Category: personal

2 My 30th birthday wishlist

September 9, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · personal

Today is my 30th birthday. I know a lot of people talk about how getting older is a drag, and how turning 30 is the end of something. For my part, I’m actually really excited for my 30s. I have devoted most of my 20s to building a scaffolding for future success (in my job, in my musical career, in my personal relationships) – my 30s are when I am planning on building some real things on top of that scaffolding. There’s a lot of really great things happening in my life as I head into 30, and I am optimistic about things getting even better.

If you were inclined to do something nice/special for me on this birthiest of days, here’s a list of cheap/free things you can do that would make me very happy.

1: Read My Blog

You’re already doing this one right now, so thanks! But I’ve written a bunch of other things that I think deserve to be read. If you go to the blog’s front page, there is a pulldown menu on the top left that allows you to access 4 years of archived posts. Something there may interest you.

2: Become a Facebook Fan

I have been sinking a non-trivial amount of my time and effort into my music projects, all of which is documented on my Facebook page. There are free mp3s, Youtube videos, pictures, and a whole bunch of other stuff that is available for free. I do it all with the hopes that people will listen and enjoy, so I hope that you will listen and enjoy.

I do have a personal Facebook account, but I don’t add people I haven’t met in person (or unless I’ve had long-standing online interactions with them, in some rare cases).

3: Become a Patreon Sponsor

If you have a couple of extra bucks kicking around, please consider sponsoring me on Patreon.com. I write, record, and release original tunes roughly once every couple of months. Patreon sponsors pledge a small amount of money (the lowest level is $1) for each song I release, and get rewards for doing so on a sliding scale. The money I make on Patreon goes toward purchasing studio time to make professional-quality recordings of my music. If you’ve got at least 30-50 cents a month, consider throwing some of that my way!

4: Subscribe on Other Social Media

I am a surprisingly easy person to find online:

– I have Twitter
– I have Instagram
– I have SoundCloud
– I have YouTube

I try to keep all of my channels free of boring/spam content (although no promises about my Twitter feed), so if you’re interested in what’s going on in my life, that’s a really good way to accomplish that.

5: Listen to my latest song

I released a new recording last week. Listen to it.

6: Come see a show

If you live in the Vancouver area, I am playing two shows this week. On Thursday I will be playing with my new band The Sheets at the Blarney Stone in Gastown. This is what The Sheets sound like. I’m not in that video, but imagine more fiddle (and less creepy murder-light), and you’ll be somewhere in the ballpark. There is no cover on Thursdays.

On Friday I am playing a solo show at Clough Club, also in Gastown. This is what my solo set sounds like. Clough also has no cover. My set is a mix of original tunes and covers, and people usually seem to enjoy it. If you’re around, and you like live music, you can come see some.

7: Come to my party

I’ll be at Clough Club on Saturday as well, for the formal celebration. The more the merrier, although if you’re meeting me in person for the first time, you won’t be seeing me at my best (although I will be at my most distracted). There will also be fantastic live music courtesy of Alex Maher. This is what Alex Maher sounds like.

That’s the list. I would be very happy if you did any of these things, as they are all quite meaningful to me. For my part, you can expect more writing, more music, and more new endeavours. I’m looking forward, as always, to sharing that process with you.

Thank you!

0 Joining The Sheets

August 5, 2014
by Crommunist
· bmusic · personal

The world works in funny ways sometimes.

I was walking home from my girlfriend’s place, and because I used to live in the neighbourhood I happened to take a particular route to the bus stop. Passing by a bar called The Pint, I noticed with moderate interest the fact that they had an open mic on a Tuesday night. Attending that open mic some weeks later introduced me to the guys from the Gastown Royals, who were regulars there. One of their members invited me to play fiddle on a project he’d been working on, which I happily accepted. That, in turn, led to me meeting Tom, who is the bass player of a group called The Sheets. They just happened to be looking for a fiddle player for a regular gig they play at The Blarney Stone, a popular Vancouver club.

And so it was that I found myself on stage a few weeks ago, jamming alongside The Sheets and their blend of rock and reggae covers. I was invited to join the group for their Thursday gig on an ongoing basis, and after giving it some thought I eventually accepted. Now you’ll be able to catch me Thursday nights at The Blarney Stone, as well as Friday nights a The Coppertank with my band, Even Handed Odds.

As one might imagine, having two weekly gigs requires some ‘give’ somewhere else in the schedule, so I am putting most of my solo project on the back burner for now. I will no longer be pursuing solo gigs, and once the busking season is done I will putting solo stuff on a fairly comprehensive hiatus. I will continue to write and occasionally record my own solo songs, but otheriwse the solo stuff will run pretty quiet for a while.

For any of you who might be disappointed by this decision, there are a couple of practical matters to consider. First, while I really do enjoy solo performance, it’s quite a bit more work than ensemble performance. For every 3-hour show I might play, there are countless hours spent promoting and preparing new music – these are now hours that I can redevote to songwriting and recording. Indeed, many of the days that I have spent busking this summer are days where I had to decide not to work on turning a growing number of music fragments into coherent songs. Less time out on the streets, at open mics, and in bars means more time in my apartment working on producing new stuff for you.

The other silver lining aspect to this development is that this gig with The Sheets isn’t a volunteer position – I will be making a decent amount of money. It is a well-known truism in the world of gigging musicians is that steady work is better than flashy work. 100% of the money that I make performing is funneled directly back into music, meaning that this gig will allow me to pay for equipment upgrades (I very badly need a new viola – I’ve had Dennis since I was 14 and I outgrew him by the time I was 18). More importantly it will allow me to pay for studio time, which means I’ll likely be able to release an EP within the next year.

For my own part, I am mostly happy about this turn of events. The guys in The Sheets are really talented, and The Blarney Stone is a huge room – it also has an honest-to-Hendrix dance floor, which is a feature much appreciated by live musicians. It will also give me an opportunity to try something new, and to sharpen my fiddle skills. At the same time, I am obviously conflicted about arresting the momentum I’ve been building with my solo project, and curious about what this will end up meaning for Even Handed Odds. On the whole, however, I’m very optimistic about this new direction. I hope you’ll come along with me!

16 Single? It’s probably because you’re an asshole

May 27, 2014
by Crommunist
· blog · critical thinking · feminism · gender · personal · privilege

This post is going to be more navel-gazey than is normal for this blog. That’s not a disclaimer of apology, just a ‘heads up’. This piece is also very much rooted in gender binary language, and that is a disclaimer of apology. I am speaking most often from my own experience. As a mono cis hetero guy, my romantic experience falls along a gender binary with a single partner. This is not to elevate or normalize mono cishet relationships above others, but I don’t want to speak too far out of my own depth. I am sure that relationships between queer and poly people have dimensions that I simply cannot address, and I don’t want to do it hamfistedly. I am very interested to hear what parts of this post do and don’t resonate with your own experiences, particularly if they are different from my own.

I am sure that I’ve made oblique reference to this before, perhaps even on this blog, but my sexual and dating history are perhaps a bit atypical. I say ‘perhaps’ because a pretty decent argument can be made that everyone’s dating history is atypical. However, from the standpoint that the average age at which people in Canada have their first sexual encounter is some time in their teens, my history is slightly to noticably atypical. This has a lot of explanations, some of which I am capable of explaining in some detail; others that I am still puzzled over. I’ve talked a bit about this process in a post I wrote a couple of years ago:

After a year spent in a different doomed-to-fail relationship in my first year of undergraduate (this time I ended things, and for what at the time seemed like noble reasons), I embarked on a long journey into my own bruised psyche to try and figure out what it was about me that made me so undesirable while everyone else had girlfriends (author’s note: most of my friends at the time were single). It was an endless pattern: I’d meet someone, we’d hit it off, I’d eventually work up the courage to ask her out, and then I’d get rejected. In my feelings of dejected misery and frustration and need for self-affirmation, and because there was a whole intellectual institution created around it, I embraced the “nice guys don’t get laid” myth wholeheartedly.

So, I didn’t get laid a lot. That “endless pattern” lasted, for the most part, for around 8 years. After I broke up with Jane (not her real name) in fall of 2004, I didn’t enter into another committed relationship until spring of 2012. During that intervening period, I had a small handful of flings with women, but nothing that lasted longer than 6 weeks or so. None of this did anything to disabuse me of the notion that I was, at some deep, fundamental level, incapable of being loved or having a lasting, meaningful relationship. It wasn’t all bad, as I’ll discuss further down the page, but there were a lot of pretty despondent nights. … Continue Reading

24 Steubenville, consent, alcohol, and me: my stories of sexual non-quest

March 19, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · crommunism · feminism · personal · sex

This post is going to contain some stories about my personal life – specifically, my sex life. If you’d rather not know that kind of information about me, this is probably where you want to stop reading. Also trigger warning for discussion of rape (but I swear there’s nothing explicit).

I generally don’t blog about rape. My specific opinion on the topic (spoilers: I’m opposed to it) is barely marginally helpful, as I am just as likely to set foot in the wrong place as I am to say something profound, and there are people who are much more directly affected by the discussion than I am. My preference is to read the opinions of others who have more pragmatic experience with the topic, either as someone who has been raped, someone who works with rape victims, or someone for whom fear of rape is part of their daily life and decision making. Listening to those voices has been immeasurably helpful to my own understanding of the topic and the sociology underpinning it.

One of the biggest shifts in my thinking – more crystalization than a real ‘shift’ – is about the topic of consent and how it relates to alcohol. I managed to figure out on my own that you shouldn’t do anything drunk with someone that you wouldn’t do sober, and that you should extend that to a potential partner – if ze wouldn’t fuck you unless ze was wasted, it’s not okay. I don’t know that I considered that ‘rape’ before I began reading feminist writings (I probably would have just thought it was a shitty thing to do to someone), but I have no problem identifying it as such now.

I have avoided talking about the rape of Jane Doe in Steubenville, Ohio because, again, I don’t think I have anything useful to add to the topic. I’m glad the judge didn’t buy the argument that a girl who was so drunk that she had to be physically carried out of a room was still sober enough to consent to sex. I think that anyone who thinks that the blame starts and ends with the two boys who raped her is severely deluded, as are those who wish to completely exonerate them. Hopefully this case will be high-profile enough to spark a discussion about the messages we send boys about masculinity and about sex and about women and about consent. … Continue Reading

23 I endorse Joyce Murray for #LPCLdr

February 27, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · personal · politics

I wasn’t a partisan before I met Joyce Murray.

In my relatively short voting career, I have voted Liberal, NDP, and even Green once when I knew the riding I lived in was a virtual lock for one of the candidates. I’ve always considered myself fairly party-independent – they all (except the Conservatives) have their merits, but no one party’s platform really ‘spoke to me’. I grew up in the Chretien era, but didn’t really become aware of politics until the Martin era.

Those of you who read this blog on a regular basis know that I am a staunch, dyed-in-the-wool, consistent opponent of the current federal government. At times I wish I was fluent in more languages so I could find new ways to curse at them for all the downright disgusting, hypocritical, insensitive, and profoundly damaging policies they’ve enacted, and the stances they’ve taken trying to defend those policies. It is only a climate of indifference and ignorance by people spoiled during the Chretien era (and the spiteful resentment of a western province) that could have brought such a government to power. … Continue Reading

2 Impersonations

January 25, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · Blogmeta · Brian Lynchehaun · critical thinking · personal

A short headsup: it’s been brought to my attention that a person out there is pretending to be me. They’re pointing at this site and claiming that they are Brian Lynchehaun, and including the above photo in their email correspondence.

Putting aside the (clearly insane) notion that being this particular Brian Lynchehaun improves your odds with the women (I have not yet been informed that they are hitting on men), should you receive an email from someone purporting to be me, I’d encourage you to click on the twitter link that follows all of my posts in order to verify that The Real Brian Lynchehaun^tm.

Alternatively, I can easily be found on Facebook and G+.

And now back to your regularly scheduled posts…

A link to Brian on Twitter!

12 Movie Friday: Where I Get it From

January 18, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · bmusic · movie · personal · Vanity

A year and a half ago, I got an e-mail out of the blue from my father, telling me that he had started learning the saxophone. Dad’s in a gradual state of growing retirement, meaning that he still works but on a purely opt-in basis. He does a number of things to fill his time, including a promising side-career as a photographer. Back in his youth, Dad played guitar in church choirs around the Caribbean – to hear him tell it, he was moderately famous. Since then he’s been singing in choirs and stuff, but the decision to acquire an entirely new musical instrument at the age of 60 was, I will confess, surprising.

Last Sunday, Dad did this:

A shocked reaction

I am crazy impressed with Dad here. I’ve heard him play a handful of times, and I knew he was pretty good, but I had no idea he was bringing game this hard. If you good folks would be so kind as to click through to the video, ‘like’ it, and leave complimentary comments, I know it would make his day.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

51 I was a Nice Guy™

January 9, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · crapitalism · crommunism · feminism · forces of stupid · personal

There was a piece in The Atlantic that caught my eye yesterday about the phenomenon of Nice Guys™ – men who attribute their lack of appeal to the opposite sex to a cognitive flaw in women that makes them claim that they want a nice, respectful partner, but then go on to date jerks who treat them like shit. More broadly, this is part of the “nice guys finish last” complex of memes that defines attractive masculinity in terms of emotional indifference and machismo, against which sensitive and caring men cannot hope to prevail.

There has been, over the years, a concerted backlash against this idea, as described in the article:

The notion that self-proclaimed “nice guys” might not be as nice as they think they are isn’t new. The Nice Guy™, as the figure is often referred to, has been an object of sustained feminist critique over the past decade: for his less-than-flattering depiction of the women he claims to treat so well, for his passive-aggressive approach to picking up women, and for his underlying assumption that sex is an exchange—that if you’re a “good guy,” the women you’re good to should fall in love with and have sex with you…if not out of desire, then out of pity or obligation.

The author of the article then goes on to express a modicum of sympathy for men who buy into the “Nice Guy” mythplex, because there is real pain and frustration going on, and the popular critique does nothing to address it. If you’re not familiar with the Nice Guy™ phenomenon, or the feminist critiques thereof, I suggest you read the article before continuing (and definitely before commenting). I have to confess that when I first came upon the phenomenon thus named, and the way it was described by feminists (mostly women), I was strongly off-put. But there’s a reason for that…

I used to be a Nice Guy™ … Continue Reading

2 Another #IdleNoMore note to fellow settlers

January 7, 2013
by Crommunist
· #IdleNoMore · blog · personal

I often feel the need to point out that when I criticize a group to which I belong, I am not exempting myself from that group. So when I talk about male privilege, that is emphatically not a short-hand for “the male privilege that you all have but I don’t because I’m that feministy”. I am the target audience for this blog, meaning that when I reprimanded my fellow settlers in this morning’s post about hijacking the #IdleNoMore movement, I was talking about my own behaviour as well.

I am, as I have admitted before, woefully ignorant about much of the history that underpins the movement, and have only very recently begun to pay attention. This blog actually serves as a living record of that, because I didn’t really start engaging on these issues before I started writing about them here. As a result, I am acutely aware of the fact that I have been, at least up until now (and in many ways probably am still) playing for the wrong team in the fight for justice.

I used to deride Twitter when I first heard about it. After all, the idea seemed profoundly silly and frivolous to me. It wasn’t until the protests in Iran in 2009 that I started to see its value. And while I had an account in August of 2010, I didn’t really start using it in earnest until the start of the Egypt protests in early 2011. Since then, I have found it an invaluable resource for political analysis, a diversity of analysis, and connection to independent media. And yes, while there is a lot of frivolity on Twitter, it is trivially possible to have a substantive and informative Twitter feed. If you’re not on Twitter, but you’re interested in learning more about what’s happening, now is an excellent time to get an account.

This is a long, roundabout way of me saying that a lot of what I know about #IdleNoMore, and about Indigenous issues generally, I learned by listening to people on Twitter, and reading the things that they thought were important to share. I’ve compiled a list of accounts that I think are particularly helpful, and provide a useful variety of perspectives, experiences, and opinions. If you’re on Twitter, check out this list. It’s not necessarily people who talk specifically about #IdleNoMore, but they do provide me with voices that I would otherwise not hear in my day-to-day life.

I would like also to make special mention of an account called âpihtawikosisân (please don’t ask me to pronounce it), who I have found to be a consistently brilliant and fearless advocacy voice, and who is a recent follow for me. She also blogs here and has a familiarity with the relevant history that I find to be incredibly helpful.

Like this article? Follow me on Twitter!

1 Movie Friday: Hari Kondabolu

January 4, 2013
by Crommunist
· blog · Canada · movie · personal · race

I got sick this week, and was thus robbed of the motivation to write something. I’ve got a bunch of ideas clogging up the ol’ brain-bin, which SUCKS because I also have a lot of stuff to get done this month. Here’s where you can catch me over the next week:

Thursday, January 10th

Playing a solo gig at the Sunset Grill (Yew @ York st. in Kitsilano)

Friday, January 11th

My first gig of 2013 with Even Handed Odds at the Coppertank (Broadway @ Balaclava in Kitsilano). We’re celebrating our anniversary as their house band, and our first time playing together since mid-December.

Saturday, January 12th

I’ll be in Kamloops, BC, giving a talk about the HPV Vaccine and confronting some of the info and misinfo that’s out there. It’s pitched for a general audience, and will reference the scientific literature without diving into it too heavily.

There is a FB event page here, and an event webpage here.

Sunday, January 13th

I’ll be in Kelowna, BC, giving an extended version of my talk looking at racism in the zombie apocalypse. I felt really rushed trying to cram all that information into 30 minutes, so this longer format (I have two hours, I am planning on talking for the heavy side of 45 minutes, with a Q&A afterward) will be a lot more comfortable for me.

There is a FB event page here, but it doesn’t say that the event will be at the Kelowna Pride Centre on Water st..

And now for the movie! … Continue Reading

Page 1 of 5