plaid was a show that i was looking forward to, and had planned around, so the weather was a necessary peril, and i had to just deal with it. i was hoping to get in a little early and maybe find some legal marijuana, as well as set up a bank account with a driver's license that i don't have yet, but that wasn't available, yet. so, instead, i ended up dragging myself through the cold for a still pretty early entry, around 22:30. that meant that i missed most of dave shettler's set.

i actually like ambient music, and i've enjoyed his sets before; i think maybe what i missed was very similar to something i had caught while on edibles during plug, based on the similarities at the end. i intended to catch the set, i was just late through a cold walk.

i would have caught the 8:30 bus if i would have just gone to the bus station to get tickets, but i was apprehensive about my payment method and the only store i was sure took the prepaid mastercard and sold tickets was shoppers. so, i took a mild detour to the shopper's around the corner, only to find out that they don't sell tunnel bus tickets - surprisingly. so, i went down to the shopper's at ouellette, another detour around the greyhound station, only to find out that they closed at 20:00! it was around 20:40. so, i checked the convenience stores and asked around and was left with the only remaining option being the station itself, which was thankfully open. so, i started off by touring around in the cold for an extra half hour, and was already pretty cold by the time i got over the border.

and, then i walked to marble, which was a colder and lengthier walk than i remembered it being. see, i've been on my bicycle through detroit for months, and it's not far on a bike up to trumbull & grand. it's a hefty walk, though. it was just too cold to bike and end up anywhere, presentable. but, i still haven't fixed my tube, yet.

it took roughly an hour, an hour spent consuming a lemonish liquid while juggling cigarettes, and with neither hat nor gloves, through -15 C windchills, although the ambient temperature itself was merely hovering around zero. it was like a blizzard without any actual snow. i knew i was getting in somewhere, but that could have been a dangerous night to get stuck out in.

i was happy to find a heater to warm up beside when i got in, found some pot, and found the set ending right when i was about to start listening. as mentioned, it sounded familiar to me, so it was no doubt part of the set he played there behind plug.

the next thing up was daedalus, who i knew nothing about other than that they were on ninja tune, and that that's a label that i have some healthy respect for - they tend to release interesting music. there was a discussion about how to classify it, but i didn't find it that daunting - it was a kind of dubstep/idm. i found it moderately interesting, and might check out some more of it if the opportunity arises.

this is a few years old, but it's not dissimilar:

plaid was kind of really plaid, it's almost like they were more plaid than plaid. if i could imagine what a plaid show would be like, it would be pretty much that. an interesting quirk to the show was that they had a live violin player playing segments of sound that were then cut up and manipulated into loops, in real time. so, what you were actually experiencing was often this group of like sound engineers messing with live sound. sonically, it was kind of very plaid - a mix of lush atmospheric ambience with jittery and sometimes plodding beats, along with some strategic melodic programming. if you always wanted to experience plaid, that was exactly what the show was.

a plaid fan youtube site seems to have a recent set from istanbul that appears to be very similar to the detroit set:

however, this is the only footage that i could find of the live violin player:

there was a dj afterwards that allowed for some dancing.

this bar is hit and miss in terms of closing times. they're sometimes open until the afternoon, and sometimes closed at 3:00. i was hoping to stretch this night out a little so that i could just go straight to the tunnel, but they were shutting the place down by 3:01. so, i had to find somewhere to eat.

first, i had to get to my jacket, which i left outside the bar and required a small journey outside to retrieve. this time spent outside in a tshirt should not have been particularly damaging to me, given that the temperature was still hovering around freezing, but with the windchill the cold was flat out dangerous, so i actually had to stop there for a few minutes and warm-up before i carried on. i ended up with a small amount of frostbite on my left thumb, but i can't tie it directly to that moment.

it was still only 3:30 at that point, roughly two hours earlier than i wanted it to be, so i had to make a choice to go to the diner, with the hopes that they'd allow me to eat there. it's a funny thing, actually - the diner was an entirely different experience, all of a sudden. rather than handing everything out via takeout, they actually had two servers that were taking orders, like an actual restaurant. i ordered some bacon & eggs, got a refill on the coffee, and paid the bill without experiencing any negativity at all. i hope that this is indicative of future experiences at the diner.

hey, i don't recall ever starting any trouble at this place, and all i ever wanted out of it was some breakfast, and maybe a place to sip coffee and/or doze off at while i'm waiting for a bus or a show. the premise of my reaction was that i was taken aback by the hostility and ultimately didn't understand it; the preferred outcome is to annihilate the hostility as counter-productive to everybody's interests, but first to understand the causes of it, and try to determine if they're rooted in factual perceptions or not. for example, if somebody thought i was a prostitute, that would be false. we haven't got there yet, and maybe we never will, but if the issue just evaporates, that's fine, too.

by the time i'd finished the refill on the coffee, i'd actually missed the early bus. but, i caught the second bus back in, and had to stop for timmy's on the way back - i just needed some warmth for my hands. and, i had no choice but to shower almost immediately, to counteract the onset of hypothermia - a shower that it took me some time to warm up in, despite the scalding temperatures.

after warming up, i actually slept nicely until late in the afternoon.

i know that people are kind of upset that the quebec court could rule that the law is oppressing people, and then not invalidate it. but, that's a peculiar part of the canadian system in itself.

i've been clear that i think this law can withstand a legal challenge, and that the quebec government should have made better use of the expertise of the judiciary as a reference source, rather than try to cut it out of the process. i've pointed to bans on political activities by civil servants as a precedent for a valid restriction on expression, within the confines of the dress code. but, the government doesn't want the debate.

what people are forgetting is that a court in canada can, and often does, rule that a law is unconstitutional, but then save it via something called the oakes test. that is, we're allowed to have unconstitutional laws, in canada, if the balance is in the public good. and, if the quebec government won't argue the case in the way that i'm proposing, it's brandishing of the notwithstanding clause as a trump card, and somewhat frivolously given that a legal argument exists, could very well lead to exactly that decision, which it seems to be perfectly ok with. they're happy to make a mockery of the law.

but, this is a point that outside observers need to understand about our court system. in canada, it's not enough to show that a law infringes on somebody's rights, that's just the first step in the process. after you've shown that a right has been infringed upon, you have to run it through an oakes test, which questions whether the law can still be justified, despite infringing on some people's rights. and, it's not hard to come up with uncontroversial examples of laws that infringe the rights of some for the greater good; that's not that controversial of an idea at all. our legal framework explicitly forces the jurisprudence to consider the question; a judge must place the individual's rights in a social context, and must rule the individual's rights subservient to the social good, if the evidence compels it to. that is how canadian law interprets this kind of thing.

this is in contrast to american law, which has no real legal counterargument to individual rights, and which liberally grants injunctions when constitutional rights issues are raised. in the end, canadian judges wield a large amount of power to declare legislation void, but the precedent is set at a high bar in meeting the grounds of the oakes test, first.

so, in context, the democratic will is a valid argument in canada to overturn constitutionally-protected rights, in ways that wouldn't be raised in the american courts. and, americans that are following this case may find the language used by the canadian courts to be galling to the point of shocking. but, we'll see what the outcome is.

if the quebec government refuses to present an actual legal case, the court may be forced to make some pretty brutal rulings.

so, i needed to sleep this evening.

i was back on wednesday morning, slept the day, then was about to get started on thursday afternoon, when the machine crashed with an 0x6b, which appears to have been caused by being unable to access specific files in the catroot directory as a part of the windows activation process. it took me until friday evening to figure that out and adjust to it. i now have what i think is a clean image to redeploy with. but, i had to sleep shortly afterwards, as the 0x6b had kept me up on thursday night. now, i'm moving on.

what i wanted to do on thursday evening was write reviews for the last week, stop to eat and then get to cleaning up and publishing the liner notes for the 2013 releases over the night. so, that's what i'm getting back to this morning, and let's hope there's some published material on it's way up by the end of the weekend.