The Phenomena of Verizon Wireless

I went to the Verizon store today to pick up a new phone before going off to school. My old phone was destroyed, probably in a fit of rage against the horrible company that is Verizon (but also certainly not).

First, upon entering the store, I had to ask about getting a new phone. My mom had to provide a whole bunch of personal information, such as her SSN, in order to confirm her account. You think that as a gigantic evil company, Verizon would have some of this stored for easy access. I guessed not. I then went to look at their selection of a dozen or so phones. This was made unnecessarily difficult by a clerk who kept badgering me about all their selection, and suggested I buy an Android after I explained I wanted something very basic. Their entire selection consisted of two main flavours: QWERTY-keyboard flip phones, and some horrible touchpad phones.

All of their selection was terrible designed, unwieldy, and flimsy. There was no exception or alternative to this. When I finally found something that looked half-decent, I was told I needed a $30/month internet plan in order to use it at all. I don't think my cable line at home even costs that much. I can only imagine that all that money goes toward vials of fairy-dust and bathtubs of leprechaun gold. After I remarked about the ridiculous price to the man behind the counter, he suggested I buy a Blackberry. "If you're going to get the internet package," he explained, "you may as well get the very best phone for it. It can even save money on texting, since you can send messages to any friends with Blackberries for free". I don't think I have ever met a single person with a Blackberry, with the possible exception of the abhorrent lifeform called Brendan Nerny.

I eventually settled on the most basic phone available. While we were checking out, I asked about transferring information from my broken phones to the new one. He explained I could only take information off of one, as they could not merge the information. I asked if he could somehow send me the data in some other form (as it should be computer accessible), perhaps over email. He did not respond to this inquiry at all. He eventually transferred all my contacts, but no text messages or images.

A woman in the line next to me then asked if she could access ringtones she bought for her old phone through her new one, which was denied. Why should a person not be able to retrieve such data if it was 1. purchased digitally though a retrievable account and 2. cost $3 and a monthly media access fee?

It's a good thing I had this distraction, since the person helping me was simultaneously talking on the phone and too a very confused man whose new phone was broken the week before he left for Disneyland (I don't think they resolved that issue either, by the way). After about 20 minutes I left with a shitty fucking phone that cost a billion and a half dollars. The end.

Sam Roberts Interview Part 3

A bit of my ignorance shows through with my next question, but I'm hoping for a certain kind of answer and so I chance it anyway. “I spoke to Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene a few months ago and he seemed very optimistic about the election of Barack Obama. Have you seen a change in Canada? How does that affect you guys?”

“The fact that Obama got elected has affected people everywhere.  Every country around the world is going to be benefit from that. We as Canadians are so closely connected to what happens here that it’s almost like an elected official in Canada. The president has that much influence over the course our country takes because we’re inextricably linked, economically, culturally, socially with the path the United States chooses. And under the Bush administration…well, at first it was great cause we had this prime minister who, while Bush was overturning all the things the Clinton administration had done in favor of his neo-conservative, religious…I don’t know what to call it really....something else…we had this prime minister who was legalizing Gay marriage and marijuana. He was on his way out, too, he had been prime minister for a long time. So he basically went around doing all these things…abstaining from sending Canadian troops to the Iraq War. There were all these things where as Canadians we felt this real separation, a sense of standing up for ourselves and for what we believe is right in the face of an enormous amount of pressure coming from the US, especially Post 9/11 America, to take a course we did not feel was right for Canadians, nor should it be right for Americans. And then he left and everything went to shit. Now we have a prime minister who is basically a lackey tagging along with every decision the Bush administration made. So to have a new leader in America, one who has finally managed to capture the people’s imagination and to do a politicians duty, which is to elevate the spirit and elevate our potential…that to me is what you hope every leader would aspire to. We hope for the same in Canada, but we’re glad that there’s someone setting the pace in Washington and our prime minister is going to have to navigate his way through disagreeable waters for his philosophical stuff.  I think we’re all really happy about that. But we keep electing him, so I don’t know…(laughs)”

“Despite the political climate, and despite everything really, there’s always been this sense of brotherhood amongst Canadian musicians. Everytime you’d buy a Canadian CD there’d be all these amazing collaborations and everybody would thank each other and just about everyone in Toronto wound up on Broken Social Scene records.”

“Just about. I think about half the population of Toronto has been on a Broken Social Scene album in some way.”

“What’s it like to be in the thick of this sort of community?”

“It’s wonderful. It really is. I mean we have some truly great friends who just happen to be very talented musicians who are making music that the rest of the world is finally paying attention to. It’s inspiring to us. It pushes us. We quickly learned, as of say 2002, 2003, when Broken Social Scene really cracked through and all the other bands started to make their mark as well that there was no just sitting around and resting on whatever laurels we managed to attain for ourself. It became very clear that to survive in the Canadian musical climate you had to be creative, you had to be ambitious, but not in a cutthroat way, just ambitious in the true spirit of what a musician ought to be; which is to feel that urge to do something and share it. And I think we’ve all benefited from that friendly competitiveness that’s come out of it all. To see that it’s possible. Because before, the only people breaking through were the Bryan Adams and the Celine Dions and none of us could relate to them in any way. There was very little to tell you that it was possible to come out of Canada. And that’s not even taking the music out of Canada. The most impressive thing has been the support we all get in Canada, as well. The fact that we can now go…cause Canada’s a big place and there’s a great deal of geographical separation and ideological separation as well between the west coast and the prairies and the east where we’re from. So the fact that we can travel coast to coast and find acceptance among Canadians and not have to be a glitzy American band in order to fill up a venue obviously means a lot to us. As Canadians, but it also means we can have a career. Which is good.”

“Talk to me about your collaboration with Angela Desveaux.”

“Yeah, she’s a great singer. She’s the Emmylou Harris of Montreal. She makes great records on her own and has a wonderful voice. She was singing on her own and in a band called the Sunny Best Band, playing country, both kinds of music, country and western. And so she was singing in that band and I always just loved her voice, so when I was working on “Words & Fire”, I could just hear it so clearly, you know? And she was kind enough to oblige.”

“Are there other musicians in Canada you’ve always wanted to work with, but haven’t yet?”

“I have to be very comfortable with somebody in order to want to make music with them. Theoretically there are a lot of people I know that are talented that could bring inspired ideas to a recording session, but I really have to feel…When we were making Chemical City, my friend Matt Mays came down, and he’s a friend of mine. We’ve been on tour for many, many nights together, and we’ve played music together. So when he was in Australia, we would sit around on the veranda playing the guitar, and I was working on this song “Uprising, Down Under” and it felt very, very natural. But if I were to say I want to work with this person or that person, it would take a lot…for me, anyway. I’m not really a collaborator. I like having the band and we all know each other. There’s nothing to inhibit the sharing of ideas necessarily and I like that. There’s no fear or self-consciousness. Cause music is a very personal thing and as much as we do it in a public forum, there are parts of it that are very private. And for me songwriting is still very, very private.”

“Talk me through your songwriting process.”

“It takes years. It really does. From the time that the idea first appears, the riff…it used to be much more instantaneous. I’d have an idea, I’d sit down at the four-track, buy a new high quality metal cassette and go. Nowadays, because I’m on the road so much, and I don’t write on the road, I don’t demo in the road, so I have an idea and it remains an idea. It’s a stem, a fragment. I’ll have a line I’ve written in my notebook, and I don’t even bother to try and make any sense of it. So there’s this marinating period that usually lasts the entire duration of the tour, a year, year and a half, and when I get home, I have to recuperate from the physical wear-and-tear of life on the road, and then, it just starts to come out. I used to do it in…well I still do it in my apartment; I go to a room in the back with some very minimal technology to get the ideas down and what I hope for more than anything is to just get the fever. Where I sit there and work for ten hours and it feels like five minutes and afterwards there’s this thing that didn’t exist before. I usually wait for that feeling. If I’m not feeling it, I don’t write.”

“You mention priests in your song lyrics in a few different contexts. Are these direct religious references; are they metaphors for something else? Where does that come from?”

“I went to Jesuit high school. So did James our Bass player and Eric our keyboard player. And actually Dave Nugent our guitar player went to a catholic high school so I think [priests are] just ingrained in our psyche as an authority figure so to speak, that we’ve always had in our lives and ultimately grown up with. Again, like a surrogate parent in a way that I’ve always had in my life. As an academic figure, I’ve been educated by priests, beyond the dogma of religion as well, so as with any authority figure there’s tension there, too. There’s always the doubting, calling somebody on their bullshit, and also trying to accept the lesson. I’m sure there will be more references to priests in the songs I write, I haven’t quite exorcised that.”

“Do you still stand by the sentiment of the line “Been dying since the day I was born?” [From the song “Hard Road” on We Were Born in a Flame]

“Yeah, It’s a physical truth, you know. It’s not necessarily up for debate. There’s different kinds of death, of course. In terms of the decaying of the spirit, no. That’s still alive and well and hopefully eternal. That’s what I’m trying to put into the music is the idea of the eternal spirit. But, uh, physically…we all know where we’re goin’. We try it to fight it off with good moisturizing cream.”

“And vodka?”

“And Vodka”

I get the wrap-it-up from Denton, the helpful, road weary tour manager; Denton did his best to make me, a perfect stranger, feel welcome. I chance one last fanboy question in closing. I get an inspired answer.

“How did you get the piano tone for “A Stone Would Cry Out” [the closing track on Chemical City]. I’ve tried to reproduce it and can’t”

“And you never will. There’s a very specific set of things that has to happen to a piano to get that tone. We were in Australia and there was this very old Australian guy who lived out in the middle of the bush and owned a piano shop. And we went up there one day and picked out a piano that sounded perfectly fine. He put it on the back of his delivery truck a week later after tuning it, supposedly. Then he brought it by one of the bumpiest roads you could imagine and dropped it off and the thing sounded the way that it did. It went from being a very normal piano to being a very irregular piano, but to me that is what gave the song it’s personality. That sound just kinda came out. A lot of times the instrument influences the way the song turns out. You could sit down with three different guitars and draw different things out [from each one]. We could have turned that song into an up-tempo, boppy whatever but the sound of that piano gave off…there was no question what it was going to turn into.”

“Well, I’ve tried and failed.”

“Yeah, you could perhaps try that. Take a normal piano, put it on the back of a truck, drive it down a bumpy country road for about 100 KM or so and see what happens.”

And there it was, the lesson I’d hoped to have taught to me without asking for it. Take a rock band, drive it down 100 kms of bumpy road, and you’ll get something much different from when it started. You’ll get something worn, unique, beautiful, and full of love. In essence, The Sam Roberts Band. 

The Election

No one's brought up politics for a good long while on these here pages, and so I thought a decent approach to this election season would be to draw everyone's attention to two things; one is a humourous anecdote about one of my favorite songwriters, and the other is something our good friend Nick Smerkanich pointed out to me.

First and foremost I'd like to start with a brief plea. To concert goers everywhere: stop being such a bunch of mean, noisy fuckheads. You people seem to come to concerts simply to muscle your way to the front and then spit beer at people. You don't care about anyone but yourselves, you're rude, you smell horrible, and everyone who likes music hates you. Get a fucking clue and never go outside again unless you can handle it. Humanity is innate, and so being around people isn't a right, it's a privilege. If you can't understand that you're hulking frames and unfathomable ignorance make people uncomfortable, including but not limited to the band, you don't deserve to be out among people.

I've seen Spencer Krug in concert twice in as many months. First with his collaborative project Wolf Parade, then with his own songwriting vessel Sunset Rubdown. Both times the seriously inconsiderate behavior of concert goers have made him too uncomfortable for words. At the Wolf Parade show, a group of Philadelphia-area yahoos rushed the front row and started slam dancing and pummeling each other and strangers. At first guitarist/vocalist Dan Broeckner and Krug, the keyboard player and one half of the vocals took a calm approach. "I don't mean to get all Ian McKay on you guys, but you should love each other", came Broeckner's mellow warning. Krug too uttered non-threatening advice a few times until the encore came about. When the reprehensible behavior of the boys in the frontrow would not let up, Krug looked at them from the corner of his eye and spat with as much seething contempt as could fit in his words "I don't know why you have to fucking hit each other." Being Canadians, I have to guess they aren't used to American views on concert going. I sympathize with Krug and his bandmates and I apologize on behalf of the rest of us; those who feel embarrassed to share concerts with these people.

The next time I saw Krug, he was clearly worn down by America. Tired, irritable, and a little red in the face, his Sunset Rubdown delivered a stellar performance. The energy and passion was there and I can't help but feel it was Krug's claustrophobic reaction to America that made him perform so well. This time the drunks were not in as full force as before, but that didn't stop a scene from breaking out. About 3/4 of the way into their set, a large man and his large girlfriend, beer in hand, waltz to the front row and begin making everyone uncomfortable with their obnoxious dancing and drunken logic. During songs they would shout and swear and dance and make out, "sometimes you just gotta dance." Krug made to apologize for his set starting later than anticipated when his animosity was provoked; Hyde stepped out.

"I'm sorry we took so long, guys."
"I'm sorry no one's dancing. I'm going to fix that!"
"That's not your responsibility."

Now, I go to concerts for moments like the wordless verse after the first chorus of
'Shine a Light' that I witnessed at the Electric Factory. That moment was for me the reason to see live music, when the band is so in tune with each other, and the groove so solid and undeniable that one has little choice but to bask in the power of music. This was a perfect 15 or so seconds in an evening filled with truly awesome performance. I go to experience moments of true artistic transcendence and to share these precious moments with like-minded individuals and close friends. Why, then, do drunken barbarians go to concerts? I cringe everytime I think about the fact that nothing will change the fact that I'm an American and so are all these fuckheads. Sorry for all the profanity, but understand that i don't take this lightly.

The real reason I bring up this Sunset Rubdown song is to illustrate that clearly everyone has an interest in how our election turns out.
Not quite verbatim Krug quotes from Sunset Rubdown's show at the Middle East in Cambridge:

"The name of that song is 'Don't elect Sarah Palin'"
"The real title of that song is 'Please don't elect Sarah Palin'"
"The long title of that, as it appeared originally was 'I don't neccesarily agree with all of Barack Obama's policies, but I'd vote for him just so that Sarah Palin doesn't get elected'"

Even Canadians hate American Republicans. I hope the first time John Johnson leaves the country, he has to explain to a group of Afghan refuges why America blew the shit out of their country and killed their relatives. I'm not taking this lightly. Party affiliation is one thing, but guess what doesn't mean shit if you don't have personal politics that extend beyond intangible concepts like 'the economy' and 'patriotism'.

Part 2 of this litany of liberal screaming:

It's no small secret that I'm an enormous fan of the critically acclaimed television series The West Wing. It's combination of perfect aesthetics and brilliant political dialogue were unrivaled during it's run, and Aaron Sorkin's writing was so forward-thinking and furious during a time when nightmares guided news cycles and wars were being fought on our behalf (oh, wait, nothing's changed). So here is a piece of Sorkin's writing, his two cents on the upcoming election. It is a trifle silly, but if you've been paying attention, we seem to all be living in a particularly frightening room of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, so I find it comforting that Sorkin has taken the low road, as it were.

Here Sorkin reaches a hand into his bag of tricks and removes one final liberal cry of hope

If you're out there, are over 18 and think for a second that your vote doesn't matter, or worse that voting for Barack Obama is the same as voting for Mccain, you're wrong. This time, you're dead wrong. Please don't let Fascists win. Not again. I'm so tired of living in a Philip K. Dick novel.

The Man from New York City

"Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single person to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

-Rudy Giuliani

And this suppurating fascist was almost president.
Just imagine someone being more proactive about the murder of civil rights for profit than the grazhny cowboy bastards in power.