endless idiotic shots of the sun
Part 1
I live in a constant contradiction. My parents bought me a condo, but I’m not a rich kid, they are just hard working immigrants. The condo is in a rapidly gentrifying part of Vancouver, but I’m a dishwasher. Working class, man. I rail about unaffordability and capitalism on my column in a magazine that is active in that very same gentrification. I’m a misanthrope with great hope for humanity. I’m a white cis-het middle aged male, but I’m an ally! I swear I’m not being performative! I have a photo of my bigot grandfather that I display proudly next to a book about IRA murals in Belfast, the same people he actively was a bigot towards. He was the leader of the Orange Order, but my father would march against him for Catholic civil rights.
On stage I am unhinged, afraid of nothing and respect no boundaries; off stage I am extremely sensitive and anger easily when people don’t respect my boundaries. Fucking privilege man it’s a bitch. I care, I don’t care. One minute I’m a fucking anarcho-syndicalist with a full working ideology and the next I’m making sexist jokes down at the pub. I’m a writer, but I don’t read. I crave attention, and yet, give it to me and I cringe. Look at me, don’t look at me.
Part 2
(As directed by Terrence Malick)
A heavy week
Heavier than most
A chorus of women
A chorus of every woman
Said Me Too
And I believe them
Gord kicked the can
And I’m not usually sentimental
About icons
The Poet Laureate of the northern pscyhe
A warm familiar blanket and the smell of exhaust
A collective second place, a knowing
An impossible identity, that covers all
Even though we claimed to hate him
Or we hated his fans
I wouldn’t call it patriotism
How I Learned to Love the Tragically Hip and Still Be Punk.
I think this begins to sort of tackle the relationship a lot of us have with this band. It's a strange thing for sure. Being Canadian, our identity has never really formed into a tangible cultural force, other than that of being the constant proverbial "other", that perennial "second" and being ok with it. But what is more, within that idea of "second" there is the other second, our first nations. Such a terrible irony there.
Terrence Malick directed a film called the New World about, well, the "discovery" of the new world. The "savages" are portrayed as a complex society albeit a tragic retelling of the story of "Pocahontas". One reviewer complained that is was just "endless idiotic shots of the sun." I love his films and his film The Knight of Cups is heavily referenced in this song.
"These images, brilliant and radiant with a love of light, rapturous with a love of motion, bring to the cinema a big and great idea: the overcoming of the distinction between subject and object, between recording and imagination. The images are both of and from Rick, showing the practicalities of his experience, his sensory apprehension of them, and his inward visual projection of them at the same time, in the same shot."