Years ago, I saw this TV interview with some author who was talking about the essence of London. If I'm not mistaken, he said something about Get the Knack by The Knack capturing whatever the essence of London is, even though they're from Los Angeles. He might have been talking about The Kinks. Regardless, I get it. If I had to pick an album for Edmonton, it would be the Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse. They're from outside of Seattle, but everything from their guitar tones to Isaac Brock's drawl feels like home.
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Recently, I've become obsessed with images in the way I used to be back when I was the movie maker kid. I try to get a couple of photos and videos in a day. I've been trying to take equal amounts of stuff that's either structural or just straight portraiture. And I really love the heady, structural stuff, but I seem to be actually really good at capturing people. It lights my brain up in a way that even something like writing can't sometimes.
Years ago, I mentioned N-----'s brother in here in passing, and I didn't even refer to him as her brother, L-----. I said something about white rappers, which are the first two words that come to mind whenever I think of him. He's a rapper. I'm not sure if he does anything else. He's a character - and when I say character, I mean fucking capital-C Character - that has been on the peripheral of my life for a few years now, but I haven't met him yet. I was supposed to on the first weekend that I went back to Red Deer when I moved to Edmonton, but in going back, J----- took my place in going with N----- and her mom to one of her brother's shows (for some reason, I wasn't aware until very recently that the plan that weekend was for me specifically to tag along with them, given how interested I've been in L-----). This night, in the words of N-----'s mom, was "The beginning of the end." You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, L-----. The simplest way to explain him is that he's quite literally Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad: vaguely similar fall-from-grace background, shockingly similar personal hang-ups and wardrobe, but, thankfully unlike Jesse, has largely cleaned up his act, and this is no small part thanks to hip hop. This is what fascinates me about him. At first, it was an almost mean-spirited, "Look at this fucking guy" kind of fascination. The kind white, small-town rappers are the perfect subject of (and a part of why the archetype interests me at all). But, upon asking into the guy, the fascination has become entirely earnest, and it's entirely because of what I've seen the music do for him and his family. When I say 'white rapper,' the image I bet you have in your head is probably close to the real guy. Think spiritual-lyrical-miracle, except not subtly racist and outwardly lame. So, think K.I.D.S.-era Mac Miller. That's at least how his music immediately registered to me as, which N-----'s mom showed me and E----- in her car after she took us our for dinner last night. I expected it to be goofy, and that's not to say that it isn't (Albertan English set to boom bap sounds weird, especially when rapping about "thick bitches"), but all things considered, it's pretty well done. By no means is it really my thing these days. Again, think spiritual-lyrical-miracle. But he can put together a functional rap song. Where this really becomes important to me is seeing N------'s mom lip sync every word of this one song, "AOKAY." First off, her mom is a K-12 special Ed teacher who is very sweet but also militantly neighborly in a way that's kind of off-putting, which is to say she seems too nice for the good of anyone, but that's besides the point. That I'm sure gives you a very particular image, one with cardigans and Southern Albertan dontcha-knows. Now, picture that woman lip syncing to a rap song written and performed by her song that's one part braggadocio and three parts positivity. No matter the references to thick bitches, picture her going about it like a hymnal, where the music elates as if to literally redeem, smiling with the intensity of recovering from cancer. Picture the traffic of nightlife - cars, the homeless, and 18-year-olds - passing by in the windshield of her car. Picture the feeling of everyone else in it thinking this might be going on for too long. Picture the thousandth drive home under the light of condominiums and new student housing developments: the look of the North Saskatchewan River and the challenge posed by the Canadian night. I wish I had recorded it. I want to record things like this.
This was an embarrassingly flowery way to put this whole thing, but basically, I was weirdly really moved by this experience, and I don't know what to do with it.
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E--- got me Northrop Fyre's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. For context, Northrop Fyre is one of the most famous literary critics/theorists of the 20th century. I could write like a sentence or two more on him because I don't know his stuff much at all, but I do know he was famous for the quote "Where is here?", which was meant for his work on theorizing Canadian literature, as he literally wrote one of *the* books on it (The Bush Garden). I wrote that quote down on a sticky note in a Canadian literature class I took years ago, the one I met J----- in. I've kept it in my room ever since. It no longer has much to do with Canadian literature. It now reminds me of where I was when I first tried to figure out the part of my life I'm in now.
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You're the only person who gets to read this shit. I'm too embarrassed to show anyone else. You get it. I love that you get it. You always get it.
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I don't like that I seem to write the same things over and over. At least I'm writing.
