On those lonely afternoons in June I need you

Just like raindrops (7songs)

Basement Jaxx - you remember them from "Where's your Head at?"

This week has energy. Could you feel it? To me, it was like everyone was glowing.  The weather was nice (mostly) and generally, Things were working out.

And thusly, I bring to you, a series of songs that take me from lounging and feeling unproductive to Sonic The Hedgehog levels of enthusiasm.

More specifically, I have a style of music to introduce to you. It's called Dubstep. You've probably heard of it before since I'm behind the times on just about everything. Wikipedia says it's big in england, and my roommate introduced it to me by saying "Dubstep is the kind fo music where, even if you're just walking by in front a club that's playing it, you still feel like a badass."

Wikipedia says that "Musically, dubstep is distinguished by its 2-step rhythm, or use of snare sounds similar to 2step garage and grime, and an emphasis on bass, often producing 'dark' sounds, but just as frequently producing sounds reminiscent of dub reggae or funky US garage."

Now, I don't fully understand what all that means, but one thing sticks out to me about Dubstep - and that's emphasis on bass... let's go.

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Control Yourself

Take only what you need from these seven songs. English indie-pop band The Kooks.

So I've neglected the Seven Songs to Get You Through the Week tradition for a couple weeks now. This came out of both laziness, and the fact that I was getting tired of purely talking about music on this site. Now that I have two fairly lengthy rants under my belt since the last 7Songs, I feel it's time to return.

I've got some cool stuff for you this time. I hope you're in the mood for indie, because that's what I've been listening to lately.

Let's dive right in.

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Stand for something

Or you'll fall for anything.

Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa 2007.

Here's the scene:

I'm up at 7 this morning, on my way to a Remembrance Day cermony with two of my buddies. These two gents happen to be members of the Canadian Forces, specifically, the Air Force. They're pilots in training, it's all pretty cool, and I look like a scuzzbag when I stand around with them but anyway, we're losing focus.

So here we are in the car, pulling a decidedly Canadian manoever by stopping at a Tim Horton's drive through (thru?) on the way. We get to the window, and the young lass who works there does a double take.

"Are you guys in the army?" She says with bright eyes and a peak of interest.

My one friend, Mena, assuming that she's actually taking an interest in the uniform corrects her - "Well, no." he says "We're in the Air Force."

"Oh." She squeaks and pulls her head back through the window. Grabs the sandwich, grabs the coffee, and hands them to us. "It's just, Army gets free coffee today. That'll be $21.75"

None of us have the heart to correct her of course - we don't want to look like penny-pinching douches - but they're all the same thing. Well, that is to say, they're all part of the same thing - the CF.

This is what happened: Somebody sitting at his desk at Tim Horton's decides everyone in the CF is going to get a free coffee today as the company's thanks to veterans. He tells his little underlings, who tell their underlings, who tell the franchise operators at each store who tell their employees. What was once "Canadian Forces get free coffee" becomes "Army gets free coffee".

Now, they're not upset that they didn't get free coffee, they're bigger than that. But it raises an interesting point about the ignorance of the average civilian.

I'm lucky to have met these guys. I'm of course, not at all the kind of person who you would expect to hang around a bunch of dudes in camoflage with rifles. I can barely pick up a gun, let alone fire it. But having spent so much of my recent life listening to them talk about BMQ (stands for Basic Military Qualification), DND (Department of National Defence), CFRC (Canadian Forces Recruiting Centre) etc etc, you're bound to pick up a few things.

What I've come to realize is the sheer disregard for it's department of defence that this country has.

Earlier on Facebook today, I read status updates. This one's my favorite: "_______ will wear a poppy the moment we stop fighting in a war for oil."

There are two things wrong with that statement - one: we aren't fighting a war over oil, that's the Americans. There's no oil in Afghanistan. And two: this person has completely missed the point of wearing a poppy in the first place.

The poppy is a symbol. Something we wear on our hearts to respect those who have passed away, fighting for what they believe in. Let me say that again - We wear poppies to respect people who died fighting wars to protect us.

Where do we get the idea that a poppy means "I support the war"?

Listen anonymous facebook user who represents Canadian ignorance - whether you support our presence in Afghanistan is immaterial. Firstly - like me, and most other civilians - you don't know enough about the situation to really make an informed decision anyway. And secondly, now that we're there, we can't just pick up and leave.

You haven't really thought about that have you? If we just got in our planes and helicopters and peaced the fuck out of the middle east, do you have ANY idea what would happen over there?

Another man I know in the military, a very close friend of my two Air Force buddies was talking today about his experiences in Afghanistan. I would tell you what he said, but it's not my place to paraphrase, or reduce his speech into my own, poorly constructed sentences. Nothing I can say to you at this point will do his stories justice. And that's exactly the point.

There's this whole universe of people in our very own country who have seen tragedies and calamities that we simply cannot comprehend. Remembrance Day is a time to stop for a moment, and try to put ourselves in their shoes. Try for just a second to break away from our Playstations and Twitter and binge drinking and focus on the ones who fought, and gave their lives so that we could have Playstations and Twitter and binge drinking.

So when you're sitting on the bus, and looking up from your Blackberry you see a member of our Armed Forces, do not spit on him. Do not swear at him. Do not try to indoctrinate him with your views on our "misguided war on terror". You, with your Levi's jeans and your Nike kicks, don't know shit.

The Army has an expression - "dumb civvies". It refers to those ignoramuses among the civilian ranks who just don't understand. I'm a dumb civvie too. This message isn't coming to you from some foot soldier, or tank driver or whatever - it's coming from a liberal-as-fuck unemployed artist. And so I hope when I say that when you treat our veterans and reservists with such a lack of respect, you're making ME look bad, that it carries some extra weight.

You don't have to agree with a war to respect those who died in it. Smarten up Canada.

-K

PS> If that girl who works at Timmies is reading: I'm not saying you're an ignorant, disrespectful fuck - but you should probably spend a few minutes on wikipedia.

Where were you on 9/11

Where were you this morning?

Why halo thar! I can has people burgers?

I hate that I spend so much of my effort on this website talking about TV.

There're a myriad of other things I could be talking about, but it's just.. whenever something comes up on the boobtube I feel immediately inclined to write about it. This time I'm writing about the new show "V".

A rip off of Independence Day, which was a rip-off of the original "V" from the 80's, this hour-long sci-fi drama premiered the other day. I caught it on CTV. I am of course generally against remakes and re-imaginings for reasons I have expressed before, but this series premier has started to change my opinion... find out why below!

Basically, the show is about an earth-wide alien invasion. Called the Visitors, or Vs, these attractive, human-like creatures drop motherships down, which hover above all major cities on the planet (no Toronto, or Ottawa of course.) They're smooth talking, hot walking aliens who promise new technology, betterment of medical science, and all sorts of other stuff that we 21st centurians need.

And oh yeah - they're actually evil reptile aliens disguised as people who want to eat us all up.

We've got the usual cast of can't-fail characters - the worried mother, the religious figure, the shadowy man with a mysterious past, Alan Tudyk - its all there. And it all works relatively well. But what interested me wasn't the vaguely coherent personal stories, I was caught off guard by the themes seemingly bleeding out of every frame. Let's go back in time...

Remember 2001? Remember that thing that happened in September? No, not my thirteenth birthday - that terrorist attack. It set off a western panic for years to come, not to mention it forever changed the way we saw ourselves, that is, no longer invincible. I think that's one of the concepts this show is trying to get across. I think that because the writers cleverly pointed it out in the first five seconds of the first episode. \/

Because this show is just as important as that was.

First thing we see are the words "Where were you when JFK was assassinated?" then "Where were you on 9/11" followed up cleverly with "Where were you this morning?". My thing with this isn't so immediately apparent, I need to explain more.

Remember that we're still back in 2001. The American president back then was George I-believe-fish-and-people-can-coexist-peacefully W. Bush. Who didn't hate that guy? Certainly no one in the entertainment industry, that's for certain.

Every second TV show, or film, or book, or Double Bubble cartoon had some sort of commentary on the Bush administration and/or the scary, paranoid nature of both them and the people they governed. Heck, even the new Star Wars are allegories for what a douche W. was. It was a time of assurance. Growing up, I knew who the bad guy was - and so did every other sane individual. But the times, they are a changin'.

Now America has Obama. A White Knight (hehe) who's here to clean up the country. Instead of depress-fests like the fatalist Matrix or the bleak 28 Days Later, we get movies like Star Trek. We're told to hope. We're told things are going to change. That's all fine and dandy, but now, at whom do we direct our frustration?

I think it's left us all a little jilted. Before we writers had it easy - ATTACK BUSH, ATTACK COLIN POWELL, ATTACK AMERICAN IGNORANCE! But now that crutch is gone. The easy button of political commentary has disappeared, and we're being forced to say new things.

Now back to 2009 - V has just come out and in the first episode alone, the secretly evil Visitors have already promised "hope" "change" and even "universal healthcare". Watching the episode I couldn't help but think that the writers were trying to suggest, through scaley, alien metaphors that we should be weary of Barack Obama.

Barack Obama - Agent of social change, or evil reptilian invader?

How dare they! I thought. He's doing a good job, who are these people to criticise him so early in his career? Why can't they just leave Barack alone! And then it hit me.

My life has flip-turned upside-down.

As a liberal, I used to hang my head every time Bush created a new 'ism'. I sat up on my high horse here in the cold, white north, and looked down on all you yankees. I smugly assured myself that things would never get as bad up here. I used the dire situation as an opportunity to attempt to enter the avant-garde through social commentary. But all that has changed.

Now I am a supporter of the victor, I'm no longer some underdog who shuts up when things are going well, and throws his hands in the air every time something goes wrong. My role in society has gone from accusing the people in power to defending them. That's kind of fucked if you think about it.

Those roles shouldn't be there. I shouldn't be putting up walls between me and other people. I should always be looking at the situation at hand, and judging it based on what I believe, not who's side I'm on.

And that's kind of what's going on in this show. As human beings begin to assess the alien occupation, some are choosing sides, others are wait-and-seeing it. Just like real-life present day America.

Now was all this controversy intentional? We're not super sure. Wikipedia says other people have been talking about this, but that the cast and crew deny any bias.

One TV Critic called it "a barbed commentary on Obamania that will infuriate the president's supporters and delight his detractors." And this blogger muses that it may have been written by participants of the recent Tea Party protests.

To me though, at this point, it doesn't matter one fucking iota.

More than ever it's clear that finally, America, and the world itself, has begun to move past the artistically crippling paradigm of making everything a metaphor for how much the U.S. sucks. We're talking about new stuff, finally - namely beware of false idols, something we - Obama or not - should all remember.

Art (storytelling) is really just a tool. Or rather, an excuse to get people thinking, get people moving, and get people feeling. V has underlined to me that the only way to move forward with our art (that is, the only way to fight off this intellectual masturbatory concept known as the remake) is to make sure every iteration of these stale ideas, be it the new Robin Hood, the new Batman, or Star Trek has something important to say about the time it was made.

So even if the themes brought out offend me, they're still worth contemplating. Actually, make that "especially if they offend me". And even though Earth has been invaded countless times, it's never happened quite exactly like this.

I guess in the end, what I'm trying to say is that I for one, welcome our new overlords.

-K

A brave man tells the truth.

Part 3 of 7 Songs to get you through the week.Röyksopp - Norwegian electronic duo.

I'm late this week! Friday was a clusterfuck, I was strangely busy and this minor tradtition competely escaped me.

In fact, the website has been neglected all week, and that's a shame... but I've got a few entries stewing that I'll post up later this week.

FOR NOW: Seven songs to get you through the week.

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