L&L Tavern

Again, I have not posted here in too long.
[Apparently I started writing this in September 2024… Happy New Year!]
While that would normally make me feel bad, I have good news in that I have been filling my spare time pretty productively for the past year or so.
Recently, I’ve been working on a comedy project with some pals. Hopefully one day we’ll have something recorded so that I can add another something else to this here website, but for now it’s just nice to be writing fairly consistently.

I had a weird, fun thing come my way in Spring. In classic me fashion, this will require some, probably too much, backstory. Sorry.

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2022!!
I booked a relatively short-notice trip to Chicago to see Guided by Voices play at a free festival in Logan Square. A previously planned family trip to Chicago in May 2020 had been cancelled, so I decided to take a few days on either side of the festival to be a tourist. My to-see list was extensive, filled with no-brainers (the architecture boat tour, looking at the bean, the Art Institute, etc) and weird little things (going to Joan Cusack’s gift shop). Incidentally, when I went to said gift shop, she was working there and was so so nice. I did not acknowledge that she’s an absolute queen because she just wants to get on with running her shop. I nearly died when something I said made her laugh, even if it was just out of politeness. Maybe we’ll become pals someday…
Part of my plan was to check out all of the bars listed by Michael Shannon in this article. M-Shan is my absolute fave, and I knew that if anybody was going to have a trustworthy taste in dive bars, it’d be him.

Old Town Ale House was great. I went twice with two different friends in the space of two days, then another two times during a trip to Chicago five months later.
Weeds was also very chill. They were playing Talking Heads and had so much space, including a patio that looked excellent. I haven’t been back since, but I will.
Most importantly, though, on my second last night in town, I found myself at the L&L Tavern. If you didn’t click the above link, this is how Michael Shannon describes it:
“It was a dive bar full of geniuses and eccentrics like you might imagine at New York’s White Horse Tavern in its heyday with Dylan Thomas slurring his eloquent speech … Sometimes I would climb up the side of the building it was in. The next time you drive by, just imagine me hanging off the side like Alex Honnold climbing El Capitan.”

I was very intrigued, so I made sure to stop by. It was a Sunday night, just after 9pm, and as I opened the door into the bar, I saw that there were just two other customers there. The only sound, other than the chatter from the couple sitting at the bar, came from the tinny speakers of a TV showing an endless stream of Ed Sullivan Classics. I sat at the bar and ordered a Miller Lite. One half of the couple tried to start and argument with the guy behind the bar. I think they claimed that they’d had a Hamm’s in a bottle from the L&L and they were told that Hamm’s hasn’t been sold in bottles for years or something. I may be misremembering that. Hamm-heads, sound off in the comments.

Anyway, it was very clear that this beleaguered barkeep didn’t have much time for this couple and kept to himself as best he could. Fortunately, they left soon after but not before bitching about the sizes of paper cups by the water dispenser or another thing just as tedious. The guy behind the bar visibly softened once they disappeared. He introduced himself to me as Kenny, the owner, and reassured me that the place was usually much busier with people. I was wearing a GBV tshirt, so he asked if I’d gone to see them the night before (yes) and we started talking about indie rock. A regular came in and introduced himself to me. At first he was in high spirits after a day at the beach, but he ended up getting emotional over an ex love. He cried. Kenny left me to deal with this turn of events and went down to the far end of the bar and pretended to be busy. Eventually, Kenny returned, told the sweet guy that he never liked his ex anyway, poured some Nerds onto the bar and said, “stop crying and eat your candy”.

Kenny then poured us each a shot and my new friend, cheered up by now, left with some To Go beers. As I was apparently only the third customer within four hours of the bar being open, I was apologetically told that they were going to close early. He said to come back the next day when they’d be busier and he asked what made me stop by in the first place. Too embarrassed, for some reason, to say “Michael Shannon used to come here”, I pretended to have forgotten. He said, “Ah, it was probably because of Bourdain…”

I got back to my place that evening and searched to find out when Anthony Bourdain had been there. I was surprised to discover that the bar has a Wikipedia page. The introduction to the article at the time was just facts about previous ownership and concluded with the unintentionally hilarious throwaway line, “The bar attracts a mixed crowd”.
Unfortunately, it looks as though the page has been updated, but underneath the intro, the first section heading read SERIAL KILLERS. This was yet another unexpected delight to me that, so fortunately I screengrabbed it.

We’re not even at the point of this entire post yet, so I’m going to leave researching the serial killers of the L&L Tavern to you, if you’ve made it this far.

I never did get the chance to return on that trip, but was able to twice at the end of 2022 and on New Years Day 2023. We were back in Chicago for a run of concerts that got cancelled at the last minute, but my crew and a bunch of long-distance friends had non-refundable flights, so decided to make the journey anyway. As we were all in different groups doing different things over the course of the few days, I insisted that our meeting point would be the L&L. I feel honoured to have brought the place into the lives of this ragtag, international group. Yes, I am taking sole responsibility for that. Unfortunately, Kenny wasn’t in on either of the above occasions, but me and various buds still had the best time. On the New Years Day visit, the bar’s landline rang and was answered by the bartender. She moved the phone away from her ear and shouted to those of us in the room, “Does anybody object to someone bringing a Weiner dog in here?” Of course, we all yelled NO and waited excited for said dog to turn up. When he and his humans arrived, we cheered. He wandered around the place and we learned that his name was PJ. “What does PJ stand for?” my friend asked his owners, unaware that our lives would be changed forever after learning the answer.
PJ stood for Potato Julio.

All of this is to say that the L&L has a very special place in my heart and I chose to honour it when Halloween of 2023 came around. This is for another time, but every year for Halloween since I’ve lived in Toronto, I’ve dressed as a building drawn onto a cardboard box. More often than not, I’ve gone as a bar. Do not read too much into this…

I posted it on Instagram along with an abridged version of the story of my love affair with the L&L and tagged the bar. Their instagram account was pretty much a place-holder that was lying dormant at that point, so I assumed nobody would ever see it…

…Until months and months later, when I received a comment on the above photo from a stranger who turned out to be the guy who had been sad about his ex on my first visit. I’m keeping him anonymous on here but he seems like a legend and we are now internet friends. He apparently was still a regular and must have shown my photo to his pals who worked there because they got in touch with me and asked if they could post it on the L&L’s page. They did and then shortly after, a different regular I hadn’t met before reached out and said that he’d been trying to get the bar to make merch for years and asked if I’d design a tshirt for them. As you can tell from my ‘Halloween costume’, drawing is not a particularly strong skill for me, but I felt happy to be asked and decided to take up the challenge. I submitted a very amateur sketch and excitedly awaited the results.

A couple of months after that, we found ourselves in Chicago once again and I arranged to pick up some tshirts from the bar. We had a great evening with new pals at the L&L and it was such a novelty to see my amateurish design in existence.

My new pal said it was a limited run of shirts, so who knows if they ever SOLD OUT. Stop on by Chicago’s best bar to find out.
As well as taking a couple for me and my beloved, I had a brainwave before we left the L&L that night. “We’re going to see Michael Shannon in a play tomorrow. Can I take another shirt on the off-chance that I get to say hi to him and give him one?”

The next day, a little hungover, I hastily scrawled a note bullet-pointing the above tale of my experience of the L&L Tavern and stuck it in a shitty plastic bag with the tshirt and took it to the theatre. The M-Shan play was excellent (‘Turret’, directed by Levi Holloway and also starring Travis A. Knight and Lawrence Grimm) and the three actors, as well as the assistant director did a little Q&A at the end. I was surprised and pleased that the actors stuck around for it given how exhausted they must have been after an incredibly physical performance. After the Q&A, a small crowd gathered around the actors for autographs, but everyone was ushered out. I asked someone who worked at the theatre if they’d pass my shitty plastic bag to Michael Shannon. “It’s just a tshirt” I reassured them, then headed out.
I waited in the lobby while my beloved ran to the bathroom and he urged me to speak to M-Shan, should he pass me on his way out. I was set on not doing that, because the dude had just put in a helluva shift and I didn’t want to stand in the way of him leaving, but as he was walking towards me, I think he sensed my panic and looked at me kindly in a way that suggested he’d be okay with me approaching him. I noticed he wasn’t holding the shitty plastic bag, so I thought I’d make sure he had received it and then let him get on with his day. I opened with “Hi, I’m so sorry, I don’t want to keep you” and he gave me a reassuring pat on the arm and leaned in to hear what I had to say. I told him I’d left something for him with someone and he said he didn’t get it so went back to the box office to retrieve it. For the second time in minutes, I blurted out, “it’s just a tshirt!” and he said “I like tshirts” appreciatively, which I believed, because he was wearing a Jesus Lizard tshirt at that very moment. He asked if I wanted him to open it in front of me. I told him that it was okay, so he didn’t and then we spoke for a couple of minutes until my beloved returned to us. As predicted, Michael Shannon is an absolute gem of a human being and it was a thrill to have this full-circle moment of being able to gift him a tshirt I designed for a bar I probably never would have known existed had it not been for a handful of words he’d written about it.

I don’t know if he still has the tshirt, has ever worn it or has even taken it out of the shitty plastic bag, but if I ever come across pictorial evidence of him wearing it, I will lose my goddamn mind.

Chicago remains the greatest city in the world.

Fake Posters Pt. 1

I haven’t put anything up here in a long time. I’m feeling pretty antsy and indecisive about how I want to be filling my spare time. I know I want to be productive and maybe even creative, but it’s hard sticking to one idea, especially when I’ve got limited resources.

Something that’s really low stakes that I enjoy doing is making and sticking up fake posters. I hope that they make people smile if they spot them hanging from somewhere. All I strive to be is a silly little guy. Maybe I should make a vow to do one a month…

For now, here are some of the more recent ones.

My friend Graeme absolutely loves the giant Frankenstein’s Monster Eating a Whopper at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, so I made him this for his birthday today. Turns out I can’t do any types of hands – human or monster.

Here We Go For Today’s Number

I don’t think this one is as good as my attempt at George Harrison, but it’ll do. My plan was to do all stages of David Lynch picking a daily number (“swirl the numbers”, “pick a number”) but this one part proved that I can’t really do hands… or faces… so probably not worth the time.

She Bee Vee – 14 Cheerleader Coldfront

I can’t wait until we are all in one place and I can shoot an actual video that we can be in together, rather than this almost Found Footage approach we’ve had to use for the past two videos.

A short one this time, covering GBV’s 14 Cheerleader Coldfront, written by Tobin Sprout and Robert Pollard.

She Bee Vee – Big Boring Wedding

In September 2019, at the annual Guided by Voices love-in, Heedfest, She Bee Vee was formed.
Initially, it was pitched as a hypothetical all-women Guided by Voices cover band that was largely an excuse to stay in touch with one another and encourage the new friends’ musical endeavours. However, after the “band” sweet-talked their way onto the bill for the 2020 edition of Heedfest, it then had to become real. Time to shit or get off the pot, as they say.

Living in five different cities across two countries (the US and Canada) would prove to be a logistical pain point, however, the women of She Bee Vee enjoy a challenge, so vowed to learn their parts as individuals before coming together for some IRL practices. Plans were made and planes were booked in order for them to hold a band camp in Minneapolis in July 2020, a few months prior to the Heedfest show in Dayton due in September 2020. Obviously, neither of these things was allowed to happen in the end.

Buzz about what the band would be like had started to accumulate online within the GbV community at an uncomfortable rate, and the Sheebs wanted to put something out into the universe to commemorate the lack of Heedfest in the Covid-19 era. They learned the song Big Boring Wedding, recording each of their parts separately to then be mixed together. A video was made. People seemed to like the whole thing.

I played bass and put together the video. It was really fun to do and I was grateful for the opportunity to do something real. My buds are very talented. You can learn more and keep up-to-date on new developments here.

George Harrison – Cloud Nine

Much like a lot of people, I have been working from home for the last nine months. My workspace is at one end of our dining room table and my friend sits at the other end. We cannot see one another behind our large computer monitors, but I think we have a good thing going. Our days are filled with spontaneous singing, having lengthy conversations in accents that are not our own and occasional ranting about certain aspects of our respective jobs.

Before we started working from home, my work office had a shared Spotify playlist that we could all add to and it was played over speakers on a shuffled loop for 8+ hours a day. It was a nice idea, but sometimes I would still plug my headphones in and just listen to what I wanted to for the day. Now, at home and with a friend, it feels weird to have headphones on, effectively leaving the room in silence. To combat this, we listen to music together, but it is music that has been democratically chosen by both of us. Sometimes our playlists will be themed. We’ve had days where all we listen to is Lizzo, Dolly Parton, Elton John or Springsteen. Other days, we’ve had choice jams from musicals such as West Side Story, the Producers, and our beloved Moulin Rouge. Sometimes it’s fun to belt out Ewan McGregor’s parts in Your Song and Elephant Love Medley.

This is a digression. Most of the time we listen to hastily thrown together playlists, adding tracks to the Song Queue when we think of them. We have a couple of go-to songs that we never tire of and that act as placeholders until we can decide what we want to play. I’d say our top five, in no real order are:

Every time I see the cover of Cloud Nine, the George Harrison album on which the above song appears, I am filled with such joy at how charmingly shit it is. It may be my favourite album cover of all time. It feels so slapdash, just a cheesy picture of the best Beatle in front of some clouds, his guitar not even properly slung around his neck. For a long time, I’d see it and think it’d be easy to do a MS Paint version of, given that there’s not much to it. When my brain conspires against me, I find it comforting to launch my phone across the room, put on a podcast and piss around on MS Paint for hours. It’s really therapeutic. So I finally went ahead and made this. The only time I didn’t feel in a semi-meditative state while moving my mouse around to do it was when it came to the shirt, which was a complete pain in the arse. His mouth cracks me up, though, I did not do a great job there…

I’ll Just Leave This Here

2020 was going to be OUR YEAR!, wasn’t it? All of us? Y’know. Until it wasn’t.

I’m not one for new year or resolutions or expecting too much from a calendar change, but in Classic Me style, I decided early on that 2020 might actually be a good one for me. With the dawn of each January 1st, I still manage to convince myself that I will make more of an effort in self-improvement for the coming year and beyond. I gave up on making actual strict resolutions years ago, after realising that I was incapable of setting realistic goals. I seem to recall when I was 14, vowing to “write a series of a sitcom” in that one year. And that was only one item on my extensive To Do list.

This year, I decided to keep it attainable with one real resolution:

  • I will not ride the Dufferin bus.

The Dufferin bus basically stops right outside my house and is undoubtedly the most convenient bus for me, but it’s quite simply the worst. It’s never not uncomfortably packed and all of the drivers on that route drive like maniacs over an incredibly ill-maintained stretch of road. It was a joke resolution, and there were times when taking that particular bus was unavoidable. However, on several occasions, I managed to go to great lengths to avoid it, often inconveniencing myself by taking other routes that would take me further away from my destination and I’d end up walking more than I would had I just taken the bus. I switched up the route I would take to and from work every day and I felt pretty pleased with how long I managed to go without the Dufferin bus. Then the pandemic hit and I had no need to commute or go anywhere, so the job was done for me.

Mid-January 2020: The snow and hill were obviously too much for the Dufferin buses to take, as we counted EIGHTEEN of them in a row between Davenport and Dupont, none of them moving. I just consulted Google Maps, which tells me that the distance between these two streets is a mere 650m. Absolutely fuck the Dufferin bus.

Although not an official resolution, I also decided that I’d actually follow through with trying to work on myself. I’ve been growing increasingly frustrated with my lack of creative output for the last few years and often start on projects in order to combat this, only to give up or forget about them. I don’t really know how to do much, so I wanted to learn things. I had agreed to be in a band who had one show lined up in September, so figured I should actually learn how to play bass, rather than just noodle about and teach myself the odd song here and there as I’ve been doing inconsistently since I was 16.

So, I took the plunge and had my first ever bass guitar lesson! It was great! My teacher actually cared about what I hoped to get out of it and didn’t make me feel stupid, which was a real worry. It was a success and, as he left, I said I’d definitely like to continue. He told me he was out of town for the next couple of weeks but to drop him and email and we could continue from there when he got back. That first lesson was at the end of February. There have been no further lessons. I can blame the pandemic for this one, right? Excellent. The end.

Not really. I’ve been feeling conflicted since March, when things went weird. I’ve got so much free time and, on one hand, I’m firmly in the “don’t feel bad if you’re not using it to be productive when you’re trying to navigate a fucking global pandemic and all that comes with it”, but on the other, I am tired of making excuses for myself as to why I don’t follow through with things. My primary concern is that I don’t know what to follow through with and I float from idea to idea, interest to interest, but rarely for long enough to make any progress. A conversation that has come up often with a friend is that we miss making things for the sake of making them. This seems to be something particularly prominent when you’re young, but maybe life just zaps the will out of you as you age. So, I’m trying to reclaim that a bit. In the last few months, I have made a couple of little things for no reason and it’s felt great.

I figured it’d be good to put them somewhere and maybe some people will see them and enjoy them. I don’t have a discipline, I just have stuff I like to do. I enjoy making silly videos, taking pictures and writing things down, so I suppose this page will just be that. Maybe this will help me figure out where I want to spend more of my time, or maybe it’ll just be a dumping ground for what’s in my brain. Anyway…

I’ll
just
leave
this
here…