SOUNDTRACK: MATT MAYS-Live at Massey Hall (May 4, 2018).
I had never heard of Matt Mays. He was once a part of the Canadian country band The Guthries (who I also don’t know). Perhaps the most surprising (and disappointing) thing to me about this show is when I saw an ad for this concert and saw that Kathleen Edwards was opening for him (!). And that so far they haven’t released the Kathleen Edwards show.
Before the show he says he wants all feelings present–happy, sad–he praises the expression “all the feels” because that’s what he wants to happen tonight. He wants the night to be “like a Nova Scotia kitchen party.” You laugh you cry you dance and you fight all in one kitchen.
He starts with “Indio.” Like most of these songs, it is a rocking guitar song with a definite country-rock feel. It’s also interesting that a Nova Scotia guy is singing about “old fashioned California sin.” There’s a ton of lead guitar work from Adam Baldwin. Mays also plays guitar and there’s an acoustic guitar as well from Aaron Goldstein The song breaks midway through to a piano melody from Leith Fleming-Smith. Mays asks “You feel like singing Toronto? It’s real easy.” And it is: “Run run run you are free now. run run run you are free.”
For “Station Out of Range,” he invites his dear friend Kate Dyke from St Johns, Newfoundland. She sings backing vocals. It opens with some big crushing drums from Loel Campbell. It has a slower tempo, but it grows really big with some really massive drum fills.
“Building a Boat” opens with a repeating keyboard pattern before a real rocking riff kicks in. Ryan Stanley also plays guitars. The song rocks on with a lot of little guitar solos. Mays takes one and then Baldwin follows. They jam this pretty long.
“Take It on Faith” starts with a simple piano before the guitars come roaring in with two searing solos. The melody is really catchy, too.
“Terminal Romance” is a slower number. Mays puts his guitar down and its mostly piano and bass
(Serge Samson). Eventually a guitar with a slide is added. It builds as more guitars come in. They jam this song for about 8 minutes.
He ends the show with “Cocaine Cowgirl,” an oldie that still means a lot to him. He says he’s been playing Toronto since he was 19 years-old in font of tow people. He’s thrilled to be at Massey Hall. His band is his best buds from Nova Scotia. It’s an absolutely wailing set ender with Mays throwing in some wicked solos. The song seems like its over but Mays plays some really fast guitar chords and aftee a few bars everyone joins in and rips the place part with intensity. It runs to nearly ten minutes and it’s a really satisfying ending.
[READ: August 3, 2019] “Shopping in Jail”
When an author releases a lot of books and essays in various formats, it’s pretty inevitable that you’ll wind up re-reading one or two. Especially if some of those essays are reprinted in other books.
So it turns out that I read this small book five years ago (it’s understandable that I didn’t remember that after five years). Here’s what I said about it five years ago:
Just when I thought I had caught up with everything that Douglas Coupland had published, I came across this book, a collection of his recent essays. I enjoy the very unartistic cover that Sternberg Press has put on this. It looks extremely slapdash–look at the size of the print and that the contents are on the inside front cover. But the essays contained within are pure Coupland and are really enjoyable.
I have read a number of his older essays in recent years. And here’s the thing: reading old Coupland essays just makes you think, ho hum, he knew some things. But you don’t really think that he was on the forefront of whatever he was thinking. So to read these essays almost concurrently is really fascinating.
His thoughts are science fiction, but just on the cusp of being very possible, even probable. He also looks at things in ways that the average person does not–he notices that on 9/11 people didn’t have picture phones–imagine how more highly documented it would have been. These essays are largely about technology, but they’re also about the maturation and development of people and how they relate to things. Coupland can often seem very ponderous, and yet with these essays he seems prescient without actually trying to predict anything. I enjoyed this collection very much.
I’m going to include what I said last time (in italics), but I felt the need to add some five-years later thoughts on each essay.
“On Supersurrealism”
Everybody throws around the word surreal, which is kind of interesting given its origins. If surrealism had been created now, it would be a meme that was gone in a week.
I enjoyed this observation: Teenagers on reality TV like to throw around the word surreal…these are people who can’t locate France on a world map. They are not wrong about its use although they mean more something like “an external identity randomizer.”
“On Reading Ed Ruscha”
Examples of discovering Ruscha-like works in the real world–a bronze No Smoking plaque, a hotel employee sharpening a pencil on a curb, digging a hole in the desert.
His discussion of a gold-plated No Smoking plaque is funny: He imagines the meeting: the government meets the insurance oligarchy meets a junior designer in a corporate in-house design studio: “we have to hang this sign, like it or not, so make it look good: this is California and people expect swankiness at the St. James Club.” The third part of the piece talks about him making a film of someone digging a hole and burying books in the desert.
“On Craft”
Craft has gone from “not-art” to a kind of political movement.
Craft means that (one must grudgingly admit) a creative person has chosen to limit has or her expression to one medium–one medium–in a post-medium world . But contemporary craft has the medium as a overt part of the message–its a radical concept.
“Convergences: Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru”
Gods Without Men, Kunzru’s latest novel is a work of what Coupland calls Translit–in which locations are everywhere and nowhere. And, man, Coupland makes this book sound fabulous. So much so that I decided to read it and will post about it soon. The stories span from 1775 to 2009 and jump between Manhattan, Southern California and Iraq. It is neither chronological nor linear. The theme is interconnectivity across time and space.
“British Columbia”
We think of British Columbia as having no past, but it is there, and Coupland imagines traveling through it.
First he thinks about the word British (The Queen, the Sex Pistols). Where he grew up was Brady Bunch suburbia. Now it is more like Beverly Hills. It’s interesting the way he bounces around imagining what people were doing in his location (and others) throughout history and how those things might bounce off each other. He even speculates about Vancouver in 2057.
“Do You Like the Talking Heads?”
Coupland proposes that liking the Talking Heads is a litmus test for whether or not you are Generation X. This article is about his book Generation X turning 30 and how weird its success has been for him. He explains that the book was originally called 52 Daffodils. Just imagine how different things would be in our world if it had been.
The 1990s didn’t have a pattern like previous decades–until grunge happened. Then it began generating decade-osity. He never liked to talk about how to monetize Gen X or even what Gen X was exactly. He just maintained that if you liked the Talking Heads (or Joy Division or New Order) you ere probably Gen X. “Or something, anything other than that wretched Forrest Gumpy baby boomer, we-run-the-planet crap that boomers endless yammer on about.
“Everybody on Earth is Feeling the Exact Same Thing as You: Notes on Relationships on the Twenty-First Century”
Several bite sized chunks about how the internet has made things different. This is a listicle and a very fun one. I liked how he said Looking for Mr Goodbar just seems ancient. “Like people lived in badly furnished caves connected by landlines.”
Many of these items are in a piece in Bit Rot, his other recent collection. Like how weird it would be to invite someone over to sit next to each other to go online or the amount of streaming in Fort McMurray. There’s also this truism: Even the most nice-seeming people turn into trolls and monsters when they go online alone at night. He maintains that most people spent the first ninety minutes of the day online collectively waking up the way we used to wake up with newspaper. Then you can say “Ahhh. now I’m gong to check my personal email.” [I find this to be the inverse of what I do].
“All Governments Seem to Be Winging it Except for China”
Coupland travels to China and expects to see what we all think we’ll see there–slave labor, darkness, unhappiness. But it seems that China has totally embraced the 21st century in ways that the West hasn’t. Their buildings are beautiful and open–they have embraced personal happiness even while embracing communism and they really have a sense of the kind of output they want to have. He says that whereas Western leaders are politicians, Chinese leaders are economists. It’s a great article that was a real eye opener for me and demystifies China.
This essay was quite long. Bits and pieces appeared in other essays in Bit Rot. He is amazed at how clean, efficient and quiet it is in the factories. The company he was investigating says “we add one Holland worth of customers a month into China.” Machine to machine communication is absolutely the future of speed, profit, capacity and bandwidth maximization.
Like the North American Gen X, China has the Pre-80s and post-80s: 240 million people have been born since the government implemented the one child policy. Their upbringing is so different that they seems like another species to the older generation: my daughter challenges everything i say. Also, you never hear someone ask a European what their country will be lie in 20 years, but everyone wants to know what China will be like.
Coupland looks at this factory and wonders why there isn’t one also in Michigan where 10 million primates needing 2500 calories a day are sitting on top of a cold rock in the middle of the North American continent and they’ve got nothing to do all day except go online and watch porn, TED ideas and bit-torrented movies…. “Is North America to become what China is now ceasing to be, a place where you might as well work for thirty cents an hour making baubles because there’s absolutely nothing else to do except shop from you jail cell?”
Alcatel bought ITT in 2002 and Shangai Bell came with it, this allowed China technological entry on a massive scale.
The next technological step for China is 4G-PDX optical broadband to every home in China. Twenty years ago the internet used zero percent of the world’s energy. This year [2013], it used 4 percent. That doesn’t sound like much, bit one must remember that a relatively short time ago it was zero.
In five years these numbers will seem absurdly small. He wrote this in 2013. For comparison, in 1994 internet was still italicized and people unironically said information superhighway.
“I am You and You Are Not Me: A Three-Part Look at Biography”
I loved this piece. It looks at technology and how modern technology would impact not only the past but also your own future. The first part wonders what if George Washington was somehow able to transport to the 21st century and get an extreme makeover–ease all that ails him, fix his poor teeth, give him three weeks of recuperation–imagine how great he would be then. Or would he? In the second part he talks about the game show Remote Control and their game Dead or Canadian. This leads to him talking about Marshall McLuhan who is both. He discusses writing McLuhan’s biography and how he would do things differently now. The final section really made me think a lot. He talks about cloudgängers–people who exist somewhere on earth who are very similar to us. Like uncannily similar (based on all kinds of data records that a supercomputer could scan). And what would it be like to meet someone almost exactly like you in interests, tastes, desires etc. What about the top ten most like you? Or the top 1,000? How far would you have to go before deciding someone was not enough like you anymore?
Sounds like the basis of a great novel.
I found this whole collection thought-provoking both in 2014 and again in 2019.
For ease of searching, I include: cloudgangers
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