so, last night was a band from montreal called fly pan am that i remember from a few constellation records releases from the late 90s and early 00s, but mostly the late 90s. i walked into the show without having heard their brand new record, and without being very familiar with their last two, either.

this was awesome back in the day, though:

i'm going to give a shout out to montreal favourite steve hackett via fly pan am, though. yes, that's phil on drums, for those keeping track of the phil posts.

i didn't get to the bar until after 22:30, more like 22:45, expecting to have missed the opening act, but i didn't. it was some kind of mope rock, defined by a guitarist with a loop pedal and a drum machine. fairly boring...

i spent most of the money i had left for september on last weekend, which, given the current forecast for october, is looking like it was a wise choice. but i didn't want to miss fly pan am, so i held to an extra $21.79 in my account. the plan was to pre-drink on the way in, pull that $20 out at the last minute and spend the remaining $8 (along with some change i had kicking around) on two beers at the bar.

which bar?

windsor has a total of one alts-y kind of bar, called phog. there's another spot around the corner that's fairly safe, called villain's, that has a bit of a younger crowd nowadays that i'm borderline too old for, but they don't do a lot of shows, so i usually just end up in there for a few minutes at a time. there used to be a bro-ish punk bar down the street, but it was too bro, and i never even went in there once. i didn't fit in at the marijuana bar when it was open and didn't really want to hang out there, with gamers and normies. before that, there was a slightly more diverse space and absinthe bar called milk, but it's been shut down for a few years, now. if you look around town, you might find the odd thing here and there, but the only seriously interesting venue for the entire time that i've been here has been phog.

phog is a great venue, almost an institution, but it's very small, and the owner has been trying for years to open up a bigger space for bigger bands, something he keeps failing at - because the market in windsor just isn't there. the market he wants to tap into is really in suburban detroit, which is a good distance up woodward, and saturated as it is. so, he's tried working with the theatre next door, which is always empty, and that fell through. he's tried working with a bar down the street called the rondo, which has since closed. his most recent attempt to get a bigger space was to help open a renovated bar across the street from phog, an old dance club. so, this is a new bar in town, and one i may end up at from time to time. fly pan am wasn't the first show, but it was the first show i was at.

so, i hit the machine on the way in, bumped into some people outside the bar, made sure i was at the right place, plopped my $20 down and took mt $8.00 + $2.00 in quarters to the bar for a beer.

tom is working the bar, for some reason. $6 for a cherry porter, a request that confused him; he seemed to think i'd want something a little lighter. but, i'd rather have a heavy beer with a fruity tinge than a lighter beer that tastes like bread mold. don't misunderstand me; the beer was good, and it was tall, and it was fairly strong, but i just didn't have $6 on me for another one. so, when i stumbled downstairs to find a smoke, i stepped into villain's to down a beer i could afford.

i was met face to face with somebody in a ridiculous tinfoil suit that was threatening to play a 12-string guitar at the open mic inside. well, ok. it turns out that he was essentially playing bass, backing up a singer-songwriter type on an acoustic guitar. they had some people excited about them, but i found them rather boring. this is an open mic night that i've considered playing at before - and in fact did play at years ago - but that obviously isn't the right audience for what i'd want to do. like, i really actually don't like "indie rock". they'd no doubt tell me to chill out, and stop playing so loud. i don't want to come down on them too hard - they're friendly. really. - but i've picked up these question marks as to why i don't go to villain's more often and the best way for me to answer you is to suggest that you don't know me very well. they wouldn't like my music very much, and i know that; i'm rarely impressed by what i see in there, either. it's nice to have the friendly space not far from where i'd rather be, but i keep it at an arm's length for a reason.

so, i finished my beer up, bummed a smoke, caught a quick toke on somebody's thc vape and made it in for the last half or so of a set by a detroit band called pato y pato. people outside suggested they sounded like tortoise, but i didn't pick that up. to begin with, they didn't have a guitarist; it was two keyboard players playing through a haze of guitar effects. i thought a better comparison was to fuck buttons, but they didn't have the same focus on song structures, or the aggressive lyrics. in some ways, it just sounded like kraftwerk. it was an enjoyable slab of sound, but kind of not more than that. sometimes, you don't need more than that. i'd advise not skipping them.

so, i went out for another smoke between sets and found myself back out at villain's, sharing somebody's bong, but i had to get back in to catch the set. i hate to smoke and run like that. they're finally opening up a store downtown in november, so the days of me buzzing around like a fly are nearly over.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/windsors-first-legal-pot-shop-slated-to-open-nov-1

i had no idea what fly pan am would sound like in 2019, and i don't think i recognized anything in the set, which seems to have been mostly brand new tracks. some of it made sense, while i found some of it lacking; i wasn't sure what to expect, but i wasn't expecting a standard punk rock band, and at points that's exactly what they were. they seem to draw more from their label mates, gybe!, nowadays then they used to (and, for those wondering what happened to skinny fists era guitarist roger tellier-craig, this is the band he came from and is still in). the instrumental interludes seemed to draw as much from industrial music as they did from musique concrete, which was always a big part of what they did, but has morphed into something different altogether. the post-punk aesthetic has evolved into a motorik, and apparently taken in some influences from black metal, perhaps via the black ox orkestar? it's a starker, almost nihilistic sound from a band that i remember as dubby and warm. i think i was entertained, overall - i was impressed at points, at the points it made sense based on their history, and less so at others, when it maybe didn't. hey, they got me talking. i'm glad i went...

they have a bandcamp site up:
https://flypanam.bandcamp.com/album/cest-a

so, i get out of the show and walk across the street to phog, where there are people smoking. i have about $0.75, usd, on me. i want another beer. there's now $1.79 in my account. sol? i left $6 usd from last weekend on my stove, thinking i might be able to use it for blanck mass on friday, in a pinch...

i'd have to walk home, get the $6 and bike back. can this be done?

i spent the walk back trying to put proper mathematical bounds on this process. i left about 21:50; my bank receipt said 22:32. so, it took me about 42 minutes to walk to the machine, which is about two minutes further than phog. let's say it took 40 minutes. i left at 1:08. can i make it in half the time? probably not. 75% of the time? if i walk quickly, efficiently, that's not absurd. and, if i can make it home before 1:40, then, could i make it back to the bar before 2:00?

time on the clock when i got in: 1:36. lots of time to get back and order a beer before last call...

so, within a few minutes, i'm back at phog, ordering not one but two beers (a sneaky trick right before last call, to extend the night). tom is at the bar again, and it's now clear why - he's entertaining some old friends that are back home from out of town, and he would do so a little late, on this night, which was fine, as it gave me the chance to finish the two beers that i bought before last call. so we're all clear about that.

one of the folks at the bar was an angry croatian nationalist. he was angry all night, and seemed to enjoy it - it was a bit of a shtick. but, what is the difference between a serb and a croat, anyways?

i asked him after bumming a smoke from him, outside.

"it's mostly about the religion, right?"

that's what i always thought, anyways.

i have to tell you that i always thought they were mostly the same, really, and could never really figure this out. i knew serbs. i knew croats. one was catholic, the other orthodox - kind of a minor difference, given that they're both christians. now, the bosnians are a more complicated thing, as are the kosovars, but why the fuck are the serbians and the croats and the slovenians going after each other, anyways?

religion. as always. right.

no - and he got pretty mad at me for suggesting it, too. he claimed it had to do with a different history, but that didn't get through my bullshit filter, either. they were both under turkic domination for a while (and both resisted it), and then they were both under austrian hegemony. before that, they were in the broad grouping of slavic raiders that set up on the outskirts of the empire, and periodically plundered greece. there's no history for either serbs or croats before that, and so you're stuck trying to figure out if they're ancestrally iranian or slavic, or something in between. even if you derive them from what herodotus called the "royal scythians", you're still stuck with the reality that their only history is greek until well into the middle ages, however far back you can extend it, and with whatever speciousness.

i asked him some questions, but i couldn't get a straight answer out of him, and it just left me remembering how stupid that nationalism is, as a concept. he may have been trolling me slightly, and i got that point. but, he honestly couldn't answer my question.

he could tell you he was proud to be a croat.

he could insist that the serbians weren't like him, and that his father was in the right when he fought against them.

but, he couldn't tell me what the difference between a croat and a serb really is.

he eventually stormed off, but i think he was just looking for an excuse to get home, as it was getting fairly late. it was almost 4:00 when i got home, took a shower, made some eggs and went to sleep.

so, that was fly pan am in windsor in 2019.

the liberals are supposed to do better than this.