Decade of Debris ~ Object #50

Notebook Collection

(January 2010-Present)

I am sitting on an Amtrak train cruising through the Northeastern US on a trip to Montreal—over thirty hours of travel between multiple stops, and we chose not to pay for sleeping cars. Probably wasn’t the best idea, especially for my first train-going experience. After hours of watching passing winter countryside and blazing nighttime smokestacks that my friend compared to something out of Blade Runner, trying to get as much rest as we can in our seats, I am very tired. At some point during the daytime, I walk over to the observation car, sit at one of the tables, and pull out a cheap notebook, retrieving ideas from memory and writing them down, keeping my mind busy as the Adirondacks chug past the window.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #49

Interstellar Rodeo T-Shirt

(August 2017)

This is the kind of concert merch I expect: overpriced, poor material, and despite being labelled as the proper size, definitely too small to wear. It might as well be just a branded handkerchief or a flag for all the use I can get out of it. Still, I wanted some memorabilia from this show, because it had been so long since the last one, and I wanted to continue my tradition of buying something from each event, no matter how pointless and expensive it was. I can imagine that no piece of merch will ever be as practical as my Arcade Fire hat was, but you know, that was never entirely the point—it’s just an object to project certain memories and emotions onto, a physical reminder of good times had. I’m sure the people putting those sales stalls together know that too, and use it to bamboozle wistful fools out of even more money with low-quality product, but what can you do? The heart wants what it wants.

The last concert I had been to was that Arcade Fire one from back in 2010, and despite keeping my eye on events happening near me in the years after that, I could never gather the will to pursue them further—story of my life. At some point, though, I just got tired of my own lack of initiative, and when opportunities presented themselves, I tried to take them—so when I saw that Beck would be performing at the Interstellar Rodeo (a yearly outdoor concert series), I kicked all my usual dithering to the curb and got myself tickets. I finally wanted to do something.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #48

The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai

(August 2019)

Despite being into the genre, it’s hard for me to keep up with Science Fiction, which has so many new things coming out all the time while I have so little of my own time to give. New fiction has gotten a short shrift from me recently because I mostly just read whatever catches my interest no matter how old or recent, and I’m in a constant state of feeling left behind, like I can’t read whatever the latest Nebula Award winners are because I still haven’t gotten to the ones from forty years ago (if you’re wondering why I haven’t written about any other novels or short story collections for this series, that’s why.) My taste in Science Fiction is also pretty idiosyncratic: with a few exceptions, I’m not particularly partial to many of the tropes of the genre on their own, stuff like space and time travel not doing much for me, and big galactic empires often being a major turn-off. I like stuff that plays fast and loose with genre rules, co-opting certain ideas and images and spinning them in new ways, especially in ways that speak to whatever deeper social or philosophical observations they’re trying to make. SF is a genre where you can, and should, do anything, because it allows you to say so much more about the universe we inhabit.

That is probably why I’ve been so drawn to the novels of Larissa Lai, who has written them only sporadically (there was a sixteen year gap between her previous novel and the most recent one)—probably because she is busy being a poet and an academic—but uses SF as a way to create genre-fluid, personal stories with utterly unique and compelling visions. All three of her novels are fantastical in some way—her first, When Fox Is A Thousand, is a modern story merged with the mythological; the second, Salt Fish Girl, brings the mythological into the context of a Science Fiction future that features virtual reality and cloning, among other things. The lines between the different levels of reality in Lai’s novels constantly blur, with the recurring theme of history—often cultural history, as Lai usually writes from the perspective of people from Chinese immigrant families—staking a permanent place in the people’s lives. The Tiger Flu, which was published in 2018, continues many of the motifs of Salt Fish Girl, including an exhausted future society on the brink of collapse and a backstory involving genetic engineering gone awry, but makes it even more visceral, both physically and emotionally.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #47

Rejection Notice

(February 2017)

I have long felt both burning curiosity and trepidation about how I would deal with the eventuality of rejection—I could daydream all day about how I thought I would react to both praise and dismissal, but there is no substitute for the real thing. As someone who aspires to have an artistic career, such things were inevitable, and I needed to prepare myself for one or the other—but it’s also pretty clear that in many ways I’ve been intentionally avoiding the process of finding out, which is to say, I make things and then never share them with anyone. It’s very hard to advance your aspirations for an artistic career when you never let people see your art, but I never said my decisions actually make any sense, not even to me.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #46

Monster Milk Youtube Channel

(July 2013-December 2016)

If Youtube has any value at all—and some days, it’s a real challenge to find it—it’s in giving people the opportunity to find or create the kinds of anti-art that almost justify all the cynicism and lunacy at the heart of our increasingly decaying excuse of a culture. Yes, I watch plenty of video game footage (no commentary, please), some good video essays, and public domain movies (and…sometimes some non-public domain movies), all legitimate uses for the format—but the thing that I come back to again and again is the utter nonsense, clips taken out of context, scenes from movies or old footage of any kind edited into surreal nightmares, or weird things that don’t even need to be edited into surreal nightmares. I could fill many pointless hours with freely available documentaries, or I could watch a montage of Christopher Lambert laughing, a commercial from Fox Kids where Hank Hill talks to the Silver Surfer, or whatever the hell this is. The experience I want to have is to be baffled by what can be crafted in the mind and by the hands of humankind, but in a fun, dadaist way.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #45

John K. Samson, Winter Wheat

(October 2016)

What I’ve always loved about Samson’s lyrics, as part of The Weakerthans or in his solo work, is how he focuses on small-scale lives, finding the beautiful and sad things in everyday existence or in the kind of odd folks you’d likely pass by without much thought. Winter Wheat is an album with songs about people anxiously writing Power Point presentations, living with fellow recovering addicts at rehab, or believing they have telepathic powers, all treated with equal sympathy, their lives as full of poetry as anything else. As a fellow Manitoban, I also appreciate the Manitoba-specific references he throws into his music—we can understand the title “VPW 13 Blues” (one of the three “blues” song on the album, a direct reference to Neil Young’s 1974 album On The Beach) and the reference to the town of Beausejor, and share a subtle nod when Samson sings about “the flood” and “the strike.” In crafting songs with that level of specificity, it fully demonstrates a close observation of people, landscapes, and the interplay between them (for example, a tree being a signifier for multiple generations.) Everything is suffused with personal history and importance, a long line of memories and relationships, and a deep abiding love of the micro level.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #44

The Venture Bros., “All This and Gargantua-2” Special

(January 2015)

Watching The Venture Bros. is a bit like having a world-travelling relative who only visits every once in a long while, but usually has some interesting stories to tell you when they do. Since 2010, there have been three-and-a-half seasons aired, two or three years apart, and heavily serialized in a way that’s even more intricate than even the heavily serialized shows that dominate the TV landscape. Yes, despite not having a set schedule, they still sometimes expect you to remember what happened five or more years ago. Normally, that sort of thing would irritate me, but VB has maintained a high level of quality, being consistently funny and exciting, and its continuity threads are at least constructed in a way that is rewarding and doesn’t just jerk your chain constantly. When you suddenly  have a Halloween episode or a one-hour special two years after the last season aired, it’s a great surprise.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #43

New Kitchen Table

(January 2017)

When I moved into my own apartment at the beginning of the decade, I did so entirely with the cost-skimming mindset of the poor student, despite the fact that I was no longer a full-time student. Still, you gotta start somewhere, and I chose to start with hand-me-down furniture and dollar store furnishings. It served me well for many years! Sure, one of the couches was two decades old and technically had no legs, but I saw that as adding a little personality to my humble abode. It seemed like I was mostly going for “personality” in the early days, because I didn’t buy any new furniture for my apartment for years and years, instead relying on whatever my roommate brought over when he moved in, or taking whatever I could get for free (for example: an old desk from a school.) Did my apartment look like someone moved into a secondhand store? Maybe.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #42

Donkey Kong Country Returns

(December 2010)

2D platformers went from a nearly absent from the video game landscape to plentiful once again, thanks mainly to the rise of digital platforms opening the floodgates for indy developers who love the genre, and also because of Nintendo’s success with the New Super Mario Bros. series. The double surprise we got when the next big 2D run-and-jump game from Nintendo was revealed was that not only was it the resurrection of the Donkey Kong Country series after almost fifteen years (eleven if you count Donkey Kong 64, I guess), but that it was developed by the people who brought us Metroid Prime. It seemed unfathomable to people that Retro Studios could switch tracks like that, going from serious Sci-Fi to incredibly cartoony ape sidescroller, but we were all the better for it. While Retro’s Donkey Kong games are very different from what they had been doing before, they have the same eye for detail, thoughtful and rewarding design, and provide a very smart bit of genre reinvention—Donkey Kong Country Returns was probably the last truly great Wii game*, and even though it was certainly successful critically and sales-wise at the time, the praise felt weirdly tentative, and these days it almost feels like the game’s accomplishments have been forgotten.

Decade of Debris ~ Object #41

Unfinished National Novel Writing Month Project

(November 2011)

National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for people who prefer contractions that look like a mixed-up periodic table) is one of those Internet things that feels very much of its time (the mid-two-thousands, in this case), but seemingly continues to this day, avoiding the fizzle met by most online trends. For those unawares, it’s an open challenge to write a fifty-thousand word novel from beginning to end in the month of November, with a website that you can register on to keep track of your progress. It’s basically just a hobbyist thing, a “fun” activity to focus your free time on if you consider yourself to be in any way creatively inclined. Many people who don’t do anything particularly artistic in any of the other eleven months will think they can get to that fifty-thousand, and then either will or won’t, no harm, no foul. It ostensibly represents online community projects at their most benign, although I don’t know, maybe there’s some drama behind the scenes that I don’t know about because why would I look something like that up. To what end would that serve, I ask you.