Ahead on Differential

I don't use my personal YouTube account on my work-assigned computer. This has its drawbacks: nothing gets preserved, nothing gets saved, I’m the mercy of what the algorithm wants to throw my way. One odd advantage to this friction: when my browser decides it’s time for an IT-mandated upgrade or a surprise cookie deletion, my YouTube front page becomes a clean slate. This is when I do what I call “goosing the algorithm,” where I run as many videos I like in as many tabs as my poor work laptop can handle at one time (with the sound muted, obviously). The idea is that it keeps the recommendation engine on its toes; what will the oracle offer me after a steady diet of Jon Bois videos, live Ween bootlegs, stationary hauls, guitar rig rundowns, Criterion Closet videos, videos about spelling and fonts and decentralizing the role of your phone in your creative life? There are worse ways to pan for gold.

One of the nuggets this method has yielded is the channel of Evan Monsma, a young Midwestern maker with a flair for the junky, the janky, and the jury-rigged. He builds shelves out of scrap wood, camera rigs out of spare parts, and injection molders from drill presses. He’s also a videographer and scores his own videos. His mix of rolled-sleeve creativity, broad interests, and unpretentiousness reminds me of Wade Nixon aka Dankpods, the similarly down-to-earth Australian drummer/torturer of automobiles/chronicler of obsolete tech.

A week ago, Evan posted a video challenging his just-south-of-30,000 followers to do something creative every day in October. Hardly a novel idea (Kleon has also championed doing something to this effect several times), but something about the way Evan frames it—“nothing complex, nothing super high-pressure,” just something to keep the creative muscles loose—makes it approachable. Don’t drive yourself up the wall making a perfect thing; just make a thing. One small thing a day for a month.

It doesn’t even have to be thirty-one of the same thing. On the 1st, I wrote two verses of a song about the seasons going out of phase; it still sounds like three Mountain Goats songs spot-welded together. Yesterday, I wrote this very post. Today? Who knows. I don’t want to fence myself in. Like Wade and Evan, I have a few different things I’d like to do (though mine involve about 100% fewer sawblades and oil changes). I’ll try blogging a bit more. I want to restring my crappy beginner guitar and learn Leonard Cohen’s not-so-secret six chords. I want to take the Polaroid I got at Value Village for ten bucks out for a spin. I made a zine for a friend recently and was amazed at how invigorating it was to do. There’s a stack of postcards next to my desk begging to be sent. Scrabble, like every Scrabble player will tell you, can be as creative and beautiful as chess, but this specific kind of creativity and beauty falls outside the parameters of “something small every day.”

What I really want to work on is that long-gestating sci-fi poetry manuscript that I’ve been putting together piecemeal for the last few years. But I fear I’ve stalled out because I may have set the bar too high for myself in terms of emotional ambition; I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that I think I’ve written myself into a corner I don’t have the skill or heart to escape.

Maybe I’ll feel more up to the task by the time Halloween comes around.

#blog

the moon is two-faced unwilling to answer prayers and made of cocaine

#poetry

1. The word for the shavings left over when someone drills into steel is “swarf.”
2. The laundromat is an underrated third place.
3. You can write about 160 words on one quarter of an A4 page.
4. “Plots are for coffins and pedants.” —Spencer Hall
5. Board game streams are only as good as their colour commentators.
6. It's good to be a local legend.
7. Baseball is primarily vibes.
8. If you're boiling your corn on the cob, six minutes is plenty.
9. If you can't sleep, read.
10. Old notebooks are the cheapest form of time travel.

#tenthings

The great Shelley Duvall passed away today, and all I can think about are the rougher edges of her story. Her agony on the set of The Shining, that stupid fucking episode of Dr. Phil, her years in the whatever-happened-to wilderness. But I don't want Shelley Duvall to live in my memory as a victim, as someone who was yelled at, ground down, and paraded around as a sideshow. A Cannes Best Actress and Peabody Award winner, let alone of the the iconic American actresses of the 1970s, deserves a better legacy in my head.

Duvall was, in short, the coolest, an instant value-added to any movie she was in, no matter how small the role. What her filmography lacks in volume is made up in pure presence. There is, of course, her god run as part of Robert Altman's stock company in the 1970s, but her idiosyncratic TV work in the 1980s, much of it as the main creative force, is well worth your time and attention. After her heyday, she popped up here and there in the 1990s and 2000s, in projects helmed by everyone from Jane Campion to Steven Soderbergh, and retired in 2002.

Then, 14 years late, that stupid fucking episode of Dr. Phil happened, an episode of television so cruel and callow that Lee Unkrich—the fucking Toy Story guy, who's also Shining superfan number one—tracked her down himself to make sure she was okay.

Broadly speaking, she was. In 2021, Duvall was profiled in the Hollywood Reporter and, for the first time in a long time, she got to tell her side of the stories that loomed over her legend. People loved and will always love Shelley Duvall, but this piece, written by Seth Abramovitch, was key in reminding the world who she was. It made clear as day that behind the big eyes and ingenue roles was a woman tough as Texas leather.

But what will linger with me the longest is the audio of her being coached by Harry Nilsson through her rendition of “He Needs Me,” from Big Swing Hall of Fame film Popeye. Any Altman starring Shelley Duvall is worth your time, but Popeye is kind of a weird miracle. The part of Malta where they shot the movie still looks like that.

“Good, Shelley!”

#obit #movies

Some of these are things everyone's favourite video game plumber has said over the course of his storied career. Some of these things are shouted by Mark Morrison at the end of certain lines of his immortal 90s R&B hit “Return of the Mack.” Your job is to figure out which is which (and also imagine “Return of the Mack” with Mario ad libs instead). I'll say this: there's more overlap here than you think.

1. “It's a-me!”
2. “Hold on!”
3. “Come on!”
4. “Boy oh boy!”
5. “Round and round!”
6. “Here I go!”
7. “Once again!”
8. “Here we go!”
9. “Oh my God!”
10. “Oh yeah!”
11. “All right!”
12. “Be strong!”

This way to the answer key. How did you do?

#music

All right, time to clear the decks.

The arc of life bends long, but I don't know that holding my own writing hostage because I'm not thinking about Mixtape Forensics or Ten Things or (this one is for the real heads) the Ebert Cup is a good or productive idea. Sometimes you just want to write a short missive about what you've been up to.

For good or ill, I often think that I'm pissing my days away doing dumb shit. Then I get in my head about what not pissing my days away might look like. Everyone has their own version of the proverbial “good day”; some of us write legendary rap hits about them. Sooner or later, I start thinking about a post Austin Kleon¹ made in 2017 called “A checklist for every day.” In it, Kleon traces the origin of Goethe's good day—”one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words”—and emphasizes that liking stuff is the first step towards making stuff. But also, doesn't just sound like a nice way to spend your time? Music, poetry, art: what day isn't at least improved by experiencing them?

So how have I been completing the Goethe Haul² lately?

For reasons that can be traced back to the Midnight Special YouTube page, I've had Slade's glam-rock stomper “Gudbuy T'Jane” stuck in my head for most of the last month. Roy Peter Clark's How to Write Short inspired me to keep a book of little poems in my bag. I got reacquainted with the graphic design work of the great Aaron Draplin, a man who loves Dinosaur Jr. and painted signage on corrugated steel in equal measure; as good as his work is (and it is good, peep the archives, read the book), what I admire about him most is his blue-collar Our Band Could Be Your Life approach to working and lecturing. I'm knee-deep in words, reasonable and otherwise: books, podcasts, press releases, Scrabble³, correspondence with friends.

Most of my days are good using the rubric, and that's good enough.

¹ The decks may have been cleared, but one thing that will never change here at Ahead on Differential is most of my good ideas can be traced back to either Kleon or Kottke.

² A “haul” is what soccer fans call a four-goal hat trick, or so Reddit tells me.

³ Not only is Scrabble still an ongoing concern, but I am paying someone to teach me to get better at playing it.

#blog

Memory's funny. I have forgotten key facts about the people I love and cherish the most, but somehow, I still remember the eight seconds of Canadian basic cable where the Beastie Boys dissed Al Di Meola. If memory serves, and it may well not, it was on MuchMusic (i.e. Canadian MTV). The context for this cross-genre drive-by has been lost to time, but I distinctly remember there being a cutaway from the Beasties to a dude who looked like a bad guy from RoboCop twiddling knobs while strip-mall martial artists and tech demo assets dance around him. It's a baffling cultural artifact from an era thick with them.

The video for “Sequencer,” and its parent album Scenario, were unleashed onto an unsuspecting public in 1983, the year jazz fusion broke on MTV. This wasn't because of Di Meola: the video for “Sequencer” is, charitably, the dorkiest thing I've ever seen. Di Meola is doing is best Rick Wakeman impression throughout, what with the capes and synthesizers and all. It is the visual equivalent of a katana hanging on an otherwise bare apartment wall (and not only because there are literal katanas in this video). No, jazz fusion broke on MTV because that same year, Herbie Hancock took over MTV with the funky avant-garde nightmare fuel of “Rockit.” This was not a fair fight. Hancock was filtering his sound through the nascent idiom of hip-hop; Di Meola filtered his through Miami Vice, which makes sense, since the credited songwriter is the smuggler himself, Jan Hammer. So while “Sequencer” isn't great jazz fusion, it is superlative arena-rock cheese.

I still don't know a ton about Di Meola or his work. I'm familiar with Friday Night in San Francisco, his landmark live album with fellow guitar wizards John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía, because every used record store on Earth is legally required to have one copy of it in stock at all times (see also: August and Everything After, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, and that one ELO compilation, you know the one). I'm not a big Chick Corea/Return to Forever guy; my taste in jazz fusion runs funkier, towards Casiopea or, say, Herbie Hancock. But the main lick of “Sequencer” is catchy, the synthesized percussion in the middle reminds me of Hiroshi Sato's work (consider this my plus for his wonderful 1982 album Awakening, and the music video is an all-time piece of kitsch, memorable enough to appear on my brain's front door last month after literal decades of not thinking about it.

#music

Okay, this one requires a little table-setting.

There's this cartoonist/animator from South Korea who goes by Ramdaram. If you've encountered any of her stuff in the wild, it's likely one of her animated music videos starring her OCs, one for Jack Stauber's “Two Time” (24 million views at time of writing), one for Tim Legend's “Soda City Funk”^[1] (52 million views). The OC lore is extensive and cryptic in the way these self-contained universes tend to be (no doubt exacerbated here by my inability to speak Korean), but the videos are fun explosions of Gen Z webcore energy. “Poison” is a newer, moodier entry in Ramdaram's “Underfity Friends” story cycle^[2], soundtracked by Evgeny Bardyuzha's “Tastes Like Poison.”

There isn't much online when you search Bardyuzha's name, which leads me to believe he's just a dude out in Chelyabinsk who likes making electronic music, sometimes for clients (those motivational business videos don't score themselves, shout out to the library music producers out there), sometimes for fun. “Tastes Like Poison” is indeed fun in a club-goth Drive-core kind of way. It sounds like the Weeknd and M83 trying to write a crossover EDM hit. Ramdaram seems to be doing well for herself as well: just south of a million YouTube subscribers, a handful of viral videos, a steady stream of new work on Instagram (movie dork bonus: her most recent piece at time of writing contains a nod to Chungking Express). There's something heartening about stumbling onto the work of people plugging away on the other side of the planet.

[1] It is absurd how hard “Soda City Funk” goes. I mean, it's just “Got to Be Real” plus “Do You Wanna Get Funky?” at 1.7x speed, but it works.

[2] Perhaps sensing there were a bunch of non-Korean goofballs like yours truly among her subscriber base, Ramdaram released an English-language lore explainer last year with the circuitous, oddly poetic title of “Story of a city where it's not strange for a person to go missing.”

#music

Continuing from last time: “The Surfer” sounds like Vampire Weekend's version of a lo-fi hip hop song, down to the drum machine, leisurely tempo, and woozy processed piano. But “The Surfer” also has Ezra Koenig singing and some sick George Harrison-esque guitar, which, honestly, more lo-fi hip hop should have.

As indie-heads of a certain vintage shuffle towards middle age, one question lingers in their hearts: does Vampire Weekend pass the Five-Album Test? I couldn't hum you a single bar of anything on Father of the Bride right now, so I'll have to revisit it before I set my take in stone. But to hear father of the Five-Album Test Steven Hyden say it, the band has sailed over the crossbar with room to spare. This discusson can be heard on a recent episode of Hyden's Indiecast podcast, which he co-hosts with fellow music writer Ian Cohen. It's a banger of an episode: they talk about that one time Pitchfork reviewed a Jet album with no text, just a video of a monkey pissing into its mouth, but they're dead wrong about Good News for People Who Love Bad News being overrated.

But there's at least one thing my fellow greying Xillennials and I can agree on: Only God Was Above Us is awesome! It rocks hard! The workrate has slowed down (Koenig was otherwise busy daisy-chaining hyphenates in the five years since Father of the Bride was released, just as he was in the six years between that album and Modern Vampires of the City) but the work, crucially, is still good.

#music

I want to invoke a gentler version of Sturgeon's law: 90% of lo-fi hip hop sounds interchangeable. That's not a knock against the genre: I, along with tens of thousands of people this very second, have chosen lo-fi hip hop (or its hacker cousin, synthwave) as my ambient music of choice. It's what courses through my ears when I read on the couch in the wee small hours. The idiom is still in its infancy, still evolving out its clichés, making it reasonably easy for an artist to stick out. One of my favourites, the Finnish musician Kupla, sets himself apart with waltz times and free reeds. “just can't help it” by Vancouver-based producer Ngyn grabbed me with a simple, evocative vocal hook. Sometimes that's all it takes to end up on a playlist.

Lo-fi hip hop's fuel is nostalgia. Yours, someone else's, real, fictional, it doesn't matter. Now, if I were younger and more guileless, “just can't help it” would have 100% inspired me to make my own track, one sampling, say, Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea saying “I can't beat it,” so I understand the impulse to make of this kind of art. It's the same impulse that drives people to make AMVs soundtracked by “Somewhere Only We Know” or similar, nightcore versions of Rural Alberta Advantage singles, or sadboi moodboards set to the score of Minari (I believe the technical term is “webweaving,” which appears to be the Tumblr arm of the TikTok Sadposting Industrial Complex). People on the internet are often sad, so they create these digital pamphlets and readymades that are conduits for their own aches and lightning rods for those of others, all refracted through the lingua franca of a pop culture, if not the pop culture. The only difference between then and now is the tools used to perform these microcultural emotional exorcisms got easier to use.

In other words, lo-fi hip hop at its worst is kitsch, gunning for unearned pathos using trite shorthand. But at its best, it can evoke a whole world, not just your childhood bedroom. It can come by its resonance honestly like any other kind of music: through the alchemy of instrumentation, performance, arrangement, and production. Hell, even a good song title can help; “Rat Salad” kicks ass in no small part because it's called “Rat Salad.” The same is true for “Mist Beneath Your Apartment.”

#music