MY OWN BEST OF TWENTY+TWELVE

8. Full disclosure Jess and I have been intimate for an epic half-decade and I collaborated with Jessica on the score for the video on which these paintings are based. Jessica is not gonna play the Daughter of the Phenomenologist and I always felt like Jess's portraits (even the early ones) explained "perception" more than any University Press book on Hussrl ever could, anyway. These paintings are all based on a video called the Fuzz that features a handmade universe of Gods and worshipers and murdered slugs spawning Lovers all rendered in true-school Exploito/b-style. The movie stars two local luminaries whose bands I won't mention because music has nothing to do with this. The forms, composition and color in the works are stunning. Jessica has finally found a way to flex her serious painting CHOPS as well as show us the weird little world she ALONE has always inhabited. And faster than you can say "Tammer repelling down a rock face smoking a PJ Light" Jessica is gone and you'll wish you'd checked the technique while it was here. Later MTL.

7. Imagine renting your Dad's campgrounds to a bunch of yaboos for their Bonko-Volcano Noise Rally...and the first thing that happens is a shorter dude with an incredibly flowery vocabulary shows up and tunes the massive PA with some Power Supplied Ground Pounders. That’s our MADMANDEK. He also deftly negotiated volume levels with the management, fauxhemian demands for more raving, some dude accusing everyone of stealing his iPhone all the while keeping the talent happy, on time as well AND conveying any notable quotes and hilarity from the soundnest crew to the stage. Whether you're Timeshare Timmy or Lexical Moontan you were at ease knowing the Bee was in the zone. Meanwhile all the deer-ticks and West Nile skeeters all boogied off to Elsewhere, Pennsylvania, terrified by the BASS BOOM BOTTOM>><()><<

6. Josh is prone to show up at The Zone with a nugget-buster and so it went one night when I came home from a long day of slaying MC’s at the phone jockey game. Josh was sitting there all pert and told me about The Bauds “Telemorphosis”, warning me that it was “crushing”. He was not lying. Containing two short essays, one of which is ostensibly about social-networking albeit written before the term really existed, the book accurately describes Being in the Nothing Age. Even if you are unfamiliar with the difficult language of 20^th Century continental thought this book conveys a sense at least of where the Bauds is aiming. Printed in a cute little small-press, limited edition, this one accompanied me on many morning visits to “Studio B”. Christ, if I wasn’t already plumbing the depths of a deep nihilism I sure as shit am now.  This is the Bauds on  “The banalization of existence” and all of our complicity in it. Each page will wreck your soul. Ugh. Luckily pro-hockey is back in effect and I’ve got the Mckeen’s 2012-13 Guide (which is the FORCED EXPOSURE or ACID ARCHIVES of hockey writing) to help distract me further as I plod through these stupidly dark times.  Nothing nugget busting  about goalies “who keep the paddle down in close,” wingers who have “dazzling top gears” and are “swooping skaters ” or centers that are a “lethal gamebreaker when  prowling like a cougar.”

5. Adidas Ameritapes Block Stoppers:

Be it a Van City Cyberpunk Rave or a heat-night’s deck shredding disco-style at the Casa the Adidas Ameritapes Block Stoppers have lived up to they name. Your rep hard-precedes you into the Zone Chamber when your kicks straight stop the block. Not hard in the Hen where NO-ONE ROCKS DOPE SWAG that's over age 16. Also: props to my own-damn-self for clunk-innovation on this Moskozone Mobile Disco Crate.

4. My own prescient self: Check this entry from my Best Of 2007 on Stillepost.ca…:

1.     Godspeed You Black Emperor - Yanqui UXO - Constellation
I ain't not heard the new Cousins of Reggae lp yet, despite badgering Hargreaves constantly. That said, Jon Shapiro and the 3rd Doctor (Jon Pertwee) showed up in the Tardis and invited me in. I was like, "Damn this shit is bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside." Next thing I know, Shapiro opens the door and we walk outside and boom, we're inside my living room. Jon gingerly waves his hand into the room Ghost-of-Chrismas-past-Alister-Simms-version style and suddenly I'm face to face with myself sitting on the couch, wearing a t-shirt that says "Fuck You, Time!" I got a kitty sitting upwards sphinx position on my lap and a huge fresh bag from Blam layed next to me, with a few wisps of smoke still a-rise from the bowl of my classic Unireverse Hobgoblin bong.  The final strains of Quartz are playing out on the tt, the needle auto-lifts off the side and a sudden peace, freshly flown up the Canal from the east, origins Atlantic, settles into St. Henri, the jamaican's cease their incesant bickering and turn off their ETERNAL bassline, stars all twanx above and the city skyline seemingly tips towards me from up St. Jacques. Into this intersticial silence I hear my own voice say to nobody, "Dude, Thats the best record of 2007." The 3rd Doctor and Shapiro both nod approvingly. Jon, with an extended arm, leads me back inside the Tardis and brings me back to now!

2007 = come retarded or stay home, dangler!!!

3. Panning/Langdon Pans. Got real into this killer time-waster game. Started getting encouraged by the crew. Just sit around late Cleveland summer heat-night and pan anything; modular synth scene to sitting ducks like Grimes, Black Flag, Grateful Dead boots ect. Hell, even started panning my own sacred cows, find myself sipping Bitburgers telling the lads how awful Coltrane's "Expressions" and "Solo" Monk are or how "top to bottom bad" the playing is on "Half Machine Lip Moves" or saying shit like "Buckley's vocal range doesn't make up for the fact that his lyrics are a Ploughman's Lunch-sized platter of cheese and Starsailor is Exhibit A". Being the Toot that I am thought I was the PANNER SUPREME, that no one spit bile on an entire scene like I could. Then I got back to the Queebs and heard Langdon pan vigorously, demolishing a whole scene/movement in 3 words or less. Impressed

 

2. The Van City Crew John "Brenz" Brennan, Sydney "NO JOKE" Koke, Trevor "Civic Engineer 'em" Rutley, Jake "The Shake" Hardy, Boss Birdwise, Pete "Two Beds" Moskos, Maggy "Crossedword" Archibald, Poib "Fingerflip" Fehr, Greg "Light Out" Moskos, Josh "Oh My Gosh" Stephenson, SIK NIK Hughes. It can rain 24/7/365 and you wont care with crew like that. 
 

1. San Diego Fireworks July 4^th, 2012

Let me take you back to ’02 and like the dumb little fuck that I was , tearing it up in the Conc’s Communications Department (the faculty were all chill enough to tolerate my nuttiness), I wrote an epic final term paper explaining/exploring Stockhausen’s statements/interpretations of the 9/11 attacks. Much of this was likely informed by an American philosophy professor who was encouraging his class to see the attacks from “the enemies” perspective aka = as a successful military operation in an on-going martial campaign. You had to at least consider Stocky’s point. Either way you wish Block Rockin’ Stockhausen had lived long enough to see San Diego’s July 4, 2012 Fireworks Display so that he would at least have another contender for “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos”. Anyhoops, here we have the year’s best jams, best performance AND best record (in as many senses of that word as you might be able to conjure from your ever-shrinking lexical cupboard). I mean if Dillo or Crump pressed this youtube clip onto a 7” I would buy multiples of the thing. Whether this art-event was a screw-up or a prank matters little. Best of the year, best of the decade, we don’t make good records anymore, none of us. But this, this is art, music, sexily lit, hanging there, mimetic, cathartic, gorgeous.