Hanging Shad

What was supposed to be a great day got bogged down in ambivalence. A good reminder that low expectations are usually the way to go.

First there was the sports during the day, with two classics lined up: Canada v Russia in Olympic hockey quarter-final action, and Chelsea against Barcelona in the Champions League Round of 16. They started almost simultaneously.

Leo, Josh and I were packed into little Kickoff with about 30 others. Inside the multicultural sardine can were mostly Canadian hockey fans, but next were a dozen Barcelona supporters, a brave contingent of Russian onlookers and a lone Chelsea fan with his girlfriend. Despite being assured by the bar's owner that soccer would be played on the big screen, the tyranny of the slim majority prevailed and hockey was on instead. The 15 or so diehards were forced to watch their football on small screens without sound.

The first hour was excruciating; after two periods and one half, none of the four teams had scored. But the second hour was a cracker (to use a stupid British soccer adjective), with Barcelona and Chelsea trading own goals before Eto'o put the game away while Russia's Alexander Ovechkin torched Team Canada for the game's winning goal. As an aside, it's interesting how Russia selects its best 20 players no matter how they fit togther, while Canada relies on building the best, if not most-skilled, team. That worked in 2002 and again at the 2004 World Cup. But as Gretzky now knows, this is a risky approach if the chemistry fails, as there isn't as much raw talent to fall back on. Next time, Eric Staal (75 points) won't be overshadowed by Kris Draper (16 points). Of the top 30 goal-scorers in the NHL, 13 are Canadian. Only 5 of those players made the Torino squad.

Needless to say, the whole experience was cacophonic. I watched a furious game of muted soccer while listening to the familiar play-by-play of CBC hockey annouoncers Bob Cole and Harry Neale, voices I grew up hearing, though they seem so much older now. I swivelled 180 degrees between the two screens, craning my neck whenever excitement became palpable on the one I wasn't watching. No matter who scored there was a obnoxious outburst from one part of the room. The Russians hurled garbled insults at the screen whenever they came close to scoring. Canadians were reduced to spitting obscenities at their own players out of frustration. Since Canada never scored, the biggest cheer was for Barcelona's second tally. I'm not sure what exactly happened, but Leo ended up with my beer all over his leg and a broken glass on the floor.

Ultimately, I left the bar happier than I entered. Though Canada lost, I would have been more disappointed if Chelsea had beat Barcelona. It's amazing how quickly European soccer has pulled me in; I now care about a team 6000 km away more than my home nation. In 2002, Olympic hockey was the be-all, end-all in sports for me. One foreign exchange and four years later, and I'm cheering for the bourgeois nationalists of Catalonia over my own countrymen.

Next, Leo and I were off to see Shad K open for Common at the Kool Haus. As with most concerts I've been to lately, I found it slightly underwhelming, but this time partially because I had already seen Common about 8 months earlier at the same venue (The article I wrote on Shad last summer can be found here).

As I was essentially there to see Shad, his short set was disappointing in length if not in quality. He was understandably nervous about performing infront of the 2000-plus crowd, and if you listen to his album, he admits that his stage presence needs work, which it does. After four album-songs, one freestyle and one new track (which sounded promising), that was it. They couldn't have been on stage more than 25 minutes. I noticed how every time Shad felt there was lull in crowd response, he kept mentioning how Common was coming on next to get the crowd cheering again, when really, he should have relied on his own music to keep the Laurier-heavy audience into it. It was cool that Common did his encore in a Shad "I want a Claire Huxtable" t-shirt, though.

When Common hit the stage, it was almost identical to the set he played last year. I was hoping that since his newest album has been out for a while, he'd play some stuff off the older Resurrection or Can I Borrrow a Dollar? But aside from performing "My Way Home" and swtiching around the order of some songs, he added very little to his show in almost a year. Even DJ Dummy, who blew me away with a scratch solo last time, almost seemed boring.