It's On Like Donkey Kong!

No we're not talking about the Super Bowl.

In a few hours Federer and Nadal will square off against each other in Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena, initiating ActI of what could be the most fascinating sporting contests in recent history. Federer's sublime skill versus Nadal's strength and dogged determination. The idea of these two tennis giants matching up in the finals of tennis' four Grand Slams, each one equally capable of winning all four, a feat not seen in tennis in over forty years, makes the heart beat. Whoever wins the Australian Open will be in the driving seat headed into the spring and Roland Garros.

Sit down, and strap yourselves in, this one's going to be a real ride.

2008 Song Of The Year

There were a lot of great songs last year - a quick look at the back of any of our top ten albums reveals at least a dozen. Asking your friends will bring on dozens more. Despite all these options, Cadence Weapon kept us coming back time and again to "Do I Miss My Friends?", the lead off song from Afterparty Babies.

Last fall it was announced that the American economy was officially in a recession, but the news had been all over the financial press for well over a year. As the housing market bubble looked ready to burst throughout the summer of 2007, the question was on everyone's lips, even as prices and the stock indices climbed higher. As Ozymandius from The Watchmen informed us, a recession turns people's thoughts to nostalgia.

So in a way, it is fitting that a song about "Back In The Day" is on the top of our lists. But Cadence Weapon goes beyond simple nostalgia. For us, a significant part of "Do I Miss My Friends?"'s allure is the tension that exists within individuals who have forced to choose between a stable and boring future and the wilder promises of their youth. Having cut our teeth in Calgary's Northeast and later Victoria Park, we have had many friends who've "skipped the rent" and thrown notorius damage deposit forfeiting last day of occupancy house parties. As careers and mortgages have come our way, those friends have fallen down to that particular circle of Facebook where we keep old acquaintances to be seen and heard, but not touched, where their behaviour continues unabated.

When Rollie Pemberton, a.k.a. Cadence Weapon asks, "Do I miss my friends?" for us the question is whether we miss those specific persons from our past and the relationships we had with them, or do we miss the freedom from responsibility that they represent? Is a kind of question that really has no answer, but the search is always deep.

Safin v. Federer, Australian Open 2009

Safin v. Federer, we've seen this before and it has always been a match filled with the promise of excellence, as Safin is usually considered the only player to possess more tennis skill then Roger Federer. While Friday's match showcased their talents, it also served to highlight that Safin's time has past him by. In the past we have always been excited to see Safin play, in part because his volatile nature meant that one was never certain which Safin would show up, often at any given moment. Certainly, watching Safin has given us much to think about regarding the relationship between unnatural talent, maturing, and in Safin's case, coaching. On Friday, it became evident that Safin has finally come to terms with all of his ghosts. He has awoken to find himself calmer - and older. There were no dramatic meltdowns on Friday, but Safin never really seemed to be able to challenge Federer, always seemingly three or four steps behind the younger Swiss maestro. In some ways, it is fitting that Safin has chosen this year to be his last in tennis, since we will also be shuttering our own (albeit limited and spotty) tennis coverage at some point this year.

Top Ten Albums of 2008

Better Late Than Never - Our Faves From Last Year

1. Beck - Modern Guilt

2. Hayden - In Field and Country

3. Cadence Weapon - Afterparty Babies

4. Herbaliser - Same As It Never Was

5. Tokyo Police Clib - Elephant Shell 

6. Portishead - Third

7. The Breeders - Mountain Battles

8. The Bug - The Bug

9.  Fort Knox Five - Radio Free D.C.

10.  The Street - Everything is Borrowed

Open Invitation to Our Readers

We want to encourage everyone who ever read any of our postings, or shared an impromptu conversation with us, to send us stories, good riddances, farewells - maybe one of you will even send us a logo that we never got around to designing ourselves (lazy bastards!). Send email to elvisbonaparte@gmail.com.

Welcome to the Afterparty

The writing was literally on the wall. Our office space is being sold. Our lease let out. It will be interesting and unpredictable to suggest what will happen to our little group after we no longer have this space. To say that we had a lease might be something of an exageration as it was never clear how we might have afforded such a thing, since all we ever seemed to do was hang out and talk, as people dropped by to sit on couches and write stuff down. During lazy summer afternoons we'd watch movies (wow, to think this might be the end of Afternoon Kino!), and likewise but less frequently on cold winter nights. The postings that you read here, are really just the tip of an iceberg. To be honest, people have been dragged in more directions lately, and economc downturns tend to bring about geographic dislocations, so perhaps things would have wound down eventually.

But this is not a good-bye - more like a forewarning or last call. We now know that what we're doing is not sustainable and will somehow come to an end, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop. We have at least another few months before we have to leave or space, and things might even linger own a little while after that.

So, what to expect? We'd like to suggest that there'll be a flurry of postings, punctuated with pictures of us having a good time, but maybe we'll just be too busy enjoying our last days.

Friends On The Scene

We are pleased to announce that our friend, documentary filmmaker Dominque Keller as launched a new blog aimed at collecting the stories of young women coming to grips with the various and conflicting legacies of feminism.

We are very interested to see how her project unfolds and encourage one and all to visit her site:

http://dominiquekeller.wordpress.com/

Heath Ledger, Best Supporting Actor

Warner Bros. is apparently pushing to Heath Ledger for a Best Supporting Actor nomination. At first we were looking forward to such a thing, viewing it has an apology for not winning one for Brokeback Mountain. However, watching the way that critics have started to rally around the film has put it in a different perspective. Now it seems that the push is not so much to honour Ledger, who died back in January just as promotions for the movie began, lending an air of tradgedy to his portayal of the Joker, but rather to give legitimacy to movies based on comic books as serious films. By extension, this legitimacy would extend to comic books themselves.

It seems about right that we are going through this cultural acceptance of comic books and graphic novels. Other genres, like the Western, have been through it as well. The successes of movies like Unforgiven and Brokeback Mountain came decades after the genre was pioneered in the 1920s and 1930s. 

In a larger perspective, this is perhaps signalling the momentum of the cultural shift that we have talked about elsewhere, i.e. as members of those generations raised in the primarily visual medium of television, movies, and yes comic books, mature to become cultural producers, they seek to validate the myths that they grew up with.

We'll write more about this in a few days. 

Okkervil River

Hiphop and electronica figure prominently on our year end lists, but let's not forget our unabashed love of sweet rock n' roll. The Islands may be quirky goodness, but Austin's Okkervil River gives it straight up. Aside from some stellar songwriting, the band also has it's own peculiar sense of humour, as witnessed with their videos for their new album The Stand-Ins, made up exclusively of footage of their friends re-recording covers of all the songs. All of the videos are available on YouTube, and include the likes of A.C. Newman (shown here).



Not to be outdone, Tokyo Police Club, with their album Elephant Shell, has also been filling our sweet tooth musical cravings.

What's Playing In Our Office

Remember when we argued that Obama represented the end of the 1960s? It seems like Washington, D.C.'s Fort Knox Five collective felt that this year's election was an opportunity to wind the clock back with booty-shaking results.



Speaking of sonic time-travel, we've also been giving Portishead's latest album, with more than a nod to 1960s style psychedelia, heavy rotation of late:




While the Fort Knox Five record seemed to presage a mood change in the nation's capital, it put us in our mind to revisit the Beastie Boys' own love letter to their home town on the post-9/11 To The Five Boroughs.

Music Update

Here are some YouTube clips of what's been on our stereo lately, starting with something off of the stellar Herbaliser album, Same As It Never Was:

We've also been spinning Cadence Weapon's Afterparty Babies pretty heavy too:

Sean Avery, we thank you, really

Yes we agree that the above title requires a lot of explanation, but it's true. If Sean Avery of the Dallas Stars had not spoken so poorly last week while the team was in Calgary we never would have had the chance to talk about what he reportedly said, something that ended up catching us offguard. According to Avery, he was simply trying to stoke a little hype and emotion about the game since Calgary defenseman Dion Phaneuf is dating Avery's ex-girlfriend Elisha Cuthbert and referred to Cuthbert as "my sloppy seconds". This created an immmediate sensation, especially among the NHL's older guard. What became evident though, is that while everyone seems to agree that the term is innappropiate and extremely disrepectful to Cuthbert, there is some argument as to how disrespectful it actually is because, as it turns out, the meaning of the term has slowly changed over the last few decades.

That langauge changes and slowly evolves is nothing new, but that we can hear this happening as a generational argument is rare. For example, Avery's use of "my" implies that "sloppy seconds" is a noun, objectifing Cuthbert and putting her on a level with last night's dinner leftovers. A lot of our younger friends are in agreement with this kind of usuage for the term - not that he was right to use it, but rather that he used it in the correct manner. However, for many of older friends, say 50+, the term is much more explict, describing an action. Thus, it would be wrong to say "he can have my sloppy seconds" just as it would be wrong to say "he can have my ménage a trois", and in fact this term is a little closer to the idea held by older speakers, although ménage a trois implies a sort of consensual character that is absent from sloppy seconds, though to call it gang rape might take it too far, but not necessarily.

Our conversation quickly turned from Avery to another derisive turn who's definition has dramatically changed over the last forty years ago: punk. Prior to the establishment of Legs McNeil's magazine Punk, the term described, as Williams S. Burroughs poetically put it, "the boys who gave their asses to the wolves". It was always something of a msytery to us how the term went from describing gay prostitutes to rowdy musicians, but Sean Avery's comments led us to reconsider the impact that the infamous 1969 Stonewall Riots had on the emerging punk scene. The raids on gay bath houses and subsequent marches are typically seen as the jumping off point of Gay Rights, and it would be hard to imagine that as Greenwich Village was the locus for much of this activity, as well as for what would become punk, that the two crowds did not mix, nor that media-savy types like Legs McNeil would not notice the press the gay crowds were garnering.

We think, and largely because of Sean Avery, that the time is ripe for a critical re-evaluation of gay culture on early punk. 

#MonthofNewMusic

If you're not using Twitter, then you're probably missing out on the informally organized Month of New Music. Twitter prompts users to post 140 character updates as to what they are doing, though what users actually write is highly variable. Some use Twitter as a microblog and talk about what they doing, watching, or eating, while others use it to start conversations, organize meetings or events, or share news in a kind of RSS-style. Realizing that new music was a fairly common discussion on Twitter, user cawlin suggested that folks listen to one new album a day for the month of November. The albums do not have to be "new" as in recently released, but rather new to that particular user, turning the Month of New Music into a kind of referral music for people on the look out to expand their musical circles.

Twitter users can actively participate in Month of New Music by including the phrase #monthofnewmusic (the # flags phrases for Twitter's search engine), or can simply view what users are playing by visiting cawlin's dedicated Month of New Music site: http://cawlin.com/monm/

Over the next few days, we will posting YouTube clips of some of our own selections for #monthofnewmusic here, so check back often.

Las Vegas: Paying a Price to be Left Alone

It's sometimes funny how often you can look at a thing and then suddenly it gives you a new idea. A recent trip to Las Vegas helped focus an idea that we probably had been working on for awhile, but it took Vegas to tease out.

Reading some of our earlier posts on theories of consumption and wealth, as put forward by the likes of Thorstein Veblen, we have, in the past, toyed with the idea of purpose and uses of wealth. Last week, Vegas helped illustrate that wealth is anti-social and insular. Walking around the tourist areas, proved the inspiration for this.

Tourists areas are by nature supposed to attract people, giving one ample opportunity to study crowds and crowd behaviours, so one of the interesting things we noticed about Las Vegas was the general trend that geography and social density are related to wealth. True, this has been pointed out before, that zoning permits tend to group like economic groups together, something that is reinforced through real estate prices. Also it is true that the distribution of wealth is uneven, there are the numbers of wealthy people decreases as the value of wealth increases. However, quite a few tourist areas are free, or have a significant portion of their attractions available for free. This leads one to suggest that the distribution of tourists, whose goals are to see attractions, would be relatively even across destinations.

This is not true, however, in part because the ancilliary services (like food and souvenirs) to support these attractions are expensive. The prospect of visiting an attraction and paying six dollars for a cup of coffee dissuades a number of people, in effect turning the extra few dollars per cup into a premium some are willing to pay in order to have a cup of coffee in less crowded conditions. A survey of restaurants can yield the same interpretation: witness the crowding of buffet lines and the sparse attendance of the Michelin-starred restaurants. With restaurants particularly, but also many other services, such as shopping, not all of the price differential can be attributed to what we'll call a "privacy premium". Part of the price differential is to recoup costs from superior or rarer ingredients, as well as the higher real estate prices. Furthermore, some higher end shops also include a more personalized shopping experience as part of their price differential: fewer customers in a store increases the likelihood that the shopper can receive individual attention, either informally or through appointment. This extra attention can often help identify a better suited item for purchase, just as eating more expensive food can result in eating food with healthier ingredients.

Again, we find wealth a fascinating area of study, especially the ways in which the possession of even a little bit of wealth helps to reinforce or maintain the benefits of wealth.

Cinema Whispers

Face it, you're all talking about it . . .

Elliott Smith We Miss You

The Sixties Are Finally Over

Back in March, in a post entitled "The Ghosts That Haunt Us (Richard Nixon Lives)", we mused about the ebb and flow of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements, specifically in the context of the French Revolution and the tumultuous American 1960s. At the time, we talked about the current Bush II government having its roots in the Nixon administration, and drew some analogies to the French Revolution, in the wake of Barack Obama's presidential victory last night, we'd like to extend that idea, suggesting that now, finally, the United States can begin to move past the divisions that erupted during the 1960s. No longer will they haunt every political argument. Sure, the short-term  will probably see a lot more talk about the 1960s, but a post-Obama U.S. will be one that faces new problems, instead of rehashing old ones. A post-Obama U.S. will finally admit, the Sixties are over.

Back in March we talked briefly about the reign of Louis Phillipe, the last King of France, and so-called Citizen King after his liberal tendencies. Louis Phillipe came of age during the French Revolution, that starting date of which most historians point to 1789. That his coronation came in 1830 does not lessen the claim that Louis Phillipe was a child of the Revolution. Despite ten years of Revolutionary government, followed by reign of Napoleon, who pronounced the Revolution officially over, the return of the Bourbon monarchy after a twenty-five year absence saw an effort to unwind many of the changes made during the Revolution. After the death of Louis XVIII in 1824, matters only escalated under Charles X, creating support for the liberal backlash that enabled Louis Phillipe to assume the thrown in 1830.

Part of what happened in the years after Napoleon was the aging of the Revolutionary generation. The men of 1789, who might have been in their thirties and forties at the time, were by 1815 in their sixties and seventies, and by 1830, in all likelihood, dead. The generation that had to live during the transition from Napoleon to the Bourbons did much to give rough shape to what the legacy of the Revolution would be, and it was their children that grew up to support Louis Philipe in 1830.

We have often referred to the 1960s as a failed revolution, but this assumes that all revolutions have as their aim a political regime change. As a social revolution, the 1960s have left the United States a vastly different place than where it was in 1959. Watch AMC's Mad Men and you get to see some of those differences, but there are all sorts of formalities, traditions, and rituals that did not survive the 1960s. The back and forth between Republican and Democratic presidents can be seen as part of an on-going debate over which aspects of the 1960s should be allowed to endure, which carried forward, and which overturned. 

Just as Louis-Phillipe absorbed the lessons of the Revolution in his youth and they provided a context for society under his reign, Obama is literally a child of the sixties (born 1961), and they provide part of the framework for his vision of the United States in a way that George W. Bush (born 1946), Hillary Clinton (born 1947), and John McCain (born 1936) cannot match. For Obama, the sixties were a reality to be lived, not argued over. 

The sixties are over. The future is now.

Who Says There's No Global Warming

Everybody wandered around town today in something of a daze. The first day of turning the clock back an hour left everyone somewhat off their game, but the real confusion lay in the recent warm weather. The high today reached 17 degrees celsius - an unsual feat for a northern Canadian prairie city. True, Calgary is home of the fabled "Chinook" or "snow-eater" a warm high pressure system responsible for unseasonably high temperatures in winter, and the telltale Chinook-arch cloud formation was visible all last week, but nevertheless it makes one wonder . . . 

Flotsam and jetsam

Here's another piece of classic internet effluvia that looking for information on Joy Division yielded - a short clip from a review of the biopic Control:

The line we loved was the opener: "Any biography of a fringe performer with a cult following must give the uninitiated some clue as to what the fuss was about"

Our answer is no. 

Granted, Ray Bennett goes on to argue that such efforts are necessary for the film to move beyond a narrow circle, which is true, but that presupposes a desire to move beyond a narrow circle, as if that were the goal of all film, music, or art. Certainly, Control's lack of effort is in keeping with the music of Joy Division. That same turning your back on fame is echoed in the sentiment behind American Hardcore, where American punks deliberately tried to avoid mainstream success. In fact, somewhere out there is a whole catalogue of deviancy literature on the efforts of subcultures to keep themselves below the radar. 

Who Killed The Electric (Mini) Car

Seriously, it's hard to believe the following news report. BMW is announcing that they are coming out with an electric version on the Mini Cooper - great news to electric car fans. However, we question how many electric car fans have not seen Who Killed The Electric Car. Obviously not BMW. They are still running the electric Mini on the same leasing plan that GM did - at the end of the lease period that cars are to be returned to BMW. You can't be serious.

For an article, click here.