Can - "Mushroom"

When I was in high school I had a radio show at CHUO, the University of Ottawa’s campus station. During the station’s funding drive, I offered copies of a friend’s record to those who pledged a certain amount of money. Sean called and pledged at least that amount, and I remember writing his name down on a piece of scrap paper as a reminder that I should give him the record. We didn’t really know each other. I don’t remember whether or not I gave him the record, but I do remember (because he recently reminded me) that he did not come through with the pledge.

A couple of years ago, around the time I first met Dan, I leant him my copy of U and I, Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary chronicle of his love for John Updike. Dan read the whole thing within two years and recently returned it to me. When I brought it home, I placed it in the crib I’d built for it, offered it drink and food - though it stoically refused both - and after what we tacitly agreed had been a mutually respectful period of time, I delicately opened its cover and flipped through its pages, whereupon I found the piece of scrap paper I’d written Sean’s name on when I was sixteen.

I took this coincidence as a sign - but of what, I did not know. At first I investigated the possible significance of the fact that in this particular formation of the StG triangle, I constituted the hypotenuse. This surprised me given that, of the three of us, I am both the shortest and the least prolific. Unsurprisingly, this approach led me nowhere but into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Moving on, I examined the possibility that my coincidence was a sign of the existence of god, but then, remembering the ontological argument for that same conclusion, abandoned the approach, seeing the absurdity of a redundant sign. Finally, I thought that perhaps the appearance of the note was a sort of (and I’m sorry to mix my metaphors in this way, but I think you’ll see that it’s necessary) temporal road sign, pointing backwards to when I was doing my radio show.

Sixteen, I would say, was the age at which I began my great consumption. It lasted for roughly three years and consisted in buying, rather indiscriminately, many hundreds of albums of very diverse musical styles, and ended with the beginning of a sort of misanthropic hermitage, still currently underway. I was so completely open to and excited about all kinds of music that, thinking back, I’m reminded of Richard Dawkins’s little witticism that, “We must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” My brains were everywhere. I ate them on toast.

But still, there was something nice about the world of music seeming so vast and uncharted, with so many undiscovered treasures ahead. I still believe that intellectually, but as my focus has narrowed and as my discoveries have become more infrequent and less independent, it’s sometimes hard to feel it the way I did when I first heard Can’s Tago Mago, sitting on my bed in my parents’ house, thinking, ‘this music is from another world - it is so crazy, it is so unbelievably good, and I found it.’ [Buy]

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Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Tortoise - "Thunder Road"

Two great things can bring out the worst in each other. Listen to “Thunder Road” as you would eat a calamari and sweet cheese danish. That is, try to forget that you’re throwing up a little bit, and enjoy the greatness of each individual element. [Buy]