Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Punk Song for Every Owner: Francesco Aquilini, No Wishes, No Prayers

Clear the Crease co-founder and Chris Collision heterosexual life partner Pierre Idiot Trudeau is An Actual Canadian, and In Fact From Vancouver, so my initial impulse was to turn this entry over to him.

Pierre Idiot Trudeau: I don't know. The Aquilini Brothers, man, I don't get 'em. Can't really hate on the guys, they opened the checkbook and produced a shit-ton of wins, but no Cups and none in sight. Yeah, this sums up our near future.

Pierre Idiot Trudeau: But maybe not. That song is about atheism. Not about no hope. Hmmm.

Pierre Idiot Trudeau: I guess as a retort to evangelical owners...it's a good angle. One of the brothers is born again.

Collision: Well. The secret about this project is that it's actually not about the owners.

Some years back, Pierre Idiot Trudeau and I heaved ourselves off the couch and betook ourselves to Vancouver. His team was in the playoffs, and I was white-knuckling against a deep depression and desperate for anything that would pull me out of Portland for a couple days. So we drove up, and found P.I.T. a scathingly expensive ticket, but only just the one. We were fed outstandingly by his delightful parents, we drank preposterously, and, in time, soundly mocked a gentleman named "Rob"—who we were careful to call "Rod"—who kept making the NWO Wolfpack hand sign and howling "I just drove up from Kelowna, eh?"...

Eventually P.I.T. went to the game. I wandered around, looking for something cheap to do. Eventually, I found a coffee shop and listened to the game on AM radio. It was a rough night: the Canucks absorbed the full litany of ways to describe a loss that you probably remember from Infinite Jest, up to and including the St. Louis Blues—them again!—going back in time to prevent their parents from meeting...0-6 at home, first game of the playoffs; make up your own comparison, I guess, but you certainly wouldn't want that to happen to your sister. My own beloved Avs endured a similar fate, losing to the desperately mediocre Minnesota Wild in a game that would prove to pretty much mark the end of the Avs' status as a first-tier franchise. Sigh. Losing sucks. These are the things I was thinking as I trudged up the entrance ramp to GM Place.

I didn't mention that that 10apr evening, I happened to be wearing my favorite magic garment: a bizarre short-sleeved Patrick Roy jersey that is the only thing that survived my purge of Avs merch. I was wearing this as I salmoned against a neverending stream of exiting Canucks fans. A certain moeity of those fans took some notice of my jerkin and commented on it. For maybe a hundred feet I tried to laugh it off—"Haha, yeah, my guys lost too...rough night, right?"

As I pressed on, drawing closer to the wellspring that would eventually disgorge my friend, the frequency and intensity of the comments increased. I bethought myself...self...if you're going to get your ass kicked for a shirt...let it not be a shirt about hockey...in Vancouver, the Nicest City In The Land.

I zipped up my shitty windbreaker and kept beating on up against the tide. Eventually we went back to the Cambie to get obliterated. In honor of Vancouver, and my pal Mark Black, who wrote a book about Nomeansno that you should absolutely buy and read, here is a song about limitation by probably the best band Canada has ever produced.

—Collision, who didn't get his ass kicked (that night) but who knows one or two things about limitation...as do the Canucks SICK BURN