very funny aside about how people studying The Sopranos in a several decades will necessarily have to study Journey because “Don’t Stop Believing” was in the finale.
When he talks to Neil deGrasse Tyson he says that Tyson seems a little annoyed with him. Tyson says that things have fundamentally changed since 1600 because after 1600 science was determined by conjecture rather than theory. Any thing before then was conjecture, so was easily disproved, but once we started collected evidence of things, attitudes changed. Klosterman doesn’t want to challenge him “compared to Neil deGrasse Tyson, my skull is a bag of hammers” but he wants to know how we know we are not in our own version of 1599. And its interesting that Greene and Tyson have somewhat different opinions about this.
I loved his chapter on conspiracy theories–conspiracy theories aren’t merely goofy they are detrimental. And yet he wants to bring up one that I’ve never heard of before. The Phantom Time Hypothesis is a minor theory which suggests that the years 614 to 911 were falsified by the Catholic Church so that the you begin in the year 1000. The Major theory says that everything that happened prior to the eleventh century is a historical forgery–created in the 15th century by French scholars. They claim that we don’t actually know what happened before the 11th century and scholars just made it all up.
Although he say these are cuckoo, he also wonders if it would matter. Some things would be slightly less far away than we thought, but so what.
I also liked the way he talked about how TV was once an extension of radio–things that were on radio morphed into TV but now they are considered very different items. The next advancements in TV will also be so different that we might never think of TV the same way again.
Klosterman also loves sports so there is a lengthy chapter about sports and how it seems inevitable that the NFL will go away in 25 years–someone will die on the field and that will be that. We already see that enrollment is declining at younger ages which means fewer players in high school and college which means fewer in the NFL. Although Klosterman suggests that there will always be people who want to watch football because it has gotten so violent But the game and the audience will be very different.
Interestingly he says that interest in sports in general has diminished over the years (which is hard for me to believe in my lacrosse and soccer heavy town). But he has stats to prove it.
The final section has him investigating what we know about freedom. Americans will never blame the Constitution for anything even though it is a flawed document.
He talks with a historian who (rightly) talks about Reagan as being a disaster and wondering why people love him so much. Dan Carlin, the creator of Hardcore History says that he can’t understand the hero worship of Reagan. Carlin lived through it and doesn’t understand it. Look at the verifiable problems in his presidency: the lowering of the top marginal income tax rate on the super rich from 70 percent to 28 percent, the myth of Reagan’s destruction of the Soviet Union, dis-empowering labor unions. “He was, factually, a bad president.”
But as Klosterman says, the 1980s felt prosperous even when they weren’t. Historians will look back on the 1980s and presume that US populace must have suffered some kind of mass delusion prompting then to self destructively lionize a president who factually made the country worse. Oh My God when they look back on 2016….
One of my favorite sections of the book was Klosterman’s criticisms of the phrase on the internet “You’re Doing [It]Wrong” (Sarah and have other hated phrases too, but I hadn’t really thought of this one until Klosterman pointed it out. Despite the premise of this book, he hates this internet attitude (You’re Doing It Wrong: paying ATM fees, eating a banana, tying your shoes, whatever), because the corollary is also always “And I’m doing it right.”
Getting back to sports briefly he talks about people who follow sports and love stats and how stats used to be for kids who couldn’t watch the game to reenact the game, but now it has become just something else for people to argue over. Little kids love stats because you can argue who is objectively better (even if they don’t play better). I love this: “there’s simply no prick like a math prince in a sports bar.” The numeric nature of sports makes it especially well suited for practical analytical. I fully understand that it would be of interest to people who own teams, to coaches looking for an edge and (particularly) gamblers. It’s less clear why this is of interest to normal fans, assuming they watch sports for entertainment.
He ends the book talking about the end of the world. In 2005, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar said the possibility of a nuclear detonation in the next ten years (somewhere in the world) was 29 percent. But in ten years nothing like that has remotely come close to happening Yet it always seems to be more and more likely. So it seems like it’s nearly 40 percent now. And of course with trump and Kim John Un, it’s closer to 85% now.
This is a satisfying collection of incidents. One of the things I’ve noticed as I get older is that anyone who thinks that he or she is right is basically just an asshole. Anyone not willing to even consider another side is a danger to himself and others. And the scary thing is that people who feel this way are elected to office all the time. No wonder our country is so fucked right now.
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