In case anyone is curious why I haven't been blogging so much recently...

It's because I've been writing things like this.

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the critical philosophy it created generated a storm of responses, ranging from the near-deifying to the dismissively critical. In 1792, Gottlob Schulze anonymously published Aenesidimus in response to both Kant’s original text and an interpretation of it by Karl Reinhold. Aenesidimus was an attack from the side of the Humean sceptics, claiming that Kant and Reinhold’s attempt to move past Hume’s scepticism begs the question. Although based on a misunderstanding of several of critical philosophy’s key points[1], it was highly influential at the time in turning the public tide against critical philosophy (Di Giovanni 24-25). Kant’s main thesis is as to the existence and nature of a priori concepts, or (as Schulze often calls them) necessary synthetic concepts. These have their ground in the mind, are applicable only to experiential cognitions, and provide the form for all our experience (Schulze 136). Unfortunately, Schulze says that these judgements, which attempt to resolve Hume’s sceptical doubt, claim to do so by simply assuming exactly what he was doubting to begin with and what Kant himself claims is impossible(Schulze 132-133): that we can have knowledge of things outside our experience, such as things-in-themselves.

In particular, Schulze claims that there are two related assumptions made by the critical philosophers that were taken as objects of scepticism by Hume. The first is the assumption that the principle of sufficient reason extends to things-in-themselves as opposed to simply our representations; the second is the assumption that we can infer anything about the nature and composition of objects-in-themselves from our representations of them (Schulze 101, 132-133). According to Schulze, both of these questions are begged multiple times by Kant in the exposition of several of Kant’s points regarding necessary synthetic judgments. Furthermore, Schulze finds Kant contradicting his own philosophical principles at times, for Kant similarly claims that we cannot have any knowledge of the thing-in-itself and that the categories of cause and effect can only be applied to objects obtained through the senses—yet he proceeds in depending on knowledge of the thing-in-itself and applying the laws of causality to things-in-themselves (Schulze 160).

In order to understand Schulze’s argument, it is first necessary to explain the principles of Hume’s scepticism and how Kant intends to refute them. Di Giovannni sums up Hume’s basic principle as follows: “the only distinction in intuition is between the subject and its representation” (24). All consciousness is assumed to be present only within ourselves, and there is currently no scientific or logical reasoning that allows us to make any definitive claims about anything outside of experience, such as a thing-in-itself (Di Giovanni 20-21)[2]. Related are his arguments on cause and effect. If the principles of cause and effect hold absolutely and come from our human reason, Hume argued, we should be able to understand how this necessity arrives a priori. This does not seem to be the case, however. As Schulze puts it, “it is quite impossible to see how, just because something is, something else must be also necessarily” (135). Therefore our experience of the concept of cause and effect is based merely on our experiencing these things together and associated on a consistent basis and assuming from that that they must be necessarily and objectively linked (Schulze 135). Our sense that synthetic judgments have necessity, according to Hume, is due merely to a process of induction and not due to their a priority. Kant, on the other hand, claimed to have shown that a priori synthetic concepts—of which cause and effect is but one example—exist and provide this necessity due to having their ground and cause in the mind (Schulze 137). Schulze claims, however, that these arguments cannot refute Hume, as they do not actually argue against his points—they merely assume that his doubts as to the nature of cause and effect and our knowledge of things-in-themselves have already been satisfied and continue from there. Furthermore, Kant seems to ignore his own assumptions in the construction of many of his arguments.

Schulze begins his argument by claiming that the entire concept of necessary synthetic judgments assumes the nature of causality that Hume doubted. Kant looks at judgements that we have and says that they must be the “effect of something” (Schulze 137). Kant then assumes that given that they are an effect, they must have a cause. This cause is the mind (making them a priori), leading to all the other properties they have, such as being the form of sensibility and only being able to be applied to empirical intuition (Schulze 137). This, however, assumes that Hume’s doubts are no longer valid, since we cannot know if judgments even have a cause or ground and if, more generally, the laws of causality apply to actual things. Schulze speaks for Hume:

Rightly he could say: “As long as…the concepts and principles of causality…are still uncertain and disputed…it is pointless to want to enquire into the sources of the various parts of human knowledge, or to establish anything about them. For before we have the right to ask ‘What are the sources and causes of our knowledge’, we must already have established that for every actual thing there exists a ground and its cause, and, specifically with respect to our knowledge, that all its determinations are the effect of particular causes.” (Schulze 139)

Even if we were to acknowledge that assume that the claims as to the causes of our knowledge are given, Kant will beg the other sceptical question (of what we can know about objects-in-themselves from our representations of them). Kant, Schulze claims, begins with the claim that necessary synthetic judgments cannot be thought to have necessity if they do not have a ground in the mind (140). From this, Kant makes a leap to claiming that they therefore are grounded in the mind (Schulze 141). This is assuming that we can make claims about things outside of our representation (in this case, that necessary synthetic judgments are based in the mind) based on our representations of them (in this case, that necessary synthetic judgments cannot be represented as possible unless they are based in the mind). This is a clear violation of Hume’s sceptical principle, and seems especially problematic because it also does not mesh with Kant’s own insistence that we cannot know anything about the realm of things-in-themselves (141-142).

Kant runs into similar problems when he tries to speak of the nature of a priori judgments as only applicable to empirical intuitions. Schulze frames Kant’s argument as similar to his argument about the mind being the source of a priori cognitions: we can only think of one way in which it is possible that we can have concepts that precede yet refer to a specific representation: to have those concepts exist as the form of our cognition of those objects (Schulze 150). Therefore, this is how these a priori concepts actually are. This, like the first case, assumes that the nature of things-in-themselves depends on our representations of them, “that something can be only so constituted—objectively and actually—as we are capable of representing it to ourselves” (Schulze 151, emphasis in original), which completely ignores Hume’s doubt that we could ever know such things and Kant’s own claim that we cannot know the thing-in-itself.

Schulze also finds problematic Kant’s description of the what exactly the mind is that supposedly underlies these judgments. Kant does not make it clear whether his system assumes the mind as a thing-in-itself, a noumenon, or a transcendental idea (Schulze 166). The first options, that the mind is a thing-in-itself or noumenon, follow a common line of thought, according to Schulze: that something “real” (the representations) also need something “real” as a ground (154). The problem here, of course, is that attempting to say that the source of our necessary synthetic judgments derives from either of these goes against both Kant and Hume’s philosophy. The first and familiar objections are that a) if the mind or subject is a thing-in-itself or noumenon, we cannot know anything about it, as we cannot know the nature of things outside of experience and b) we cannot assume that it can even be a cause, given that the laws of causality may not apply to things-in-themselves (Schulze 155). It also, yet again, goes against Kant’s own philosophy, as it would make no sense from a critical philosophical point of view to depend on a supposedly unknowable thing-in-itself or noumenon as the ground of a priori synthetic judgments.

The third option is that the mind exists not as a thing-in-itself or noumenon but as a “transcendental idea.” This is a Kantian concept of an a priori concept that brings “unbounded unity and completeness to our experiential cognitions” (Schulze 164). One of Kant’s proposed ideas is that of an “absolute complete subject which is not, in turn, the predicate of another thing” (Schulze 163). This, however, also runs into an issue. The purpose Kant puts these transcendental ideas towards, according to Schulze, is to move experiential knowledge towards completion or perfection—they are not applicable to non-experiential knowledge. The use of these concepts to ground the necessary parts of our knowledge—the a priori cognitions—is therefore seriously flawed (Schulze 171). Yet again, Kant seems to assume that we can have knowledge of things outside of experience even though his own philosophy denies this very claim.

Finally, Schulze attempts to summarize his critiques. Kant’s overarching goal is to find the origin of our representations. By doing this, however, he makes two fundamental errors. The first is that he attributes “[not] merely logical truth…but above all real truth” (Schulze 174) to his claims, and does so by proposing that things must be the way he proposes them to be simply because we cannot represent them in any other way. This has no chance of refuting Hume, as this argument takes for granted what Hume doubted about the connection between representations and objects, and it flies in the face of Kant’s own claim to not know anything of the thing-in-itself. Furthermore, if this was true, fields that have been refuted by Hume’s claims, such as rational psychology, cosmology, and theology, become again legitimate—for they also operate on the principle of “it cannot be thought to be different, therefore it must be as I propose” (Schulze 175). These schools of thought, Schulze claims, would have exactly as much claim to legitimacy as the Critique of Pure Reason and all of critical philosophy (175). Kant’s second fundamental error concerns the nature of causality. Kant claims that causality applies only to our representations, yet wants to make judgments about things such as the “real ground” of our experience. This is obviously a problem, says Schulze, as “we cannot assume that ‘causality’ belongs only to our representations, or to our way of thinking, yet ask how in actuality our knowledge originates in something different from it, or ask for some true cause of it” (Schulze 176). Kant is using an argument that is faulty by his own system and Hume’s. Thus, claims Schulze, Kant ultimately fails in his goal to refute Hume’s scepticism, and his philosophy, like others before it, has been torn down by Hume’s doubt. Until we find a system that once and for all will establish the truth of all that which the sceptics doubt, Schulze concludes, philosophy will be left without the materials for building a coherent system (180).

---

[1] I will not go into the faults with Schulze’s understanding of the critical position in this paper, but as Di Giovanni has pointed out, it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the thing-in-itself for Kant and Reinhold (24-25). Their position is that the thing-in-itself exists merely as an unknowable “something” which must be the cause of our representations, for if we cannot ascribe the representations to an object outside of us, we cannot be sure the representations themselves are separate from us and we thus doom ourselves to solipsism.

[2] Hume does not claim that the thing-in-itself is completely unknowable in principle, simply that right now we cannot necessarily know anything about it through scientific methods or say that the laws of cause and effect apply to it (Di Giovanni 20). This is a major difference between Kant (at least as viewed by Schulze) and Hume.

Random pet peeve

When graders say to "expand on something" when everything else in the paper has been stripped down to its bare minimum and you're barely fitting within the alloted length. Where, pray tell, would you like me to expand into?

P.S. It's the first big snowfall of the season. I'm sitting in a cafe, writing about bioethics, and watching big chunky flakes sift down outside. It's been snowing nonstop since early this morning. Winter is most certainly here, and for now--for now--I'm certainly enjoying it.

He/she really makes a good point...

Urgh, finals have taken over my life. But I'm bored with writing those, so I'll write something here instead...which makes the first time in a while.

I hate prescriptive grammar, and I think that attempts to impose change on a language--especially one as widespread and with as complex origins as English--are not only doomed to failure but also near-offensively paternalistic. There is one thing, though, that has started to drive me crazy about our fair tongue: the lack of gender-neutral pronouns. There are several reasons why this bugs me...

1) The classic problem of how exactly to refer to a neutral third-person subject. "He/she" is just...awful, and the singular "they," although I see no problem with it, is one of those prescriptively prohibited things that might get you in trouble on an essay. I often resort to just alternating genders between hypothetical people in an attempt to be even-handed, but then I start feeling like I'm populating my essay with a village of nameless specific people, which would just be weird.

2) The second one is a bit different. I am currently writing a paper on the concept of personal identity and its relation to bioethics. The author of the book I am basing it off of is named Jeff McMahan. Every time I speak of his arguments, I have to write something like...well, "his arguments." The point is...why in the world do I have to specify his gender every time I speak about his arguments if the arguments have nothing to do with his gender? There's a very deep idea in a lot of philosophy that who specifically is making the argument makes absolutely no difference as long as the argument itself is sound. If Hitler writes a book that makes a valid point, it's just as true as if Martin Luther King made the same point. That's what the term ad hominem means--attacking the person behind the arguments instead of the arguments themselves. Given that, I hate that I have to specify something as mundane as the writer's gender every time I make reference to a claim he makes. It's as if I had to refer to the writer's marital status or sexual orientation every time--I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't affect the arguments being made.

All that being said, I cannot bring myself to write a sentence like "McMahan claims that eir “embodied mind” account of personal identity..." It's unnatural, it's forced, and it's an attempt to impose outside change on language. In other words, it's everything I hate about prescriptive grammar.

What's a man/woman to do?

The greatest writer ever:

William McGonnagall (no relation to the professor of Transfiguration, as far as I know). He was a Scottish "poet" from the late 19th century, most famous for his masterpiece "The Tay Bridge Disaster," which begins as follows:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

What's amazing is the unpredictability. After the inspired rhymes of "Tay" with "say" and "away," you might expect the next line to end in something like "day." That's where he gets you. Although that word does appear, it is NOT where the gentle reader might expect it to be. He jogs right past the too-few-syllables-into-the-line expected rhyme and straight to the ending date. The effect is rather like slipping on a pile of dog shit and smashing your head into a brick wall, or perhaps flying off the end of a broken railway bridge into an icy river. The former is more accurate, the latter perhaps more the author's intention. Maybe.

The poem (his masterpiece, although his other 199 or so published poems all have their moments of genius) continues on for another 7 stanzas, full of great sequences like:

And the passengers' hearts felt light,
Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov'd most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.

The crowning glory, however, is unquestionably the final stanza.

Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Despite the creative uses of "lay" and "confesses," the genius of this lies in, again, the devious rhyme scheme. After "Tay," "lay," "dismay," "way," and "say" all coming one after another like a machine gun of rhyme fired straight into the brain of the reader, one might expect "day" to come up again in a cleverly-placed internal rhyme . Yet again, McGonnagall fails to conform to our naive hopes. What we get instead, in a glorious display of creativity, is "buttresses," a word which perhaps no other poet would have the gall to use in any poem, let alone one in which it so blatantly flouts the already precariously variable meter and rhyme.



Seriously, though, I can't stop giggling when I read his stuff. There's an archive of everything he ever wrote here. Enjoy!

Electric guitar amps for dummies

I have fully immersed myself in the world of electric guitar for long enough that I forget that not everyone wets themselves over the thought of an all-original 1965 Blackface fender Twin. This, then, is for my friends who have no idea what I'm talking about. Also, I'm not an electrical engineer or physicist, so my descriptions of the circuits involved are going to be accurate enough but probably very very wrong. Please forgive me.

______________________________________________________________

Your standard-issue acoustic guitar works because the strings vibrate at a certain frequency, and those vibrations are transferred to the hollow body of the guitar. The sound waves bounce around in there and get the whole body vibrating. Since a big piece of wood vibrating at 440 Hz (or whatever) will make more noise than a thin piece of wire doing the same, the guitar is naturally amplified, and the sound is loud enough to fill a small room.

This is great for playing alone, but what if you need to be heard in a concert hall over, say, a drummer, bass player, and horn section? You could theoretically build a HUGE guitar, but that would be impractical. Instead, what some genius in the 1930s realized is that you could use electricity and magnets to amplify the sound. The important parts of an electric guitar, then, are the neck, the strings, and a few electromagnets underneath the strings called the "pickups." Nothing else is vital--not the shape of the body, not the paint, nothing. That's why you can have electric guitars that look like this but most acoustic guitars look something like this

The pickups are the little rectangle or oval shaped things underneath the strings you'll see on any electric guitar. As stated earlier, they're usually not much more (or at least don't have to be) than a magnet wrapped in wire. When a guitar string (made out of a magnetic metal) vibrates at a certain frequency, it disturbs the magnetic field, creating an electrical current at that frequency. This current travels down the wire from the guitar and heads into the amplifier, where the signal is amplified (the waves are just made bigger) and this current then causes the speaker of the amplifier to vibrate at exactly the same frequency as the string(s) were.

Simple, right? Yes, in principle. But then it gets complicated.

To start out with, there are two basic types of devices you can put in an amplifier to actually do the grunt work of making the signal stronger. In the olden days, they used vacuum tubes. Then, in the 60s and 70s, somebody discovered that you can use transistors to do the same thing. As you might be able to tell from the picture, the transistors have the advantage of being a hell of a lot smaller. Solid state amps (as ones based on transistors are called) are also cheaper to make and have less chance of distorting the signal. Perfect, right? Technology is on the march and tomorrow is brighter than today!

Except no. Most amplifiers for things like microphones and audio systems try to reproduce the signal exactly as it came in. Early guitar amps did this as well, until somebody figured out they sounded damn cool if they got turned up really loud. What was happening was that the level of the electrical signal was too high for the electronic components in the amp, so the top part of the wave got "clipped."

Visual aid:

In most audio amplification, this is VERY BAD, because it sounds like crap. For a fun experiment, turn your computer speakers up all the way and play a song. It will probably sound a bit like diarrhea. For whatever reason, however, when you do this to a guitar, it sounds a bit like this. There are, of course, levels of distortion. In the clip above the amp is pushed into a moderate level. If you listen to someone like B.B. King, he has the amp set so that it's just a smidgen over its maximum, and you end up with a very smooth, mild, almost unnoticeable distortion. If you listen to a heavy metal band, however, they've got the things turned up so high that the waves end up looking square.

Why exactly most people enjoy the sound of an "overdriven" or "distorted" guitar (the two terms mean roughly the same thing) is hard to answer. Certainly many people who grew up in an era in which the sound was to be as avoided in guitar amps as it would be in any amplifier say that it sounds like "noise" to them. For whatever reason, though, most people who have grown up listening to music since the 60s enjoy it and find it sounds "gritty."

So what does this all have to do with the tube vs. solid state issue? It turns out that a tube amp (also called a valve amp in England, for some reason) sounds better overall, but ESPECIALLY when it is distorting. This is because generally tube amps will have a much more graded scale, from creamy smooth blues sounds at around 3/4 on the volume dial to pure, balls-to-the-wall rock if you turn it up all the way. The transistors in solid state amps tend to handle the signal differently, by keeping it as clean and undistorted for as long as possible before suddenly breaking into very harsh, unpleasant-sounding distortion. There are also other factors, such as the supposed "warm" sound of a tube amp versus the "lifeless" sound of a solid state, which do have some validity--but to the majority of untrained listeners they're pretty damn similar. Even virgin ears, however, can usually tell the difference between "cranked" (guitar talk for turning it up to the point of distortion) tube and solid state amps.

Because they sound better, they're more delicate, and vacuum tubes aren't used in much else nowadays, tube amps tend to be more expensive. A smallish (usually around 15 watts or so) solid state amp will tend to run about $100-$200 dollars. A tube amp of a similar size will cost you minimum $300-400, and sometimes up into the thousands. For this reason, most beginner-level amps are solid state, and the vast majority of pro guitarists (and, indeed, almost anyone who is playing actual shows for a paying audience) bite the bullet and upgrade to a tube amp at some point. Occasionally guitarists (often jazz guitarists) will play with high-end solid state amps if they want a very clean sound, and some pretty big-name guitarists have heavily used solid-state amps in the studio (Brian May!)--but in the vast majority of times tube amps are the way to go.

So now you know the basics about guitar amps. We've only scratched the surface...

It's been a while

Sorry folks, been busy with school and life and a bit too lazy to keep this up.

I'm writing this as I lie in bed with what is either a very nasty cold or the beginnings of the flu (swine or otherwise). Luckily I have the internet, some class readings, a few books, and some video games to keep my company while I try to not feel all achy and coughy.

I'm kept in high spirits, however, by the fact that I have a new toy:



A Traynor YGM-3 guitar amp (from 1971!).

All tube, 22 watts, built in reverb and tremolo...nice stuff. It'll be my new go-to amp for Sugar stuff. To explain what the hell that all means, maybe you should check out my next post...

Facebook's targeted ad fail (cont.)

-"Pick your pleasure! Diamond rings from Versace, Gucci, Baby Phat, and more!"

-"All sweaters and outerwear 25% off from Pennington's size 14+ woman's clothing"

and this one wins for pure irony:

-"Get your online BS in marketing!"

On navigation and Walruses

True to the name of the blog, I thought I'd trumpet a little bit about the small modicum of fame I have achieved as of the publication of the last Walrus, a widely read Canadian magazine somewhat akin to the New Yorker in content and tone, although rather differing in the comprehensibility of name choice.

The last issue contained a feature article on whether or not modern technology is killing our ability to navigate our way around the world (cleverly called "Global Impositioning Systems") which features quite prominently Dr. Veronique Bohbot's lab, where I have worked since May. Cool beans.

Also, there's an accompanying video. Watch the whole thing--it goes to our lab at about 1:30, and you can even hear and see (I'm wearing 3d glasses, the height of chic) helping the author around the lab in the middle of it! It also feature Dr. Bohbot herself and some of my lovely co-workers. Check it out!

In totally unrelated news, I still am confused as to my own tendency to want to spell accompany with a "g" after the second "a." You'd think I would have learned by now.

Facebook's targeted ad fail

I'm convinced Mark Zuckerburg is somewhat of an evil genius. Although the concept of Facebook is nothing really that innovative, what he (or someone he was working with) realized was that what social networks end up giving you--laid out in front of you like a Thanksgiving day table--is the personal information and tastes of a huge swath of the 15-30-year-old population. We've probably all heard of the scandals over our information being sold to advertising partners, and we've all probably shrugged off the cries of the privacy advocates who recognize that we're all participating in what amounts to a giant marketing survey.

So, given that Facebook pretty much exists to mine our personal pages for information to sell us shit, why is it that the targeted ads on the side are always (to use internet lingo) so full of fail?

-"Meet hot single Canadian girls now!" and the like. One would think it would be the most efficient use of ad space for facebook not to show these to people who are listed as being in a relationship? Also, Canadian girls don't usually go for internet dating. The traditional ones won't come out to dinner with you unless you bring them a pair of moose antlers and three beaver pelts.

-"Find the best place to celebrate Diwali near you!" I'm not Indian, although I do greatly enjoy butter chicken.

-"The BEST DNA decontaminator!" Urgh. Really?

-"A Conversation with George W. Bush in Montreal on October 22nd! Tickets still remaining, get yours fast!" Oh boy, my favorite president in my home city?! I'll have to bring an extra pair of shoes.

-"Download the free online beer fridge!" This isn't as much mistargeted as just mind-numbingly stupid. After a hard day, there's obviously nothing I love quite as much as an ice cold binary beer.

-"Etes-Vous Francophone? Travaillez pour Facebook!" Yes, I'm a francophone. That's why I'm from California and my facebook page is in English.

-"Too early for Christmas?" Yes, actually. Why on earth would they have these ads up now? "I didn't think so. Download an entire album of Christmas piano for $3.96!" ...oy. when I do my christmas music shopping, I only go for the highest quality merchandise. This four-dollar crap just won't cut it.

-"Play Evony Now: World's #1 Web Game! Play subtly with me now! FREE forever!" Hmmm...

-"Become a fan of the Jonas Brothers!"

Now you can stalk me MUCH better

Apparently Google maps now has street view for Canada. This means that anyone who has never come to visit me in Montreal can now come visit me in internet-land and not feel guilty about having never come to visit me.

I'm kidding on that last point.


Here's my cross-streets (I'm not posting my exact address on the internet, geez). Ta-da!

Playing around with photos...

I thought this one turned out rather nice...didn't do much to it, either: just contrast, focus, and very very slight color adjustment.

 

(you can click to make it bigger)

Moby

Last night, I went to a Moby concert. I'm not a huge Moby fan by any means, but EVERYBODY likes his stuff. You can't not. So when my friend badgered me to go see him, I acquiesed, thinking I would at least get to dance.

What. A. Show.

Probably the best I've seen in Montreal...although the Jazz Fest shows from this summer definitely are up there. The best way to describe it is probably half rave, half rock show. Most of it was a live band show: Moby on guitar (he's a great guitarist, btw...who knew?), a mostly female backing band, and this big black lady backup singer with an absolutely phenomenal voice. She handled singing most of the samples ("Why does my heart....feel so bad?"), especially the ones he took from old Alan Lomax folk recordings. The rest were handled by his keyboardist/opening act/probably at least part-time lover, this woman from Brooklyn who, despite being a little white girl with hipster bangs, just about blew the roof off the damn place when she started singing.

The live stuff was suprisingly rock-y. Lots of crunchy guitar riffs and pounding drums, and a few suprises that seemed to hint at Moby's underlying love for funk, blues and classic rock--an oddly straightforward cover of Neil Young's "Helpless" and a raw, bluesy version of "Honey" (with guitar replacing piano) that turned into a big jam with the band launching into badass covers of both "Whole Lotta Love" and "War Pigs" (!).

This was, of course, supplemented with some decidedly more dance-oriented stuff. Although I'm decidedly more of a rocker than a raver, there's something pretty amazing about a sweaty room packed full of bodies, flashing lights, and pulsating bass. Plus, who doesn't love dancing?

Possibly the most surprising (although not so much in retrospect) is how much of a nerd Moby is. His onstage banter consisted of some horribly butchered "merci beaucoup"s after every song (which nonetheless got huge cheers from the mostly Francophone crowd) and decidedly un-rock-star-like asides like a five-minute ramble about the new effects pedals he bought for his guitar, ending with his admission that "sorry, you probably don't want to hear some middle aged guy talk about his guitar equipment." Despite the fact that his music had the audience in the palm of his hand for a couple hours, he seemed like the kind of guy who needed to speak through that medium--as a person, he would probably be a lot more happy sitting at home with his sampler and turntables. His stage banter wasn't his voice. That honor belonged to his beats.

A shout out...

...to my friend Angela, who has started drawing a lovely semi-autobiographical web comic in her spare time:

More Than This Provincial Life

Most of the humor is probably funnier if you actually know the people involved--if anything, the author has toned DOWN the hilarity of the "main characters"--but it's still worth checking out. It's great stuff.

Overarching themes

It could be that I'm crazy (always a possibility), but I've found that every semester of my university career has had some sort of "theme" to it. Last semester, for example, I found that a lot of the concepts I was taking in across my classes revolved around the theme of "self." That might sound over broad, but there was a definite thread. Existentialism was the most obvious source of this, but I found that little things in my other classes pointed the way as well.

This semester, it's "how we become what we are." I'm taking Cognitive Development (should be obvious); Biomedical Ethics, in which we are currently discussing personal identity and at what point a fetus becomes a person; Genes and Behaviour, in which we are discussing how our genes and our environment shape us as people; and 18th/19th Century German Philosophy, in which we're currently discussing how we come to gain the knowledge we have.

It might seem like a stretch, and I'm definitely not claiming to uncover some sort of grand conspiracy--maybe it says more about me than about the classes--but I still think its interesting.

A brief rant about cinnamon gum and related atrocities

Okay, seriously, this stuff sucks. It's like someone decided that the best idea in the world was to have a gum that BURNS YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU CHEW IT. You know that wonderful cooling feeling mint gives you afterwards? Yeah, cinnamon doesn't do that. It makes me feel like I have a case of strep throat--something I'm sure every product should aim for. Also, I sure as hell would rather have any giver of kisses to me taste "minty fresh" over "cinnamon-y fresh."

See, that second one isn't even an ad-slogan-turned-expression. It's stupid. About the only piece of candy that I hate more than cinnamon gum are these:
...that is, all except the one second from the left. I have many memories as a child of picking a candy cane which, to my colorblind young self, appeared to be a stick of minty deliciousness, only to find it tasting a bit like what I picture day-glo paint tasting like. God made candy canes mint. That's all they should be.

Back to the grind...

HUMAN reason has this peculiar fate that in one species
of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as pre-
scribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to
ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also
not able to answer. 

The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any
fault of its own. It begins with principles which it has no
option save to employ in the course of experience, and which
this experience at the same time abundantly justifies it in
using. Rising with their aid (since it is determined to this
also by its own nature) to ever higher, ever more remote,
conditions, it soon becomes aware that in this way -- the
questions never ceasing -- its work must always remain
incomplete; and it therefore finds itself compelled to resort
to principles which overstep all possible empirical employ-
ment, and which yet seem so unobjectionable that even
ordinary consciousness readily accepts them. But by this
procedure human reason precipitates itself into darkness
and contradictions; and while it may indeed conjecture
that these must be in some way due to concealed errors,
it is not in a position to be able to detect them. For since
the principles of which it is making use transcend the limits
of experience, they are no longer subject to any empirical
test.

-Immanuel Kant

Sometimes I wonder why I got into philosophy.

Cottage country

This past weekend, I finally got the chance to visit one of these mythical "cottages" everyone in Canada seems to have. No, seriously: maybe its the socioeconomic makeup of the Canadians I encounter at McGill, but there's a bizarrely high proportion of people in this country who seem to have a vacation home somewhere in the vast tracts of forested and lake-ed land that you encounter about ten minutes outside any major city. That vastness probably has something to do with it--when you have so much land, it's not that surprising that there's a lot of it available for relatively cheap.

My girlfriend's roommate (from here forward referred to as GFR) has one up in the Laurentians, a mountain range an hour or two north of Montreal. Since GFR is also the current president of the McGill Triathalon club and my girlfriend is a member, it was basically a triathalon-oriented trip with a few relatively slobbish people like myself tagging along. I like to think of myself as fairly in shape, but these are people who are excited by the prospect of 90 kilometer bike rides and come back from said rides saying things like "wow, amazing ride...who feels like a run?" instead of "OH GOD MY LEGS BURN."

Now it wasn't all intense training with me sitting on the sidelines feeling out of shape--there were some more casual activities as well. It was while trying my hand (feet?) at waterskiing on the first evening that things started to get...injurious. While futilely attempting to stand up on the damn things--it's hard, if you've never tried--one of my skis came off and beaned me quite hard in the side of the head. By the time we got back into the cottage, my left temple was swollen up and I was being fussed over and given ice and Advil by GFR's mother, who was up with us and happened to be a doctor. So okay, one of ten or so people up on a trip has a minor accident and ends up with a big bruise on the side of his head (and a very impressive black eye). Big deal.

...except that the next morning my girlfriend quite literally broke her face and split her lip falling out of bed and into a bedside table (it was a small chip fracture of the upper lip, but "broke her face" sounds awfully good, and is technically correct), necessitating a trip to the emergency room. Another girl almost passed out on the bike trip and later cut up her shin jumping off of the dock and onto a submerged rock. Another guy cut himself with a kitchen knife while making dinner. Another girl, while trying to throw another person out of a canoe, managed to fall into a canoe and bruise/scrape up her legs badly. Everyone was fine, but it became a running joke that the injured were starting to outnumber the healthy ones.

Then I get into work today: my co-worker's grandfather has died, another's house burned down a couple weeks ago, and my supervisor's mother fell very ill and her son broke his arm.

What the hell is going on?

Anyways, besides the apparent curse on this August (starting off with a shooting, no less), the weekend was pretty amazing. By the morning after my accident the swelling had gone down enough that I was able to enjoy myself. I never got back on the water skis, but I did try tubing (very fun), and although my poor girlfriend had to refrain from all intense physical activity--which was supposed to the point of the weekend--she still got to have a nice couple of days relaxing in the beautiful woods of Canada. As did I. And man, it's beautiful.

Apartments

I apparently fail at keeping this blog going with any regularity--or at least I've failed in the past couple weeks.

It's really not my fault. I've been fiendishly busy. I think I can safely say that apartment searching (with a rather strict deadline after which homelessness ensues) is my least favorite activity on this planet. I've never had to administer an enema to an elephant, but I think I might choose that over this. It's also amazing how much absolute sleazebag-ness there is present around anything related to student housing. There are entire blocks (*cough* most of St. Dominque *cough*) of absolutely terrible apartments rented out to students at prices that aren't even low enough to justify the slum-ness.

When its at its worst, it's like my future roommate, who actually had his bathroom roof collapse and his landlord still wouldn't come fix the place. They know students are desperate, gullible, and in most cases pretty damn naive about what you can get for the money. Not all landlords are total douchebags, of course. My current landlords are great, my past one took some hassling to fix things but was a decent fellow in general, and my (probable) future one seems like a good bet.

Yes, that's right, I found a place. It's not totally finalized yet, so I'll avoid posting pictures in order not to jinx it. But when that lease is signed, you can bet your ass you'll be seeing them.

Return of the guitar porn

Amazing--it's not raining.

This city is so so beautiful when it's sunny out. Take a day like today: about 75 degrees, blue skies with fluffy white clouds, light breeze. I had to skip out from work at lunch just so I can enjoy it.

It's a pity it's been sunny all of seven days in the past two or three months. Canada, I know you're supposed to be the great white north and all that, but can't you at least pretend that it's summer?

Happy fucking birthday.

Well, I'm officially 21. My year definitely got off to a bang.

That's right, I made a joke about it. That's because I can laugh about it now, and I'm still not fucked up by thinking about the fact that I watched a man get shot to death about 20 feet from me while I was standing on the street after my birthday party and saw my friend lying on the street with people holding her side to hold the bleeding. Because she had been fucking shot.

Most of the time, I've been fine. In a way, the more I talk about it, the more unreal it becomes and the more it becomes just another story I can tell people. I don't want to dwell on it too much--as a friend said to me, it's easy to use this kind of thing as an excuse to sink into dark places. I certainly don't want to do that, but pretending everything's all sunshine and rainbows isn't the best idea either. I need to feel something--it's just hard to know what.

I was saying to some friends that maybe this is a karmic thing. Maybe the universe decided to get all the shitty-ness that will happen to me in the 21st year of my life out of the way three and a half hours into it. Lets hope. I'm just glad my friend is all right.

We all make mistakes

That's why this correction from the NYT is so awesome. Some people, thankfully, find the taste of their own foot in their mouth to be a sign they maybe shouldn't kick so high.

Also, two recommendations. First:

Great, great, GREAT book. I can't recommend it enough. It's got everything. And, although you certainly don't have to be Jewish to enjoy it, there's something a bit more special about it if you are.

Second:

I'm literally listening to it RIGHT NOW for the first time, and I'm blown away. It's got French art song duets with Rufus Wainwright, Talking Heads esque funk/electro dance stuff, bossa nova songs about going on a date, and even something that might be hip-hop. His voice is the best I've ever heard it. Just download it already.

I'm back!

I was in California for a week...and now I'm back.

I'll probably put some photos up.

Until then, here's another wonderfully deranged spam poem that arrived in my inbox this morning from "Felipe."

final looker.
stress missel akimbo matter.
bora jigger final fabric.
stayer chess sheikh.
reach basnet thwack vizir!
patch sports drowsy hydra?
final maxima swage doable.
clown alien devise gouge?
juror ullage spoor.
me jigger debtor sports.
take wail thwack.
jail exile devise take?
twit orrery jigger.
swage dirty swage basnet?
jail jerked.
stayer iamb shorn derail?
saber indue piddle tocsin!
gouge cuboid prelim oozy!
orrery debtor.
chess sports swage.
chess matter bream bream!
orrery grease.
jerked bowery saber bream!
final akimbo.
dart basnet jerked hugely.
stress unworn derail blague?
clown overly.
akimbo sloe dart micro.
bora uproar cult plaque?
thwack piddle.
oozy excise blague grease!
vizir matter weapon.
blotto radix iamb basnet.
tatty priced weapon oozy?
take reach.
wail jerked mask blotto?
tocsin iamb.
exile micro bowery doable!
hugely menial.
hugely blotto dirty gouge?
reach record.
chess debtor.
grease fable sports twit.
plenty clown oozy shorn.
uproar basnet.
matter micro prelim appal.
thwack matter tact unworn.
mask reach limey alien!
hugely vizir missel akimbo!
tact wallah overly unworn!
siskin final bora derail.
basnet burial ullage choosy?
weapon dart.
fabric twit divan juror!
grease burial grease juror?
micro priced blague buffo?
reach chess wail.
oozy weapon.
cuboid excise.
bowery patch tact limey?
exile dirty gee clown?
matter swage dart.
spoor burial debtor fabric.
gee overly oozy micro.
weapon debtor missel flier?
blotto limey.
reach record sports gee!
bora stress.
jail outfit excise hydra!
limit crude hugely withal!
debtor appal.
dart micro take gee?
sports hydra tocsin unworn!
cult alien outfit.
bream orrery grease alien.
withal ullage.
hugely swage reach jail.
blague earwig weapon clown!
take shorn looker micro.
thwack uni bora grade.
tact mask.
clown tig clown matter!
cuboid spoor withal lain.
wallah stayer take.
sheikh fabric.
fabric me.
iamb jail.
indue micro tatty bream.
jail stress thwack tatty.
crude record exile.
dirty iamb sloe siskin?
twit hydra tocsin doable.
doable outfit uproar divan!
mask stress gouge sloe?
patch bowery flier matter.
record grade bora.

"Fabric me" indeed.

Weirdest thing I've learned all day.

Lauren Bacall and Shimon Peres are first cousins.

The Stevie Wonder experience

Dateline: June 30th, 2009.

I get off the metro at Place Des Arts station (heading back from work) at about 4:45. The concert is right next to the exit; it's already damn crowded. I learn by phone call that Mick (bassist in my band) and a couple other friends are already there, and that they've managed to squeeze up front. I run home, relax for five or ten minutes, grab a couple slices of pizza, and make my way back to the concert. By this point (around 5:30), it's gotten even more packed. I somehow tiptoe my way over people who insist on bringing a blanket and taking up way too much room, squeeze past several very angry-looking folks, and get about ten feet from my friends before I'm stopped by a man who was, in my father's terminology, built like a brick shithouse. The guy looks me over, and, after my fervent exclamations that my friends were waiting for me just over there (and their frantic waves towards us), he let me pass, but with the warning that "this door is now SHUT."

Perhaps I should give some perspective as to where we were in relation to the stage:



And what the crowd looked like behind us:



Or maybe both in one go:



By the way, what look like gaps in the crowd in that video are actually spots where people were sitting down. These folks were actually much harder to get through than those who were merely standing. There were no gaps. We could barely find room to put our backpacks down on the ground. I think by the time the show started there were somewhere around 200,000 people there. This is all an attempt to impress upon my readers how much I suffered for Stevie.

Then three and a half hours passed. I can't say it was a fun three and a half hours, but it probably wasn't the worst three and a half hours of my life. I had friends there, and although I couldn't really move, could barely sit down, didn't have any water, and couldn't actually leave to go to the bathroom--Mick made the brave journey out through the crowd to the outhouses and somehow struggled all the way back to the front, meeting one kind fellow who threatened to "cut his foot" if he tried to get by again--we still had friendship and the distant prospect of a FREAKIN' STEVIE WONDER CONCERT FROM THE FRONT ROW, which made it all almost enjoyable. That's a big almost. We also met a few friends of mine who also happened to be up in the front row, and a motley cast of characters including the drunk/high guido-esque folk standing next to us and a girl who claimed to be a model and to have been "seen with the Wayans brothers" in one of the more incomprehensible celebrity name-drops ever. Still, props for her, I guess.

Oh yeah, and it started raining.


Finally, at around 9:15, as my bladder threatened to burst, the DJ left, the stage cleared, the lights went into performance mode, a roar went up from the crowd...and then this guy showed up on the video monitors to talk about how wonderful the jazz festival was for about 10 minutes.



Then he shuts up and goes away, and a figure makes his way onto the stage. STEEEEVIE!

..wait, nope. These guys.



They talked about how awesome Jazz Fest was for another 10 minutes. Then they left, and we waited. And waited. And waited some more. It was probably only about 20 minutes, but as the model/Wayans brothers associate noted, it felt longer than the other four hours.

And then this shmuck came out.



Oh wait.

I can't quite describe how odd it is to see someone you consider a musical genius and one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years standing no more than 50 feet away from you looking for all the world like a pudgy older middle-aged guy. It's not that I didn't know what he looked like, but it's more that. He's human. He's an actual guy who, you know, does all those human things we do. He just happens to be Stevie Wonder. Music is a strange art, because in no other is it as easy to become so acquainted with the most intimate details of another person without having the slightest clues about the normal stuff. The visual arts aren't as direct a window into the psyche or soul (yeah, argue this point if you want) and although a movie star might be equally as distant, at least you're looking at their face and body as it occupies physical space--and plus, they're playing someone else. Stevie Wonder has always been a disembodied voice and some musical notes to me (plus photos, and a few videos, but much less so), yet I feel you know so much about him. Seeing him there in the flesh--yes, he actually does the head-bob-y thing--almost, in a strange way, stole a tiny bit of the magic. Almost. Maybe it would have if he hadn't kicked ridiculous amounts of ass.

He started off with a speech about the late great Michael Jackson, basically telling the haters and the myriad vultures around his corpse to go get stuffed. He started the concert off with "I Can't Help It," a tune he wrote for MJ which, I have to confess, I had never heard before. He was obviously pretty shaken up over his death, which is not surprising given their friendship. He actually stopped several times during the show to play MJ songs over the speakers. I understand the tribute, but I wished he'd actually played them.

The show continued in a somewhat disjointed fashion. His first hour or so was light on any huge hits and a bit too heavy on some post-1980 stuff, which I tend to pretend never happened. There were a few pretty amazing performances, though: "Master Blaster" was amazing, especially after having covered it with my band, "Higher Ground" was everything you could hope for, and "Knocks Me Off My Feet" was gorgeous. There was also a cool Indian/Middle-Eastern sounding singalong thing that was quite possibly improvised. The lyrics certainly were. As cool as it was, a couple things need to be said. One, Stevie, do us all a favor and never try to freestyle lyrics again. Stevie is musically unquestionable yet has always been a wee bit shaky lyrically. Second, never try and get a huge crowd to sing a minor second. It doesn't work.

There were also a few cool surprises:


I should stop here and say that his voice has apparently not aged in 25 years. During the big Middle-Eastern singalong, I was totally blown away by the precision and power in his tone. He sounded like a muted trumpet.

Then things got really cool. In honor of Jazz Fest, he decided to do some, well, Jazz. Miles Davis' "All Blues" was first, in which Stevie took the most badass harmonica solo ever.



Then they did Coltrane's "Giant Steps" for a bit, before launching into a truly epic version of Chick Corea's "Spain" that lasted for a good fifteen minutes or more, with each member of his rather sizeable band taking a solo. What a band, man, what a band. The two guitarists and two keyboardists were amazing, the bass player was a rock, and the two percussionists and the horn players were jaw-dropping. The drummer, though, was something else. The man sounded like a bombing run when he got going fast, and he was hitting the damn things so hard I thought they would snap--yet he was perfectly precise and never over-the-top. I guess that's who you get as a drummer when you're Stevie Wonder.

Then he did "Our Love is Here to Stay."

After the sick jamzzz, things got going, really going. "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," "Uptight," "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," "For Once in My Life"...plus "I'm Gonna Laugh You Out of My Life," a Nancy Wilson song sung by his daughter Aisha, who is one of his backup singers and was the subject of "Isn't She Lovely." And who has an astoundingly beautiful voice.

Then, after the obligatory but still midly cringe-inducing "I Just Called to Say I Love You," we got this:



If you can't tell, that drumbeat at the end is the start of "Superstition." I had to put the camera down because I needed to dance, because it's fucking "Superstition." Then he did "As." AHHHHHHHHH.

The only problem, the ONLY problem...I wish he'd actually done the full versions of those three songs in the video. That's a minor complaint because I WAS 50 FEET AWAY FROM STEVIE WONDER SINGING "SIR DUKE," "I WISH," "ISN'T SHE LOVELY," "SUPERSTITION," AND "AS."

He ended the show by having a bunch of MJ songs played over the loudspeakers while he stood onstage and held hands with his band. Mick and I took the opportunity to leave--not because we wanted to disrespect MJ but because we didn't like the idea of trying to get out of a plaza at the same time 200,000 other people were trying the same thing.

Then there were fireworks.



Legs feeling like they were composed of a metal near the end of the periodic table, bladder now adapted to its distended state, and mind and ears full of music and the unflinchingly positive energy that is Stevie Wonder, we staggered home.

What a night.

The full setlist can be found here, if you're curious.

Today's spam poem

I got this e-mail today...reprinted exactly as I got it.

mascot truss.
daman hey spiral.
comfit demo banded rumour.
lobe daman visual peg?
sprite shape.
hush lacing teak pique?
elves floor among spell.
bang thole.
dud teak peg group.
cannot hurl postal wormy!
saliva spiral abroad wormy.
comfit lobe gauze ardour?
pique versed.
epic duly duly lacing!
viral hey.
spell comfit lobe menu!
sprite duly elves marque!
comfit rumour blanch zariba?
debris paddy scathe bang.
spiral trek drain lobe.
laical disown potty wormy?
dampy jape.
chut rumour brazen.
hush aspire.
versed group laical postal.
wormy elixir rumour potty.
floor lacing mascot totem.
tatter poster.
shin homage banded.
one fin bang sloven?
shape elves elves sloven!
cougar slug parted banded?
cannot jape tatter daman?
postal abroad.
group viral.
tatter wormy scathe.
homage versed floor abroad.
disown elbow.
clod puke laical postal!
in in demo jape!
versed denial rumour wormy?
group potty chut lobe!
bang cinque basalt.
daman keck halt wormy?
shin poster.
debris halt.
rumour teak menu zariba.
epic churn elbow comfit?
rug hawser slough keck!
gauze paddy.
drain ardour hush recast.
hey shin ardour postal?
crabby keck comfit menu?
daman paddy whelk sol.
laical elixir teak saloon?
whelk epic jape elixir.
ardour duly elves keck?
aspire clothe shape versed.
blanch among.
rug visual.
hurl hush lacing in?
bang menu.
chut tatter hey.
lacing group blanch sol.
in keck dampy.
pique lacing cinque sloven.
scathe sprite sloven jape?
visual group visual duly?
shin gourde ordeal brazen.
ardour shin.
drain menu spawn ordeal.
tatter floor scathe.
dampy tatter laical in?
puke thole rumour keck.
recast versed group group.
bang saliva lacing.
spiral parted elves.
pique elixir rhetor brazen.
clothe demo.
rug parted cinque shape.
cinque poster.
hurl elves.
trek sloven visual in?
rhetor blotto parted sloven!
trek shin paddy saloon!
zariba brazen clothe.
paddy brazen paddy cannot.
brazen group abroad keck.
rug ripply.
disown totem walrus demo!
denial sprite brazen recast!
recast keck.
basalt potty recast drain?
rumour wormy group daman.
poster saliva elves.
parted elixir abroad abroad?

First You Get the Sugar...in the studio.

A few clips of us...unfinished songs (all missing keyboard parts, most missing vocals and a few guitar parts) and jonesing around in the studio. Enjoy!

Happy 4th!

After having been in Canada for Canada day, it's really interesting how different the two celebrations are. Maybe it's something to do with that famous American individualism, but Americans don't really seem to go in for the giant fill-the-downtown street festival thing for many of their holidays. It's more of a "have a BBQ with the family, go to the beach, watch some fireworks at night" type of thing, and there's nothing wrong with that in the slightest. That's quite fun. Buuuut...


That's Ottawa on Canada day. Doing a google search for "Washington D.C. 4th of July" brings up some photos of people enjoying the fireworks, and some people parading down various streets, but nothing like the teeming masses of humanity I saw even in the not very pro-Canada Quebec a few days ago. Canadians, it seems, take any opportunity to fill the streets with a giant party, and really--who can blame them?

Good riddance

Goodbye, Sarah Palin. Please never come back. Hopefully your delusional belief that leaving the governorship of Alaska BEFORE THE END OF YOUR FIRST TERM will help you run for president will come back to bite you in the ass. Maybe this will convince that small segment of people in the USA who didn't realize the massive joke you were of how frightening your presence in the highest levels of office would be.

Steeeevie

I was in the FRONT ROW of the Stevie Wonder concert that kicked off Jazz Fest...a concert which had an attendance of 200,000 people. This concert. What an experience. Pictures, video, and a review to follow whenever I can make it to Second Cup to upload the photos.

A brief rant about Canadian grammar

This is going to sound harsh, but seriously, guys. When God (or Samuel Johnson/Billy Shakespeare) created English, He included these wonderful parts of speech called "prepositions." They fulfill an important role: making your sentences not sound like they were spoken by someone with Broca's aphasia (tasteless neuropsychology joke). Do you guys not realize how strange it sounds to say "I'm done work today"? It makes it unclear whether you're failing at constructing the past tense or failing at constructing the present. Just one little "with" would make it all so much better.

The worst part is that I've started picking it up, just like I picked up "eh"--which I actually like. I'm being slowly sucked into a bizarro world of Northern grammar.

BTW, the answer to my last post: Barack Obama and Mr. T.

Adventures in Egotism trivia contest

Question: Who are the only two living people to have chia pets made in their likeness?

Google and other internet methods of searching are strictly prohibited.

Why I love Quebec

Because eating "Capitaine Crounch" for breakfast is so much more satisfying than "Cap'n Crunch." I prefer my officers in the cereal navy to be of French descent.

The rampant bilinguilism here is hilarious, especially when its completely unecessary. Yes, I understand that its giving respect to the two language communities, and as an English-speaker here I appreciate the effort. But still, seeing streets labeled "Boulevard LaSalle Boulevard" will always be funny.

R.I.P. MJ

Despite the tenuous grip on sanity the man had, Michael Jackson was an astoundingly talented fellow. He wrote that song, by the way.

R.I.P., bud.

Colo(u)r changes

For all the good it will do, I've decided to "green" the blog in solidarity.

If I made something orange or brown by mistake, please help a poor colorblind boy out and let me know.

D'abord Vous Obtenez le Sucre

First: we're playing a monster three-set show that will run run us from around 9 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. here on Friday. Come check us out if you actually live in this town!

Second: next Tuesday we're playing at a St. Jean Baptiste day celebration. St. Jean Baptiste day, a.k.a. La Fête Nationale, is a holiday that somehow (too lazy to go on Wikipedia) has basically turned into "Quebec Day" and is often an occasion for nationalist/separatist/anti-anglo sentiments...or roving lynch mobs (just kidding, Mom). For anyone who doesn't follow Montreal news, there's a bit of a brouhaha about English bands playing at these things, and we're a band made up of an American, two English Canadians and two Montreal Anglophones. We sort of represent a constellation of everything les Quebecois detest in principle.

To alleviate any language tensions that might arise, we thought it would be a nice goodwill gesture (or hopelessly patronizing insult, but...you know) to translate one of our cover songs into French. Our keyboardist--one of the Montreal Anglos, but fully fluent in French--suggested we do it with "As the Years Go By" by early-70s Montreal-born one-hit-wonders Mashmakan. What he discovered when doing the translation is that the lyrics actually read more smoothly in French than in English, even when keeping the grammatical structure intact:

A child asks his mother, do you love me
And it really means, will you protect me
His mother answers him, I love you
And it really means, you've been a good boy

And as the years go by
True love will never die

Becomes:

Un fils dit à sa mère, "m'aimes-tu?"
Et ça veut dire, "me protégeras-tu?"
Sa mère lui répondit, "je t'aime,"
Qui veut dire, "t'es un garçon sage."

Et au fil des années,

L'amour mourra jamais. (it even rhymes!)

He did a bit of research and it turns out that, sure enough, the lead singer of the band was French, even though the rest of the band were Anglos. Its like he wrote the lyrics in French and ran them through whatever people used for awkward translations before Google translator and BabelFish. Weird. I guess all you die-hard Mashmakan fans who read my blog now have something to ponder.