The Best Rock Shows. . .

are always surprises. Sometimes it’s the quality of the performance itself, but in this case it was the very existence of the show.

Looking up the starting time for Tuesday night’s Zombi/Maserati show, I stumbled across a listing for last night’s Grates/Life and Times/ Bad Flirt show at the Main Hall. I’m a big fan of the Life and Times and Allen Epley’s brand of anthemic rock (his previous band, Shiner, was practically life-changing when I first heard them). So we went from having no plans last night to catching a show.

True to Montreal form, shows start on time — but there is some kind of secret hipster network where everyone except me knows what time the show actually starts. We arrive at the venue at 8pm when the show is supposed to start, and are informed by the very nice doorman/bartender that the doors will open at 9 (it would be 9:30). The hockey game is on next door at the Green Room, so we go and watch what turned out to be a very exciting, shootout-ending Toronto-Montreal game with a small group of vocal Habs fans. By the time we get back to the venue, the bartender and coat check woman both want to know how the game ended.

So onto the show. The Life and Times was my primary motivation to attend and I was not disappointed. I hadn’t seen the new band, but Epley’s performances with Shiner were always great and I even saw them once or twice at poorly promoted gigs playing to nearly empty rooms. They played giant and anthemic songs performed at punishingly high volume. Melodic and drowning in effects, just as I like it. The new material was particularly delightful since I didn’t even know it existed. They’ve been around for awhile but the newest songs suggest a level of sophistication that never happens on a band’s first album. Afterward I went up and talked to Epley (who I know a little only because I was enough of a fan of Shiner to offer to put them up when they visited Pittsburgh back when I lived there. I haven’t done that for any other band where I didn’t know one of the members beforehand.) Anyway, this was their first Canadian tour. They made money, so I hope they come back.

I arrived with no expectations for the other bands. Bad Flirt were young. Really young. Carrie saw some people helping them haul gear out and wondered if they had parents as roadies. (1) But then, maybe they thought I was really old. Back in grad school my band once shared a stage with Emocore heroes Braid, and after the show one of the guys comes up to us and says “that was an awesome show. It’s great that you can still rock when you’re older.” And that was probably 10 years ago. Anyway, they were fun, funny, and had good banter with their friends. The songs were catchy but also big–which is no wonder since they had 3 guitars and a keyboard player. The keyboard player appeared to rock out the most. I picked up their CD 6 Ways to Break Your Heart.

The last band was the Grates, what are a little pop-punky for my tastes (which was even more apparent when you realize how empty the stage looked after The Life and Times removed all their equipment) but wow did their lead singer put on a show, and her inbetween song banter was probably the funniest I’ve ever seen. Her use of foul language was downright innovative, which is no small feat in the rock world. She got the audience more involved than I’ve seen in a long, long time. And the drummer smiled while she was playing for almost every song. Even though the music wasn’t my thing, it was among the most entertaining shows I’ve seen.

Not bad for a single night.

—

1. If the band searches themselves and finds this comment, my apologies. I know it’s not rock and roll to mention parents, but then it’s not rock and roll to mention grad school either.

Baby’s First Liberal Convention

Last night Carrie and I watched our first Canadian political convention and . . . is was boring and disappointing. Yes, I know we should have known better from years of American political conventions but somehow I thought it would be different here, that issues and positions would be discussed. Instead, it was a serial pep rally complete with powerpoint-inspired videos and calculated cheers. At least in my high school pep rallies we could make fun of the old white guy teachers who appeared to like the danceline segments a little too much.

While the performances were calculated and the speeches were largely devoid of meaningful policy content, it did give me cause to reflect on a few things.

1. Figuratively speaking, Canadian politicians are considerably less slick than their American counterparts. And it’s something that is clearly valued in some quarters. I thought Bob Rae’s whole “without a net” speech was awkward to the point of being uncomfortable to watch (well, at least it wasn’t boring) but it got higher marks from the commentators than Ignatieff’s more polished and practiced speech.

2. Literally speaking, Canadian politicians are less slick than their American counterparts. Gerard Kennedy appeared to be missing a tooth and neither of the major American political parties would have allowed their frontrunner candidate onstage at their national conventions with hair in the condition of Michael Ignatieff’s:

He’s got stray hairs everywhere. Again, nobody commented upon it or seemed to care. If that was a democrat or republican frontrunner some commentator would say that it means something. So while I’m tempted to reach some conclusion about there being less superficiality here but then, I’d have to explain or defend the vacuousness of the speeches and the pep-rally behavior. And I’m not ready to do that.

3. I think CBC’s dubbing practice is a terrible idea and I found it really jarring. I’m sure there’s some history behind this I don’t know, but if one of the politico-linguistic goals of Canada is bilingualism, then its public institutions should not “protect” people from either language. Use subtitles instead of dubbing (after all, the networks have the scripts of the speeches in advance) and let people actually hear the French. Television is an audiovisual medium and they should take advantage of that fact. A good deal of the French spoken from the podium didn’t even really need translation — especially when candidates were simply repeating themselves in French. It’s the same principle as food labelling here: both language appear, which sort of works like flash cards. As it was, the candidates are making (well in Stephane Dion’s case, anyway) a serious effort to be understood in both language because Canadian politics demands that kind of fluency (or at least it does when in Montreal) and here’s the public broadcaster undoing it.

4. The whole handshaking thing is really nuts. Maybe today will be more exciting.

The Catinator

It’s a snowy Friday, so in the tradition of “Friday cat blogging” elsewhere, I will provide a cat health update since I’ve gotten a few questions about an oblique reference in a previous post.

This is Tet. He’s not radioactive:

However, he’s proportionately had enough steroids in the past two weeks to turn him into Arnold Schwarzenegger. I am certain that he would be a better governor for California. I can see the signs already: “a can of salmon in every pot.” Okay, maybe he needs better political advisors.

Tet’s been through a lot of medical treatment in the last couple years. And he’s now had two brushes with death. In both cases, he looked into death’s jaws, raised his paw and extended his tiny middle finger. I’m starting to believe the 9 lives thing because he’s on #3. #2 started last February when we thought he had panceatic cancer but it turned out he had a benignly inflamed pancreas. #3 started just under two weeks ago. He’d just come home from five days of hospitalization for an unexplained low red blood cell count. The vet there told us to take him home to die (your red blood cell count can only drop so far…). A call the next morning from his regular vet and a hurried trip to her office produced a bottle of prednisone, which we administered to him. After what can only be described as a hospice-like regimen, he’s now producing red blood cells again. He’s still on the steroid, though, so we aren’t out of the woods yet.

To say that we were emotionally wrecked when we thought he was about to die would be an understatement. This is one of those places where there is just a big gulf between pet owners and non-pet owners. He’s a member of our family and as long as he’s got the will to live, we’ll help him out as best we can. We owe him that much — even when he was at death’s door he was as affectionate as ever.

New Text + Sage Update

(Scroll down to the bottom of the post if you just want the link to the article)

This lovely note arrived in my email this morning:

Dear Author

We are pleased to send you a pdf file of your paper which will very shortly be published online in
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. The page numbering is correct for citation purposes. The
latest content may be viewed at www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr

This pdf may be forwarded to coauthors without separate permission being required from Maney
Publishing. The pdf may not be used for commercial purposes. Interdisciplinary Science
Reviews must be cited as the original place of publication and a link to
www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr included with any listing. The pdf may be posted
on your individual website or that of your institution. Please ensure that it replaces any earlier
online version of your paper (e.g. preprint or first proof pdf). Authors are entitled to make copies
for reasonable personal use only.

Thank you for publishing in Interdisiciplinary Science Reviews

Now that all seems more reasonable to me than what Sage sent, doesn’t it?

And so, with no further adieu, I present you with a link to the .pdf of

“The Death and Life of Digital Audio,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 31:4 (December 2006): 338-348. It’s a bit of a reprise and refinement of the argument in Chapter 5 of The Audible Past but applied specifically as a critique of the idea that digital audio is a degraded version of analog recordings. There are pictures.

The whole issue is on sound and science (broadly defined as you’ll see, since they let me in) and you can find it at www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/isr

—

While I was out of town, a hard copy of the New Media and Society issue in which I published arrived. So I guess Sage has fulfilled their obligations to me since they haven’t figured out a way to affix DRM to paper (yet).

“I love it when Americans immigrate”

Permanent residency (or “landed immigrant” status as it used to be called) is a big step in any immigrant’s life in Canada, but a lot of people don’t know exactly what it means. Basically, it means that we get all the rights of citizens except for the vote. The vote comes with citizenship in about 2.5 years (given my frequent trips out of the country–you need a certain amount of time to become a citizen). I suspect that I’m also slightly easier to deport than a naturalized citizen, but I don’t plan to find out the specifics on that.

So, what, in effect does permanent residency mean?

1. The main thing is that it means the right to live here and pursue any life I choose. Before permanent residency I was here on a NAFTA work permit which had to be renewed annually or every two years (I got a sympathetic agent last time around). The work permit was tied to my job at McGill and specified that I was not allowed to enroll in any university courses or work in any other professions. Not that I’m planning to become a chef or anything, but nobody wants to be tied to their job forever.

2. The NAFTA work permits don’t go on forever. I think they have a 5-year limit or thereabouts. So permanent residency is indeed permanent in a way that other visas aren’t. And indeed, it does feel like a kind of super-tenure: “now they can’t fire me or kick me out of the country” except, of course, for some kind of gross misconduct.

3. Canadian institutions relate differently to you. For starters, we can now go get different social insurance numbers. Right now, our SINs start with 9s. 9 is the scarlet number. It says “non-permanent foreigner,” as so every institution knows it. Our jobs, our healthcare, our bank, our mortgage broker, and so on and so forth. Everything is tentative and temporary, in need of constant attention and renewal. Those “welcome to Québec” and “welcome to Canada” pamphlets we get might seem hokey (and they are) but as they provide instructions for integrating into Canadian society, they also symbolize crossing over into a different relationship with the country and its institutions. Of course I’ve been busy working on my Canadianization project since coming here in August 2004, but we’re now in a new phase. Or so I feel.

All of these things may seem small in print but they feel big. And that’s what matters.

–*–

The actual process of immigration was only slightly anticlimactic (as these things tend to be). After spending thousands of dollars, going through medical tests, getting transcripts, criminal records (or rather proof of their absence), notarized endorsements from friends, and on and on, we got our forms in the mail a few weeks ago. We took them, along with our certificates of selection (and a pile of other documentation we didn’t need) on our thanksgiving trip to Milwaukee. When we landed in Montreal on Sunday, we told the customs agent we were immigrating. She gave us a big smile, a “welcome to Canada” and told us that we’d made her day. “I love it when Americans immigrate.” And with that, we were off to the Canada immigration office where various forms were signed and paperwork was given to us. Having been allowed into Canada, we then had to go through the Quebec office, which is where I received my free copy of “Learing about Québec.” At 3pm on a Sunday, we were the only people immigrating, so the staff were very attentive, made sure to welcome us to Canada, and offered us all sorts of services. We declined most of them since we have been living here, but it would have been interesting to go to the various orientation sessions that the provincial government puts on as it tries to get people to assimilate. With that, we picked up our checked bag, cleared customs, and walked out into the parking lot.

Permanent residents at last.

The “Quebec is a Nation” Controversy 101 for Americans

Ron writes in the comments that he’d like an explanation of what the hell is going on up here in federal politics. Given that I have found no more divisive issue (1) among Canadians (and that’s among anglophones and among francophones as well as across language divisions), I’m sure to get myself in trouble here. But that’s what blogs are for, and it never stopped me before. And it’s probably appropriate for my first post as a permanent resident. More on that later.

Right now, the liberal party is having its own election (=”primary” for the Americans reading) in which is will choose a new leader. There’s a crowded field with no obvious frontrunner, but this is a very important election since the liberals have ruled Canada for most of its history and are likely to unseat Harper sooner or later. One of the Candidates, Michael Ignatieff — an early frontrunner — recently caused a stir. Now it must be said that Ignatieff, though Canadian, is something of a recent transplant. Actually, he’s kind of a carpetbagger, like GW Bush or Hillary Clinton. A professor of political science at Harvard (and one whom my friends and colleagues who read political theory have read), Ignatieff moved back up and got elected in a riding in a suburb of Toronto in the last election (at least I think that’s where he got elected). Ignatieff is now running for the liberal leadership, and that’s where the trouble started.

Quebec has never officially signed on to the Canadian constitution. Indeed, my copy of Learning About Québec: Guide for My Successful Integration (a text I hope to cite regularly in this space), refers not to the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms which has become a model around the world, but instead says that “To adapt to and participate in this new environment, you must be prepared to discover and respect the fundamental values expressed in the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. This may seem weird, but it’s even weirder to me that Canada has really only been constitutionally independent from Britain for a couple decades. Okay — let’s review:

    The constitution was recently made up
    Quebec never signed
    This is a big issue for all involved

Now of course all this is tied up with nationalism within Quebec — the two referenda on independence (1980 and 1995) and the ongoing debate concerning Quebec’s status in Canada. Should it have special privileges as a province because of its francophone majority? Or the distinctive culture that comes from having a francophone majority (yes, this is a different thing and an effort to move away from the appearance of Quebec nationalism as an ethnic nationalism)? What about language rights? Submerged in all of this is whether Quebec is a “nation.”

Nobody knows what “nation” means in this context. Is “nation” some kind of ethnic designation? A cultural designation? Does it mean that Quebec should be independent, or does it mean that Quebec simply has a “special status” in Canada? The answer depends upon whom you ask. As far as I can tell there is really as much disagreement among federalists and separatists as there is between them. Some federalists believe that the way to keep Quebec in Canada is to give it some kind of special status (2), while others want no part of that. Some separatists believe that Quebec should become an independent nation, while many others believe that it should become independent officially but have sme kind of “sovereignty-association” with the rest of Canada. Some of these people have now taken to using the European Union as a model. More than once, I’ve heard people suggest that the United States would cut Quebec a better deal than Canada. I am completely comfortable saying that those people are really catastrophically wrong. I have two words for them: Puerto Rico.

Anyway, traditionally, the federalist parties have refused to budge on the question whether Quebec is a nation, given that nobody knows what it means but it sounds like it might open the door for sovereignty. During the last election, it was spectacularly bizarre to watch a debate where liberal PM Paul Martin stammer around the question of whether Quebec was a nation when the question was put directly to him by Gilles Duceppe, head of the bloc Quebecois. That’s what is changing now.

Ignatieff proposed and the Quebec wing of the liberal party adopted a motion that says “Quebec is a nation.” Nowhere does is specify what this means or what its implications are. It is also ambiguous as to whether it’s talking about the province of Quebec and everyone in it or whether it’s talking about the francophone Québécois who live here.

Then Gilles Duceppe, the head of the non-federalist federal party the Bloc Quebecois, proposed a similar motion in parliament. Stephen Harper then scooped them all and proposed a motion that says that the Québécois are a “nation within Canada” so it gives national recognition but within a federal framework. Sort of — because it pointedly does not say that the province of Quebec is a nation. Very clever, Mr. Harper. Either way, nobody can really say for sure what any of these motions mean. It is clearly costing Harper, who lost a minister over it (and indeed nobody would have predicted that a conservative party would have sponsored a motion to affirm Quebec’s nationhood) and it may also cost Ignatieff his shot at the liberal leadership. But the motion passed yesterday.

The sad thing is that for all of this grandstanding, I don’t expect much if anything concrete will change, at least not in the near term. Because the implications and interpretation of the motion are entirely unclear. And many other important issues in the liberal party will be eclipsed by this one issue. Granted it’s a big one and it matters to a lot of people, but this was not the result of a grassroots movement. This began as a calculated attempt by a liberal leadership candidate to separate himself from his competition, and it was then opportunistically taken up by other parties. It does, however, make for good news coverage. And so now you have a national controversy.

For now, I will spare you my own pronouncements about nationalism in Quebec beyond what I’ve written here. I am, however, certain that Montreal is a wonderful, special place unlike anywhere else in the world.

You can check out Maisonneuve Media Scout for more.

So ends my dissertation. I am happy to answer questions from Americans in the comments and to hear objections from Canadian readers. I will have to correct my typos and poor choices of phrasing at a later date.

—
1. Though my hypothesis is that if people really did seriously start talking about race here, it would catch up to language pretty quickly.
2. It must be pointed out here that Quebec already has special status on many matters in Canadian policy, and since Harper has come into office, has even been able to represent itself — separately from the rest of Canada — to some international bodies.