I’m making a mix tape. I don’t know why I bother pointing that out, I’m always “making a mix tape”, I just oscillate through periods of remembering and forgetting that there is a purpose to the short list of songs I’m carrying in my head.

In any case, I am making a mix tape, for a friend, and I wanted to use a Weakerthans song. There’s lots of them, and they are well represented on the file sharing networks, except one: “I Hate Winnipeg”. For some reason, that particular track eluded me again and again. The search was growing religous when, on a whim, I double checked the name. In one of those “well, is it plugged in?” moments, I realized it’s actually called “One Great City!”. Ahem. There are plenty of copies of One Great City!. Of course, there were just enough people out there who had also mislabelled it “I Hate Winnipeg” that I had my common mistake reinforced for long enough to become bewildered. This, I think, relates to my notions of trail building algorithms: how false trail extensions are propogated and reinforced and sometime become new trails and sometimes don’t.

As part of checking the name, I came across this great essay, written by Paul Tough, a guy obsessed by The Weakerthans in the way that some people get obsessed by bands, but who has family connections in Winnipeg and decided to actually go there and track the band down. He had a talk with John Samson in the back room of a club, mostly about the city itself.

It’s long (I’m actually not quite done reading it yet), but it’s good:

City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

There?s something magical about a city in decline. Especially in moneyed times like these on a moneyed continent like this one, cities like Edmonton and Buffalo and Pittsburgh and Winnipeg feel protected from a certain type of urban degradation: the erasure that goes along with giant malls and theme restaurants and off-ramps and luxury boxes at baseball stadiums, even as those crumbling cities embody an apparently harsher, more tangible decline.

What is hopeful about those cities is that new and original art and ideas often grow in them in unexpected ways. ?There is a lot of potential in places that are removed from the centre of power,? Samson said. ?I have this feeling that that?s where a lot of interesting things are going to emerge?things that have the potential not to be sullied or defeated as soon as they?re created. They can be ignored for a while. They can hover in between.? In between success and failure, I guess he meant; fame and oblivion.