What a couple of weeks. It’s a bad out there, folks. You probably don’t need me to tell you this. Slow crises like the climate and the cost of living go unaddressed as world leaders gear up for another pointless war. The price of oil is soaring, threatening to destroy the economy. And here in Nova Scotia our premier, whose qualifications for the job include “tax haven accountant,” is implementing an austerity budget.
You don’t need me to go into detail about any of this stuff. You probably can’t stop hearing about the war in Iran from every corner of the internet, and if you want more detail about what’s happening in Nova Scotia I would just point you in the direction of this good, comprehensive Halifax Examiner article. What I will say is that it’s pretty frustrating to be unemployed right now. Every industry I’m interested in (arts, publishing, not-for-profit, government work) just got hit with a sledgehammer, and the larger economy is threatening to get really weird. Nothing going on right now is good for anybody, actually, except for rich guys, like Tim Houston and his buddies.
But forget about that, this is a blog about Baseball and music! Wait, hold on, Israel is playing in the World Baseball Classic? Ah fuck, America is hosting the thing? Paul Skenes said something about how America is supposed to “assert our dominance over everybody else?” I’m beginning to think all our cultural institutions are rotten, having been birthed by a rotten culture. I don’t know, man.
Let’s think about spring training, instead. Spring training games are weird. Teams throw out real lineups for a few innings, and then let a bunch of prospects vying for roster spots take over. It makes for incredibly low stakes viewing, which is saying something for a sport where the season is 162 games long, such that individual regular season games don’t matter all that much anyway. I kinda feel like it’s weird that spring training games even get broadcast. It’s like watching a band’s rehearsals.
For other teams, if I understand correctly, spring training broadcasts are sort of an occasional treat. But the Blue Jays, being owned by Rogers, have all their spring games broadcast on Sportsnet. The commentators have been interviewing players on the broadcast too, after they come out of the games. This makes these broadcasts feel like entertainment products aspiring to the heights of regular Baseball broadcasts, but this aspiration grinds with unignorable friction against the reality of the games on the field, where teenagers none but the most stat-pilled and fantasy league addled among us have heard of inherit games from the big brothers occupying spots on an already full roster and play them to generally boring finales, with suitably ridiculous final scores. There’s a casual hangoutitude to it I appreciate, but this doesn’t mitigate the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve snuck into the gym to watch the athletes lift weights.
I do like how the 2026 Blue Jays are shaping up, though. Daulton Varsho is getting some big hits, Okamoto looks like the real hitter everybody wants him to be, and these new pitchers are all really goddamn cool. The biggest bit of excitement for me so far has been Andres Gimenez who, in one game I watched, hit a double and homer in back to back at bats. This could have been a fluke, but it has me imagining an Andres Gimenez who can hit for power. An Andres Gimenez who hits for power would be a cartoonishly good Baseball player.
Now we have the World Baseball Classic to keep us occupied until the start of the regular season (if we can ignore and/or stomach the horrors), so I don’t have to pay quite so much attention to the awkward spring games. I watched Vladdy hit a sac fly for the Dominican Republic the other night, which ruled. I’ll be honest: I have no great hopes for the Canadian team, and am basically just rooting for the DR.
I’ve had a pretty busy week for an unemployed guy, and haven’t had a ton of time to sit down and really listen to music. So, rather than one relatively in depth review, I’m going to give a little sampler of three albums that I’ve listened to this week, but that I haven’t by any means properly processed. I’ll just go in the order I first listened to them.
First, Charli XCX’s “Wuthering Heights.” I was going to review this in full for last week’s post, which would’ve been entirely Wuthering Heights focused, including a review of the movie. Writing about the movie ended up feeling like smashing my head against a wall, though, so much so that I ended up skipping last week’s post entirely. The movie is exactly what I expected from Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights: bloated and confused like all her movies, but with some good performances, again, like all her movies. It was an incredibly shallow interpretation of its source material. Also, I think the way it made Heathcliff white and basically a good guy while simultaneously making Ellen both Asian and explicitly villainous is kinda racist. The book is subtly about how a racist society (among other things) turned an abused Heathcliff into a monster; the movie is about a scheming Asian woman plotting against our hot white protagonists’ love.
Now I realize it sounds like I’m getting off track, but it was important to address the movie a little bit here, because it actually did end up influencing how I feel about the soundtrack album. I listened to the album before seeing the movie and liked it a lot. I liked how brooding and scary “House” is, I liked how Charli XCX retained much of her usual style while incorporating more natural instrumentation, and I liked how “Chains of Love” seemed to maybe offer an interpretation of Catherine and Heathcliff’s love as a force neither of them could account for, binding them together.
In the movie, though, “House” is used to evoke vague ideas of Wuthering Heights being haunted, a theme which never develops into anything interesting, and “Chains of Love” is used in a montage of Catherine being sad to be living at Thrushcross Grange, revealing what I thought was a dramatic take on a specific interpretation of Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship to be a bone-shatteringly unsubtle, thoroughly ham-handed description of how Catherine feels about marriage to Edgar. Basically, watching the movie made music I had liked feel sort of offensively shallow. At least the movie only actually used a couple songs from the album.
Rating: ☆
Next, ella guro’s “Saint Elizabeth.” I have listened to this exactly once, and it deserves much, much more attention. If nothing else excites me in the coming week I might come back to this one for next week’s review. For now I will say I love the big, loud synth sounds, and I love all the little production flourishes all over this thing. It reminded me in equal parts of David Bowie and LCD Soundsystem, but still sounded more like itself than anything else. Very cool independent project. I’m going to hold off on giving it a rating for now, since, as previously stated, I’ve only actually listened to it once.
Finally, Mitski’s “Nothing’s About to Happen to Me.” I’m loving this one. I’ve only listened to it a couple times, so my impressions are still shallow, but on first blush “In a Lake,” “Where’s My Phone,” and “That White Cat” are all standouts. I love the way the arrangements lean towards folk, with lots of acoustic guitars and lovely backing vocals. It’s a well structured album, too: big and bold at the start and finish, with a couple slower, softer tracks in the middle to break up the pacing. I don’t have a ton to say about it right now, but don’t be surprised if it comes up when I talk about 2026 in review next January.
Rating: ☆☆