I haven’t put anything up here in a long time. I’m feeling pretty antsy and indecisive about how I want to be filling my spare time. I know I want to be productive and maybe even creative, but it’s hard sticking to one idea, especially when I’ve got limited resources.
Something that’s really low stakes that I enjoy doing is making and sticking up fake posters. I hope that they make people smile if they spot them hanging from somewhere. All I strive to be is a silly little guy. Maybe I should make a vow to do one a month…
For now, here are some of the more recent ones.
My friend Graeme absolutely loves the giant Frankenstein’s Monster Eating a Whopper at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, so I made him this for his birthday today. Turns out I can’t do any types of hands – human or monster.
I don’t think this one is as good as my attempt at George Harrison, but it’ll do. My plan was to do all stages of David Lynch picking a daily number (“swirl the numbers”, “pick a number”) but this one part proved that I can’t really do hands… or faces… so probably not worth the time.
I can’t wait until we are all in one place and I can shoot an actual video that we can be in together, rather than this almost Found Footage approach we’ve had to use for the past two videos.
A short one this time, covering GBV’s 14 Cheerleader Coldfront, written by Tobin Sprout and Robert Pollard.
In September 2019, at the annual Guided by Voices love-in, Heedfest, She Bee Vee was formed. Initially, it was pitched as a hypothetical all-women Guided by Voices cover band that was largely an excuse to stay in touch with one another and encourage the new friends’ musical endeavours. However, after the “band” sweet-talked their way onto the bill for the 2020 edition of Heedfest, it then had to become real. Time to shit or get off the pot, as they say.
Living in five different cities across two countries (the US and Canada) would prove to be a logistical pain point, however, the women of She Bee Vee enjoy a challenge, so vowed to learn their parts as individuals before coming together for some IRL practices. Plans were made and planes were booked in order for them to hold a band camp in Minneapolis in July 2020, a few months prior to the Heedfest show in Dayton due in September 2020. Obviously, neither of these things was allowed to happen in the end.
Buzz about what the band would be like had started to accumulate online within the GbV community at an uncomfortable rate, and the Sheebs wanted to put something out into the universe to commemorate the lack of Heedfest in the Covid-19 era. They learned the song Big Boring Wedding, recording each of their parts separately to then be mixed together. A video was made. People seemed to like the whole thing.
I played bass and put together the video. It was really fun to do and I was grateful for the opportunity to do something real. My buds are very talented. You can learn more and keep up-to-date on new developments here.
Much like a lot of people, I have been working from home for the last nine months. My workspace is at one end of our dining room table and my friend sits at the other end. We cannot see one another behind our large computer monitors, but I think we have a good thing going. Our days are filled with spontaneous singing, having lengthy conversations in accents that are not our own and occasional ranting about certain aspects of our respective jobs.
Before we started working from home, my work office had a shared Spotify playlist that we could all add to and it was played over speakers on a shuffled loop for 8+ hours a day. It was a nice idea, but sometimes I would still plug my headphones in and just listen to what I wanted to for the day. Now, at home and with a friend, it feels weird to have headphones on, effectively leaving the room in silence. To combat this, we listen to music together, but it is music that has been democratically chosen by both of us. Sometimes our playlists will be themed. We’ve had days where all we listen to is Lizzo, Dolly Parton, Elton John or Springsteen. Other days, we’ve had choice jams from musicals such as West Side Story, the Producers, and our beloved Moulin Rouge. Sometimes it’s fun to belt out Ewan McGregor’s parts in Your Song and Elephant Love Medley.
This is a digression. Most of the time we listen to hastily thrown together playlists, adding tracks to the Song Queue when we think of them. We have a couple of go-to songs that we never tire of and that act as placeholders until we can decide what we want to play. I’d say our top five, in no real order are:
Every time I see the cover of Cloud Nine, the George Harrison album on which the above song appears, I am filled with such joy at how charmingly shit it is. It may be my favourite album cover of all time. It feels so slapdash, just a cheesy picture of the best Beatle in front of some clouds, his guitar not even properly slung around his neck. For a long time, I’d see it and think it’d be easy to do a MS Paint version of, given that there’s not much to it. When my brain conspires against me, I find it comforting to launch my phone across the room, put on a podcast and piss around on MS Paint for hours. It’s really therapeutic. So I finally went ahead and made this. The only time I didn’t feel in a semi-meditative state while moving my mouse around to do it was when it came to the shirt, which was a complete pain in the arse. His mouth cracks me up, though, I did not do a great job there…
2020 was going to be OUR YEAR!, wasn’t it? All of us? Y’know. Until it wasn’t.
I’m not one for new year or resolutions or expecting too much from a calendar change, but in Classic Me style, I decided early on that 2020 might actually be a good one for me. With the dawn of each January 1st, I still manage to convince myself that I will make more of an effort in self-improvement for the coming year and beyond. I gave up on making actual strict resolutions years ago, after realising that I was incapable of setting realistic goals. I seem to recall when I was 14, vowing to “write a series of a sitcom” in that one year. And that was only one item on my extensive To Do list.
This year, I decided to keep it attainable with one real resolution:
I will not ride the Dufferin bus.
The Dufferin bus basically stops right outside my house and is undoubtedly the most convenient bus for me, but it’s quite simply the worst. It’s never not uncomfortably packed and all of the drivers on that route drive like maniacs over an incredibly ill-maintained stretch of road. It was a joke resolution, and there were times when taking that particular bus was unavoidable. However, on several occasions, I managed to go to great lengths to avoid it, often inconveniencing myself by taking other routes that would take me further away from my destination and I’d end up walking more than I would had I just taken the bus. I switched up the route I would take to and from work every day and I felt pretty pleased with how long I managed to go without the Dufferin bus. Then the pandemic hit and I had no need to commute or go anywhere, so the job was done for me.
Mid-January 2020: The snow and hill were obviously too much for the Dufferin buses to take, as we counted EIGHTEEN of them in a row between Davenport and Dupont, none of them moving. I just consulted Google Maps, which tells me that the distance between these two streets is a mere 650m. Absolutely fuck the Dufferin bus.
Although not an official resolution, I also decided that I’d actually follow through with trying to work on myself. I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with my lack of creative output for the last few years and often start on projects in order to combat this, only to give up or forget about them. I don’t really know how to do much, so I wanted to learn things. I had agreed to be in a band who had one show lined up in September, so figured I should actually learn how to play bass, rather than just noodle about and teach myself the odd song here and there as I’ve been doing inconsistently since I was 16.
So, I took the plunge and had my first ever bass guitar lesson! It was great! My teacher actually cared about what I hoped to get out of it and didn’t make me feel stupid, which was a real worry. It was a success and, as he left, I said I’d definitely like to continue. He told me he was out of town for the next couple of weeks but to drop him and email and we could continue from there when he got back. That first lesson was at the end of February. There have been no further lessons. I can blame the pandemic for this one, right? Excellent. The end.
Not really. I’ve been feeling conflicted since March, when things went weird. I’ve got so much free time and, on one hand, I’m firmly in the “don’t feel bad if you’re not using it to be productive when you’re trying to navigate a fucking global pandemic and all that comes with it”, but on the other, I am tired of making excuses for myself as to why I don’t follow through with things. My primary concern is that I don’t know what to follow through with and I float from idea to idea, interest to interest, but rarely for long enough to make any progress. A conversation that has come up often with a friend is that we miss making things for the sake of making them. This seems to be something particularly prominent when you’re young, but maybe life just zaps the will out of you as you age. So, I’m trying to reclaim that a bit. In the last few months, I have made a couple of little things for no reason and it’s felt great.
I figured it’d be good to put them somewhere and maybe some people will see them and enjoy them. I don’t have a discipline, I just have stuff I like to do. I enjoy making silly videos, taking pictures and writing things down, so I suppose this page will just be that. Maybe this will help me figure out where I want to spend more of my time, or maybe it’ll just be a dumping ground for what’s in my brain. Anyway…
kirsteninneski.ca 