Chapter 9: Enjoy yourself

There are no shortcuts to the heart.

It has been a mad, mad, mad week. Maddening, as a matter of fact. Jeezes, when did I last post? It occurs to me repeatedly how much of my formerly-Blogging-oriented energy is now used by Twitter. A lot of my little thoughts go there now, so fewer entries come out, and I store up all my shit for you to enjoy in large helpings.

Not so different, just less frequent.

So many more gaps, though. I'll often go back and thing "What happens between posts?" I don't have a terrific memory for events (very good for faces, names and factoids,) except those I write down. Essentially, if I don't SWP it, it never happened, or may as well not have. This was the theme to Travesties by Tom Stoppard, or at least my interpretation of it as written on my final test last night in De Groot's drama class. I don't know how well I'll do on that, stemming both from my sketchy-at-best understanding of the material (I read a lot of it this semester I swear!!) and my brain, addled by illness and the drugs designed to combat said illness.

Monday night I was feeling a scratchy throat and sneezing. I was on the fence as to whether it was allergies, but I popped a couple Cold FX anyway. It was not a fun scene to be spreading my germs at work.

Later that night - as in the time I was supposed to be sleeping - the cold made itself known by way of a massive congestion and tons of snot leakage. Aren't you glad you read my blog?

I admitted to Vasa later that day that I've never been particularly good at "being sick." I wake up in the morning with a cold and then I try to go about my day, which is not advisable. I felt like death but I had this test. I wanted to get it done even though I could easily have gone for the later exam, which is for people who were observing passover. This is all largely to my detriment.

So I went out to school, I suffered, I did my thing, I went and watched LOST at Vasa's. Lots of pills, both cold pills to treat the symptoms and Cold FX to treat the cause. This is my strategy. If you treat the symptoms with say Tylenol Cold, it will keep them under control and prevent the cold from gaining strength and recurring overnight (my major problem for Tuesday.) But ColdFX is what wins that battle. Neither is enough to do it on its own. I say this because I am feeling much better today after popping some sleepy-time pills along with the last dosage of Cold FX for the evening. Not 100%, but it's a three-day treatment.

I am a schmuck because I have not yet finished my Music Paper. I have written half of it, which is good because I work until 9:30 tonight. I picked up the shift from Chantelle because a) she asked, and had been good enough about taking mine last week and b) I am missing out on at least one shift due to the Easter weekend.

So the time crunch is on to get this last 1000 words done, which will include quotes that I am set to gather this very afternoon. Considering I wrote the first half on my brother's Netbook en route to Toronto, I'm in decent shape but could probably use revision.

It's going to be a long night.

But, I do this to myself.

(And that's what really hurts.)

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Chapter 8: Due to foreseen circumstances

I like it when an album grows on you.

Some albums, I buy and I immediately love: both Locksley records, every White Stripes album, Hollerado. Some are hit and miss. Some, I listen to again later on a whim and find myself more into. This was the case for every Coral album after Magic & Medicine, and to some extent Joel Plaskett's Three (which grew on me in bits and pieces, the second disc coming last.) In this case, it's Ashtray Rock, by Plaskett, which I honestly didn't know what to make of when I first bought it. In researching the purchase I knew it was a concept album, and that it would have a different, more electric sound than the bluegrass folk soul of Three. It's close, but distinct.

Here is an album that is in turns sweet and bitter, angsty and nostalgic, funky and ballad...y. It's a real concept album, with a story and characters, as opposed to the loose concept feel of Three (the mode I would have to say I generally prefer - The Dark Side of the Moon style concept album as opposed to the Kilroy Was Here type.) But it doesn't hang itself on trying to tell that story, it just uses it as a tighter framework to hang the songs, and keep the feel of looking back on teenage romance alive. Plaskett may never write a song better than "Through & Through & Through," however, but he can take consolation in the fact that few do (this is a compliment I often pay The Coral's "Dreaming of You.")

Anyway, a concept album allows you to get away with other stuff like sound effects (most often background crowd noise) unusual song structure, instrumentals (for telling a story? Surprisingly effective) lyrical and instrumental theme development, spoken word, song snippets, etc etc.

I'm just really glad I didn't have this album when I was a teenager. It'd be the anthem for the breakup I didn't ever have.

I had a rough day the other day, Monday. I'd been so good at letting whatever-may-come roll off my back until then. Sometimes it hits you and you get buried in it. I haven't felt like that in a while, although I can't remember my last honest-to-God freakout. I've probably had one since my famous overreaction to all-this-shit back in second year, which Amanda likes to occasionally tease me about. This wasn't nearly that bad, I'm not that guy anymore, I was just having a few bad moments and needed to let off some steam.

It was largely my own fault anyhow. I had a paper due Monday, and I had it more or less written by 2 AM Sunday night. About 2000 of the 2500 words. I was mentally fried, however, so I set it aside and said "I can write an intro and conclusion before class tomorrow before class." I don't know what kind of intro and conclusion I was necessarily intending to write in the 30 minutes between getting to Innis and having to go to class. Doesn't matter, didn't happen; I shouldn't have assumed it would. Should've just plowed through, although the quality would've suffered gravely.

So I was feeling shitty about that. It was my own idiocy, more or less, that drove me to that point. I'd been asked to go into work early because Gus was sick. except there's only so early I can get in.

Worse, when I got back to Oakville in the rain, I absentmindedly got on the wrong bus (14 Lakeshore rather than 13 Bronte.) So I had to get off at the first stop and hurry back, taking an alarmingly pricey cab to Oakville Place. So on top of that. Durr.

It wasn't a great night at work, neither, as I really had to clear my head, but it did relax me and I managed to put my stress behind me by the time Karen left. It was quiet: Sarah, a quiet, inexperienced girl we hired last monthish, was called in for support. If it'd been say, Taylor or Chantelle or Alan or Matt, I would've had someone to talk to. Andy, even, would've made things interesting.

The night didn't go without hiccups, but I won't explain.

The other thing was Adam. Good guy, always great for a conversation about music, probably the only one left in the store whose tastes and attitudes closely match mine. He suggested I buy the Big Star CD, a combo of their first two albums. We played it while we were setting up new releases, I really dug it. It's more or less what I need right now. Haven't bought it yet though, need Karen or Gus to do so.

I should get a bigger iPod. One of these days. Later than sooner though.

So I did end up finishing off that paper yesterday, handing it in, la la la. Met up with my friend Emily before class, we had to go buy a copy of Statements by Athol Fugard, talked about stuff, read the play out. Went to class, got lectured at, got our papers back.

Apparently too many of us got 80's (myself included) that de Groot has to write one of those explanatory letters of awesomeness to his overseers.

At the break, we all gabbed about Stoppard, engaging in a rare lively discussion (amazing how that happens when the Prof steps out) followed by a video of Sizwe Bansi is Dead, and then talkin' about nothing much.

Then LOST. My God, LOST.

I was on Omegle the other day and after mentioning I was a writer (my go-to factoid when called upon to say something honest and interesting about myself) my conversational partner asked what my overall themes were, which I think is a fascinating question not only to answer but to have asked.

In case you're wondering, there actually is an answer I didn't have to think long about: loneliness, and the inability to know everything about other people. That's what my short story collection is about, anyhow. I was walking down the street today, behind this girl, when I broke the ice on a short story that has vexed me for months, when I realized in my head I was reciting it in third person and it sounded so much better. Going to do it Nathan Zuckerman style - a character in the story telling someone else's story. There's probably other great examples of that form of narrative voice (I've used it myself in Melancholy) but that's the one freshest in my veins. "Here's what he told me." Gives you an intriguing lens through which to view the story.

Yesterday, in film, Mackenzie spent the entire class lecturing on the acting style of Bill Murray, largely hinging on clips from Groundhog Day (tomorrow we watch Lost in Translation.) Bill Murray was the typical indie actor before indie cinema had even come into its own.

Keen.

Such is my life these days. Trying desperately to manage my time, straighten out my projects, and point toward the future. Music class on my mind. Sigh, sigh, sigh.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Chapter 7: Every opportunity is bogus

It's been an interesting week for words.

I've been thinking about how Canadians have a way with words. Some of the best lyricists of our time are Canadian, Chad Kroeger notwithstanding, although maybe I'm biased. We always seem to be striving to reconcile awkwardness with coolness. Sloan, Weakerthans, Joel Plaskett, Tragically Hip, the folks in Metric and Stars all seem to have a way about them to say exactly what they want, in very precise terms. Matthew Good, Tegan and Sara. Sam Roberts. Canadian hip hop is flavoured very distinctly from its American cousin. k-os.

This is not new, per se, nor absolute. While I wouldn't say The Guess Who, the first Canadian rock band to have any significant success on a world level, wasn't known for their lyrical acumen, no, there's a certain level of sophistication to some of their tunes. Then there's Rush, who gets away with saying things in a way no human being would ever communicate just because they're Rush. Then there's Leonard Cohen, who has been known to come up with a nifty line or two. The royalties from Hallelujah alone must be staggering.

We're great at alternative music, maybe because we're an alternative country (maybe we are.) We have that attitude in general. We don't do mainstream well. we do self-satire, self-effacement, anything to avoid boasting about ourselves or insisting ourselves on the rest of the world. Few countries have given the world so much, yet remain so enigmatic. Maybe Japan. Japan's given the world a lot more than we have, but they also export their own culture more obviously than we do.

Just trying to put things in order, get into a headspace before writing a pretty major paper. The problem with life is that it doesn't often leave much time for living. Much less for writing about it.

Monday night - going back to even my last post - something weird happened. Two girls enter the store. Not unusual in and of itself. When I have nothing better to do, I become more or less a professional people-watcher. Tall girl and short girl. Tall girl looks kinda spacey. Short girl is dressed like a gangsta, with appropriate shorts, hoodie, hat. I think for a second maybe she wasn't a girl at all, but her voice was distinctly feminine. So there's mind-body disconnect. Gangsta girl holds up a Marilyn Manson book and says to spacey girl, "Would you like me if I looked like this?" although it may have been "still like me." So now I think some kind of lesbian thing, which is fine, if true, I don't judge. So the spacey girl gets to my till, shows herself as a considerable Twilight fan, then says I look familiar. She correctly guesses my grade school, and I scrunch my brow, because she seriously does not look familiar, and I have a good memory for names and faces. She says which teacher she had in grade 8, which was the same teacher as mine. Now I start to see what's going on, she must've graduated the year after me, but she swears she graduated 2001. Well, people get mixed up sometimes. I did say she was spacey looking.

I ran into my American Lit prof on the subway the other day, which was weird. She's one of the few profs who has ever bothered to learn my name. I take it as a given that I don't get, nor particularly feel the desire for, much face time with profs, so I would say the lack of this isn't something I feel bad about, but I also like it when it happens. Reibetanz knew my name for obvious reasons. Rayter eventually got to know my name, from taking attendance and seeing me in the same spot all the time, and because he had the same first name. Anyway. I waved and nodded politely in her general direction, because it would've been impossible to honestly ignore her. But I didn't talk to her, because I would have felt obligated to talk about class, when I had really nothing to say (I was not much enjoying the then-current book.) The ride also took longer than it ought to have, owing to a stalled train. She was signing some kind of greeting card, I browsed a play I should have already finished reading, kind of as a show that yes, I am sometimes a serious student outside class.

Friday night, I attempted to get a jump on my Music paper by going down to the Moonshine cafe and speaking to the owner, although it felt like I came off as an ambush. He did give me his card, though. It was very chill. I have some ideas what I can write, although how good it'll be for the project I couldn't say.

And now, I am off to continue collecting my thoughts and then try to write this paper. Hmp.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Chapter 6: More than everything I know

This is a true story:

I was sitting with CB at a bar last year, talking about the end of the semester. He related to me the story of his Russian history class. It was the end of the semester and he was exhausted. The final exam consisted, apparently, of the essay question "Explain two positive contributions Stalin made to Russian society." CB, being a snarky mofo, and up to here with schooling, wrote only the phrase "He died." and turned it in. His professor was apparently so impressed with his straightforwardness that he got full marks.

I don't know if this really happened to CB. It sounds too good to be made up, quite frankly, just quirky enough that you can see it being fictional, but it'd be a brassy move to try to pass it off as real if it weren't. So I believe it. But it's a true story nonetheless, because they story wasn't about CB writing a sarcastic answer to an essay question, the story was about CB telling me about it.

See what I did there? True story. That happened.

There are these student council elections going on at school lately. In the past I was vaguely aware of them - glossy posters would adorn campus bulletin boards featuring a bullet list of noble objectives and an impossibly happy-looking, overachieving student dressed casually. I'd be aware of them, then eventually feel guilted into voting, and cast my vote randomly. This year I will not be doing that. This year is different. I am consciously abstaining.

This year, which I had not noticed in previous years, the candidates have organized themselves into opposing political parties. The green team and the orange team. Both of their objectives are more or less the same. They're not like the liberals and the conservatives. Everyone knows what students want: lower, manageable fees, a TTC discount, cheaper textbooks, maybe a place to crash or some parties. Whatever. Who cares.

They both have more or less the same objectives. One's been in power already, the other is alleging they have failed in their duties, and the first is claiming the second is lying about that (this was an actual exchange two of them had in front of me, courting my vote: One makes a statement about the ruling party's performance, the ruling party interjects, "That's a lie.") They don't differ in ideology, their resources have to be close enough as to be indistinguishable, and there's only so much the student council can do anyhow. There is no way one can prove to me they would be more effective at running the school than the other.

So I'm abstaining, but it's not just voter apathy. It's voter irritation. It doesn't matter to me who is in control of the student council. I am not the least bit aware of their actions or what they do, and frankly there's no way to make me aware, or care, so why bother? Worse than being interested and not voting, would be to cast a totally uninformed vote, which I have done in the past. Then I'm jut fucking up Democracy. Dad always says, if you can't complain, but I never complain anyway. In my local elections I vote, and I complain, as is my right. Here, I simply can't see it making a difference.

What I'm really getting at here is a reaction against the type of people who run for these positions. I'm not saying it's a popularity contest or anything, but I'm saying that although they will surely do as good a job as they can, they really just want bragging rights, and something cool to put on their resume in the future. It's like the movie Election.

If I find myself this time next year sitting here thinking "Shit, I wish the Orange team had gotten in power," I will be very surprised.

Not a lot interesting has been happening, I have been squandering the hiatus between papers. I ought to write one soon.

I remember when Cary and I ran through the Half-Past script, and he observed, "I like how all your characters are secret Jews." The Jewish people have a way with dialogue, and moreover I seem to have absorbed it through some kind of cultural osmosis. One actor apparently declined to audition, saying "I can't play Jewish."

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Chapter 5: It started as a joke

I often drop in seemingly unrelated titles for my posts, because I discovered years ago that I hated trying to name these things or trying to anticipate exactly what I was going to write about. It has always been more fun to just drop in a quote or a nonsense-phrase (increasingly common in later times) and more often, this nonsense guides what I write, rather than the other way around.

That phrase up there, "It started as a joke" didn't come from anywhere in particular, but I just thought it in the course of my normal daily activity - as is often the case for these phrases. But think about the connotation there, the whole story. "It started as a joke." It was a joke at one point, but it got serious, or it got real, or it just stopped being funny and became sad. Sad. When and how did this transformation occur?

Well, fuck it, man. Whatever it is. It's still a joke to me. Always will be.

Days start to blur. The rest of the week passed idiosyncratically. Wednesday I had off from school because my AmLit prof had a stomach flu. It was a relief.

Thursday night was interesting. After the screen, I stuck around and got food, then waited for Eric. I had gotten a free pass for an advance screening of Hot Tub time Machine, which looked awesome from the ads I had seen. Like Back to the Future but with duck jokes. Anyway, we met up at Innis and talked a bit before the movie started. He's had some good stuff going on lately, regarding his school and his writing. Having read the script he submitted for his assignment, I am quite pleased with stuff.

I won't say much about Hot Tub Time Machine, other than it was exactly what I expected it to be, and managed to surprise me a fair bit, and if you think there's a chance you'll like it, I can assure you you will.

We hung out a little while at this deserted bar we discovered back in the fall when we saw Night on Earth. Still empty of all but one other group, we drank more than I should have (no comment on him, he has a bigger tolerance than I do) and then parted ways just in time for me to catch my train home and doze off.

Friday, school, then work.

Saturday: more work, and staying up late due largely to Daylight Saving Time.

I had an interesting conversation on Omegle with a girl, or at least someone who claimed to be a 17-year-old girl from BC. She seemed to speak in a 17-year-old's voice about a 17-year-old's problems, so there's that. No matter who she actually was, it was clear this was not going to be one of those conversations that found its way to my other thing.

It's so rare that anyone actually wants to talk about anything interesting on that site (mostly they just want young girls to cyber, which I had a hard time believing was still a thing,) so I engaged. She explained that she was frustrated with her romantic life, and I offered what shallow reassurance I could as an anonymous stranger across the vast nothingness of the intertubes. After making what seemed to be a few successful jokes, she abruptly left, saying goodbye. Such is life. We have to connect with people, however possible, if possible at all.

A lot of my writing concerns not getting the whole story.

Then I accidentally hit "Back," thus destroying the whole thing.

Today, work again. Chantelle has returned, which is nice. It was her, me, Alan and Matt, so it was a long goof-off session today. At one point, Matt physically pushed me out of the way to get to a potentially-attractive customer before I could. What a champ. All I could do was laugh.

Working 4-hour shifts isn't really much of anything at all. It's practically a vacation. So casual.

Well anyway. Life goes on as expected, unexpectedly.

Keep on rockin
-Scott

Chapter 4: You used to exist

Boy, it was a crazy-ass weekend.

It was so crazy that it barely even ended on Tuesday night. The craziness, not the weekend. although the length of the weekend itself was unusual as well, by my own doing.

Partly it was my fault. Slipping back into bad habits, I had been putting off writing my Cinema Studies essay. See, I was all ready to get it written for the 2nd. It had come up a bit quick, but I was prepared. I had watched Reservoir Dogs, I had my copy of Down By Law sitting on my coffee table waiting for an opportunity, and my copy of "Narration in the Fiction Film" by David Bordwell to plunder for quotes. It was going to be a bummer, but I was prepared to write it over a weekend.

Then MacKenzie decided to do everyone a favour and push it back a week. Good intentions...

So I got lazy. I put it off a week. This coincided with my drama paper on Glengarry Glen Ross. How like me. Falling somewhat into some negative study habits.

Saturday, I get to work and I find out the next day we have inventory, and I've been elected to come in at 7:30. Fair enough, this is work after all, things must be done. But I'm trying to budget my time so as to be sane, with only a bit of notice. So here's me, starting my cinema studies paper at 10:00 on Saturday night, outlining all my points and trying to rig up a coherent structure in about 2 hours, so I can get a half-decent night's sleep.

Sunday was uneventful at work, other than the 4 hour spent in near-total silence while I followed the inventory-takers around the store double-counting their work. We barely got in under the wire of opening the store, followed by 4 hours of the usual Sunday looky-loos and old folks.

It was in my interest to get out early, which I barely did, but did thanks to some understanding by Matt, because we had Aunt Karen's birthday in Toronto that night.

It's a funny background story with Aunt K's birthday. It always, always sneaks up on me. I always expect it to be later in the month, but it's not. So, most especially in even-numbered years, something comes up to mess with my head and make me almost miss it. In 2008, I was hanging out with Ryan and Chris Ferg, having slept at Ferg's place after a monstrous snowstorm, then gone down with him to get Smash Bros. Brawl, and spending all morning playing it with him and RyLai. This was in the days before I had a cell phone (imagine!) so they had no way of knowing where I was or when I'd get home. I didn't check in, because, not knowing it was a birthday, I thought I had the whole day to myself.

Two years before that, I was hanging out with Robyn. In both cases I had to go over to Grandma's, where it was held, on my own. The 2006 day was nice weather, the 2008 was not (I mentioned some kind of snowstorm earlier...?)

So this year, I got out in half-decent time and we drove out to Toronto, because for whatever reason, it was opted to have the event at Aunt Lori's. Personally, my preference is for events at Grandma's, because there's a big open space to play around, and Cam and Ali can bring whatever toys they please, but not feel like it's their territory and thus entitled to make demands. At our place, it's a bit of a bummer because there are fewer options. At Cam's place, it's a huge drag, because he has a million different things he can potentially drag out to ask us to play with.

Man. They say, guys, this is your payback for all the attention the aunts paid you as kids. But you know what? When I was a kid, I remember waiting for the aunts to come over so they'd read with me. CAn't get these kids to look at a book, we're just there to wrestle with Cam, and to make Ali feel left out because she doesn't like to wrestle but Cam is too demanding to want anything but a monopoly over our attention.

I'll be so damn relieved when they're awkward preteens who don't want to hang out with us anymore. By the time Cam's 12, I'll be 28, effectively an adult, part of a different world. And I won't say "It's such a shame, Cam doesn't want to play with me anymore, he's growing up," because I'll hopefully understand and remember how I felt at the time.

Ali, I don't know about. I already don't know, so when she reaches the double-digits it will be far beyond my understanding.

It's always been about the kids, man. Ever since they were ambulatory, it's been up to me and my brothers to entertain them. We are able to do little else at family gatherings, so it's understandable how it is not something we get really excited about. Cam... I love the kid, he's precocious and everything, but Pokemon is warping his little mind. He's becoming that kid who makes up the rules so that he always wins. He bosses Ali around, "NO Ali," is his catchphrase, "I dodged your attack!" "I'm invincible!"

When I was a kid - a bit older than Cam, sure, but this starts young - I was playing games with my friends where we teamed up to fight invisible monsters. His imagination is engaged by re-envisioning Pokemon battles, to win at all costs.

I want to change him.

So that took up the bulk of the evening. We got home at 9, at which point logic dictates I finished off that essay I'd begun yesterday. Instead, I watched the Oscars - even the uninteresting parts (and there were many) - and let the cursor blink.

I ended up finishing the essay at 2 AM that night, producing a level of work that was either inspired or madness, I won't know until the end of the semester. It's either the culmination of a semester of tight focus on my studies, or evidence that I have reached the end of my rope and am no a babbling incoherent. For what it's worth, I think I did some good work. I think the points I made were cogent, and that I made them rather eloquently. Not succinctly, mind you. This is the first paper I've ever written that was at the high end of the word count allotment, at 2700 words. Usually I'm trying to decide how far under I can get before it becomes noticeable. In this case, I could hardly stop myself talking about the two movies, although I may have wound up getting redundant. Form has never been my strong suit in academic writing. The most common remarks I got in my second-year paper was "You make some very good points, but in a slightly disorganized way." I have a tendency to speak extemporaneously in organizing my thoughts. That's the entire concept of SWP, after all. In the paper, I wrote a short list of dot jots to branch out my arguments, it just happens that those dot jots all begot long, spiraling paragraphs.

I work best in a casual mode, a mode that is not particularly academic (SWP.) If I were to write about how Down By Law and Reservoir Dogs embodies the independent aesthetic, I could probably do so here in a way that would make sense, enlighten, amuse, and contain a umber of dick jokes. That sort of thing is generally frowned upon in University writing.

But if you had to ask: The films take from classical narration the concept of the goal-oriented protagonist, providing for that character obstacles not material in nature, but psychological (an attribute it has in common with art cinema.) In Reservoir Dogs, the goal is to learn who is the rat: the obstacle is Mr. White's trust in Mr. Orange. For the escaped crooks in Down By Law, it is the uncertainty of the Louisiana swamp. The cause-and-effect progression of classical cinema is also disrupted, largely be factors of chance. Special attention is also usually paid to use of form: see Orange's "commode story" narration, in which a flashback contains a flashback, which is a visualized representation of a fictional event, and the obscure mise en scene at the beginning of Down By Law. The blending of art and classical elements, especially the unity of form and content, embodies a postmodernist impulse that embodies the independent aesthetic: a blend of influences that self-consciously incorporates without mocking or criticizing.

Now, obviously that paragraph can't be a paper, but it's the Cole's Notes version. You have to know about the content of Down By Law (and Reservoir Dogs, which is more likely,) in order to see what I'm getting at clearly, but it's all there.

Even if you don't know what classical cinema looks like, you know what it is. Back To The Future is the best modern example of a classical screenplay. Everything in that screenplay falls into place. Not a spare thread. It's a work of brilliance. Art cinema is tougher to divine, because it's a trend that has largely died out due to art cinema not being very profitable, my generation not being very good at art, and the trend moving toward the aforementioned indie aesthetic in recent decades.

I say my generation is not very good at art. I mean, we're not a generation of Fellinis and Bergmans and Antonionis. I am not particularly interested in seeing filmmakers of the current day and age attempt to express themselves in the same manor as those filmmakers, with all the self-examination and obscurity that entails. We're instead a generation of Tarantinos and Sofia Coppolas and Charlie Kaufmans and Jason Reitmans, who understand the value of narrative to drive an artistic aspiration along. There's no way to say "this is good art" but an artistic interpretation of an entertainment mode, I think, has the highest cultural currency.

So that paper was done Sunday night, and then there was the matter of my drama paper, due the same day, several hours later. And also the matter of my having to work Monday night. So having at least a little bit of self-awareness, I stayed home that day and wrote as much as I could.

It wasn't much. I barely scraped my way to the halfway point before suffering burnout. I then went to work, where I spent 5 hours doing nothing of consequence.

Something funny did happen, though: Alan had helped a couple of ditzy teenage girls find a Euro Mix CD, but when he turned around to help another customer at cash, they were gone, and he had no idea where they had left the CD.

The obvious conclusion was that they had stolen it. We tested another copy of the CD, and it did not set off the anti-theft device. I was annoyed by how audacious the theft was. We were standing right there, there was no guarantee the alarm wouldn't go off, we had made contact with them. Fuck. Fuck them.

Then a few hours later I found it sitting on the shelf with Jay-Z. So there you go.

It was one of those "you had to be there" things. Or else, it's getting late and I just wanna wrap up so I can get to bed.

I was smart enough to know I'd be too tired/distracted by How I Met Your Mother after getting home from work to do anything for the paper, so I had to put my faith in the gap between classes from 1 to 4. The gap is actually between 1 and 6, but at 4 I meet up with my friend Emily to read whatever play we're studying.

I managed to get it written, more or less to my satisfaction (after having a fairly productive semester I seem to be faltering a bit here at the end.) Emily was feeling down forschool-related reasons I don't care to reveal. Sometimes you just feel the weight of it all, lord knows I've been there. I didn't offer much i the way of comfort, because I'm not the kind of guy who is good at making people feel like I feel their pain. So I sat there a while, talked her through it - not like a counselor or a therapist, but like a conversationalist, like a friend, making jokes and trying to be reassuring without being all "Everything's going to be okay, I totally know what you're going through." She did cool down after a bit of that so I guess it worked.

I think I'm a half-decent shoulder to cry on, because I will sit there and listen to anything. Anybody's problems. Because I've been blessed with friends, over the years, who would listen to my incredibly trivial bullshit (ex: you're reading this right now) and while I appreciated their ear, nothing they said to be explicitly comforting ever really worked. And as I've said, what I fond most effective was actually one of the harshest things ever said to me. and I don't have it in me to be harsh.

So I'm really just a "tell me about it, here's some cocoa" guy, except I don't hve cocoa, but that would be awesome.

Class was tedious, and we got into an irksome discussion of Oscar Wilde. Lot of assumptions were made. Characteristically, I mostly just listened.

Afterward, LOST at Vasa's. Great little ritual there. Always brightens my evening.

I need to cool down, it's 3 AM and of course there's school tomorrow. Me and my bad habits. Sigh.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Chapter 3: I'm always ready to go

I'm always checking the clock, I've always got my bag, my traveling gear, I'm always twitching in my seat. That's the life of the commuter. It's sad, sometimes, I've had some far-too-abrupt goodbyes in my time, especially this year, but I need the commute now more than ever.

So this is where I'm at.

Two papers due Tuesday. Not unfucked for them.

Slipping into some bad habits. Squandered my lead time on the film paper. Work this weekend, plus a family birthday. Where did your focus go, Scotto? You've been doing really well.

Have gotten a good number of papers back, will marks all on target for what I think I should be doing, well up from last semester proving that my downward slide from last semester was not irreversible. But it won't do a damn bit of good if I don't get these papers made.

I've had a lot of ideas flash through my head lately. Ways of properly framing stories I already had, fleshing out ideas I already had in slight detail, and ideas built from the ground up. So when I got home from school today I was more focused on those, because the moment is the moment, as detrimental as it is to my scholastic pursuits.

My own fault.

This week was such an uneventful week at school, I can barely bring myself to remember it. It's just zipping by lately. The most interesting thing didn't even happen to me, it was described to me by a friend who goes to another school. He was taking his recycling out and he ran into a pretty girl bringing her laundry down to the wash, so he gives her a smile, as a courtesy. He returns for his recycling bin later to find a red thong in there. He asks me what to do in this scenario. The answer would be beyond obvious if it weren't for the fact I left out: he has a girlfriend. So, using my writerly skills, I coached him on what might be a good way, if he should see her again, to defuse the situation. Or is it diffuse the situation? Like a lens diffuses light. (Dictionary.com says defuse.)

I've been in my own head a lot this week.

Been thinking about TV laugh tracks. They're disappearing, as TV writing gets smarter and less quip-based, with better stories and characters. This, after watching NBC's Thursday night lineup, which consists (as it has for years now) of four single camera-style shows, three of which are top-notch.

Shows in this format have a lot going for them. It's a form and content question. Laugh track shows are mainly descendant from stage plays, single-camera shows from movies (the first show of my generation to embrace this format was Clueless. M*A*S*H was single-camera, but had a laugh track and was filmed rather conventionally.) You get scenes in a single-camera show you couldn't or wouldn't, do in front of a live studio audience. The humour takes a less obvious "look at me I am being funny" stance, because there is nobody in the immediate vicinity that needs to be amused. But take last night's episode of Community, where a game of pool ends up as a strip showdown, or the Office, which had a montage of Dwight dismantling Jim and Pam's kitchen. Can't do that on a stage with a hundred audience members waiting for the shot to be set-up.

This is the entire plot of the second series of Extras.

Really, there's no reason to assume people are all that attached to the traditional multi-camera sitcom with a live studio audience anymore. We still have them, though. Some of them, like Two and a Half Men, are lame. Big Bang Theory, I happen to like, because it works both within the form of the multi-camera and as a subversion of it, just by virtue of how unique the character of Sheldon is (an extreme sitcom archetype with his own set of internal logic, Kramer for the 21st century. One episode deftly deconstructs the concept of the sitcom lie. The show is not un-self-aware.)

Interesting hybrid, though, How I Met Your Mother. It's a multi-camera sitcom not filmed in front of a lie studio audience (*the laughter, apparently, comes from an audience shown a tape of the final episode.) This allows for better usage of the show's flashbacks, variety of settings and plotlines. It's a relatively complex show, yet all in the name of an extreme level of conventionality, elevating the norm to an artform.

It's all a matter of artifice. Despite its less stilted approach to dialogue, character and story (you can follow characters anywhere and let them say anything, going deeper than mere quips,) the single-camera show involves a more considerable level of construction, of heightened form: editing, music, often some kind of third-wall-breaking narration of talking head. The multi-camera, for the most part, has a simpler nature. Given its relationship to the stage play, it usually plays through one scene to its end, to enable the audience to fully comprehend it.

From a production styandpoint I can see how the multi-cam is preferable, but from a finished product, there's no denying that the best single-camera shows are superior. There have been crummy single-camera sitcoms *(Kath & Kim comes to mind) but when you consider how many lousy multi-camera shows appeared for a brief period before cancellation between 2000 and 2005, when HIMYM and The Office both debuted, it's hard to deny that multi-cam was a dying form.

The shame of it is, many really strong single-camera shows fell by the wayside as the audience needed time to acclimate to this trend. Andy Richter Controls the Universe is my main example. There may be another one. Arrested Development hung on by its nails for its entire existence, but at least it got a fair run.

Anyway. It's more complicated than "The network wants to tell you when to laugh" *(although there certainly was that element.) After all, laughter is a community activity: don't you feel less self-conscious about laughing when others are, too?

Well whatever. My computer's running lamely. I uninstalled McAfee and put AVG on, per my dad's instructions, so I'm hoping that isn't the cause, that suddenly my computer's gonna get all laggy again. I was listening to Joel Plaskett's Three. I don't necessarily buy into the idea that that album represents an authentic personal expression as much as a mythologizing of drifter idioms. That said, it's a fallacy to prize "authenticity" in pop music anyhow (this is something I had thought of before, and was recently brought up in Pop Music class.) That said, there most definitely seems to be a distinction between those songs that come from personal experience of the performer and those that are merely constructed and performed. It's an impressive production. I think it probably could've been several tracks shorter, but that would've messed up the entire conceit (three discs of 9 tracks. Here you have construction and representation and artifice at play again. I am such a university student.) I could say the same for Locksley. They so brilliantly ape that pre-Rubber Soul era when the Beatles weren't much singing about themselves in particular.

Everything's made up. I always wonder about those questions I got after Half-Past, wondering how autobiographical it all was, and I had to observe their mild confusion when I admitted "Uh, none at all? It's a work of fiction." What you do, if you're a good writer, is put real feelings into stuff that never happened.

I'll never forget Rayter's words: Just because it really happened doesn't make it good writing.

I've never read a James Frey book, but I imagine there's a brilliant proof of that statement in there (in that people were more willing to consider A Million Little Pieces a work of genius when they thought it really happened.)

One of my many ideas for a new project is heavily based off things that happened to me in life, but recontextualized in a way that it becomes fiction.

Read Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" for a brilliant examination of the phenomenon.

I'd better get to bed. I've got to take penance for my procrastination tomorrow.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Chapter 2: It isn't

It was Jorge Luis Borges who said you could write a thousand biographies of a single person. A biography about their loves, about their jobs, about their family, about their taste in food and music and all the times they went to the barber and every time they write a train...

He didn't say that exactly. It was a half-remembered description of a Borges quote from a prof I had back in the summer, now cutely summed up in this way.

Of course, in any given person, only one of these biographies would probably be of interest. If that many. A few years ago, I attempted (and more or less succeeded) to write an autobiography wrapped around the conceit of my near-decade of bowling, mingled with my awkward adolescent experiences with girls, my growth as a writer (to think I thought I had fully grown then: I'd barely started. Still growing now, at a remarkable pace I think.) It was a fruit salad of content, but the backbone was bowling because from 1998 until 2007, it was the constant. It was where I met my first girlfriend, where I had my first job. Where I first saw a transsexual, for what that's worth. It was because of this bowling that dad met his longtime girlfriend. I was in the league with her son.

Of course this was a pointless exercise. I wanted something easy to write, and although autobiographies are against the "rules" of NaNoWriMo, the contest in which I was ostensibly participating, I went ahead anyway. A funny thing. All the years leading up to SWP are obscure, gone except for my memory of them, but so long as there's an internet, I assume SWP will always be there to be my record. How stupid it sometimes is: a faithful record of my stupidity, unconcerned with the future context of some of my more morose ramblings. A person writing himself into existence. And now I'm tweeting myself into a double-life too. A punchier, more lighthearted one.

An autobiography of Scott as athlete.

Bowling was the only sport at which I ever excelled, possibly owing to my self-obsession (which has long since mutated into an eager preoccupation with observing others.) I wasn't immediately good at league-level 10-pin, but uncharacteristically I persevered, until by the end of the first year I rolled a 180 in Travel League finals at Bowlerama West (the crown jewel of the Bowlerama franchise,) a number I'd be rather pleased to get nowadays. In bowling, you don't face other people, you face yourself. The lane is supposedly the same, although it isn't always. The pins are supposed to behave the same, although they don't always. Your opponent's performance has no effect on your own except the psychological. You face your inner self and your physical limitations. Bowling was my way of wrestling against all the things my body did that were out of my control as a teenager. How I walked, swung the ball, walked confidently up and down the lanes was a different person from the shuffling, introverted kid I was during the week. But that was when I was doing well. When I wasn't, when my arm gave out sooner than usual, or my stride just didn't hit the right rhythm, or for whatever reason I wasn't doing as well as I knew I could, I took it hard. I was an over-emotional kid, which might shock some of my friends but not all of them. But man, I sure did get worked up over not making a spare.

Technically speaking, if you're a skinny kid with glasses, you can bowl as well as a fat middle-aged dude or a grown woman. It's physical, but not dependent entirely on the facts of your body: it's just how you use it.

This was the sport that carried me through puberty, those awkward years between grade 6 and the end of Sheridan, by which point my body was more or less mature. I was a spotty kid (to use the British terminology.) I always thought the grease of the bowling alley contributed to this problem: the beginning and end of my case coincided with beginning and ending league bowling. It was just me though, not an epidemic. It bothered my parents, which bothered me. And now here I am, however many years later. I don't know if I'm a good-looking dude or not, but my skin is clear.

Before that, it was football, and before that soccer. Soccer started around the time kids at school were getting tired of games of make-believe and fake a cappella groups (we did really bad Weird Al style parodies) and needed something physical to do at recess. I was usually goalie. Remarkably I never broke my glasses.

I had fast hands. Still do. Oftentimes at work, I'll be struggling with a bunch of product and it might get knocked off a counter, and without even looking at it I'll catch it -- or stop it, or catch SOME of it. My proudest moment was a shoot-out where I was in net against Dean, at the time a formidable soccer player. He tried to fake me out. He took his shot. Bam. It hit my hands. The ball was stopped between my palms. I was holding it. And what I remember about that moment was this:

One: I just stopped a shot from the best player in our grade. I am the greatest goalie ever.

And two: Holy FUCK THAT HURT.

Pro goalies wear gloves, kids.

Football I was less good at. The tagalong kid. My best friend Drew was the quarterback. I was typically the guy passing him the ball at the snap. Maybe the dude just liked ass. Any ass. Probably not though.

Couldn't throw a spiral, couldn't hardly catch a ball (sometimes though.) Definitely couldn't run (that's why I was a goalie) and couldn't tackle for shit. Football was not my sport.

There was also a brief time when I was good at basketball: sorta. I had an amazing talent for getting the ball off my opponents, just snagging it when they weren't looking, swiping it and speeding down the court before anyone knew I had gotten the ball. Couldn't shoot for shit, though. And that was the shame of it, there was never anyone on my team at that end of the court to pass it to, so I had to take the shot.

The last time I played any of these sports was in grade 9 gym. You know that cliche about the skinny, nerdy kid who always got picked last? Oddly enough, that wasn't me.

It totally would've been, mind you. I so completely fall into that archetype. But at that age, somehow it's as much about who you know as what you can do. I was friends with Luke, who usually ended up as captain of whatever team so while I was definitely not the first round pick, I was in such low demand that by the time he had one or two relatively strong athletes I'd still be there, because I was his buddy and he was loyal. I didn't think I even deserved it.

Anyway, life has been that uneventful that I've spent this whole night reliving this nonsense rather than deal with the actualities of my life... which is sad, sincEI have papers coming due.

Well, I'll find my way. I always do.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Chapter 1: As far as you know I am here

(This is a warning from the middle of the post: I'm halfway through writing this and I realize I've gone off and written a rant I've already written numerous times before, so if you're not interested, I won't blame you for clicking away. I would never blame you for that anyway. If you find yourself gettign bored, just scroll down until you get to the word Cabbage.)

It amuses me to some degree to hear the music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones emanating from my brother's room. Not that he shouldn't like them, by all means. But as far as I can remember I was the only one in my family with any real interest in music.

That's inaccurate. Eric has a healthy respect for music, but never got around to doing the necessary legwork to become familiar with it on any meaningful level. So the works of Led Zeppelin and David Bowie and the Clash remain largely obscure to him, but that doesn't mean he doesn't care, that he can't appreciate good music, or that he doesn't occasionally stumble into deep love of a key obscurity or stray classic.

When I was about 12, Eric, then 16 or so, was obsessed with the films of Tarantino, and played, endlessly, their soundtracks. Tarantino is no musical slouch and his early films especially represent a whirling cyclone of postmodern cultural patchwork. Steelers Wheel and Little Green Bag and Al Green and Chuck Berry and Bobby Womack all blended together only by virtue of the fact that it was the music, the specific songs, Tarantino had chosen. And he played them on and on without headphones in our basement, at all hours of the night, as if his own little world didn't intrude on ours.

B. and I were raised on Aerosmith. B. got his love of them from his childhood friend Andy (and the fact that they were, in fact, the most popular band in the world in 1992,) and I got mine from them. Steven Tyler's voice has a kind of fatherly familiarity to me and I can barely remember a time he wasn't yowling to me about Walking This Way or making Love in an Elevator. Not the most sophisticated band, perhaps, but far more clever, in their lyrics and arrangements, than most observers would credit them: the undeniable groove of their early recordings and their inventive, intuitive solos that always seem so natural it's hard to believe one of the guitarists had to actually plan it out. To begin the Pop Music in North America course, Pilzer played an mp3 of two Nickelback songs overlaid (How You Remind Me Of Someday) and this exists not as a criticism of Nickelback in particular but as an observation about pop music in general. There is a form that seems to repeat itself, here in its most obvious form: Kurt Cobain (whose own songs could probably be overlaid with some success) described it as "Verse, chorus, verse, solo, bad solo." Something along those lines. It isn't that Aerosmith escaped these trappings, it's that they were particularly excellent at manipulating the elements as it pleased them.

Sometimes their songs begin with the chorus, sometimes they don't have a chorus at all. Sometimes there's a long solo before the vocals kick in. If the chorus to "Dream On" goes "Sign with me/sing for the years/sing for the laughter/sing for the tears," what would you call the part that goes "Dream on/dream on/dream on/dream until your dram comes true"? It's not a verse, and it can't be a chorus because it's sung only once, and at the end of the song, rather than the middle like a refrain. What about their version of Train Kept A-Rollin, which changes tempo midway through? What about the way the two guitars seem to smash into each other in "Toys In The Attic?" And when they go verse-chorus-verse, as they often do, especially on forgotten album tracks and in their later song doctor-afflicted years, they find ways to spice it up, whether in instrumentation (as frequently on Pump) or by forgetting the structure they started with and surprising you late in the song (as on, say, Lick and a Promise, off Rocks.)

Lyrically, they are often dismissed as being overly cock-rock oriented, and though they are often that, it would be stupid to dismiss them as only that. It's like saying the Who are all cock-rock because they did Squeeze Box, or that AC/DC is only cock-rock because... well, actually, they are. But I think the Who comparison is apt, if slightly exaggerating the artistic merits of Aerosmith's music. They clearly don't aspire to art, and it is because they are so good at what they do that they reach it. If all their songs are about a good time, what kind of a good time is Rag Doll, or Dude Looks Like a Lady, or The Other Side?

Yeah, a lot of their songs are about getting laid, but they never seem to glamorize it all that much. There's a weariness in their lyrics, especially their early ones, that goes along with their blues roots. When Tyler & Co sat down to write the songs for their first album, they seemed to think they'd already been rock stars for a decade. "It's ain't easy livin' like a gypsy, I'll tell ya honey how I feel," on "Mama Kin." On "One Way Street:" "Lately, it's been so hard to make ends meet." And then on "Movin' Out" he gets philosophical, "Level with god and you're in tune withthe universe, talk with yourself and you'll hear what you wanna know / Gotta rise above 'cause below is only gettin' worse, life in time will take you where you wanna go." Again, on "Make It" and especially "Dream On." Young Steven Tyler seemed to have an obsession with the passage of time, because at 25 or so he was observing "All these lines on my face gettin' clearer / The past is gone," unaware that 30 years (or one lifetime) later he'd still be touring (or rather, getting out of touring) with the same four guys.

Their early albums contain a mix, track-to-track, of reckless abandon and mournful exhaustion. The entire second side of Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic and Rocks (both sides of Rocks, actually) alternate between these two moods. Exhaustion took over after that, and the band did its creative and popular nosedive, and then the legendary comeback. After that, it feels like the exhaustion and the good times had blended into each other. Hence, cock-rock songs like "Young Lust" and "F.I.N.E." that sound really dumb, musically, unless read as a commentary on what it really means to have a "good time." (Sample from "F.I.N.E.:" "I know these hookers down on 42nd street but uh / ill-gotten booty's not my sty-i-y-i-yle") and as a means of redemption and even salvation after the end of their drug problems ("Monkey On My Back" and "Voodoo Medicine Man" are entirely about this.) The songs begin to interact with the outside world rather than interpret them as how they affect the self. Probably the best song they ever did, noting this, was "Janie's Got a Gun," but I'll also always love "Living on the Edge" because it was impenetrably vague (it's possible, even likely, that the songwriters had no idea what they thought they were trying to say.) But that endless call-and-response outro gives you all the sense you need of what they're trying to say. You can't help yourself from falling. Just like I've fallen into this rant.

Cabbage.

My point was originally this: B. never had much beyond that at musical stake. He certainly didn't seem to engage with it as deeply as I do, although that's not to say he took all the music at face value. He occasionally has his own thoughts, which always surprises me, because I've never really seen him as someone who thinks critically that way. He likes whatever he happens to like. Not that putting the Stones and the Beatles on his iPod represents some kind of stylistic revolution. It's all the same stuff he's heard for years on the radio when we're at dad's.

A sudden resurgence in interest in childhood interest has inspired a few new ideas. I don't put them near the top of my to-do list (lord knows that list is long enough) but I do need to get out some kind of summary so I don't forget about them.

Expect more talk along those days. I was talking to B. the other day about my earliest memory, which is of my second birthday (or so I believe) being cared for by my great grandfather. I remember only him, but factually there were probably others there. But that's a bit too far back for these hypothetical projects I'm talking about. I'm thinking grade 5 or 6. I'll probably blog it out later to get my momentum on, but for now, I need to end this post, because I've had it open since this afternoon and it's gotten late.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto