Hot Hot Heat

Kingston weather for the last three days:

Today: 31°C (88°F)
Yesterday: 32°C (90°F)
Monday: 36°C (97°F)

It's been a hot, humid, smoggy, sticky, horrible week. One of the hosts of CBC Radio 2 put it best this morning when she said "Summer is upon us like a duck on a junebug." Lousy global warming...

Jazzy Craziness

I just saw this guy Raúl Midón on Letterman. I've never heard anyone make that kind of sounds with a guitar before! It was amazing. I don't even know how to describe it, except as the most original thing I've seen in a long time.

Album Review: Billy Corgan - The Future Embrace

I make no secret of the fact that I am--or at least was--a HUGE Smashing Pumpkins fan. Back in 1996, Billy Corgan was my hero. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is still one of my all-time favorite albums, and Siamese Dream and Gish are right up there too. The last two albums (1998's Adore and 2000's Machina) had flashes of the brilliant songwriting of the first three, but ultimately fell down on inconsistency and poor production. The same applies to Corgan's album with Zwan in 2003. Hearing that Billy Corgan was putting out a solo album, I was decidedly pessimistic, but as a die-hard fan, I had to get it. Well, it came out on Tuesday, and I've given it about eight listens so far. Here's what I think about it:

I didn't know what to expect, but this isn't it. It sounds like a bizarre mix of Depeche Mode and early Boards of Canada, but darker than either. It's all drum machines and synthesizers, with surprisingly little guitar (Corgan is an incredible but underappreciated guitarist). The album bears a passing ressemblance to Adore on some tracks, but is mostly unlike anything Corgan has done before. His whiny, nasal voice doesn't particularly suit the music, but provides some welcome familiarity. On my first listen, I didn't care for it much; no songs were particularly bad, but there wasn't anything that really caught my ear either. The album is anything but exciting. That said, repeated listening reveals sensitive, well-crafted melodies and lyrics. Beneath the electronics, the songs have a beautiful simplicity to them. It's a refreshing change from the shiny over-production of Corgan's last few albums. It's not earth-shatteringly amazing, but it's damn good. It may not spark any new trends in music, but it's style is original.

In short, I like The Future Embrace.

The other interesting thing I discovered while listening to this album is Billy Corgan's website. Billy has been publishing his autobiography in the form of almost daily posts, detailing snapshots of his life from age three onwards in seemingly random order. As someone who has followed Billy's career for nearly a decade, and picked up a tidbit or two about his personal life along the way, I find myself reading it compulsively. It's as if your best friend gave you her diary and let you read it, and in it you found in great detail intimate secrets that you had only hints of, or that you never would have guessed. It's given me a new respect for the man and the artist. Also, on the news page of the site, Corgan says outright that he has plans to revive the Smashing Pumpkins! This would make me ecstatically happy, except for I have my doubts that it will happen, considering Corgan's ongoing bitching out of James Iha (former SP guitarist, now with A Perfect Circle) and comments about D'arcy's out-of-control drug use. One can hope, though...

Batman: Hero of the People, or Dark Servant of Capitalism?

I saw the new Batman movie last night. It definitely redeemed the series after the last two Joel Schumacher-directed monstrosities; in fact, I think I liked it even better than the 1989 original. Ultimately it's still a Batman movie, but at least it's a Batman movie with good character development. In fact, this movie ultimately got me thinking:

Consider Bruce Wayne: billionaire whose parents are murdered by a desperate street criminal, and who swears to rid the world of such people through his own brand of justice. He claims to be a hero, protecting the people from crime--but at the same time, he lives a life of luxury far beyond what most other Gotham City residents could ever hope for, while the street criminals he brings to "justice" are trying to get by in a world in which they are disenfranchised and powerless. It's the classic tale of the capitalist class trying to demonize the poor so as to justify the inequality inherent in their own lavish lifestyle--only in this case, the usual method of accomplishing this--police oppression--is not sufficient, and Wayne must become Batman, a dark vigilante whose power extends beyond the law and is enforced through training and equipment that only the rich could ever afford.

The movie blurs the class conflict by making Batman's main enemies wealthy psychopaths who value raw destruction rather than power. The fact is that in reality, such people are few and far between, and usually lack the ability to commit large-scale acts of destruction. This is where the concept of the Batman series falls down--in the idea that evil exists in some pure, unadulterated form. In reality, evil is done in the pursuit of power--whether it is by street criminals, organized crime bosses, capitalists, or nation states. The two former, I would suggest, are collectively a much smaller detriment to civilization than the two latter; the law is very effective at limiting the power of some, while aiding the accruement of power by others. This is because the law is not, as we are led to believe, aimed at producing impartial, fair and equitable results, but rather at producing results which favour those who make the laws.

Where the Batman myth falls into this is unclear; it exists in the context of an unrealistic society which is dominated not by the rich and powerful who control the laws, nor by the common people, but by some powerful group that operates outside the law. Therein, he serves the state interests over those of organized crime. He fights for the lesser of two evils; he's the John Kerry of Gotham City.

Do you think I made too much of this movie? Maybe, but at least I didn't spend a lot of time criticizing the special effects.

Book Review: The Long Emergency

I just finished reading The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. It was probably the most compelling and terrifying pieces of nonfiction I've ever read. The basic thesis is that in the next few years, and continuing for many decades if not centuries, human civilization is going to experience an economic crash the scale of which will make the Great Depression look like a minor market correction. The industrial age, Kunstler says, is all but over. The fundamental reason for this is that for the last two hundred years, industrial civilization has been growing increasingly dependent upon fossil fuels, particularly petroleum, as a source of cheap energy. The problem is that this supply of cheap energy--solar energy which has been stored up within the earth over millions of years--is very soon going to run out. To make matters worse, we've developed an infrastructure which is heavily dependent on the availability of cheap oil, from suburban living environments that require long commutes by car, to agriculture dependent on chemical fertilizers made from oil and gas feedstocks, to box stores which depend on international shipping of goods to fill their shelves. Even though coal, nuclear and alternative energy could potentially provide us with energy for many years, the infrastructure simply doesn't exist to use that energy to do everything we need it to do, and when the petroleum economy collapses, we won't have the means to switch anyway. Basically, we're all fucked one way or another, through flooding, starvation, disease, war, or environmental destruction, and there's not much we can do except try to lessen the immense damage.

On the whole, I thought the writing style left a little to be desired; Kunstler arguments weren't as well formed or as well supported as someone like Chomsky's would be (Chomsky, in my opinion, is not only a great thinker, but also one of the best arguers of our time). Nonetheless, almost every one of Kunstler's points was something I was already at least somewhat aware of: the effects of global warming, the upcoming peak oil production, the unsustainability of modern agribusiness, the nightmarish suburbanization of our cities, etc. I ended up feeling almost naive for failing to put it all together the way Kunstler does, into a cohesive vision of what the world is going to be like in upcoming decades. The results are perfectly logical, but utterly terrifying. I pray he's wrong, but I think he's mostly right; a new dark age is coming, and it is almost undoubtedly coming within my lifetime.

You have two choices: you can read this book and know what's coming, or you can not read it, and sleep at night with the idea that the world is going to go on the way you've been told it will for the rest of your life.

June Update Part Deux

I remembered what I'd wanted to mention the other day. First of all, I cut off my dreadlocks. Here are the before and after pictures:

Notice how my head is hung in shame in the after photo? Yeah, part of me wishes I hadn't done it, but it was time for a change. Will I be renaming the blog to be consistent with my dreadless status? Not for now.

The other thing that happened was that I spent the May 24 weekend up at my friend Jamie's cottage, with many of my friends. Here's a photo:

Good times.

Music: Bloc Party - Silent Alarm

June Update

I've been very lax in my posting recently. It seems like I've been very busy, despite not working. Here's what's new:

• I went up to Montréal with my girlfriend on Monday, mostly to visit my potential supervisor. I met him and his grad students, and got the tour of the lab, and pretty much everything looked great. Then for most of the afternoon we wandered around the city, but it rained so we ended up going underground. Then we had a total nightmare trying to get out of Montréal at rush hour. I see why Quebec drivers have a reputation as being crazy; you have to be to drive anywhere!
• As a result of the trip, I've accepted my offer from McGill. As a result, I'll be working here next year.
• Brain the cat is still living at my house for a few more days. His owner brought some horrible disease back with him from Cuba, and he wasn't able to come up to Kingston from Toronto to get him.
• Last Friday I had my official graduation ceremony! Convocation itself pretty much sucked, but the after-party was a lot of fun.
• Most of my friends have now left town permanently. Boo-urns. A few will be up for Arts and Science convocation on Friday, but mostly now I'll only be seeing my Queen's friends on special occasions. It's the end of an era!
• Now that a lot of stuff is coming to a close (and now that the weather has suddenly gotten really hot), my summer is going to begin in earnest, I think. That means I should be posting more frequently, hopefully.

I think I forgot something important, but oh well...if it's that important I'll remember it and announce it later.

Music: Townes Van Zandt - Our Mother the Mountain