schadenfreude, er, thursday: littering the globe like liver spots
We are working on some ACTUAL CONTENT, including a) the rest of this website and b) a bunch of pseudo-essays about the Joel Plaskett shows at The Horseshoe in December. But, this is the first week in a long time where I have gasped or guffawed while reading album reviews, and also, I totally thought it was Wednesday when I got up, except it’s not. Whoops. Anyway, our runner-up comes from Pitchfork reviewing Turin Brakes’ Dark on Fire. I had to review one of their albums once, and every word Ian Cohen says is true:
When it comes down to it, there’s a very poorly kept secret about this band that will likely determine what you think of Dark On Fire: some of these lyrics are just borderline retarded, combining rhyme-first, ask-questions-never couplets with more arson imagery than a Thursday album.
But it has nothing on the bile-filled, gasp-inducing reaming that someone allegedly named Filmore Mescalito Holmes just gave Dane Cook’s Rough Around The Edges at PopMatters. Which is not to say it’s really a well-written review–there are chunks that I am sort of shocked were not edited out, mostly demonstrating an adolescent contempt for the unenlightened masses–but as a long experiment in that weird sort of critical rage that comes off as deeply personally offended, it’s sort of like written performance art. Here are just a few cherries from the sundae:
The Billboard charts also don’t mean jack-squat. There are cities full of anxious, depressed people littering the globe like liver spots, and sometimes the overbearing politics of Bruce Springsteen can be too much for some of them …
Seriously, they don’t even count votes in international elections properly anymore and we’re supposed to believe corporate-generated totals are completely accurate? There is some truth to the figures, just as I’m sure someone actually voted for Dubya, but at one time over 1.2 million people thought the earth was the center of the universe and that the moon was made of cheese. They were wrong, but you could have been tortured by a church if you told them so. So, basically, numbers-schmumbers …[H]e relates a story to himself about being on the set of Dan in Real Life the day after this November 12th performance. There, in response to a PA asking him what he did the night before, Cook hypothetically but confrontationally replied, “Ah… Madison Square Gardens, twenty-thousand people, two shows… what’d you do?” Prolly something a whole lot more fulfilling, like watching a Canadian House Of Commons debate. Pee-Wee Herman once sold out Carnegie Hall, and he’s a better actor …
The novelty of funny sounding words, simple props (unless you’re Rip Taylor), and infant noises always wears off when the current coke craze dries up.
in which the internet is too great for us to take pleasure in the misery of others
So maybe we slept through the prime posting hours of Schadenfreude Wednesday because we’re trying to sleep off our cold/cough/pink eye/rash/year of mysterious but mostly low-grade illnesses. (During a particularly strenuous coughing fit yesterday I got a little panicked: “No! I haven’t thrown up in an entire two months, don’t break the streak!”) I’ve actually gotten pink eye four out of the last five years, which just means that I can’t keep my snot out of my eyes. Not such a mystery why I don’t have an honours degree.
Yesterday on Idolator our minds were blown by this state-produced video employing a giant rapping groundhog to encourage the kids/kidz to pursue a career in health care. Watch it. Don’t wimp out during the first verse, there’s an amazing “cameo” by the governor of Pennsylvania to come.
Realizing that some portion of the $4,157 budget for the video went to paying the rapping groundhog (memo to Ontario government: I have better flow than the groundhog), our minds wandered to a job we coveted as kids: working on the songs at the end of every Bill Nye, The Science Guy episode. So, to YouTube we went. And while we didn’t find nearly as many as we thought would be there, we did find this. It would have gone right over my head back in the day, but now that I’m old enough to know who Morrissey is …
(Other highlights: Chris Bellew of The Presidents of the United States of America parodies “Peaches” himself with “Farm Food,” Nyevana’s “Smells Like Air Pressure” and LL Bloo J’s “Birds”. The “Love Shack” parody is actually not very good.)
But the legacy of Bill Nye has its non-educational downsides, as this dude named Bill is sick of people singing the theme song at him. I would sympathize if the theme song was not totally awesome, though maybe this is a historic bone of contention between people with catchy, chant-able names and those of us without. Then there is some talk about warts. Hey, at least I’m not vlogging about my pink eye … even if it’s only because I lack the means to do so.
schadenfreude wednesday: matt good wedged under the front of a firebird, plus, hey, remember sloan?
We didn’t find anything recent that was both mean and actually good this week–way to drop the ball on Blackout, everyone. So we had to go a little bit further back than usual to dig up Paul Isaac’s deeply nasty take on Matthew Good’s Hospital Music in Eye:
Poet, musician, activist, political blogger: is there no beginning to Matthew Good’s talents? Recorded after a depressive episode and a painful relationship breakup, the angry, cathartic Hospital Music sounds like an album Good desperately needed to record – but that no one necessarily needed to hear. Full of self-indulgent moping (“99% of Us is Failure”) and barely disguised bitterness towards his ex (there’s a song called “Girl Wedged Under the Front of a Firebird”), Hospital Music is an ugly record in sound, philosophy and intent. And even worse – it’s not even catchy.
For extra credit, here’s an old Pitchfork review of Sloan’s Navy Blues, which is cute rather than mean, but good for a chuckle or two. I distinctly remember reading this review in highschool and thinking it was like totally hilarious, but I think I just got very excited back then whenever I actually recognized names being dropped.
The future’s looking bright (dim?), though, with Raine Maida’s The Hunter’s Lullaby coming out November 13th, and one can only assume more reviews of Cobra Starship’s new, distinctively terrible album ¡Viva La Cobra! trickling down the tubes. (And I REALLY LIKE Fall Out Boy. That’s how bad Cobra Starship is.)
And since I’m not above coasting on past successes these days, here’s a Hallowe’en feature Lauren and I wrote last year on eight mysterious deaths in rock music history. PAC LIVES. (OMG IF I EVER SEE A ZOMBIE TUPAC COSTUME I WILL FREAK OUT.)
schadenfreude wednesday: when you eat cheese together, you make an architecture in helsinki record
Hey, it’s the only day of the week we ever post on! SURPRISE! But this time we have no runner-ups whatsoever, in order to give space instead to Helen Spitzer’s one-star review of the new Architecture in Helsinki album Places Like This. The whole review. Because, wow. The ‘z’ on ’skillz’ is really the killing blow.
Curiouser and curiouser – didn’t Architecture in Helsinki used to be sort of good, or at least a bit of fun? If so, those days have been obliterated from public consciousness by the Australian collective’s latest effort (and yes, I do mean effort – these songs are as strained as a post-cheese-festival bowel movement). It starts out painful and keeps pace – really, it’s almost freakishly admirable – track after unrelenting track. Imagine, if you will (do you want to?) Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock with the lyrical skillz of Simon Le Bon, trying to recreate “Love Shack.” And then try to scrub it from your eardrums, because if Places Like This exist, baby, I don’t want them to.
you got no fear of the underdog
Spoon @ The Kool Haus, 10/15/2007
Utilitarian / The Minor Tough / Everything Hits At Once / Me And The Bean / Take A Walk / The Way We Get By / Stay Don’t Go / Jonathon Fisk / Someone Something / The Beast and Dragon, Adored / My Mathematical Mind / They Never Got You / I Summon You / Don’t Make Me A Target / The Ghost of You Lingers / Don’t You Evah / You’ve Got Yr Cherry Bomb / The Underdog // Black Like Me / Anything You Want / The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine // I Turn My Camera On / Fitted Shirt
Spoon are a studio band in the best possible sense of the term: not due to demonstrated incompetence at everything else, but by being so damn good at producing their records. I first heard them on the musical Jenga game of 2002’s Kill The Moonlight, which removed as much as possible from its arrangements before the songs collapsed—not that I cared too much about the production, instead fascinated by a ludicrously catchy pop album whose incredible spareness made the songs sort of dangerous and sexy. (I was just starting university and an even bigger prude than I am now; the breathy percussion on “Stay Don’t Go” seemed a little scandalous. I remember being disappointed when I found out what Britt Daniel actually looked like, as he was not, in fact, the sexiest man I could conceive of.)
Tingly bits aside, 2001’s anxious, occasionally eerie Girls Can Tell would eventually become my favourite Spoon album. I still feel kind of stupid for buying Gimme Fiction, which padded out a few typically great Spoon songs (”I Turn My Camera On,” “Sister Jack”) with a lot of uncharacteristically unfocused material and songs whose initial charm wore out as they just kept going … to nowhere in particular, all tension and delay with no release. At least it made Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga an even more pleasant surprise, embracing the promise of Kill The Moonlight’s forays into minimalist soul while putting a little more meat on its bones and a little more heart on its sleeve.
Suffice it to say, I am very, very fond of Spoon, and was nervous about seeing them live for the first time after having spent so long with their recorded output. A band as meticulous in the studio as Spoon, with such a consistently high-quality back catalogue, has a few options to make their live performance equally compelling: giving a really energetic, engaging show; experimenting with the arrangements of their songs; or exploring the connections between their older and newer work. Unfortunately, those qualities were rarely in evidence on Monday night at the Kool Haus, where Spoon gave a wholly decent—but only decent—survey of all their albums … in chronological order … with all the songs in the same order as they appear on the albums. (Okay, there was nothing from Telephono, two pairs of songs were reversed from their album sequence, and the encores weren’t chronological. That’s it.)
To say that the show lacked the element of surprise (for the people most familiar with their discography) would be a bit of an understatement. It also didn’t do much for momentum, with most of the audience having no clue what was going on during the opening A Series of Sneaks tracks (though some folks were freaking out) and the first really huge cheer coming at “The Way We Get By.” Daniel was plagued by monitor problems and guitar issues all night, resulting in little harm to the music but a lot of awkward pauses between numbers. And while Daniel’s voice sounded just as awesome in person as on CD, and he’s quite a spectacle at well over six feet twitching and shimmying behind his guitar, the non-musical inertia of his bandmates pretty much left him to carry the whole performance by himself (I couldn’t see keyboardist Eric Harvey and sometimes didn’t have an ideal view of drummer Jim Eno, so if they were killin’ it, I have no idea).
Maybe it was due to his frustration with equipment problems, but Daniel rarely communicated a real sense of urgency, and neither did a lot of the music. The horn section (tenor sax, trumpet and trombone) first showed up to lend some heft to the low end of “Stay Don’t Go” and stayed around to punch up a great, spittle-showering rendition of “Jonathon Fisk.” But soon after, Spoon’s marriage to their chronological setlist killed the mood with about 20 minutes of Gimme Fiction, including some of that album’s least satisfying material. Having been able to see this chunk of the evening coming, I tried to give the album another chance, but their selections just confirmed my general impressions of the album: Oh, this sounds cool … oh, it’s still going … still going … I guess that’s it? “The Beast And Dragon, Adored,” like a lot of Fiction’s songs, has an impressive beginning and a lumbering, sinister groove, but never delivers. They followed it with back to back five-minute songs and the frustratingly limp “I Summon You.” Daniel spent a lot of time crouched in front of his amplifier with his back to the audience, first manufacturing an impressive guitar squall for “My Mathematical Mind” and then a much lamer version of the same during the interminable “They Never Got You.” I never thought I’d be so excited to hear “Don’t Make Me A Target.”
I never thought I’d be so unimpressed with “The Ghost of You Lingers” either, whose space-y, cold piano turned into a duel of synths that sounded like they were soundtracking a movie from outer space. The song still sounded weird, but not to positive effect. There were also no backing vocals, which I figured was de rigeur for their live performance until Harvey and bassist Jim Pope chimed in on an awesome three-part ending to “Don’t You Evah,” which made “Ghost” even harder to excuse.
To their credit, Spoon ended well with a strong trio of Ga x 5 tracks, accompanied on the latter two by the horn section (watching the trombonist during “The Underdog” was really entertaining). But this had at least a little something to do with saving the songs everyone knew until the very, very end as opposed to actually winning anyone over with their performance. It’s not that Spoon were bad, and they sounded pretty great most of the night: it’s just that seeing them live didn’t add anything to my understanding or appreciation of their music, and I find it hard to believe that they’re not capable of a better show. Instead of a chef using familiar, quality ingredients to create an unique, interesting meal, it was like getting a TV dinner—a pretty good one, but still a microwaveable entree with every element isolated and cooking in its own little plastic mold. A $21.50 TV dinner.
Daniel did seem very appreciative, thanking Craig Laskey for booking them “since we opened for Jimmy’s Chicken Shack at The Horseshoe” and saying, “This is a great audience for Toronto. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve been coming through here for a long time and this really means a lot.” The band returned for two slightly rushed encores and ended up playing for a total of around 90 minutes, but when a band has six albums, you’d kind of hope so. During “Black Like Me,” Daniel sang “All the weird kids up front, tell me what you know you want” without even glancing at the weird kids up front, and I got the sense (during and after) that it didn’t bother most of them, but it did bother me.
(Elsewhere: Eye Weekly is satisfied with the show, but Torontoist kind of read my mind.)
schadenfreude wednesday: and raine maida is on the board!
This week’s runner-up comes from Matthew of I Heart Music, who finds that Raine Maida’s forthcoming spoken-word album The Hunter’s Lullaby deserves a fate worse than obscurity:
It’d be so easy to be cynical regarding Raine Maida’s first solo outing, The Hunter’s Lullaby (due out in a month or so). It’d be so easy to suggest that his reinvention/reincarnation as a “hip-hop-style beat-poet” probably has as more to do with the fact that no one cared any more about Our Lady Peace than any kind of artistic urges. In fact, part of me … even wishes I could say that, shockingly, The Hunter’s Lullaby is actually good, and that the sorta-depth Maida showed when his old band created Spiritual Machines has blossomed into something really special.
Sadly, however, that would be a lie. The Hunter’s Lullaby is bad. So very, very bad. So abysmally awful that I’m actually writing about it, rather than just letting it find its way into a CD contest winner’s package without me ever thinking about it again.
If you wonder what that faint scratching noise is, either there are mice in your walls or it’s the sound of Canadian music writers sharpening their pencils in anticipation of The Hunter’s Lullaby’s actual release date. There are going to be so many Our Lady Peace jokes, guys. So many. But for the win, a few chestnuts from Jeff Vrabel of Pop Matters‘ generally pleased review of Eddie Vedder’s solo soundtrack for the film Into The Wild:
At its heart, the story of [Into The] Wild is one of alienation and distancing and and the self-discovery that can be found only in wandering and escape and solitude, themes you may remember from Every Other Thing Pearl Jam Has Ever Done (if you’ve ever made out to “Better Man”, read that sentence again immediately). Eddie Vedder does emotional distance like Springsteen does cold dark rivers. Luckily, both chestnut metaphors still seem to be working for both.
And while we’re being negative: second-best Crap E-mail From A Dude ever over at Jezebel. (It still has nothing on this incredible, nigh-endless masterpiece of delusion.)
schadenfreude wednesday: TIME MACHINE EDITION (with extra cheese)
Obviously it’s not Wednesday, but our Internet exploded yesterday morning (sometime after PopMatters crashed my browser like four times—no link for you!), so we couldn’t post it then. Nor could we liveblog the Ontario election, but that’s best left to the professionals anyway.
This week’s runner-up is Jess Harvell at Idolator, whose two-listen In Rainbows review includes: “Track nine sounds like ‘Hotel California.’” Ouch.
But for the sort of uninspired win, we have Chart with Trevor Tuminski’s review of the new Deborah Harry album, Necessary Evil:
At this stage of her career, though, the ballads are easier to swallow than tracks like “Dirty And Deep,” her attempt at hip-hop that sounds like grandma’s porn audition.
As long as we’re not still pretending that “Rapture” was good. Tuminski also calls her an “ex-disco punk princess,” which kind of makes us want to shove forks into our brains. Or a wall socket.
Speaking of forks (?), the Dairy Farmers of Canada are employing some bizarre logic to try to get you to eat some cheese in the new television spot for their “All You Need is Cheese” campaign. The ad doesn’t appear to be online anywhere, so let us set the scene. The commercial starts with a couple having dinner, soon joined by a voiceover: “When you eat cheese together, you feel more romantic. When you feel more romantic, you …” The shot changes to a car in a suspiciously overgrown yard with fogged-up windows and ‘wakka-wakka’ sound effects. Eventually this leads to a house full of children for the cheese-eating couple and the pronouncement “When you have a house full of love, you need to serve cheese.” (O HAY SEE WHUT THEY DID THAR??)
But seriously: when you eat cheese, you feel more romantic? Do you know anyone who gets frisky when they eat a lot of dairy products? Maybe I’m projecting because dairy tends to make me sneeze a lot (and one assumes the flying mucus is not bringing all the boys to the yard), but shouldn’t this commercial be like one-quarter as long?
“When you eat cheese together, you feel bloated. When you feel bloated, you both fall asleep with the TV on. Also, stop forgetting your girlfriend is lactose intolerant, asshole.”
schadenfreude wednesdays: chamillionaire ultimately victorious
While I try not to write really nasty reviews, I do like using the occasional well-placed barb—but I enjoy reading them even more. I suspect that I’m not alone in this, even though it makes me kind of a terrible person. So welcome to Schadenfreude Wednesdays, which will hopefully brighten the middle of your work week with my favourite insulting passage from a recent album review. Rejoice in the suffering of others, though it’s anyone’s guess whether the press-combing artist or the critic who had to listen to their work is more miserable.
Sadly for our inaugural week, most of what we came across was pretty tame, but we’ve got to start somewhere. This week, honourable mentions go to:
- Scott Bryson on Blue Rodeo’s Small Miracles: “Truth be told, the last time I heard someone say they really liked a [Greg] Keelor song was my mom after she had a few.”
- The conclusion of Dan Raper’s wholly unimpressed review of Bedouin Soundclash’s Street Gospels: “But looking upward, at least Street Gospels can be praised for one thing: I’ve rediscovered Graceland, been listening to it a bunch over the past few weeks. What a brilliant record that is.”
But for the win, we have this (unintentionally harsh?) nugget from Josh Timmerman’s mostly positive take on Chamillionaire’s Ultimate Victory:
Tangentially, a little while back, I saw a homeless man holding a sign that read “drug free and I’m trying,” which really hit me on a gut level—’cause trying counts for a lot, or should anyway. Here, Cham seems to be implicitly offering: “watching Keith Olbermann and The Daily Show and I’m trying.” Good for him.
Polaris 2007: your music doesn’t matter in a favourite dress
We went to some stuff in the last few weeks. We’ll tell you about it soon. But what you should know now: one of the only cool things to come out of Waterloo (besides us, obvs), The Sourkeys play their last Toronto show ever on their breakup “tour” tonight at Sneaky Dee’s. Fans of awesome vocal harmonies that involve a lot of yelling, the Pixies, music that makes you want to flail wildly, songs that actively contribute to your ADHD and all things that are good in this world should come. With DD/MM/YYYY, Numbers & Figures and Video Hippos, $6.
MP3s: The Sourkeys - May
The Sourkeys - Sick Since Sunday
(both from The Sourkeys, 2004—you can’t buy it online, but check a good Ontario record store, or get The Spectacle instead)
The best of the massive “WTF??”ing about Patrick Watson winning the Polaris Music Prize and its attendant $20,000: Cancrit superhero Michael Barclay and Helen Spitzer’s snarky, hungover post-game wrap-up in two parts, and Jordan Timm at The Taste Police’s suggestion that Steve Jordan and friends “consider whether the Polaris selection process is really rewarding the Best Album of the Year—or the Pretty Good Album of the Year That Nobody Hates.” His Juror X scenario is a little flawed, however, in that there were other “tasteful, inoffensive” records nominated—Miracle Fortress‘ Five Roses and The Joel Plaskett Emergency’s Ashtray Rock immediately come to mind—which seemed to have more critical mass (har, har) going in. And are also, like, better. For the record, I thought it would go to Miracle Fortress or Junior Boys, with all appendages crossed for the former.
I will say this: if Close To Paradise was actually the best Canadian album of the past year, I would move somewhere else. [DEARS JOKE REDACTED]
(Note: we like some boring-ass music. We are not mad at P Dubs for his lack of “edge” and we could probably make a good CD for your mom. We are just sad that something so unremarkable and to our ears not very affecting—though, yes, musically sophisticated for its genre—beat some really great and still accessible albums, including some of the most beautiful stuff that has ever caressed our speakers, like non-allergenic pegasus feathers floating into our room.)
You can listen to “highlights” of the gala, including performances (fall asleep twice during Patrick Watson! privately relish Jian Ghomeshi getting bleeped repeatedly while Joel Plaskett swears with impunity! Dave Bookman can’t pronounce “Doiron” in 2007! wow, everyone in Patrick Watson is SUPER drunk!), through the CBC Radio 3 podcast. Photos and gentle outrage at Chromewaves. Whither art thine shirtsleeves, Owen Pallett?
The other major Polaris “controversy” is not over Owen’s shirt, but about whether the financial status of an artist should or does affect their chances at the award. Owen did stoke the fire with this comment in the Canadian Press story:
Last year’s winner Owen Pallett of Final Fantasy said he spent much of his prize money paying off his boyfriend’s school debt, and mused on how he would like to see the contest improved.
“We should divide the award into two awards—one for the bands who don’t have credit card debt and the bands that do. I think that would be a coup. In fact, I’m going to try and make that happen,” he said.
“The Arcade Fire do not need $20,000. Leslie Feist definitely doesn’t need $20,000.”
Our kneejerk reaction was to agree, though maybe not with credit card debt as a specific criterion, and we still haven’t been swayed by all the arguments that the prize isn’t a grant and should be immune from those considerations. Sure, ideally, financial concerns would be totally irrelevant to the jurors if the prize is billed as being based solely on artistic merit. (If you haven’t, go read that Taste Police post on how the judging process itself may obsure issues of artistic merit.) But this ignores two realities:
- Sometimes, good albums and good artists get the attention and success they deserve without needing the exposure or money from an award. Yes, even in Canada.
- As long as there’s a significant cash prize attached to the award—which is kind of essential for anyone caring—and as long as Canada remains a tough market for its own musicians (what with the “lots of space, not a lot of people, hey there’s America” problem), financial considerations are inevitably going to interact with voters’ aesthetic judgement of the albums when they’re making their picks. This is probably most likely to occur in tie-breaking sorts of situations, but could also act as a conscious or unconscious filter earlier in the selection process for both individual critics and the jury.
When you combine those with the not-totally-eradicated music critic attitude that popular things are more likely to suck than unpopular things, it seems necessary to get some of the most successful/profitable albums out of the picture if the Polaris Prize is going to seriously concentrate on artistic merit. (Of course, this doesn’t touch the big debate about genre diversity in the nominee pool, or lack thereof, which we’ll steer clear of for the moment. But feel free to bring it up in the comments.)
We’re not quite sure how to rejig the prize, though, as it seems awfully ridiculous to require anyone’s bank statements. The Polaris Prize was inaugurated partly to compensate for the Junos, which are largely based on album sales (see Steve Jordan’s comment below); however, moving units pretty well in Canada still doesn’t guarantee you’re bathing in crisp bills. Should eligibility for the Polaris Prize be restricted based on a national sales cap, something like the American Shortlist Music Prize for albums that sell fewer than 500,000 copies? An international album sales cap? Would using international album sales as a criterion reflect an attitude of pathetic international approval-seeking? Is any album sale cutoff unnecessarily hostile and unsupportive toward Canadian artists who commit the crime of being both successful and talented? Or is all of this just a case for Shiftless Bitching and Moaning as Canada’s other national sport?
Right now we like the international album sales idea (also the Shiftless Bitching and Moaning, which we could have a bright and profitable professional future in), but let us know what you think.
Bonus MP3: Archers of Loaf - Let The Loser Melt
Props to Meghan Sheffield for making us her +1 to the (sadly scandal-free) afterparty.
here’s the thing: we started out friends
You miss more than sweet tunes when you stay home. Despite being bleary-eyed with exhaustion, I hobbled out to the Tranzac yesterday to see Snailhouse with a band for the first time (for me, not for him) and the consistently fantastic Bruce Peninsula. Unfortunately I missed Tusks‘ opening slot, which was apparently amazing. But the real highlight of the evening—aside from hearing a pile of quality stuff from the forthcoming, just-finished Snailhouse record—was the sort of bitter ex-bandmate chatter people were likely hoping for from The Police’s reunion tour, although it was still less satisfying than seeing Stewart Copeland punch Sting in the face.
A Brief Scene
Dramatis Personae
MIKE FEUERSTACK of Snailhouse, formerly of Kepler (disbanded 2006)
SAMIR KHAN of Tusks, formerly of Snailhouse and also formerly of Kepler
(The Tranzac Club in Toronto. A starry September night. SAMIR has recently joined MIKE and Snailhouse on stage to play bass after his own set with Tusks earlier. A moment between songs.)
MIKE: I want to thank Samir for playing bass for me, and also playing some great music for us earlier.
SAMIR: You can also thank me for letting you sleep on my couch, and driving you, and having me come in to play bass on a song you’re not putting on your record, and—what else can you thank me for? You can thank me for lending you two bucks that time you, like, had to have a ham sandwich.
MIKE: Thanks for ruining my mystique, too.
(Later in the set, between other songs. SAMIR has just muttered something apparently amusing.)
MIKE: It was so much funnier on stage when you were in the band.
SAMIR: And so much sadder in real life.