editor’s note
In my closet, alongside tired sweaters and moth-
eaten T-shirts, I keep cassette tapes of poorly-produced musical experimentations, some top-shelf literature (PopUp Kama Sutra, anyone?), and a teetering stack of old notebooks dating back to the days when I played in a band, wrote poetry, and naively aspired to be famous. It’s easy to look back at your younger self and smirk, the perspective of an older and wiser you chuckling knowingly at the innocent aspirations so typically the hallmark of youth. But if you dig a little deeper you can find whispers of your present self in those scribbled to-do lists of yesterday. We are all products of what we did, who we were, and where we came from. And I’ll take that one step farther: who we are now is inextricably linked to the books we read, the shows we saw, and the music we used to listen to. Sometimes what we listened to was for the wrong reasons: I didn’t actually like The Prodigy when they first hit the scene but I listened to them anyway because I thought it would make me cooler in the eyes of my peers. James Murphy talked about this in an interview with NY Times writer Chuck Klosterman, saying, “You can’t be afraid to embarrass yourself sometimes.” When I pull those old notebooks out of my closet and read through them, I get twinges of embarrassment at what I used to think was cool. But there’s no escaping who I was. I may have only listened to The Prodigy to 1
be cool, but I still listened to The Prodigy. I may have written strange sci-fi stories laced with LSD and rhyming quatrains, but those stories played a role in shaping the Me of today. The past creates the present and embarrassment is just a state of mind. On your local community radio station, you often get an auditory glimpse of past and present colliding— many of our music hosts play a mix of old favourites and new tunes. It’s like tuning into someone’s head and witnessing the rambling of half-remembered thoughts and snippets of songs once whistled to the beat of hightop sneakers slapping the pavement. This issue of [sic] is a new notebook that takes you to the festival grounds, where embarrassment isn’t an option, onto the train in a photo essay about our new digs, and into the philosophical in an essay about home written by a part-time resident of Smithers.We also catch up with The City Streets, a band that wrote a song about Canada’s greatest embarrassment and the shame in our collective closet. And of course, we have the usual mixed bag of reviews, music memories, and radio-related tidbits. One day, this too might be an embarrassing relic of our younger selves, destined for a dusty closet somewhere. But, to paraphrase a Lou Reed tune, “It’s all coming out, out of our closets.” – Matt J. Simmons