the surviving uncle
Been wondering how you're dealing with all that fucking humidity. Do you like Windsor? Seems to me, there must be all kinds of shit happening right across the border.Music, hockey, other things... It's been awhile so I'm gonna throw in a few things. What did you think of the Subban/Weber trade? Ever heard this? What do you think? Hear it through, it gets interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdQTYN05wqs

jessica
i actually love the humidity. i'd be happiest in malaysia or something - except that i have somewhat of an irrational fear of large cats, so i'd be constantly on the lookout for tigers.

what's pissing me off is that the guy upstairs wants the building bone dry and 15 degrees. he turned the air on in march and hasn't turned it off yet...

....so i actually had the windows open to let the humidity in and the heat set to 33 degrees all summer. and it was still cold in here, sometimes.

i would suppose that living in windsor is probably not a lot different than living in hull, except that detroit is a lot bigger than ottawa. it's dirt cheap. the small downtown core is nice, but the rest of it is falling apart, until you get out to the suburbs. there's lots of drunks. they smoke in church. i actually haven't been in a church
here, but indoor smoking is pretty standard...

i have been paying absolutely no attention to any sports at all whatsoever. that's the first i've heard of subban getting traded. but, my immediate impression would be that, from what i remember, weber always looked better on paper.

the music scene in windsor is actually fairly lively, but it's completely outside of my spectrum. i did not know before moving down here that windsor is a very active place for heavy metal. it's actually a bit annoying because the kinds of smaller, house party punk shows i would have gone to in ottawa are metal shows here; i have essentially no interest in the music scene here, as a result of it. i can get out to a few math rock shows, but they're infrequent.

detroit is actually not a lot better. the way that detroit has deindustrialized has turned it into a collection of loosely connected small towns, rather than an integrated metropolis. imagine the gta, without toronto. the result is a whole bunch of very small music scenes, none of which are of much note.

they get touring bands in, though. sort of. some of them won't even come into town, they make you transit out. i'm still getting to know the area, and floating around from place to place to see this or that band has actually really helped me do it.

i've always found the neo-prog thing to have lost the plot somewhere. it just doesn't have the excitement of novelty, and instead loses itself in this kind of bland product replication. but, you also have to understand that i grew up in the 90s, not the 70s. so, i see that stuff in a historical context. some of those records - not all of them - are legitimate works of art. when i pick up a crimson or floyd record or something, i'm not connecting with a memory or a point of  identity so much as i'm understanding a relic of the culture i exist in. listening to 70s prog isn't a lot different, to me, than listening to debussy or beethoven or something - and i mean that fully experientially. so, what is the point of reliving neo-prog to somebody that didn't live through it in the first place?

i'm usually going to want to get something at the source. but, my own logic kind of breaks down with a couple of types of punk rock. i'll listen to sonic youth knock-off artists by the bucketful, without enforcing any kind of artistic integrity on them because i just like the head cave. so, i get what you're coming from. i'm just very much attached to a different era.

i've taken to vlogging recently, which is the same thing as blogging except with a video camera. which basically means i'm running a video journal. so, i actually have quite a bit of footage built up of
concerts i've seen in detroit. it's up here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH9y-_dCwf0&list=PLrHImg7oLm2aBNQYDAsBZrz0eVnScD5yT

it's not completely comprehensive, but it's actually pretty close. i'm not sure how much of it you'll like but it's there...

life is otherwise actually pretty good. i'm focusing on finishing my own body of compositions, and while i got a little side tracked the last year or so i do think i'm back on track.

j