Tall Ships Made of Snow, Invading the Sun

"Ice sailing, Toronto Harbour, 1912," by John Boyd, Archives of Ontario.
In today's , I go ultrapatriotic and try to introduce U.S.

readers to Destroyer, Final Fantasy, Laura Barrett and Blocks Recording Club, while also making encomiums to Matmos and Howe Gelb, and sniping a bit at Nickleback, Dylan and Girl Talk. (Main regret: How did I get through that whole series without ever mocking the Decemberists?) I know it's the start of the holiday weekend, but keep an eye peeled for Ann Powers' final installment later today, in which she tries to respond to some of the rockist hateration we've received from Slate readers in "The Fray" - relevant for anyone who's been following .

Aside from that, later I'll post use the player below to hear the 1998 Giant Sand Xmas song that Gelb played at , Christmas Everyday (Maybe It'll Help), and I'm on my way out to make sure my family doesn't get stuck with, like, nectarines for Xmas. Have a happy one if you're celebrating it (and if you're not too), and we'll catch you back here after Boxing Day.
Okay, it's official: The music blog world's year-end rituals have burst the bounds of rational exchange and have become a full-on .

For that reason, I am going to do this with minimal fuss exchew illustration and justification.
Not likely to surprise regular readers very much (with a few exceptions), what follows are the albums that captured my attention most strongly or longest in 2006. How they overlap with what is according to some cosmic metric "best" or "most important" is a matter of conjecture.

Dozens of others bubble beneath the no. 20 mark (from Howe Gelb to Kode9 the SpaceApe to Agalloch to Eric Chenaux to Bob Dylan to Charlotte Gainsbourg to Vijay Iyer Rudresh Mahanthappa's Raw Materials) and thousands of others I never got to hear.
2.

Matmos, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast
5. Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
20. Tom Ze, Estudando o Pagode
Using the old-fashioned definition of "single," plus a few allowances for MySpace, iTunes and YouTube, here in no strict order are some of the tracks that I bobbed, strolled, danced, shouted, laughed, sighed and (in the case of the first, my genuine no.

1) cried to in 2006. As for favourites songs? That's just beyond my ability to calibrate at this point.

They shuffled a lot in this most changeable of changeable years.
The Mountain Goats, Woke Up New; Beyonce, Irreplaceable; Lupe Fiasco, Kick, Push; Prince, Black Sweat; Willie Nelson, Cowboys Are Secretly, Frequently (Fond of Each Other); Ne-Yo, So Sick; Clipse, Ride Around Shining; Lily Allen, Alfie; Simon Bookish, Terry Riley Disco; La Plage, Coupe de Boule (Zidane); Justin Timberlake feat. T.

I., My Love; Lil Wayne, Georgia ..

. Bush; Cansei de Ser Sexy, Let's Make Love and Listen to Death from Above; Christina Aguilera, Ain't No Other Man; Cham, Ghetto Story; Ghostface Killah, Shakey Dog; Gary Allen, Life Ain't Always Beautiful; The Raconteurs, Steady as She Goes; Nelly Furtado feat Timbaland, Promiscuous; Neil Young, Let's Impeach the President.
Elsewhere, some online 2006 mixes you should hear: list; ; and , which notably includes T-dotopian songstress Laura Barrett's Robot Ponies (and about the song).

I feel like I have to count Laura's EP as a 2005 release, but if I hadn't, it would be on my list too. As it is, her 2007 release on is atop my roster of anticipated records for 2007.

Champagne for my Real Friends, Real Pain for My Sham Friends

My latest post in the is up now.

Amusingly, in the selfsame moment that the group of critics is all raising a glass of bubbly and singing, "ding-dong, rockism's dead," the posters in Slate's "The Fray" reader's forum are doing their damndest to prove us wrong by attacking us for discussing pop: "This is the place where the reviewer tries to compensate for his lack of taste and failure to keep up with music culture by waxing poetic about the merits of Timberlake and Nelly, not where we talk about actual music (as in art rather than manufactured entertainment) or artists who write their own songs."
For those whose poptimistic patience is limited, though, my post today actually does talk a lot about non-pop - it gets into country, metal, the Mountain Goats, jazz, breakcore and noise. And my final post, out tomorrow or Friday, will probably talk mostly about Canada.

Wiping the (Floor with My Adversaries at) Slate!

The Clipse: Consensus picks of the Slate '06 crew.
As forecast, the - feat.

Jody Rosen, Jon Caramanica, Ann Powers and me - begins its annual general meeting today. So far Jody's discussed the "slow-motion collapse of the record business" in 2006, as well as country music and "Morrissey-goes-mall-rat" bands like Panic! at the Disco, while and My Chemical Romance.

We've all tacitly agreed not to discuss Gnarls Barkley (will our defences hold?). My first post is up next.

When I talk about participatory musical culture, the easiest example to bring up is the church or community choir. At the State of the Arts launch a few weeks ago, it came up that one of the fanciest high-end instrument stores in Toronto was originally founded to supply equipment to ethnic church-basement bands and choirs downtown, of which there were hundreds in the much-smaller city at the time. An amateur choir looks like one of the most pleasurable hobbies you could have, but there aren't many comfortable choices for a younger music lover.

There are serious-as-hell classical choirs which require a level of skill and work to achieve results beyond what many hobbyists can muster. And then there are church choirs, which leave out the seculars, and cornpone nostalgia choirs. Given those options, no wonder more people are likely to start just-for-fun garage bands - but those are usually just clumps of friends, not anything big enough to connect you to a wider circle.

One of my favourite things about early on was their deliberate evocation of church folk choirs, though they've now moved away from that source in sound and concept. From time to time some other artist will use elements, such as Howe Gelb's recent collaboration with a gospel choir (with whom he'll be in Toronto ) on his excellent 2006 disc 'Sno Angel Like You. But the amateur-society choir still could use a makeover for the 21st century.

Here are two twists on choral cliches that I've run across in the past week. One is an unusual seniors' choir called the in which you'll see oldsters taking on unexpected repertoire such as Radiohead or, in the below clip, Sonic Youth - which must be comforting to the aging members of SY, that rest homes across the land are being made ready for their eventual arrival. The style reminds me a bit of its opposite, the -style elementary-school pop-music choir.

Except rather less energetic. Or polished.
Another has been circulating on the 'net for a while and was covered in : The phenom of "complaints choirs," which began as an art project in Helsinki and has been emulated (or is in the works) .

Hearing mundane kvetching about civic inconveniences ("the employment agency only needs Java programmers ...

tramline three smells of pee") in four-part harmony is amusing, as witness the Finnish original below, but it also immediately suggests potential variations: A choir could substitute for the community newspaper and sing about local bylaws and zoning variances; academics could found a Critical Choir that would harmonize on genealogies of micropolitics and close readings of Mary Shelley; fans of Lost could get together and set their FAQs about confusing plot twists to music; indie-rock kids could chorus about how they disliked the Shins back before disliking the Shins was cool...

David Thomas of Pere Ubu at a festival in Moers, Germany, in 2005. Photo .
Pardon the silence; I'm busy chatterboxing it up in the other room, exchanging opinions on the state of music 2006 with my fellow roundtablers in the Music Club.

I was tickled to get the invite from my confrere , Slate's lead music critic, and incredibly chuffed to be in the company of Ann Powers ( , formerly with the NY Times, co-organizer of the , author of and ) and ( music editor, and frequent contributor to the NY Times and ).
I'm also a big fan of the online pen-pal roundtable format, which Slate is adapting from its popular . So much so that I think I might organize some similar back-and-forths on Zoilus in 2007.

But this particular discussion will begin early next week, probably Monday. (It won't include my actual best-of-the-year list, which will be a Zoilus exclusive, darlings.)
While I'm preoccupied, those interested in blogfights should go Dave Morris's summation in Eye on .

And in the same venue, there's also Brian Joseph Davis's of the new Greil Marcus joint, *, which I just finished reading myself. People are rightfully leery of Marcus these days, but this one, in an oblique way his book for the Patriot Act era, is his best in ages, probably since Lipstick Traces, with terrific chapters on Philip Roth and David Lynch - his Twin Peaks thesis, about Laura Palmer as a lost member of , is just one of the inspired leaps. And I'm compelled by his thesis/tone-poem about the persistence of an imaginary America that's constantly being betrayed yet defined by that very betrayal, bound at once to the highest democractic ideals and to the freedom, even obligation, to casually murder whatever stands in your way - and the way American art invokes this shadow America in the mode of prophecy.

But Brian's right that the chapter on David Thomas of Pere Ubu, which structurally is supposed to be the climax, is a letdown. I've concluded that it's near impossible to write well about Pere Ubu because David Thomas (who was a critic before he was a performer, remember) has already done all the criticism for you - while he does it in his own inverted-mirror language, he's outlined his themes and theories, narrated the definitive history of the band, and explained the principles behind every bit of Ubu's methodology. He even provides the cultural-studies material, explicitly connecting his work to the history of American transcendentalism (in Thomas's version of Moby Dick, he is both Ahab and the whale), film noir, folk music, the Beach Boys, MC5, and .

This leaves the would-be Ubu critic two options: Either come at it from an entirely contrary, non-David-Thomas endorsed angle, which would be difficult for Marcus because his motivation to write about Ubu is all of the same stuff Thomas talks about (and to be fair, Thomas also has acknowledged the influence of Marcus's on his own thinking); or do original biographical research and try to find personal material of the kind Thomas refuses to disclose, which would be (a) tough to do; (b) invasive for no clear purpose; and (c) not Marcus's strong suit. (I'd love to read a Peter Guralnick book about Pere Ubu. But that's never gonna happen.

) So what Marcus does is do a fine job of recycling all the already available material within his own framework, and telling a few nice stories, but it doesn't have the kinetic juice, the thrill of discovery, of the rest of the book.
Moral of this parable: Aspiring cult artists, if you're looking for a model of how to control exactly how you go down in history, follow David Thomas: What you do is use a cryptic-sounding, larger-than-life language, frequently repeat "it's your job to interpret the stuff - my job is only to make it, and I am better at my job than you are at yours," and then proceed to point by point explain every single thing about what you are doing, and . Diabolic brilliance.

(And by the way, while he might say otherwise, Thomas didn't just start this strategy later in life in response to being widely misunderstood. He was airing his manifestos in interviews from the very beginning.) The downside is that if you follow it, it means there will never be a good book written about you in your lifetime.

Besides Marcus, excellent critics like and have fallen at this hurdle. (Clinton Heylin did better by , but it's not criticism.)
* I'm on the hunt for better places to link for books and music than Amazon or Indigo: I'd love to find a Canadian store or two that is independent, has a deep catalogue, and takes orders online.

A Canadian version of , for instance. Is there such a thing? I'm guessing no.

I've neglected (except in the gig guide) to share the news with you all that beyond-legendary Hamilton, Ont., band is having its first reunion gig ever, 27 years after the band broke up, and a full 30 years since it recorded its sole album, , a set of demos and live recordings the band never released during its existence. The news has broken now that Saucer will be playing the Casbah in Hamilton on Dec.

28. I'm a bit ambivalent about the news: Very much like (probably the band in the world most similar to Saucer in both sound and stature), or the Beach Boys' original Smile, Simply Saucer is a group whose essence in some ways is that barely anyone ever saw them, their recordings were unavailable for decades, and those bootlegs that existed seemed like only a hint of the full hulking body of strangeness that was the thing itself. When such a group reunites (or such an album is re-recorded), a closely related facsimile comes to stand in the way of the original enigma.

When a ghost story is made real, some larger cultural reality is erased; it seems unfaithful to the specificity of time and place. What's more, as with Rocket from the Tombs, the new Saucer is only partly the original band - inevitably in these cases, some members either can't or won't participate, so you get substitutions, which again distort the picture.
But then when the reunion actually happens, sometimes the portion of reality it is able to capture is so powerful in itself that these quibbles fade.

Mission of Burma, who put out one of the best rock records of this year, are probably the supreme example. But Rocket from the Tombs are an extraordinary thing live, too - it is as if the bodies of these aging men, David Thomas (of Pere Ubu), Cheetah Chrome (of the Dead Boys), Craig Bell and the rest, are supernaturally possessed by the spirits of their teenage selves. The garbled fury and cultural cross-signals that enabled them to cross an unseen threshold to a previously undreamt-of sound, all of that becomes present and manifest, and in the strangest way the most obvious and right response to the puzzle of their own existence, in a manner you just can't get from .

(And we'll see what happens when the promised new RftT album is completed.)
So two cheers for the Saucer reunion, and you can bet I won't miss it.
In celebration, I'm posting a I wrote about Simply Saucer three years ago, when Cyborgs was first reissued on CD (which includes the phrase "Simply Saucer, wisely, has never reformed.

..").

It's a pretty good one, if I say so myself - having been a kid in the same chunk of Ontario when Saucer was busy burning out its roman candles, the subject goes to my gut. Er, Torontonians will have to pardon the not-quite-warranted optimism in there about the then-new Distillery District. .

Hope you enjoy.
The scenario is hard to imagine: A hot Saturday afternoon in June, 1975, with shoppers coming out of the Jackson Square mall in Hamilton holding paper bags of polyester pants and living-room-yoga sweats. Over their heads, on the roof, stood a quartet of young men looking like any other gang of jean-jacketed greasers wandering the downtown alleys, but pounding guitars to cosmic death, with outer-space effects from a crude synthesizer, and singing about Hitler's love for Eva Braun: "Ah-hah, ah-hah, I'm cyanide over you.

"
The band was Simply Saucer, already two years into its Syd-Barrett-era Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground-inspired trip to the dead ends of rock'n'roll and sounding like nobody else in Canada, almost nobody in the world. And the roof of Jackson Square was the greatest height to which they would ever aspire.
As the story is told in long-time supporter Bruce Mowat's liner notes to Sonic Unyon Records' new reissue of Saucer's Cyborgs Revisited, the band led by singer Edgar Breau endured from 1973 to 1979 in a Hamilton that barely acknowledged its existence and a Canadian music industry that actively feared and loathed it.

Punk rock in the later 1970s only confused matters - the group cut its hair and hired Teenage Head guitarist Sparky Park, got a couple of opening-slot gigs in Toronto (notably for Pere Ubu, by all reports blowing the fearsome Cleveland avant-garage band off the Horseshoe stage), and released the only record of its lifetime, the 1978 single She's a Dog. But the band didn't really fit in with punk, either, and was too old to care; a year later, the mothership self-destructed.
It was another decade before Mowat managed to get the songs SS recorded on that rooftop and at the studio of Hamilton boys Daniel and Bob Lanois out on vinyl, feeding a legend that had already, by some channel no one can explain, circulated among unpleasant-rock-noise fanciers around the world.

But Cyborgs Revisited, now embellished with outtakes from the band's later years, is pretty obviously one of the best Canadian albums ever.
Like a handful of other bands in Cleveland, New York, Detroit and Munich, Simply Saucer drew together the wisps and wraiths of proto-punk from the sixties. Against 1970s rock machismo and folk-rock sanctimonies, they vomited up a prophetic blend of Velvets, Stooges, MC5, Brian Eno-era Roxy Music, psychedelia and late-adolescent rec-room nihilism, which a quarter-century later still smacks the ear like a squawling newborn with a slight case of demonic possession.

Each band that stumbled on this mix did it in absolute isolation, and yet they sound remarkably alike, the same string-snapping Planet of the Apes guitar chords and embryonic Moog technology underlying similar B-movie poetry and premature millennial panic. ("In the future," Breau tells the crowd on one of the live recordings, "unless you have a metal body, they're not gonna allow you to walk the streets. No kidding.

")
Hamilton may have seemed an unlikely wellspring for the songs of a future that was not to be, but so did Cleveland, which eventually had a half-dozen such bands, locked in an incestuous, cannibalistic cluster that nearly made up a scene. These armpits were the only places this music possibly could come from. If the groups had anything in common, they were middle-class delinquents, petty thugs making music because they were nerds at heart, Bigfoot fans and conspiracy-theory bookworms not quite up for actual crime.

I was just 9 when these songs were recorded, but the ambience sounds familiar immediately: Anyone who grew up near the shores of the Great Lakes, where the filthy factories already looked like relics but the info-age commerce to replace them was yet undreamt, would recognize the miasmic stink of despair and dispossession and, its impulsive opposite, the nervous rush of groundless optimism: "We're gonna dance the mutation!" Breau proclaims in one song, in his best Lou Reed-as-hoser drawl. Beauty, eh?

Beauty, yeah, in spite of everything.
After the split (and amid struggles with heroin and other elixirs of escape), several Saucer members went on to other groups. Breau plays acoustic-based music now, and on Wednesday he makes his first appearance at the Horseshoe in Toronto since that infamous 1978 gig.

But Simply Saucer, wisely, has never reformed, its sound rusted in place like an old silo full of lug nuts and broken gears, solitary as Frankenstein's monster, towering over a wasteland that's long gone.
Most of the real landmarks of the industrial era were torn down, paved, painted over in pastels, but not all. In Toronto, the exciting exception is the distillery complex on the east side, buildings lately rescued by developers as a centre for arts groups.

This week's Distillery Jazz Festival, which begins today and runs through June 1, offers the Toronto public its first chance to wander through the rummy caverns of the former Gooderham Worts, while listening to dozens of the city's most unruly ensembles playing every variety of jazz - music that is itself a knotty little industrial-age holdover.
I confess that the most romantic part of me wishes the distillery still churned out hard liquor, or went on standing deserted, an empty repository for anxieties and wishes real architecture never allows. A city needs its blank spots, back roads, ghosts.

But the rest of me has never been more thrilled. If it is creatively run, not overly prettified or tamed, the distillery district can not only make Toronto a richer place, but refute our cultural amnesias, showing that decrepitude isn't ugly, there are no dead ends, and obscurity is only what we've forgotten or don't yet know.
Last weekend, as , I did a at the , around the bend and across the street from me in beautiful downtown Parkdale.

The game was this: I talked for about 10 minutes about participatory culture and Toronto's notorious "Bad Bands" - offering the Barcelona Pavilion, who were playing after me, as the original Bad Band - and then told the audience that they were all going to experience this for themselves, as they were about to become a bad band. Borrowing a leaf from local Bad Band, Dollarama, I brought out a table full of $1 musical instruments - pie plates, toy tambourines, noise makers, baby rattles, and a few ringer instruments (a Casio keyboard, a toy saxophone, a melodica) that I borrowed from friends. We got three volunteers to be the lead singers.

Everyone had been asked to make up a band name and write it on a slip of paper, and we drew one at random - it turned out to be Wanda the Cupcakes. Which made the next part tricky, as the next step was to derive a "band concept" from the name. The rules were: 1.

All songs are about cupcakes. 2. Everyone in the band is named Wanda.

3. Vocals at all times. (Except perhaps for No.

3, these are exceedingly unpromising band concepts.) I broke the crowd down into smaller groups to write lyrics in about five minutes. Then we came back together, "rehearsed" and then "performed" the resulting "song," managing immediately to violate all of our rules.

If nothing else, it demonstrated that being a Bad Band is perhaps not as easy as it looks. After the performance, I asked Barcelona Pavilion to serve as the critics (deliberately messing with the roles of audience/performer/listener/critic in the participatory-aesthetics spirit), and they proceeded to denounce the exercise in stern ideological terms. Then they played and we drank.

Overall the event would be kindly termed an "interesting failure," I think. I hope the majority of people had fun. At the least, it was good experience for me in leading group activities, which I have not done since I taught summer camp or tried to direct plays, all of which was a very long time ago.

I'd like to do more of it, even though the whole terrifying effort causes my soul to leave my body and not return for a couple of days.
You can listen to the results via CCL1 co-proprieter : Here is the and here the . Each take has different virtues.

But in either case they are few. In case you feel the impulse to sing along, which is doubtful, below are the lyrics.
Rachel Ware and John Darnielle, The Mountain Goats, at Pitzer College on Saturday.

Photo , 2006.
Many Short Posts Day continues. I couldn't let this event pass without being noted: This weekend at his alma mater in Claremont, Calif.

, John Darnielle aka The Mountain Goats did a semi-secret surprise show in the Gold Student Center, with a couple hundred people in attendance. The setlist was pretty extraordinary, ranging across the whole Mtn Goats history - he opened with I've Got the Sex and encored with one of my most beloved never-recorded Goats songs, My Favorite Things. (I can't resist quoting the lyrics: "Champagne bubbled up through the neck of the bottle/ Sweet sounds came out from the radio/ It was John Collll-trane/ Goddammit!

/ I love John Coltrane!/ You danced across the living-room floor/ You kissed me once and then you kissed me some more/ You had your arms around my neck and it felt real fine/ And then your ankle knocked up against mine/ And resonated in my bones/ Like the precise crisp drumming of Mr. Elvin Jones/ Goddammit!

I love John Coltrane!")
The newsworthy part is that for six songs in the set, he was joined by ex-Mountain Goat (and ex-cetera) Rachel Ware - the former Peter Hughes, if you will. As far as I know, Darnielle and Ware haven't played together in public anywhere since 1995, so it's heartwarming to hear of the reunion.

He reportedly said that he'd like to make the homecoming show an annual event to the gathered students and fans, who then ran home to .
PS: John D. picks a fistful of albums on the theme of "escapism" .

PPS: Later, the same person who took the above photo put some videos of the show up on YouTube. .
I had a lengthy list of subjects to get to today, and the sun goes down before I've half cracked it.

Frank Chromewaves, on the other hand, the blogscape's leading early riser, beats the rooster to the crowing once again, by posting his before December's even showered or brushed its teeth. Happy to see Neko Case on there, and I had just put aside those Land of Talk and Early Day Miners cd's last night for a revisitation. Extra points for nifty baseball-card graphics of his picks.

Via an ad on Frank's site, I just learned that there's a new album, with the aptly repulsive name of Tweedles, and even more repulsive cover art (see above). Someday, when the judge asks my mom, "How did this boy go so wrong?", part of the answer will be, "He was exposed to the Residents at a dangerously impressionable age.

" MuchMusic used to run in its early days, presumably just because in the mid-80s there weren't enough normal pop videos available to run. (Some of those videos are now in the collection of the MoMA.)
Jandek gets a lot of play for his supposed anonymity, but we actually know a lot more about him than we do about the Residents, who may or may not be the same Residents who began their unsentimental journey more than 30 years ago.

Most of the Residents music of the last decade or so that I've heard hasn't been especially compelling, but I will always stump for their '70s and '80s sounds and vision - the ethnografaux Eskimo, the mash-ups-avant-le-lettre of , the one-minute-ditties of The Commercial Album, and on and on. The backstory of the new one, if remotely true, is intriguing: A rich fan in Romania flew them over to record in his studio, and they incorporated local street musicians, a travelling circus, and the Film Orchestra of Bucharest into the proceedings - which concern a sexually predatory clown, as the album graphic hints.
I am banally amused to discover there is a .

Banally, because I shouldn't be surprised. For a group that proceeds artistically about as uncommercially as possible, they've never missed any means to make a buck.
Here's the video that especially brainsmacked me in adolescence: Hello, Skinny.

Zoilus assistant Chris Randle weighs in on some topics growing out of . (The opinions below are his; not all of them are mine.) I'll be back later this afternoon with posts on various and sundry - CW.

I was also at the uTOpia launch on Sunday, though I sadly missed most of Carl's panel. The scope and excitement of the discussions were obvious, though, and one running theme that particularly struck me was the dilemma of arts funding. Standing outside, I jokingly floated a dating service to pair starving artists up with rich would-be bohemians; put Harper's income-splitting plan to good use!

As Carl already noted and expanded upon, moderator Misha made fine points about how we could act as patrons instead of a mere audience. A consistent undercurrent in uTOpia II is the flowering of participatory culture, where everyone is neither consumer nor owner but stakeholder. That can take as ambitious a form as or the simple above-and-beyond support of a beloved artist.

I don't exactly have the expertise to sketch it out on a blog-post napkin, but surely it'd be possible to start a network to match up artists (or musicians, writers, filmmakers ...

) with those willing to help them? A band member could leave her kid with a fan working from home; a director could film on a location provided by a sympathetic landowner. Or do and already allow that, piecemeal?

That kind of grassroots support makes far more sense and seems far more helpful to local culture than government tax breaks for Hollywood movies or miserly grants that can't even pay a gallery's rent (for an elegantly low-key solution to that, read Natalie de Vito's uTOpia essay); but then, I think a lot of official aid for the arts has certain fundamental flaws.
The leaps to mind like an especially bloated toad. Have all those Canadian-content requirements on the airwaves done any good since CDs were a novelty?

Most mainstream radio stations simply play what the biggest record companies offer up, like mold filling a crack in the wall, stuff EMI's and Universal's Canadian affiliates could shove onto the air anyway. It ain't who profits from that ossified environment; it's and his exquisitely-sculpted facial hair. Before that vitriol pegs me as a card-carrying Conservative, let me explain.

I was captivated by Kate Carraway's brilliant, mordant essay "The Secret Capitalist" in the new uTOpia, where she dissected the (for lack of a better tag) indie impulse towards lefty poverty and confessed her own weakness for sensible day jobs and bourgeois comfort even while yawning from last night's show at the office. I have a lot of sympathy for that. My ideal is to work not just as a writer but as a comics writer, and you might as well try and get rich with a dowsing rod, so the identification is more philosophical than one of lifestyle.

I might not aspire to blast The Blow from my corner office, but I sure do have an interest in unconventionally individualist thinkers/economists like or .
One of the latter's central tenets seems germane to this discussion: that government regulation, control, etc. tends to be less efficient and more arbitrary than the invisible skeins of collective private organization.

The just went up, with the help of many millions of dollars in public funds. From where I'm sitting, the ballet and opera it's hosting are barely less niche than poetry or video art; but the former have the good fortune of rich and influential fans, not to mention the political benefit of being performed amidst grand architecture, and so get tons of cash as opposed to pennies. But why couldn't there be a central space for poetry in Toronto?

Why couldn't a fraction of the $100-million-plus in Four Seasons funding have paid the mortgage on that? Or, hell, why not even give it all back so a guy has an extra ten bucks to buy some band's T-shirt at the next ? All these seem more attractive to me than the current approach of content regulations and rusted, sporadically gushing spigots.

T-Dot Thrillz: This Weekend in the Rec Dept.

Two Zoilusian events going on this weekend: First the event tonight at 8 pm sharp, where I am opening the set for Barcelona Pavilion. This will be an interactive "talkshop.

" If you're coming you're invited to bring "little instruments," as the Art Ensemble of Chicago used to say, i.e., toys and noisemaking junk.

Some will be on hand but if you have them to bring, it would be a boost. (Be prepared to share.) It's going to be fun, I think, and even if I suck, Barcelona Pavilion will rule, so it's a no-lose proposition.

Second, I will be on a on Sunday afternoon at 2 pm. Here's the dish:
Toronto's record stores knit together the city's music and artistic communities, functioning in a similar way to the artists' bars and nightclubs of 1980s Cologne. Globe and Mail music columnist and Zolius blogger Carl Wilson, Soundscapes record store buyer Jason Copplestone, and other notable guests give us an insider's look at concepts of community, collectivity and coolness at Toronto's record shops.

Does that claim about record stores (and, ugh, "coolness") seem as off-base to you as it does to me? Come and we'll twist it into some more usable tool. The event's had near zero publicity - I forgot about it myself till a few days ago!

- so it'd be nice if you showed up to hang.
Sorry, that event's been cancelled.
(in the Statistical Rankings, That Is) As the Times , the newbie website has stepped up to offer an alternative to the Village Voice's long-running Pazz Jop annual critics' poll, by creating .

The move comes in response to calls from many in the critical community - including me, both on this site and on the online message boards (currently ) - for a boycott and replacement of P J since the Voice fired both the poll's creator, , and its presiding spirit of recent years, , earlier . The Voice was for decades the hub of intellectually rigorous and musically wide-ranging pop criticism in North America. The new owners' move was explicitly to get rid of the intellect and the range, so to my mind they've forfeited the credibility to be the place critics collectively "meet" to assess the year past.

I do think that function's important, partly to perpetuate dialogue and partly for the historical record: The P J serves as the best marker of critical reception we've got: If you want to suss out the profile of a year in pop history, you look at the Billboard charts and the P J for that period and you've got the best quick time capsule you can crack. Sure, maybe in the future something like will turn out to be the true substitute, but P J so far has had a bigger sample and a grittier, grainier texture, with all of the correlations to critics' individual ballots and their comments. And on the consumer side, I still know plenty of people who use it to pay catch-up on the previous year's releases.

Music fans still like lists, and P J is the list of lists.
The initial talk of a boycott was met with predictable "it's not worth politicizing" complaints, but from a critic's point of view, there's also a straightforward professional issue: If you play along with two of the most respected and senior voices in the entire rock-crit field being treated this way, you send publication managers the message that you're a doormat. Freelance and staff writers get plenty of opportunity to show editors and publishers how little power we have on a daily basis - why reinforce that imbalance by volunteering to do unpaid work to help a writer-hostile publication put out one of its highest-profile and most prestigious products of the year?

It just seemed blood-stupid.
I thought might be the ones to raise their hands, but on ILM they said that they considered it then decided to stick with their own staff poll, preserving the site's default insular quality (which isn't entirely a bad thing). I've been agnostic on Idolator so far in its few months' of existence - it's an entertaining site, with decent taste in music, but the quick-hits-and-gossip model inherited from its parent, plus mp3s, isn't exactly a direction I'd cheer as the future of music criticism.

I really hoped that would volunteer, as the place where Chuck Eddy and some of his stable of writers have migrated sinice the Voice firings, and one with a more essayistic bent. In general, it'd be more comforting if the new poll were happening in a venue with a bit more of an established berth, one that you could feel more sure would still be here next year.
Still, Idolator has started off right with a name paying tribute to the lame-o handle of the poll's predecessor, and Idolator made an especially savvy move by picking , the former music editor of Seattle Weekly and the text portion of Emusic, to oversee Jackin' Pop.

Not only is Matos a total list-head who'll apply scrupulous, persnickety math to the exercise (which is a necessity), he's a widely respected writer (viz his in the series on Prince's Sign o' the Times, among many other great pieces), and someone deeply embedded in the critical community. Unlike GW Bush, he really is a uniter. In fact, as a younger person with more of a dance-music background than Eddy or Xgau, he's likely to broaden the base of critics, to get more non-rock people, which may help make the ultimate results more varied and surprising - maybe Bob Dylan and the Hold Steady won't win after all.

Many thanks to Matos, who has from Village Voice Media/New Times, his former employer, for his troubles.
It remains to be seen how many critics participate - people from the daily newspapers and regional weeklies who don't get as involved in intramural discussions or dabble on the Internets. (Did Eddy take his contact list with him, and is he going to share?

) The Voice has resolved to keep holding P J, so this year at least we'll have two versions to compare and contrast - all more grist for discussion, which is the true pleasure of these rigamaroles in the end. And maybe they'll convince Christgau to present his annual dean's address as part of the package, in his inimitable oft-convoluted but always insightful manner? Everyone bitches aout it, but I'll miss it if it's gone.

Speaking of lists, by the way, the new issue of Exclaim has their , one of the more comprehensive in Canada. And here it is December. Let the games begin.