What I'm Interested in this Month: My Sleeping Habits and a Very Good Beer
Also featuring Tolstoy, Doja Cat, and a not-at-all definitive, completely subjective ranking of the Sleater-Kinney discography.
Welcome to to my newsletter Qollage: a collage of the things that have inspired me enough to write about them. It’s mostly about pop culture, but hey, this week it’s about pop culture a lot less. As the title indicates, here are some things that interested me this month.
Sleeping with Screens
A bad habit that I picked up from my parents is falling asleep with the television on. It is something that they, as far as I know, have always done. And for the majority of my life, I was practically unable to fall asleep without a TV humming unless mitigating circumstances prevented it. Since a very young age, as far back as I can remember,I have had a small TV in my bedroom. I cannot say what psychological effects that had on my growing brain (perhaps there’s a direct correlation to my film obsession), but it meant that every night was movie night. After I was tucked in by my mother or father, but before I would actually close my eyes and doze off, a movie from our formidable VHS library was selected and inserted into the player. I would watch maybe the first 15-30 minutes of whatever was playing before eventually succumbing to slumber. And even as I graduated to pre-school, to elementary, to high school and VHS tapes changed into DVDs, and DVDs eventually changed to an Apple TV equipped with Netflix, and finally just my laptop, I still found myself unable to sleep without the familiar faint glow of the screen and the sounds of distant chatter of some scene I had closed my eyes to.
Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian author, stands as one of the best interrogators of the human fear of death and what lies beyond the grave. In his classic short story The Death of Ivan Ilyich, he looks at the titular dying man who, on his deathbed, comes to realize that he has wasted his life. Tolstoy illustrates the difficulty of distracting yourself from the spectre of death when you are so close to it. Not only is Ivan in physical torment from his mysterious ailment, his psychological torment is even more immense as he is plagued with thoughts of what happens when he will die. He finds distractions that ease his suffering, if only temporarily. Tolstoy writes, “and to save him from this state, Ivan Ilyich looked for consolation, for another screen, and other screens appeared and for a short time seemed to save him.” The screen here of course is metaphorical, meant to symbolize a distraction that blocks or obfuscates Ilyich’s fears. Reading this though, I realized that for me, the metaphorical meaning and the modern, literal meaning of screen have combined into one.
What I have come to realize now is this preference for having the television on while I slept fused itself with two twin developments in my growing brain: my obsessive compulsive disorder that started around when I entered my preteens, and a sudden all-encompassing fear of death that began around the same time. Part of OCD is the practices of having rituals that act as a sort of centring force. For me, these rituals revolve mostly around my obsession with even numbers, but they can sometimes branch off in strange and unpredictable ways. Starting during this time in my life I began to have bedtime rituals that were done specifically to ward off the spectre of Death. As they say, Sleep is the cousin of Death, and so I had to find some way to protect myself when I for those 7-or-so hours on unconsciousness. It was a process that involved me wishing good night to various objects around my room, in a specific order that would rotate on a day-to-day basis. After this was done I would say, “Good night everyone!” and then, in a sing-songy way that you sometimes do at the end of Happy Birthday, “And many moooore!” This was the important part for me. Saying goodnight meant that I spoke a good night into existence. And what exactly did encompassed a good night? Chiefly, not dying in my sleep. The many more at the end was something of a safeguard. Adding this guaranteed that I would not just be safe for this night, but ensuing nights in the future. It also meant that if there was a night where I did not do my ritual (i.e. I was sleeping over at a friends house or I was so exhausted I fell asleep right away) then it was okay because I was protected by one of the times I said “and many more.” I don’t think I ever decided the exact numerical value of “many” but I figured that if I said it enough I was buying myself tens of thousands of guaranteed safe nights. This ritual thought would be all for not if two things were not in place though. Firstly, that “and many more” had to be the final things I said before falling asleep. If I spoke again (and sometimes I did because I was an only child who talked to himself) I had to restart the entire good night process. Secondly, the TV had to be one. It’s soft light and ambient noise were there to ward off anything that might find its way to me in the dark. Like Ivan Ilyich, I needed a screen to console me.
Did I believe this ritual actually worked? I don’t think so. It was just the result of the combination of fear and mental illness. Both a desire for comfort and something to numb my combustible brain. I want to assure you, this is actually not as bad as it sounds. Everybody has personal rituals to calm themselves and many people have sleeping rituals. This one was just mine. And as for my fear of death, it’s not like I was actively shaking in bed every night at the spectre of it, it’s just that death was always at least a little on my mind.
Eventually I stopped doing this ritual, partially because of maturity, but also because rituals change. By the time I was graduating high school, I began to feel more comfortable with the idea of sleeping with the TV off and even started to do it on occasion. This was accelerated when I reached university and was now sharing a room with a roommate. Obviously, I couldn’t just have my laptop playing a movie out loud while he was trying to sleep, so sleeping with a screen stopped. I quit cold turkey. This was a healthy development! When I moved into a student house the next year and once again had my own room, free to play any media as I slept as long as it was at a reasonable level, I felt I no longer needed to! This development continued for several years. Every now and then I might fall asleep watching something and it was like having a little treat. But one night, in the fourth year of my undergrad, I was struck by an immediate, unceasing fear of imminent death (not unlike the protagonist in another Tolstoy short, The Diary of a Madman). The only way I could find to abate it was to put something on Netflix on my laptop so I could have a distraction that would sedate my worried mind. In fact, I had almost convinced myself that if something wasn’t on that screen I would die. It was a relapse. I was worried I would repeat the experience of that night and did not want to go through it again, so, as a pre-emptive measure, I started falling asleep to a screen once again.
I was not alone in having my sleep disrupted by the pandemic. Far from it. A whole term was coined: cornasomnia. And numerous studies have all confirmed the same trend: people during the pandemic are having more trouble falling asleep than ever more. Even before our world was turned upside down I was not a healthy sleeper, but the pandemic exacerbated it even further. In March of 2020, I moved back in with my parents, unemployed, and with zero structure in my day-to-day life except a weekly Friday Zoom beers with my friends. I felt completely adrift. 3 A.M. didn’t actually mean anything to me. There were days where I could see the sun starting to creep up through my bedroom window before I was able to fall asleep. When I was finally ready to call it a night though, my laptop was open by my bedside with a Youtube video, probably one about a basketball or cooking, locked and loaded to help carry me in to dream land.
One night though, the Internet at my parent’s house decided to act up and stopped working. It was late, and I could have just gone to bed, but I encountered a mental block. And so with no YouTube or Netflix at my disposal, I dusted off the old DVD player that sat in my room. It is an odd little thing, a smooth, shiny, black disc. It sort of looks like a flying saucer, without the dome. Or perhaps an off-brand Roomba. I think about how much use it once got before physical media became increasingly eschewed in favour of streaming. My mind is flushed with a currant of DVD menus burned into my memory. They would play on a loop for hours as I slept and I would awake in the morning comforted by their familiarity. I held it in my hands, delicately, like one might hold a small, old pet: full of love for this thing that may now exist beyond its intended lifecycle, but still has the capabilities to bring me great joy and comfort. I plug it in to the back of the TV and the power socket. I selected an old episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a favourite show of my early teens, to let play as I doze off. I don’t even press play though. The warmth of the familiar menu screen is all I need. I write a bit as it plays on a loop and then roll over, swathed in my heavy, navy comforter. The next day the Internet was again in working order. I think to myself if and when I will ever use that small, black DVD player again.
These days I’m lucky enough to have a couple things to keep my sleeping habits in relative array. I have a weekly schedule and I am lucky enough to share a space with my partner. We have our own sleep rituals that involves falling asleep to a podcast, typically Myths and Legends, and letting it play like the ambient sounds of a noise machine. Falling asleep to podcasts has become increasingly common for people, so much so that Spotify has a sleep timer option. And it might actually even be good for you!
But there are still nights where she falls asleep right away and I am left to deal with a racing mind. To assuage it, I am still compelled to pull out a screen. My relationship with this screen though is a lot healthier now. It is really there for me now just as ambient noise and light. I no longer need it to ward off any spectre. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe.
Collective Arts Brewing’s Guava Gose
Aesthetics are more important than ever in the beer market. Go in to the beer aisle at any LCBO and you will see a kaleidoscope of flashy colours and unique designs hell-bent on catching your eye. Just a seemingly every new book has blobs on the cover, it seems any beer from an independent brewery is focused just as much on graphic design as they are the actual beer.
Collective Arts Brewing, a craft brewer based in Hamilton and Toronto, takes this collaboration between art and beer one step further. Since 2013, the company has put out calls for their cans and bottles, paying over the years over 650 artists and musicians and using their artwork for limited run printings on their beers. They see themselves not just a brewery, but something of an arts incubator saying on their LinkedIn, “we are dedicated to promoting artists, inspiring creativity and raising the creative consciousness through the sociability of our beverages.” The result has been that their products consistently have stood out amongst the glut of brightly coloured novelties in the LCBO. The real question though: are these beers any good?
I cannot speak to all of the products they have put out, but one in particular has become my favourite summer drink: the Guava Gose. Sour beers are often not up my alley, but the Guava Gose has a subtlety that I find lacking in other sour beers. It is able to balance a very forward-facing, I might call it “spiky” sourness with a pleasant guava flavour and a fully-body. The secret ingredient to making this work: the Himalayan pink salt. I can understand the hesitance of wanting to drink a salty beer, but the hint of sodium does just enough to offset a tartness and sourness that might overwhelm the whole beverage. The first time I had it was actually last summer, and when I stumbled upon it once again at a recent trip to the LCBO it was an opportunity to re-confirm that this is an excellent summer beer. I can truly say its unlike any other beer I’ve had before it and it is eminently drinkable. The sour floral aroma and light-pink appearance are also quite pleasing and at a 4.9% ABV, you can definitely crush a couple of these on a hot summer’s afternoon and float through the rest of the day operating a peak lightly buzzed level.
And of course, the can art is great. Though done by different artists, all of the cans use the same colour scheme, a vibrant blend of aquamarine and magenta, and unified sense of design that involves a lot of abstract imagery. Several cans feature monstrous looking creatures, one with a dinosaur-like creature another with a gorgon, with noodle-y shapes whipping all over the can. And given the guava’s tropical origins, all of the artists who designed for the can are Puerto Rican. The current cans are designed by Eliezer Fontanez, Kare Carrasquillo, Ivia Pantoja, and Sergio Vazquez. Their artwork is great. So is the beer. And if anyone from Collective Arts is reading this: yes I will absolutely take bribes in the form of alcohol to praise you even further.
New Music Roundup
The section of the newsletter where I share selected, short, scattered thoughts on new(ish) releases.
Feels, almost by design, to be her weakest album (note: Love this Giant, her collab with David Byrne, doesn’t count. That is obviously her weakest album). Her first two albums daringly combined the baroque with squalling electricity. Strange Mercy upped the ante even further creating a wholly original nightmare landscape. Her self-titled saw her ascend to full guitar god status. And Masseduction, her most “conventional” album, proved her pop bona fides and with New York showed that if she wanted to she could write a song that theoretically could be your most normie friend’s favourite (this is not a diss, “New York” is absolutely one of her best songs). Daddy’s Home is the first album where Annie Clark is giving me something that I feel like I could get somewhere else better. I love how much it sounds like Steely Dan… but I could also just listen to Steely Dan. I love the Sheena Easton remix “My Baby Wants a Baby”… at least in theory, but I don’t think it really improves on the original song. It’s a bold choice to release music that relies so heavily on pastiche and 70s cosplay while also having it be your most openly personal album. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s one that pays off.
I feel like I’m being harsh on an album where I liked or really liked pretty much every song. “Somebody Like Me” I think is particularly beautiful. “Down” has a great beat and tremendous energy that could have been used elsewhere. And “At the Holiday Party” feels like the clearest crystallization of what Clark is going for throughout the entire album. It has an easy groove that the other tracks lack. Clark has always made very angular sounding music. I would even call it stiff. It’s built on a foundation of tension and release; rigorous sounds that eventually devolve into chaos. There’s traces of that stiffness in almost all the songs on here and that holds them back. It doesn’t have the easiness of that AM Gold sound she’s trying to capture. “Holiday Party” is completely rubbery with that perfect sense of ease, making it the album’s best track. Daddy’s Home is a good album. I will likely listen to it multiple times again this year. But I can’t help but feel the impact is dulled.
Sleater-Kinney - Path of Wellness
The singles were good. The rest was uninspired. I re-listened to basically all of their catalogue leading up to this release and holy shit, it really is unimpeachable right up until The Center Won’t Hold (jeez, did not mean to be so harsh on Annie Clark in this newsletter). Rock bands can’t be good forever. Oh well.
For reference, my ranking of the SK discography (subject to change):
One Beat
Dig Me Out
The Woods
All Hands on the Bad One
No Cities to Love
Call the Doctor
The Hot Rock
Sleater-Kinney
The Center Won’t Hold
Path of Wellness
Doja Cat - Planet Her
In pop music, separating the art from the artist is either extremely easy or extremely difficult depending on your perspective.
On one hand, it is easy because pop music, and I mean pop music made with the explicit goal of putting up dominant streaming numbers and charting on Billboard, has a distinctly different goal than most mediums where discussion about separating the art from the artist happen. Poptimism may now be the dominant strain in music criticism, but music criticism is not a dominant strain in how people generally consume and interact with music. This is not to say the average person doesn’t necessarily think about the importance of pop music, but that when they are seeking it out they are looking for, above all else, something that sounds good and sounds catchy. On the other hand, separating the art and artist is a very difficult task, because when a pop star truly becomes a pop star we are not just buying their music, but buying their image.
I am not going to run down Doja Cat’s litany of controversial offences as this has been done exhaustively in the run-up to her new album Planet Her. What I am here to say is that, after listening to said album, Doja Cat is now undeniably one of the best new pop stars we have. She has a strong sense of visuals, a distinct voice, and a penchant for courting controversy that is a preternatural gift for all of the best pop stars. And of course, she climbed out of the primordial goo of memedom that was MOOOO!!! to break out and become a full-fledged success (I realize a lot of what I’m saying also applies to Lil Nas X, another one of our best new pop stars, but I digress). She is interesting in a way that feels almost throwbacky. Someone who has proved bulletproof because she just keeps putting out bangers. Cancel culture is an overstated threat and hardly anyone really gets cancelled, but I think it’s a testament to the strength of both her sound and aesthetic that she has been able to mow through any meaningful pushback against her with complete ease.
Now this is not me not saying Planet Her is a great album. It has a great first half! The stretch of songs running from Naked to Just a Dream are uniformly excellent. I Don’t Do Drugs, her third collab with Ariana Grande and proof that the two are really sympatico, floats sweetly, combining wispy 90s Mariah sounds with the galactic-trap heard throughout the album. The best song on the album is probably Payday, a bonkers Young Thug collab that finds both of them in top form; meshing their histrionic android vocals with an interstellar beat from producer Y2K, who consistently makes the best contributions to the album and might be the secret breakout star from it. After that, there is a steep drop-off. You Right featuring the Weeknd and Been Like That are poor choices to pair together on the track list as they are essentially interchangeable. While songs like Ain’t Shit and Imagine are eye-rollingly corny. The album peters out before reaching the finale: the smash hit Kiss Me More featuring SZA.
Let’s talk about Kiss Me More. It is one of the three tracks, along with Need to Know and You Right, co-written/produced by Lukas Gottwald aka Dr. Luke. If you need a primer on the allegations against Dr. Luke click here. Needless to say, out of all her myriad controversies Doja’s close ties with Gottwald are what have raised the most eyes. Not only is he a go-to producer for her, she is also signed to his record imprint Kemosabe Records which put out Planet Her. I do not how many people regularly listening to Doja Cat are aware of this, but I am. And I listened to Kiss Me More, oh let’s see, maybe a million times over the past few months. It’s one of the best pop hits of the year and over the course of its three-and-a-half minute runtime I’m suddenly able to forget about its dark little secret.
Ethical consumption under a capitalist system is impossible… but does this apply to the music industry as well? Shouldn’t it be easier for me not to listen to songs produced by an alleged rapist? To be fair to Doja, she started working with him before the full scope of the allegations came to light and, also, he has not been convicted of any crime in court. She is not doing anything illegal, but at this point in her career she has shown a formidable comfort in working within moral grey areas. The Pitchfork review of Planet Her makes an explicit point of saying that the Dr. Luke tracks are, “not the best ones,” which rubs me the wrong way. It’s as if to say that, “this album would be good without his contributions!” What I think needs to be dealt with it is that this is a good album with his contributions.
Doja Cat makes great pop music and, because of her seeming inability to get cancelled, is an inherently more interesting figure than most of the new non-stars that clutter up the top of the charts (24k Goldn? The Kid LAROI? Who are these people and why should I care about them?). Maybe separating the art from the artist in this case is a moot point and the guilt that comes with listening to some of her music is the same guilt I feel when I have to buy a plastic bottle of water. One that I feel bad about for a moment before promptly moving on. If I don’t buy that bottle, some one else will. If I don’t stream Kiss Me More someone else will. Much of the greatest music ever made was made by certifiable monsters. And Doja Cat isn’t a monster. She’s a pop star.