Anyway, I was thinking about this because I bought tickets online from TicketMaster and to find out if tickets are available you have to enter two random words, masked to be unreadable by OCR software. In an effort to avoid spam, we’ve gotten to the point where we have to type increasingly elaborate spam-like nonsense into a little box. Kind of like this blog!

I’ve been meaning to write a review of the Danielson documentary for a few months now. Danielson has been my number one favorite band for the past year, and so I was quite excited to watch the film and see a little bit of what band leader Daniel Smith, who I really think is a musical and artistic genius, is all about. It documents the band’s history up to the release of 2006’s breakthrough album Ships. The band is unique and the personalities fascinating enough that I believe it’s a good movie even for people who aren’t as familiar or abjectly fawningly in love with Danielson’s music as I am, and it raises a lot of worthwhile issues about art and religion and what it means to be successful.

In one of the interviews, Daniel Smith is asked what irritates him about critics reviewing Danielson records, and his answer is that the writer always feels the need to spend the first half of the review on disclaimers about religion: “I’m not a Christian, but…”, like a mantra to justify their objectivity with respect to the music. He correctly points out that critics review reggae records without prefacing it with “I’m not Rasta, but…”. I’m not an alcoholic, but I listen to country. I’m not a complete douche, but I listen to Coldplay. Ha ha just kidding! I don’t listen to Coldplay. But I do share this desire to add exculpatory disclaimers when I say things like “I’m really into this Christian rock band…”.It’s a problem because “Christian rock” is such an apt description, but has a lot of amply justified prejudice to live down. So it’s kind of his own fault that he inherits a lot of the indie scene’s general suspicion of Christian™ music, which is so much horrible pablum. The mainstream evangelist labels that are hostile to Danielson are essentially factories for mass-producing kitsch according to very precise specifications, who have no context at all for perfect, psychedelic pop tunes. His message may be Jesus, but his medium is pure John Lennon.

It’s clear that Daniel’s father, a folk musician himself, is irked by the reaction of the Christian music community, and it really is a massive indictment of their collective aesthetic taste. But then, this is the same community that chows down on Left Behind like it was palatable, so, you know, not exactly news I guess.

Daniel Smith is eager to share with interviewers the religious inspiration for the music; when asked about his creative process, he always responds that he doesn’t take credit for his art, he just “points to the creator.” Several times throughout the film, Smith repeats some variation on “It all comes from the Creator of music, the Creator of all everything. We just let Him speak and try not to get in the way.” He compares his relationship to his creative output to that of a young child helping his father fix a car — he’s not really helping, he’s just there, having fun, feeling useful, more in the way than anything else. It’s a little difficult for an atheist to engage with Smith about his process. Fortunately for me, we’re living in the postmodern era and I have no trouble sidelining any authorial privilege over interpretation, so I have no compunction about offering an alternate explanation: that Smith is a genius and, therefore, also a little crazy. Much like another crazy songwriting prodigy, Daniel Johnston, who was the subject of his own doc, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, who’s craziness also tends toward religious fervor. Though in his case well beyond Smith’s wholesome eccentricity, tending rather more towards dangerous psychotic breakdowns. Also unlike Smith, Johnston’s story is a tragic one, though not only for his failure to achieve mainstream success, but for his failure to develop as an artist. At the end of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, he’s still playing the same songs and drawing the same child-like cartoons of Jesus and Casper the Friendly Ghost.

I found the interactions between the two Daniels one of the more interesting scenes, because it was the one time that Smith seemed uncomfortable. Both are preternaturally gifted songwriters and “outsider” artists who struggle for mainstream acceptance. The focus in the latter half of Make a Joyful Noise Here is on Smith’s attempt to push forward and redefine himself with his music and art, without the Famile. Towards the end, director J.L. Aronson is able to get a little deeper into Smith’s actual writing process, which Smith understandably has difficulty articulating. One thing he said really struck me as a very true expression of the creative process: that mostly what he does is wait for different ideas and images to “start pointing to each other.” This is a frustrating and mysterious process that nobody really understands or controls, and that seems to me like pretty much everything that can be intelligently said about it.

Sufjan has his own little chapter in the movie, and we see him hesitantly learning to play the cowbell, taking brother Andrew’s place on their European festival show, and opening for Brother Danielson at tiny clubs in front of eight people. However, I felt like the Sufjan portions were sort of beside the point for the film as a whole, and would have been better left as DVD extras, keeping the film a bit more focussed on the perspective of the family. The film is separated into chapters narrated by each of the family/band members, which gave a very personal and intimate touch to the production; Sufjan’s section is a departure from this. I mean, it’s clear why they chose to focus on him, he’s a huge star now. I just felt like it wandered a little too far from the focus and theme of the rest of the film.

The doc ends on a triumphant note, first with the recording of the amazing Brother Danielson record, and then the critically-acclaimed Ships, which brought together everyone who has ever contributed to a Danielson Famile recording, and provides a bookend to Smith’s long-term three-part vision of Danielson Famile/Brother Danielson/Danielsonship. I really can’t wait to see where he goes from here.

Hey wait, that’s not it! That’s just what came up first when I did a google image search for ‘vancouver olympics mascot’. Silly me. Here they are:

At first I felt like they succeeded at creating a design that was just fine thank you, something I can easily ignore because it’s just sort of cute and nothingy and fades into the background of lame bullshit that is constantly in our faces. At least it wasn’t a totally offensive boondoggle like the London 2012 logo, which really is just awful and hard to look at. With the precedent of the fibreglass Spirit Bears that plagued Vancouver for years, my hopes were minimal to begin with, and were met satisfactorily.

My next thought was that I’m not so big on the whole co-opting native symbols to promote an ubercorporate sporting event thing. I agree with Only, it’s distasteful. The designers had a tough job, though, satisfying the goals of both being marketable to a diverse global consumership, and also appeasing the Canadian anxiety about our shared identity (or lack thereof) as an immigrant nation, with our own unique baggage of colonial slash genocidal shenanigans to live down. So that’s a lot of pressure, and I think the results are basically passable. And hey, the kids love ‘em, so that’s a big win.

I really think they should have just gone with the marmot though. Marmots are cool. When I was looking for a job a few years ago, browsing a government job database I found a posting for employment as a marmot watcher. You see, Vancouver Island’s golden marmot is endangered, there was only about 200 left in the wild, and they were being predated by bald eagles, which were also endangered, meaning you couldn’t shoot the eagles. So the solution they devised was to hire someone to camp out with the marmots for the summer to scare away the eagles. And I thought that would be a pretty good summer job. You know, just hanging out with the marmots. I don’t really have qualifications or experience in that field (a literal field), and I can’t remember what the listed qualifications were, but if one of them was “must think marmots are cool” then I would have been a shoo-in, because I think marmots are totally cool. Also, last July bald eagles were removed from the endangered species list, so they better watch their backs, is all I’m saying.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but you catch the most flies with a whole bunch of dead people all piled up on top of one another. Henry Kissinger came out with that bon mot while putting pepper on his baby-seal steak, during a strategy session with Dick Cheney, who smirked and thought it was quite clever indeed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skCV2L0c6K0

Not my chair, not my problem. That’s what I say.

It wasn’t a huge deal, I mean I’ll just expense it to the company anyway so no big whoop. The problem is that these fake-o taxis aren’t insured as taxis, so if we’d gotten into an accident I’d've been fucked. Lesson: learned. My co-worker fell for the same scam I guess, because she’d emailed me before I left Vancouver saying that I should expect to pay around 85 euros for the cab from the airport. So that was was that.

I also got here right when the Tour de France was going on, and i had to cross the Champ Elysees to get from the place where I picked up my apartment key to the apartment, carrying all my luggage through crazy nutty tourist craziness. It took me ages to figure out how to get into my apartment because the directions I was given were completely wrong and I spent half an hour trying to open the wrong apartment door, until I was able to convince myself that No, objectively none of these keys fit in this door, I’m not just stupid. After I had the brainstorm of matching the name on the keys to the name on the door, it worked — eventually. A sticky locking mechanism nearly reduced me to tears.

Anyways, not to go into all the dull touristy details, Paris is a nice place to walk around. But of course, I always want to see the seedy areas because those are the places that are the most fun to people-watch, so I liked going down to Pigalle and having a beer on a terrace in the evenings. Pigalle was called “Pig Alley” by the American soldiers in the second World War, because that’s where all the prostitutes hung out. Nowadays it’s mostly sex shops. I only went there once or twice, until I was warned off by a resident co-worker, but I have to say that the dodginess had nothing on Vancouver. No hordes of cracked-out zombies like we have. Mostly a lot of this:

I’m heading back to Vancouver on Sunday, and I’ll be glad to be home in my own apartment and bed and routine. One thing that bugs me about Paris is that I can’t get a big fat-ass honking cuppa joe in the morning to bring to work, as is my custom. They only serve these gay little espresso drinks. Maybe that’s why the French are never in a big hurry.

I made a faux pas (that’s French!) the other day by ordering some cheese after my meal and an espresso at the same time. The waiter was like You want espresso with your cheese??? And I was like Is that not done? He said A French person would not do zis, but you are not French so ees ok. (Another odd thing is that as soon as I would say Bonjour to a waiter, they would immediately start in with the English. My pronunciation must be terrible.)

Ok, that’s all. Here are my pictures.

He was opening for CocoRosie, but I didn’t stay to see them. I read on Pitchfork that they were arrested the next day, probably for bringing some Vancouver souvenirs back across the border.

The first opener was pretty rad though, a French beat-box guy named Tez. Here’s a youtube video, for your viewing pleasure. Note that he’s not using any instrumentation, it’s all mic.

Apologies for the lack of updates lately. More delicious content coming soon, I promise!

Friday night was the Vague Undertakings opening at the Chapel, featuring music from The Clips, Bend Sinister and Panurge, and art from various artists, including: Gabe Deerman, Adam Dodd, Wendy Dyk, Neal Everett Nolan, Chloe Gammon, Sally Hutcheon, Robert Mearns, Melissa Pavlovic, Evan Shandler, Ed Spence, Terra Varey, and Contexture Design Workshop.

The Chapel was a funeral home now converted into an artist-run space, and it’s an absolutely incredible venue. The main chapel room acoustics are wonderful, with a good sized space for dancing, and there are plenty of other hallways and rooms for mingling and looking at art, and even a pool table upstairs. I arrived late and missed the Clips, which was a little disappointing, since of the three bands playing I enjoyed their myspace tracks the most, but Bend Sinister and Panurge both brought solid, energetic sets that really got the hipsters moving.

The art is up at the Chapel (on Dunlevy near Hastings, around the corner from Pat’s Pub) until April 15th; do yourself a solid and go take a look. I’m really looking forward to seeing more events there.

Saturday night I had a dream that I was in a classroom writing an exam. It was in a large lecture hall, and I was supposed to write an essay about nihilism. I wasn’t worried at first, confident that I knew quite a bit about the subject, but then I realized that I hadn’t been to class all term and didn’t have the text books that everyone else was referring to (it was an open book exam I guess). Also, I had to write it on blue construction paper with a white crayon. I started to get angry and frustrated — why didn’t I study or go to class? I tried asking the prof for clarification about the topic, but he was mumbling and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I ended up just drawing a big white circle on my paper and handing it in in a fit of pique.

And then Sunday was the much-anticipated Man Man at Richards on Richards. I had high expectations for this show, all of which were surpassed. The sheer quantity of gear on the stage was staggering, with all manner of objects to crash and smash and shake in a seamless frenzy. Unfortunately the opening band, Victoria Victoria, was boring boring. The best thing about them was the drummer’s mustache, but it could not make up for shitty lyrics and weak melodies. They were fine at the Lamplighter a few weeks ago, opening for other local bar bands, but they had absolutely no place opening for Man Man.