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Sunday, October 23, 2005

The Sequel (Sort Of)

After a fruitless year of picking away at a literal sequel to Planet Simpson (Planet SpongeBob SquarePants, if you must know), I've abandoned the lengthy analysis of cartoons for the time being to begin work on a new book. It's about sustainability. Windfarms, urban renewal by skateboard, elaborate Danish anarchist communes, that sort of thing. One day, when I'm far less jetlagged, perhaps I'll attempt a more cogent explanation.

For now, though, I'm en route to Copenhagen for the first leg of the world research tour, enduring a 20-hour stopover in London. (Enduring the stopover part, not the London part. London's a fine city.) Went to the flagship Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street to pick up a long-sleeve tee, because Marks & Spencer makes the best damn plain unlogo'd t-shirts in the world. Also really really good wine gums, which were my dad's favourite when I was growing up. Bought some of those too. And a brolly. It's a crazy scene here in London Town, let me tell ya.

Tales of epic Danish adventure soon to follow. And eventually there'll be a brand-new blog devoted exclusively to the new book. Big plans afoot here at Planet Simpson World HQ.

It's probably dangerous to post while this jetlagged, but here goes nothin'.

Posted by Turner at 11:30 AM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (529) | Comments (1)

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

The Centre Of The Universe

(Note: If you're willing to suffer through my writerly preamble, I eventually get to my take on the "Clark Standards" playlist that's being discussed over at the wife's and Accordion Guy's blogs.)

Ahem. Observant readers of my book will notice that the opening scene is set at a campus pub called Alfie's, whereas a little later in the same chapter I profess my undying loyalty to another Queen's University watering hole called Clark Hall Pub.

Why the discrepancy? Well, Alfie's was the "cool" "dance" pub during my undergrad days ('92-96), the place to see and be seen, which meant it always had an interminably long line-up and you were guaranteed to have to suffer through at least two ABBA tunes and an equal measure of Technotronic once you finally got in and the place was overstuffed with smarmy Toronto private-school types who'd interpretative-dance along to "Thank God I'm A Country Boy" at last call like they wrote the damn thing and then leave with that cute girl from your psych class.

Whereas Clark fuckin' ruled.

Clark had headrests over the urinals and really good music and friendly staff and two-dollar pints (!) out of your very own customized mug and the best patrons a bar could hope to have. (To this day, about 99.8% of my fellow Queen's grads who I'm still in regular touch with - including several I didn't even know at Queen's - have only one thing in common: they were Clark regulars.)

So why give Alfie's such prominent play in my book, then? Journalistic integrity, that's why.

Unlike, say, Jayson Blair or Maclean's, I aim for accuracy in my writing. And the awful, unavoidable truth was that the anecdote that opens my book about the beer-goggle gag ("See The World Through The Eyes Of A Drunk!") in Episode 9F11 slaying a pubful of people - that scene went down at Alfie's. God knows why I was at Alfie's that night (at a guess, I reckon I was dragged there by someone hoping to pick up some girl he believed would be there that night), but anyway I just couldn't bring myself to exercise the ole "artistic license" and set that scene at Clark. Which was where I usually watched The Simpsons.

And, truth be told, where I also exhibited The Simpsons. Clark showed new episodes live on Thursday (and in later seasons Sunday) nights, then showed taped copies again at Friday Ritual. And as DJ, it was my job to actually operate the VCR and sound system and sigh patiently when yet another self-proclaimed Mr. Funny bellowed "Fast forward!" the moment the episode cut to commercial.

All of which brings me finally to the iTunes playlist I whipped up for the missus. It started, actually, with my obsessive efforts to produce a series of mix CDs for the delivery room in the days before Sloane's birth. I had a bunch of long playlists full of chanting Buddhist monks and the like all burned up, and then the missus mentioned that maybe she'd like a disc of heavy Clarkish stuff for the hard-pushing part of the ordeal. So I quickly threw together a bunch of old Ministry and Green Day tunes and such, burned it, and brought it along in the car when we headed to the hospital the night before Sloane was born.

Where it remained until Ash discovered it a few weeks back and blogged about it. Upon reading that entry, our pal Dana, overcome by a happy wave of Clark nostalgia, requested a copy of that disc ror herself. Instead of just burning one, I decided to put together a more representative Clark Sampler.

Here's the playlist, with a few reminesces thrown in as counterpoint to the ones on Ash's blog.

(Actually, first a quick digression for those who don't know us that well: Though Ash was a regular patron of Clark at the same time I was a DJ, we didn't meet until after we both graduated. We also have wildly divergent tastes in music. [Her repeated and frankly glib dismissals of the entire Bob Dylan catalogue should demonstrate to any serious music fan which of us is the more refined in such matters.] So my recollections are very different from hers, is my point.)

Ahem. To the Clark Standards playlist:

01. Ministry, "Jesus Built My Hotrod." Classic Clark thrash. Me and my music-snob mates would probably prefer "Some Dispute Over T-Shirt Sales," the Butthole Surfers' smarmy reply to this song, but "Jesus" was much more of a Clark anthem.

02. NIN, "Head Like A Hole." This was a mainstay of the Clark setlist during my first two years at Queen's and my introduction to industrial. I liked it. It was far heavier than most of the hair metal I grew up on, but (at least on this track) much smarter and more insightful. Plus no clumsy references to Norse mythology or motorcycles.

03. Pixies, "Debaser." My floormate Lisa (also a future Clark DJ) arrived at Queen's having already done a degree at McGill, so she had this voluminous tape collection of the best of the previous four years of alt/college music. The Pixies was one of those first bands that made this kid from the sticks with a couple of grunge albums in his collection think, "What the hell's wrong with mainstream rock radio that these guys aren't bigger than Jesus?"

04. The Breeders, "Cannonball." This is the one that reminds me the most of being like third in line on the staircase, knowing you'd be inside the pub within minutes. You'd hear a song like this floating down those stairs, and you knew the place'd be rollicking, giddy, stoopid fun and your night was gonna be just fine.

05. Stone Roses, "Elephant Stone." In my second year, I started dating a lovely woman named Chris, and a short while later my pal Iain started dating her housemate Dana. (Yes, the same Dana who asked for the copy of Ash's birth-music CD that led to the assembly of this playlist in the first place.) Anyway, she and Dana were much more into Britpop than Iain and I - which is to say that they dug quite a bit of Britpop, while Iain and I were openly and unwaveringly contemptuous of it - but with time and repeated exposure the undeniable brilliance of some of it finally sunk in. I think it might've been "She Bangs The Drums" that finally sold me on the genius of the Roses, but this one's a bit dancy-dancier.

06. Blur, "There's No Other Way." Actually, maybe this is the one I heard wafting down the stairs and knew it was, as they say, on.

07. James, "Laid." In my memory, this is the Clarkiest Clark anthem that ever Clarked. I decided about three weeks into my tenure as a DJ that I'd never choose to play this song, because it was redundant to do so. And indeed, with the exception of like the Tuesday before exam week during a snowstorm, I don't think I worked a shift at Clark where this wasn't requested.

I was sick to death of it at the time - indeed Ash left this off her recounting of the playlist because she's still sick of it - but now when I hear it, I can actually smell that unique stale-beer-and-sweat smell that emanated from those those black rubber tiles.

08. Beck, "Loser." I had a white t-shirt in my Queen's days with the Sub Pop Records logo on the back and the word "Loser" printed proudly on the front. I loved that t-shirt. My pal Iain (aforementioned) has a particularly fond memory of the time we were walking up Princess St. (possibly toward the liquor store) and we were both hungover as all hell and I had to veer off to puke all over the hedge next to this real-estate office or something. Came ambling back, looking pale and even more dishevelled than usual (I was not very, you know, tidy in those days), my "Loser" t-shirt looking more appropriate than ever.

So when this song hit the airwaves right around then, it seemed about as perfectly tuned to its moment as, like, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" was to its time. You know?

09. Beastie Boys, "Sabotage." It was either this one or "So What'cha Want." You usually heard both any given night at Clark. My final year there, two of the pub managers, Luq Ahmed and Jon "Dogger" Dogterom, had this idea that if we got the cash together and sent the Beasties a heartfelt invitation explaining how much they meant to the life of the pub, they just might come and play there. Never happened. Alas.

10. House of Pain, "Jump Around." My two closest friends, the aforementioned Iain and A.G. "Adam" Pasquella, are like six-three and six-four. I'm, you know, less than that. So if you were out on the dancefloor, and this came on, and they both started pogoing up and down, the view from down where I was could be pretty awesome.

11. Whale, "Homo Humpin' Slobo Babe." Clark had its share of one-hit wonderment. This was one of those: a nightly request for a whole semester and then - *poof!* - gone.

12. Jane's Addiction, "Been Caught Stealing." No, wait - it was the sound of those dogs barking on the intro. When you heard that from down on the stairs, that's when you knew it was on.

13. Bjork, "Big Time Sensuality." I'm not a big Bjork fan. I recognize that she's a brilliant and innovative singer, don't get me wrong. But you know how sometimes you meet a girl and you think she's a bit of an odd duck and maybe kind of fun and then you get to talking to her and realize it's actually physically painful to do so for any length of time? Bjork's always reminded me of those girls. Anyway, this tune and "Army of Me" were always the Bjork songs that had the least of that quality, in my opinion. (Whereas "It's Oh So Quiet" had so much of said quality that just thinking about it makes my head hurt.)

14. Sloan, "Underwhelmed." Remember Lisa, she of the Pixies tapes? Well, one night in first year she convinced me and some of my floormates to check out this engineering pub she'd gone to. This was sometime after Christmas of my first year - a first year whose nights out invariably ended in me cross-eyed drunk, angrily stomping around the edges of the dance floor of some cavernous, soulless club (e.g. the Cocamo, Dollar Bill's, Alfie's) like a crazy person, looking for abandoned drinks as pathetically petty "revenge" for the music, the scene, all of it.

Joey "Accordion Guy" De Villa was spinning the tunes that night at Clark. By about half an hour into the evening, I think I'd been up to the booth three times to find out the name of the song he was playing. This Sloan track was one of them. Little did I know that night that I'd spend two and a half of the next three years as a Clark DJ myself, that Joey would become a lifelong friend, and that I'd wind up married to a Clark girl with a daughter named Sloane. Thanks for bringing me to Clark that night, Lisa, wherever you are. Saved my life, I think.

15. Oasis, "Supersonic."There was a bit of good-natured tension between the Britpop guys and the grunge guys at Clark. For me, it was that there just seemed to be so many Britpop bands, and every one of them was allegedly the Second Coming. (Me and one of the managers used to crack each other up just by barking the name of one of these - "Dodgy" - at each other in a clipped, quasi-Mancunian accent.) Oasis, though, had their moments, and this was one of 'em.

16. Green Day, "Basketcase." The sentimental favourite was their first single, "Longview," since restlessness and masturbation loomed so large in our lives in those halcyon undergrad days. But this one is one of those that brings to mind vivid images of the view from the DJ booth a couple of songs from the end of the night on a particularly good night - the dance floor packed to bursting with sweaty, euphoric drunks bouncing and writhing with such intensity and abandon it made the whole building vibrate.

17. Hole, "Miss World." I decided not to put any Nirvana tunes on the playlist because the memories I associate with their music are too varied. Figured this was close enough. Whatever people say now, before Kurt died a lot of us thought Live Through This was a pretty solid album.

18. Adorable, "Homeboy." Another one of those run-to-the-booth tunes. Who is this? How could a band that writes such atmospheric and melodic anthems not be world-famous? And is this really a pretty pop song about an alpha prisoner taunting his bitch? 'Cause, dude, that'd be awesome.

19. 1000 Homo DJs, "Supernaut." It is 5:20 in the afternoon on a Friday. Warm fall sunset light streams in the windows. I can still walk well enough to make it to the bathroom without serious complication. Better order two tequila sunrises at last call. Ah, Ritual.

20. REM, "It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)." That moment toward the end where the rhythm section falls away and there's just Peter Buck's guitar chiming away, and then a tambourine's ring comes up underneath and the song erupts one last time? On the right night at Clark, that moment could be truly transcendent. I'm glad I felt it once or thrice.

Posted by Turner at 08:00 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (523) | Comments (5)