R.I.P. Live 'N Loud & Le Labyrinthe

Another day, another tragedy in the local music/arts/distribution world...

First, on the morning of April 10th, legendary rock-and-roll store Le Labyrinthe announced it was closing its storefront:

We're sad to announce that after 43 years as the largest rock/metal/punk/entertainment t-shirt store in Montreal,... fb.me/1FmqodXwl
— Labyrinthe Boutique (@LabyrintheRock) April 9, 2013

Man, I started buying Guns N' Roses t-shirts there in 1989, then remained through the grunge years where I'd buy a t-shirt per week. It calmed down at the turn of the century, as I've been into funny shirts more than rock shirts for a while, but I'd still make my way down there three or four times a year, and never came out empty-handed.

They'd expanded from the music/bong/belt buckle/poster scene to add a comics/DVD section a few years ago, and I was under the impression that wasn't going too badly, but I may have been wrong.

Later that afternoon, online music magazine/review site Live 'N Loud announced it, too, was calling it quits. I knew people who wrote for LNL, and they hadn't heard from their bosses in weeks. Now we know why.

It's a tough time to be associated with the arts in any form, and the overhead is killing many a business, particularly those operating downtown, what with the city speculating on buildings' value to increase tax revenue promptly landlords to increase the rent they charge and businesses seeing their profit margins disappear.

Another proof that short-term visions are a cancer to public finance and politics: what's better, 20% of something, or 30% of nothing? If they stopped stealing from the public directly, said public would be able to afford to spend their money, which through taxes would end up finding their way back into our crooked politicians' pockets anyway. But they get so greedy they kill off their own supply - and we all lose in the end.

Labyrinthe had been open since 1970. 43 years.

My mom was twelve, Paul McCartney was leaving The Beatles, Black Sabbath released their first and second records, Guyanna joined the Commonwealth, Rhodesia and Tonga became their own countries (seceded from the British empire), the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty came into effect, Canada declared Québec under Martial Law during the October Crisis, Apollo 13 was in space, four dead in Ohio (Kent State University students, inspired Neil Young to write what could be his best song ever), journalist Ruben Salazar was killed by the L.A. police (prompting Hunter S. Thompson - also covering the Chicano crisis - to write one of his finest works for Rolling Stone), Jimi Hendrix and Janis Jolpin both died within two weeks of each other, Monday Night Football debuts on TV, Doonesbury debuts in newspapers, the Marshall University football team were among 75 victims of an air crash, and Catherine of Siena and Theresa of Avila were made Saints by the Catholic Church.

If it seems like a lifetime ago, it's because it was. It's History, and it's being disposed of like fucking garbage.

The Distorted Eyes Of History

In the past 25 years or so, we've become so accustomed to ''grey areas'' - to finding reasons behind bad behaviour, to looking at broader pictures for further explanations - that we often find ourselves going overboard trying to ''pink up'' characters who, instead, deserve to be shown in their ''all dark'' light.

Except those outside our political systems, of course. Fidel Castro is a terrorist (whereas elsewhere, he's a liberator); Hugo Chavez was a monster (whereas elsewhere he's a provider); Mao was a mass-murderer (whereas in his country, he was a visionary and forward thinker).

Some are universally despised: your Joseph Stalin, your Adolph Hitler.

But in the days since her passing, there are far too many people jumping on the Margaret Thatcher bandwagon, and those who criticize her reign are scolded for being too harsh. We're talking about a woman who was so Conservative in her politics and policies that she created caused a rise in unemployment - a 3 million hike - and all but killed mining towns; she attacked the arts (who, good on them, attacked her right back, ensuring British films and music not all be soiled by the Duran Duran-ness of the 1980s and had some meaning, thanks to the likes of Morrissey, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, Renaud, Stephen Frears, Derek Jarman,Ken Loach, and Lee Hall); she outlawed the ''promotion'' of homosexuality; she wasn't afraid of calling larger groups of opponents ''terrorists'' so they could be dealt with by force, just as she asked for stronger police interventions; and as the world was awakened to the problems in South Africa, she refused any type of sanction on them; she privatized state-owned companies by the hundreds, fucked with minimum-and-other-wage laws and was a huge fan of deregulation - particularly in the financial sector. And she was re-elected.

Remind you of anyone?

I sure as fuck hope when George W. Bush and Stephen Harper die, we won't be applauding their reign as something that was for the best of Humanity.

This being the internet (i.e. ''public'') and me living in a police state (Montréal 2013, Québec, Canada) I want to state, as clearly as I can, that I do not wish them dead any time soon, nor do I encourage anyone to help them get there, and am in no way attempting to intimidate or threaten them in this post.

Now back to the point:

In math, a wrong answer is a wrong answer; even if all the equations along the way are correct, if you fuck up at some point, the answer will be wrong. As a human being, you can be fundamentally good, or fundamentally bad. Politics should not be any different. The good you do has to outweigh the bad, or you've done a bad job. The more the imbalance, the worse you are.

Thatcher, Bush II, Harper: all bad, be it nationally, or internationally. On almost every single level.

If you understand French, I urge you to read this column by senile author Nathalie Petrowski, a voice of reason in the late 1980s (or so it seemed through my childish eyes) who seems intent on making up for whatever decency she once had by spewing half-thoughts and writing shitty screenplays, safe in the confines of her brain's suburbs. (I am not threatening her, either, just disagreeing.) In it, she forgets about the 11 years of The Iron Lady's reign altogether and - in a reverse-double-feminist-backflip wonders if all of her detractors weren't coming at her that hard because, as a woman, Miss Maggie represented ''their mother, their country, a part of themselves, their impotence?''...

Jesus, lady, it might just be five-cent psychology, but if you use it too much, it'll still bankrupt you.

One of the only things she should be applauded for is, indeed, sporting a vagina. As a woman in Western politics, she was a pioneer. Two things, though: 1. she was still a dick, and 2. we also put a Conservative woman in place to break barriers, in Canada, but we were smart enough to not elect Kim Campbell afterwards because we knew she didn't have what it takes to lead a country and not, you know, ruin it.

There are tons of women deserving of political power, and tons who would be just as unflappable as Thatcher - German Chancellor Angela Merkel is one on the Conservative side, the U.S.' Hilary Clinton and Brazilian President Dilma Vana Rousseff are more in the center of the political scale, and the Left has Argentina's Cristina Fernández de Kirchner - neither of them would do irreparable damage to their countries, and all of them can/could do a better job than many of their male counterparts, past or present.

When cases like these spring up, I'm always reminded of George W. Bush's famous ''History will judge me'' quote, and I'm afraid some insane assholes will, indeed, try to pass him off as something other than a warmongering, power-hungry, oil industry puppet hell-bent on taking away as many rights and freedoms as he possibly could in the least amount of time - truth be told, he was way worse in the first 4 years than the latter 4, unless I'm forgetting things.

We cannot let our propensity to play Devil's Advocate ruin the way history is recorded; it's already compromised by the ''winner writes history'' thing, and the traditional burning of national libraries when at war, we don't need to add extra layers of lies and sugar-coating to not expose those who tried to regress and repress mankind's evolution, especially when it directly opposes that of the free market in our erroneous way of using capitalism (which should always be about exponential growth on both the owners' and the workers' sides so everybody profits even more, 1950s-style, not the ''let's use slave-labour in third-world countries to sell our products to folks who can no longer afford them'' way).

I may have digressed, I'm not sure anymore. But fuck Thatcher anyway.

No Metal In London Museum

I'm all for mixing the arts, but it seems London's Victoria & Albert Museum aren't - they cancelled a recent collaboration between heavy metal music (more specifically ''grindcore'') group Napalm Death and resident ceramic (!) artist Keith Harrison due to... fear they might ''damage the historic fabric of the building''!

This was due to take place in the Europe Galleries which are currently being refurbished and a further safety inspection has revealed concerns that the high level of decibels generated by the concert would damage the historic fabric of the building.

The V&A is committed to an exciting programme of exhibitions and events but the safety of our visitors and building remains our priority at all times.

Yeah, sure, the safety of shattering a centuries-old building, not of people moshing...

This Irish Examiner article adds these tidbits of information:

Artist Keith Harrison, who became interested in the band after hearing them on the John Peel show on BBC Radio 1 as a teenager, created three ceramic sound systems based on the tiles used on the tower blocks of the Bustleholm Mill estate in West Bromwich, where he grew up.

Harrison is resident ceramic artist at the gallery. Future events he has planned include the detonation of a clay replica of Keith Moon’s drum kit.

Hmmm... it's ok to have a clay drum set explode, but not a rock band (albeit a very loud one...)  throwing sound waves at ceramic tiles? Sounds like additional outsider pressure, or at the very least a museum curator who ended up listening to Napalm Death's music...

Video Of The Week: Yeah Yeah Yeahs

A week from now, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs will release their fourth full-length album, Mosquito, four years after the disappointing, Blondie-esque It's Blitz. Judging by this first single and the quick listens I've been able to string together of bits of the new songs, they've abandoned the post-rock dance party and gone back to indie-rocking, although many of their songs remind me of others: Under The Earth has a very Stooges-like feel (never a bad thing), the title song goes 1999-era Strokes mixed in with The Doors' Five To One and a few Jefferson Airplane notes thrown in for good measure, and Area 52 has an Incesticide-era Nirvana vibe.

That being said, I can never forget the impact their first record, Fever To Tell (2003) - and the live shows up to and including that era - have had on me. I remember when I left New York in the Fall of 1999, we had been called Jon Spencer rip-offs for playing a loud, rocking version of blues riffs without the presence of a bass. I mean, shit - we were shat on for two years and tagged as imitators. Fast forward a year or so after leaving town, late-2000/early 2001, as Creed dominates the charts, the top up-and-coming bands in the U.S. are The White Stripes and The Black Keys, and the most-hyped band in New York are the Yeah Yeah Yeahs - all bass-less, all overblown blues riffs, all two-or-three piece bands involving only guitar and drums (although YYY use bass tracks now).


Needless to say, I was curious to hear them, and was awaiting their live shows ready to tear them to shreds in a review. But I couldn't - they were really good. Despite the lack of insightful lyrics, the one line continuously repeated throughout the chorus, singer Karen O's cheesy gestures. They were good performers, and some of their songs - Maps, Rich, Date With The Night, Modern Romance - were truly great.

On a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 is Creed/Nickleback, 10 is anything Jack White touches and Miles Davis, and 7 is The Black Keys, I'll score YYY a good, hard 8. Despite the Blondie record.

In this video, a reverse-order sequence explains why The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus' (a great fucking movie, by the way) Lily Cole gets burned alive. Spoiler alert: she truly is the town slut.

America Versus Poutine

So someone at BuzzFeed is angry that Americans can't do poutine right, and explains how and why in much detail...

Source: midnightpoutine.ca

Let me tell you something, Henry Goldman, sir, most of Canada can't get it right either. In Toronto, most places use mozzarella or regular cheddar rather than cheddar curds; in Manitoba or Saskatchewan, you can get a severe beating just for ordering one - and my fist was sore from defending myself (and cops were coming), so I had to leave before it even got to my table.

Truth is, while the Rest Of Canada has shown a bizarre love for poutine in particular but Québec foods in general (the current debate is figuring out which between poutine and pea soup is the country's official dish...), it's pretty hard to find a decent fries-brown sauce-cheese meal outside of La Belle Province. Heck, there are probably as many good ones as there are God-awful ones even in Québec.

What we need is a list of decent places, pictures, and a how-to list that we can print out and carry at all times and take out whenever we crave one, and force restaurants to make us one on the spot whether it's on the menu or not - it could become the ''order off the menu'' of our generation.

Fries, cheese curds, warm gravy on top.

Paradise.

Priests And Porn

The good people at Torrent Freak did a little digging, and found out Irish priests like to pirate Hollywood films (via screener DVDs) while people in Vatican City have a preferrence for... well, not much, except porn.

And while TF don't mention what those guys are into and make you Google it yourself, I shall save you the trouble: RS stands for ''Russian slaves'' - chapter 77 seems pretty deep in the series.

How Toy Story And Walking Dead Are the Same Story

I'm usually the first to find similarities between different films, to the point where I could re-edit a new release each week with clips of old films (I did so with Avatar, with mostly just clips from Dances With Wolves and Pocahontas...), but this one I never saw coming, despite being a HUGE Walking Dead and Toy Story fan: 25 similarities between the two.

Here's #1, and check out the rest here:

Calorie Wise

Who can you trust when it comes to labeling the calorie content of food? Who makes sure the labels are accurate? What constitutes ''healthy'' food?

Here's a 5-minute, unscientific demonstration:

Video Of The Week: Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra

Amanda Palmer - the female Jack White for a while (when she was fronting The Dresden Dolls). Now she's more ballad-oriented, more of a Big Band mixed with Tori Amos vibe, but it's still very good.

Controversy has followed her of late, what with the postponement of her 2013 European tour, debate over whether she should try to innovate by offering fans to play as her backing band ''for free'' (internship-like) after having raised over a million dollars to record her latest album... Steve Albini publicly objected...

Her marriage to writer Neil Gaiman continues to feed tabloids, seeing as she still considers herself bisexual and polyamorous (in open relationships)...

And yet she keeps rocking, for our aural pleasure.

Noise Park

Many people take the South Park-themed apps to ''Park'' themselves, their friends, or their idols - or just waste time. The good people at Noise Park took it one step further and took the entire genre of experimental music and turned it into the crude cut-up-style creatures we love watching on TV:

Jean-Michel Jarre

Aphex Twin

Albert Ayler

Whether it's electronica, jazz or whatever that soft prog Jean-Michel Jarre creates, they are now part of the Noise Park universe!