How it Plays Out

Our Visit (fiction)

2012-01-27T20:05:00.011-05:00

“So runs my dream; but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.”

- Tennyson's ‘In Memoriam’, Part LIV,

___________________________________________

It was the first winter after their migration, when the air was so dry and cold that you couldn't make snowballs after a blizzard. We suspected that they were somehow to blame. We knew very little about them. The only source of news in our small town was intermittent reports over public radio when stations were allowed to broadcast.

When five of them arrived at the old store on a windy Saturday afternoon, it was the first time any of us had seen them in person. Marjorie and I were stocking the shelves while Uncle Wallis sat on a chair near the electric heater, working on the accounts. They were traveling in one of the original deep-green vehicles you don’t see any more, when they were still adjusting to daylight. At the time, black cars made them lose their balance and red cars hurt their eyes.

Two females and three males unfolded themselves from the auto, all of them dressed in heavy yellow greatcoats for the cold. We’d seen photographs and were prepared. They looked different, but weren't exactly frightening. You might even think they were human from a distance, but as they came closer you’d notice their crooked style of walking and the sharp angles of their shoulders and hips.

The females came in first, staring at our eyes and lifting the corner of their mouths in a gesture I’m sure was intended to be a smile. Despite the cold, neither of them wore gloves; they wrapped their hands in soft discs of something that looked like off-pink suede, using them to open the front door and place items in their shopping baskets. Two tall males flanked a short and rotund third who wore a wide, oily black belt around his middle. He made me nervous. The tall ones wore overstretched grey gloves, but the short one turned the doorknob with his three longest fingers which long curly prints that etched the brass (I never managed to polish it properly again). He wandered the length of the store while the tall ones were never more than a hooked arm’s length away.

Marjorie talked – after a fashion - to the females. We knew that they understood us, and they even managed to communicate with vocal noises that almost sounded like words. They were close to being lovely, when your eyes focused on the right places but you could never tell if the light fell strangely on their faces or if it somehow changed their features as it illuminated the all the shades of their soft skin. They filled their baskets with everything we knew they needed; boxes of peanuts, bags of peppercorns and cinnamon and all of our canned spinach. They asked if we had shredded coconut (it was rationed, for obvious reasons) and I politely told them that we didn’t. They almost-smiled again and headed towards the back of the store for soap and hydrogen peroxide.

The short male hadn’t spoken, but I watched him stretch his neck sideways to carefully examine everything in the freezers. I was trying to turn up the heater near the side door when he said “How are these made?” while point at a rack of dinner rolls. His voice was low and impossibly sharp, an infant crying through the strings of an un-tuned cello.

He turned his head and repeated the question to Marjorie. The other two males backed towards him softly and quickly, and the females lifted their baskets close to their knees. The tallest male tried to look me in the eye and his faintly mechanical voice said “Thank you. We are sorry that we are needing to be careful with our diet. We please want to know how these ingredients are created.”

The tone of his voice sounded blunt, but not threatening. Marjorie came to my side and found a few tiny words in her throat to say “That's just bread from Schultz’s bakery. Nothing but flour and milk, yeast, a little sugar and salt.”

Her last words tightened the air around everyone. The females started emptying their baskets into the deep pockets of their coats and the tallest male handed me some coins and powdery bills (perfect change, I might add) from his shirt pocket as he rushed to open the door. He had almost reached it when the short one stretched a horrible wide hand towards the rolls and screeched “They use salt in their bread!”

Marjorie started crying. Uncle Wallis reached for the broom handle under the counter while the two males flanked the short one and literally dragged him through the door. The females fled to their car (dropping their off-pink discs when the wind whispered past them) and we heard the short one laughing hysterically with that gasping bagpipe drone we’d heard on the radio, a bass banshee wailing at close quarters. “Salt in their bread! Do they know what this means? Do they know what they’re doing?”

His voice disappeared as the their car doors slammed. They drove north into the storm, leaving us shaken and exhausted. Near the doorframe, one of the female’s discs had curled and turned brown, but the other was inches away from where it had landed, quietly twisting and squirming towards the safety of the potato bin. Uncle Wallis stomped on it hard and we saw the tiny flash as it died.

For George
January, 2012

Ceremony

2012-01-11T11:35:00.013-05:00

I was helping Anton move. He had been living in the basement of a house that was allegedly close to York University (“One bus away!” the landlord had told him, neglecting to mention that the bus was hourly and didn’t run after 7pm) and was moving further south to Yonge and Sheppard where a combination of three buses could get him to class faster than the one he'd used before. He’d had an amicable breakup with his girlfriend Carla (who was also helping us move) and had enlisted me by saying “Mike, I’d like your help on Saturday. It’ll involve lifting and carrying and nothing else. Probably can't even afford to give you pizza. I can maybe manage some stolen booze.”

He wasn’t kidding. His landlord had proven to be an interesting variation on the absentee landlord model; he wasn’t around often but had sent legions of relatives to watch over the house in his absence and collect fees above and beyond the agreed-upon rent. “The water heater had to be replaced,” explained one uncle, “and it’s a lot of money. But it’s only going to cost you two hundred bucks. You’re welcome.”

Anton's basement apartment included the water heater. He had not noticed any maintenance. “It looks the same,”he said.

The uncle shrugged. “The insides. All new. When you were out.”

“Then why do I still barely have hot water?”

A brief pause. “But it’s good water. Good. Better.”

Anton didn’t have two hundred bucks so the point was moot. Voices were raised, threats to call the police filled the air (the alleged water-heater-replacer would have accessed Anton’s apartment without notice) and the flesh-and-blood landlord intervened by phone from Wisconsin to helpfully pro-rate the 200 bucks into an additional twenty dollar charge on Anton’s rent for the next 13 months. Thanks to an understanding of basic math, Anton decided to move.

The booze in question was stashed in oversize Tupperware containers under blankets behind the contentious water heater. The landlord had owned (or had taken occupancy of) a few small restaurants in Whitby and was stashing surplus bar booze, perhaps in lieu of rent. We found Macedonian brandy, vodka from generic pre-glasnost Soviet republics and whiskeys you’ve never heard of from distilleries in out-of-the-way locales (the Nebraska Fine Spirits Company supplied whiskey and gin in the same oddly shaped rectangular bottle with faded red, green and gold labeling).

Anton and I hefted boxes into the back of a cube van, his ex-girlfriend would shift them into something resembling order and we’d help ourselves to bottles of cheap booze on each trip, sneaking them into the boxes. “At least two hundred dollars worth,” he’d instructed me, “and not conspicuously.” We probably shouldn’t have worried. The blankets on top of the boxes had years worth of dust and the basement was barely lit at the best of times.

We each had acquired around 12 bottles (mine shoved carefully into two backpacks) when the basement was clear and we were emptying the megre contents of the fridge. There was a one-quarter filled bottle of flat Pepsi on its way to the sink when Anton intercepted it and said, “We’ve got to have a Macedonia. Tell Carla we’re having a Macedonia. Tell her to come in.”

I headed upstairs to tell her. She stood at the car, shuddered at the offer and said “It’s all yours” while rolling her eyes to the sky.

I went back to the kitchen and saw Anton opening one of the brandy bottles, looking delighted. He said “It’s got to be just so, you know? We need some ceremony.”

He opened the Pepsi and held it around a foot under the brandy bottle, where it received a good three shots worth of brandy poured from above, mostly not spilling too much. He then swirled the contents like a wine goblet, poured it up the wall of the bottle to judge the viscosity and its reponse to light, sniffed it, and offered me the first swig.

I drank. If you want the experience described the same way that you’d judge wine, it goes a little something like this; the fructose of the flat Pepsi served as the base note to a waft of polyethylene terephthalate,which accelerated the almost-medicinal, almost kerosene flavour of brandy into a cocoon of chemical cold and fermented heat that simultaneously caused my teeth to itch and my throat to simply relent at the sheer potency of the booze. Then it hit me between the eyes for a few seconds before my ears started ringing.

I handed it back. Anton grinned, took a deeper shot, steadied himself and started laughing. “This was my first experience in farm life in Macedonia," he said. "This was breakfast for the guys who worked the tractors. They drank wine the rest of the time. But this got them to work. Always mixed in the bottle, ‘cause it was faster. No waste,” he shrugged, “better for the environment.”

We threw out the rest of the fridge contents and headed to the van. Carla asked if I liked the drink and I shuddered. The rest of the move involved dropped boxes and swearing and a descent into another North York basement, this time with fewer stairs and a landlord who ran piano and guitar lessons out of his garage. He was, by all accounts, a non-drinking Baptist. If the clinking bottles offended him, he kept it to himself.

January, 2012

A man of wealth and taste

2012-01-05T19:10:00.023-05:00

It’s hard to play a villain at the best of times; the balance between charismatic and reprehensible (or downright terrifying) is difficult to maintain. I was indifferent to Inglorious Basterds but can’t quite forget Christopher Waltz’s friendly, occasionally charming and utterly evil Nazi Col. Landa. Delve into the classics and find Anthony Hopkins and Alan Rickman playing Hannibal Lecter and Hans Gruber with such delicious zeal that most audiences became rather attached to them and secretly hoped they’d get away with their villainy.

Less so for Lecter than Gruber, to be fair. One can imagine Hans Gruber being the best financial advisor in the world if he was on your side (he’d simply shoot any trader who didn’t generate the returns he wanted), while Lecter would be a charming travel companion with his affinity for polite behaviour and penchant for eating the rude waiters or tour guides you encountered. But Gruber would eventually feel overworked and convince you that your money was also his money (most likely at gunpoint), and Lecter would find himself peckish some afternoon and crave a snack (most likely you, if you weren’t fast enough).

Not all villains come across as party animals; evil plays frighteningly well when banal if you’ve got the right actor. Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men blends into the background (bad haircut notwithstanding) , waiting to be not-noticed enough to seize his prey unnoticed. Bounce back fifteen years or so to see Kevin Spacey’s John Doe in the largely overrated Se7en as a rather plain penalty-and-repentence type with an unfortunate gift for creative set decoration and loud voice when he wants it (his “DetecTIVE!” line carries more weight than you’d like it to).

Good villians of any stripe are hard to come by, so the recent BBC series Sherlock has restarted the game from a new angle without sending the Baker Street Irregulars into a boycotting tizzy. A modernized chestnut remains a chestnut, but that doesn't mean the series is unnecessary. The update to contemporary London is done with a little more wit than expected and the characters are riffed-upon in a way that doesn’t entirely betray their originals. People forget that Dr. Watson had been a solider (in Afganistan, yet) and Martin Freeman brings a weary PTSD aura to Watson that isn’t without a streak of humour.

Sherlock himself (Benedict Cumberbatch) has less room to riff since Holmes’ tics and fetishes are legendary, but manages a few twists by playing up Holmes’ petulance with shades of an overindulged Eton bad boy with the emotional maturity of a 12 year-old (his impression of ‘girls’ appears to be ‘icky’) who bores easily and hates being the smartest one in the room (except that he doesn’t). When a Scotland Yard flunky calls him a psychopath, he fires back with “I’m not a psychopath, I'm a a high-functioning sociopath” with more than a hint of pride.

It’s all frighteningly slick in the hands of producer Steven Moffatt, one of the forces behind the 2005 Doctor Who reboot. This sheen eventually works against it because it all goes down too easily. I was amused and impressed with the first two 90-minute episodes and forgot most of them 48hrs later. I was writing it all off as shiny if unoriginal, until Moriarty’s late arrival in the third episode when the chestnut sprouted something new.

Moriarty (an askew Andrew Scott) is the ‘Consulting Criminal’ to Holmes’ ‘Consulting Detective’ (since ‘Private Eye’ and ‘Thug for Hire’ attract the wrong sort of clients) in a Westwood suit with a flair for the dramatic and an accent of indeterminate origin. He also sports the psychological stability of a tower of Jello and doesn't chew the scenery so much as lick it top to bottom with one eyebrow cocked at a seductive angle to flirt with death, rather than any corporeal being. It's all an eyelash away from camp (he might not be a friend of Dorothy, although you're pretty sure they've brunched together on a few occasions), but his flat cartoony line-readings are genuinely frightening when lifting into flights of fancy before dropping to frosty, matter-of-fact malice. Usually in the same sentence.

He's five steps ahead of the game or on an entirely different pitch altogether. And this is just the insanity we can see. Anything under the surface is up for grabs. It all suggests great confidence. Or utter obliviousness. Or that it all might be an act, which might be the scariest option; if it’s all an act, what’s at the core? Is he milimetres away from drooling, or is he a mastermind who’s laying it on thick while still in control? Or simply thinking he’s in control?

Doyle’s Moriarty was impossibly omnipotent and therefore opaque (some people suggest that his reputation was always supposed to be a figment of Holmes’ paranoia, other people have a life) while Moffat’s Moriarty is removed enough from reality that it doesn’t matter if he’s the godfather of the underworld. He’s convinced that he is, and the intention might prove enough for the deed. The results of most villainy are fairly banal anyhow, it's money, power or sex 9 times from 10, all of which get boring in excess. You’ve got to be on the psycho side if you’re trying to acquire them simply to pass the time.

Virtue runs on the same rules; Holmes might support the police as a lark but he’s intensely fond of his access to their equipment and his monograph on the makeup of different types of tobacco ashes. It's not a hobby for somebody socialized or particularly sane. I'd go on a pub crawl with Moriarty any time, even though it might kill me; at least I'd have a hell of a time on the way out. As for Holmes, there's nobody I'd recommend more highly to solve your mystery and save the day. But would you willingly invite him to tea? Never. Moriarty's a lot more fun. Come for the hero. Stay for the villian.

January, 2012

Things Past

2011-12-10T22:42:00.016-05:00

A Facebook friend request comes in from Benny Stud. I'm wondering why a gay porn star has decided to 'friend' me out of the blue before that nickname crawls back into my consciousness from junior high school; Benjamin Stuyvesant, referred to briefly as Benny Stud for reasons that were hysterically funny in Grade Eight but have been lost to the ages to all but Benjamin himself. I haven't seen him for decades but he was a decent enough guy in the days of the Reagan administration and I have yet to find somebody to maliciously 'friend' me on Facebook. I chalked it up to nostalgia or networking on his part. I was right about the former:

Hey Benny - I thought you were a renegade gigolo. How goes?

Yo Derbecker. Goes fine. What you been doing for 23 years or so?

Just like everyone else; got a job, got married, got a kid, got old. Yourself?

Same deal.

Onto you as to us all, right?

Yeah, like that.

This might read as a lament or something sentimental, but was actually a strangely comforting exchange. Benny could be a wiseass at 12, that might still be the case. I don't even want to remember what I was like at the same stage (although there are no lack of people to remind me) but at least it's the same distance away. That distance provides the perspective to review what mattered, what was simply of it's time, and why none of it matters 20-odd years later.

Everyone gets older. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone changes, but you can at least can find yourself in the same context. And my beard is more grey than black and I feel impossibly young for that to have happened, but here we are.This phenomena is getting more and more amusing over time; it beats the alternative of being literally dreadful (the rising dread of time passing) or steeped with regret. You review the events that bring you to where you are, and occasionally find drop-ins from stories you believed that you'd withdrawn from years before.

The sentiment of 'back in the day' from people around me feels spread rather thickly of late. It isn't exactly negative nor positive, it's simply the accumulation of days taking shape, reminding you, occasionally clearing their throat and making themselves known.
___________________________________

My present job (since anyone who's been let go from a large corporation considers subsequent employment to be tenuous for a very long time) puts me squarely in old stomping grounds and a lunchtime stroll takes me into Conundrum, a used bookstore that has taken my money for a good 20 years or so. Weekends required a review of the used or remaindered books that came in on a weekly basis; I'd buy with glee and sell those same copies back months later when I knew I was done with them (or was simply broke) and always got a fair price both ways.

I didn't know that Calvin was working there until recently; we'd been friends in University and had a falling out (I thought he was being weird and aggressive; I think I'd been labelled as dismissive and patronizing) for reasons pretty much irrelevant five years after the fact and utterly irrelevant now. When I buy something, Calvin looks at my stack of trade paperbacks and children's books on the counter and adds up the bill at a glance, rather than from the cash register. He'll knock off the tax or a few bucks off of each copy.

This isn't unusual for the store; one of the reasons I was a regular was that Jack, the owner, offered the same favour to me from time to time years ago. They both might just do it for every customer as a good business practice, but they don't have to and it's always appreciated. I started going back to Conundrum a few months ago, hadn't seen Jack for years and the discount still applied. Calvin carries it on, doesn't need to and I would never ask. But back in the day has some traction. I'll say thank you and mean it, I'll hear you're welcome in the same tone and I owe him a favour if he wants it and he can charge me full price when he wants to and there's an equilibrium and all is right in the world.

A few months ago, I picked up a reprint of an old book of Italian film reviews. Jack saw me in the store and carefully asked if he might borrow it, there were some essays he'd want to photocopy since there was only one copy in the store "And you got it, you bastard" offered with a smile. I told him I'd bring it in.

He looked awkward for a second and reached into the till to take out a 10 dollar bill, handing it to me before explaining it. "For your...uh...you've gotta find it and bring so, just for...you know..."

I was just as awkward handing it back. "Don't worry about it. You..."

"No! No, please. You're doing me a favour, so..."

"You don't owe me a thing, don't worry about it. It's a good book, you've always been ...and...uh...yeah. You owe me nothing. I'll just bring it in."

He took the money back. He made his copy a few days and didn't owe me 10 bucks. His offer was polite. Hopefully, my refusal matched it. You don't owe anything from back in the day, taking or giving.
___________________________________

I've known Jane since I was 12 when we were in a drama class together. I put a bedframe up for sale on Craigslist and up for free on Facebook to anyone I know well enough on that list. Jane was building a house and needed a new bed, she accepted it gratefully:

Friday night is a good time to pick it up. And I guess at the age of 41 I'm too old to tell people that "Jane's been in my bed, if you know what I mean," sotto voce with Groucho Marx eyebrows...right?

One is never too old for such hoary jokes. Never....

Excellent. It'll mean I have a wealth of material into my sunset years.

___________________________________

Another piece of furniture, a small rolltop desk put onto Facebook with the same rules, given to Clea who once sent me a tape with the Flying Pickets' Only You in 1989 after I'd told her I couldn't find a copy and how old the song felt to me then - it had been a favourite early in high school (only five years earlier, but the duration between 16 to 21yrs old felt thick and concentrated at the time). I found the letter she'd sent me then with the tape in a box of old letters in my basement (occasionally purged) and told her about it before she picked up the desk. She remembered:

I do remember sending you the tape. I also remember putting up signs in the residence asking anyone and everyone if they might have the Flying Pickets' acapella version of Only You. It has always been one of my favourite songs and you told me you were looking for it. I started that quest in January of 1989, so yes, one could say that this really did begin 21 years ago. Finally someone found one and they came knocking on my door close to April Fools' Day and I thought they were joking, but no, there they had it in their hand. The cassette was white and the spool was super-short; only three songs, fado-like, were recorded on it.

Sitting at my window in the residence, watching the mist rise off the damp streets into a hazy April sun, wanting to be outside in the air. I gave you my copy of Van Gogh's letters: the one with the yellow spine (and bought another one for myself in the summer with a blue spine). My psyche was a bit too close to his for comfort.

I thought of you playing the piano and receiving the tape (no YouTube then) and getting a kick out of the surprise of it, and the memory of it - that I had remembered. And so that was good to me.

I liked Clea but hadn't known I'd made that much of an impression. I kept the tape for years until enough CDs came out that I could find the track and the rest became memory and a chat over an old desk.
___________________________________

The fee from an old friend for graciously (and skillfully) putting down marble tiles in my bathroom; a pub lunch, a promised evening out and a blu-ray of 2010: The Year we Make Contact. Not a great movie nor a great sequel, but held in high regard back in the day. Worth nodding to years later with a smile.

December, 2011

A meme - 10 most influential books

2011-11-25T10:53:00.009-05:00

I try to avoid memes; this one caught my attention because I realized that the 10 most influential books in my life are not the most well-written books I've ever read, nor are they necessarily books I'd force into the hands of anyone asking for 'a good book.' This list consists of the styles or voices that got stuck in my consciousness and acted as a model (or at least a base) for the way I learned to write. I read three of them before I turned 12, four of them in my mid to late teens and three in my late 20s. I've read better and more impressive works than these, but this particular 10 made the most impact on me as a whole.

Most of the authors listed here wouldn't stay in a room with each other voluntarily, so be it. And I'm indifferent to their moral character or politics. Who cares? James Dickey was by all accounts a dreadful human being, but an extraordinarily original poet when he wanted to be. And I don't want to hang out at any political action committee PJ O'Rourke would endorse, but I'd gladly buy him a beer if he'd teach me to be as sharp and snarky as he managed in his prime.

Only a few of these books rest in my shelves at home; most have done their job and left their influence and don't need to be revisited. It's a weird list, take from it what you wish. And feel free to follow the meme.

1. The Collected Poems of Primo Levi

2. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

3. Dispatches - Michael Herr

4. The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck

5. Holidays in Hell- PJ O'Rourke

6. The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

7. Dubliners - James Joyce

8. Metropolitan Life - Fran Leibowitz

9. Night- Elie Wiesel

10. The Whole Motion - Collected poems of James Dickey

Honorable Mentions: Darkness Visible by William Styron, Nobody's Perfect by Anthony Lane, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood, the collected short stories of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the collected poems of Alden Nowlan and Theodore Roethke, Songs of the Doomed by Hunter S. Thompson and 30+ years of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury.

Overplayed - 'Chess' at the Princess of Wales Theatre

2011-10-29T19:53:00.022-04:00

I walked out of Chess feeling delightfully young. It had nothing to do with the cast, staging, direction or those retro tingles that a rousing chorus of One Night in Bangkok inflicts upon select souls who boogied to it at high school dances in their errant youth. I actually felt young because the rest of the audience consisted almost exclusively of men and women of a certain age; I'd put them at late 50s with a few early 60s among the throng, husbands obviously come straight from the office and their spouses wearing casual clothes and one or two pieces of expensive jewelry to give their subscription-series evening a sense of occasion.

I'm 42 with grey in my beard and I still felt positively adolescent by the end of the evening. This might explain why I wasn't one of the walkouts in the first act; I saw at least 10 people discreetly make for the exits before intermission. I might be just young enough to have the patience or simple grim curiosity to sit through a musical that manages to be verbose, complicated, overlong and overpaced, all told with a background of raunchy dancers dressed in campy chesspiece costumes (think Lady Gaga by way of an Elton John yard sale in 1976 or so). A large segment of the older audience were probably too busy in the 80s to care about the Chess concept album and too old in 2011 to recognize the Strictly Come Dancing choreography. A few of them simply zoned out or politely stepped to the exit in a very Canadian this isn't my kind of play sort of way.

Maybe they were expecting Mamma Mia, the other Abba-related evening out. And when you're expecting a singalong version of Dancing Queen and get dancers wearing gold lamé jockstraps in stylized Bangkok fleshpots, perhaps it's best to call it an early night. But for those of us with a grudging respect for the original album and a long-standing curiosity about exactly how the hell one would successfully stage it, it was impossible to look away. It's not that the show is bad exactly, and it isn't fair to call it a train wreck. It's more like encountering a train re-imagining where somebody has decided that the passenger cars should be every colour of the rainbow and the crew should wear nothing but nylon and hooker boots and the cars should be stacked upon each other in imaginative geometric patterns rather than that old boring single-file setup. Even if the train successfully made it down the track and carried its passengers to their destinations, you'd watch it and demand to know Who thought this was a good idea...and why?

Chess has been kicking around since the album's first release in 1984. There was a long-running stage version in London's West End followed by a disastrous Broadway run and relatively few kicks at the can since then. I don't think there's been a touring version in North America since the early 90s and the show has been limited to University companies and brave small theatre groups. There's a reason for this; it's a long, complicated score that's a weird mix of Abba-inspired pop and clever riffs on operetta and chamber pieces with a libretto that ranges from droll and sarcastic to shamelessly sentimental. It runs almost 3 hours and is just begging for somebody to adjust it to work onstage.

These adjustments invariably fall flat. In plot terms, the Princess of Wales production keeps the original American/Russian cold war tensions grafted onto chess players who are busy maintaining their own demons and are not willingly dragged into being literal pawns in geopolitical games. But that which is hinted at on the album has to be spelled out onstage, stopping the action cold. The synopsis slipped into the programme runs around 1200 words and is hard to follow if you're not familiar with the original source.

This is part of what makes the piece oddly compelling - you have to stay awake to keep up with the action, making it (in musical terms, at least) unconventional and thought-provoking. It's also mutton dressed up as lamb, something that you can get away with in a pop album that knows it isn't changing the world. But to put it on stage, you can present every word and note as if it were a serious dissertation of cold-war politics and human relationships, or you can camp it up as something that might pass as pop (not rock) opera and let the characters fight their own demons while the audience has fun around the edges.

Director Craig Revel Horwood decided to try both techniques and they simply don't jibe. He's best known as a UK choreographer with street cred in London's West End and time as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, all of which contributed to keeping the action sparkly and well-populated. It doesn't help the pacing, which rushes to shove 3hrs of music and exposition into the narrative, which doesn't provide much of an emotional connection to anyone onstage. When the Russian chess champion and the Hungarian-born, American-raised former lover of the American chess champion (it's complicated) fall in love during the first 2 minutes of an 8 minute song from a cold opening, nobody cares. The plot keeps chugging while the audience wonders what they've missed.

On the whole, the Russians come off better than the Americans or Brits in this production; Tam Mutu as Champion Anatoly and Steve Varnom as Apparatchik Molokov look appropriately tortured or devious in their roles, with Varnom acting as the show's only gleeful comic relief. James Fox as the American Champion sticks to one note of misunderstood and pissy; Shona White as the Hungarian can't quite handle the softer songs between the belt-to-the-rafters ballads. It's all passable, but not memorable.

But the chorus is unforgettable, not for entirely positive reasons. The black and white chesspiece costumes are as over the top as they want to be (the knights with long tails brought out numerous horse's ass comments at intermission) but they're pointless. A cast of 20 or so could have been cut to 10 without reducing the spectacle, and do we need a generic glossy dance troupe with extensive chess costumes at all? They do play their own instruments, and I'll admit it must be one hell of a challenge to manage a violin while lying on your back in 6 inch heels during a dance number. But their effort is largely wasted; the show's band (hidden behind scrim) is synth and drum based and it overwhelms anything played onstage. The acrobatic dancing orchestra could be faking it for all we know, why make them do the work when the audience won't appreciate it?

I saw walkouts in the first act and more than a few people head off to intermission with their overcoats under their arms (and not to go for a smoke). Those who stayed for the second act managed to see how it could all gel during the last two numbers when the complicated games finally come together for a sequence where everybody gets their pound of flesh from the tortured (or opportunistic) Anatoly. There isn't a wasted step or note. It's a very long wait for the payoff, but it's almost thrilling to see that the story can get itself together, even with so many characters and double-crosses taking place at once.

Unfortunately, it simply ends there. When the house lights dropped and the cast came out for their bows, there was a wide-reaching sense of 'Huh?' throughout the house. It's either a brave ending (it does follow the story) or a mistake to deny their audience a well-explained finale. It represents everything that's wrong with the show itself; when there have been so many expository passages allegedly to keep the audience up to speed, it's jarring to have the production shrug it off suddenly.

The show isn't awful- just uneven and rushed, held together with narrative tricks that don't do it any favours. You can almost smell the flop-sweat from backstage, and it's possible that the producers have realized that, costumes and retro-vibe notwithstanding, they don't exactly have a crowd-pleaser on their hands. That might be the reason why the show's biggest hit (One Night in Bangkok) comes across as a clone of the original version, it might be the sop to an audience which will want what they know. Most of them won't be familiar with the entirety of the original show to feel the edits have denied them any riches.

You'd think somebody could fix that, which is a dangerous gambit that's resulted in numerous productions over the last 25 years or so. And as long as the original album keeps selling, somebody, invariably, will try to make it work. Again.

October 2011

Old acquaintance be forgot

2011-10-22T00:58:00.012-04:00

Early 1990s, my mid-20s and a New Years Eve I remember little about other than I was alone. I had been dating a musician for a long time and was convinced I had either become boring or she had become distant because time alone with her was increasingly scarce. And New Years Eve is always too loud but being at a bad party is still being together and the odds of that felt unlikely even before she proposed something that formalized the evening into something that could go down in history books as ‘not discussed’ rather than denied, or at least it that is how it all felt around a New Year's Eve sometime in the early 90s.
___________________________________________

“Do you want to do something together on New Year’s Eve?” Louise asked over the phone. “Because I have an idea. It’s something we both could do.”

I hadn’t planned anything. There had been a few pub nights years before, and a Solstice party a few weeks earlier and I was looking forward to finding a spot with too many people and doing the 10-9-8 count before midnight and warbling Auld Lang Syne before replacing it with more drink or food or just giving into it for a few hours. New Year's Even hadn’t always been – ever been – anything close to exciting for Louise and I, and the usual routine of seeing new bands or old bands in new small places was at least fun, most times. I thought she was going to offer the back room of a club to see a mutual friend or a friend-of-a-friend and music and wine.

“Oliver’s having a party,” I told her, “it’ll be crazy on the first two floors but there’s a fireplace hidden on the 3rd if he’s not renting it out just now and we could probably find our way upstairs with a bottle or at least a few coffees. What did you have in mind?”

She said “I’ve been asked to sing backup at one of the High Park performances, maybe do some trios. There’s a family night there at first, then some jazz when the kids have all gone home. It’s on a 20 minute cycle, 20 on and 40 off. You could be part of it.”

I imagined a cold night and a bench and long waits while Louise performed. I said “How, exactly?”

“I think they’re giving away candy during the shows," she said. "Or they’re supposed to. Or we are. It's still up in the air. Maybe you could do it for us. But you don't have to. And I won’t do this if you don’t want me to.”

If I can’t remember the year precisely then I have to be nervous and fair about the events that follow. I have a faint memory of saying something like I really don’t want you to and hearing I’ve sort of already volunteered in response which isn’t fair to Louise. I think if I had objected then and there, she would have begged off the gig and we would have ended up together someplace and she might have sulked about it as much as I might have sulked being a non-performer stuck at a venue on one of the coldest nights of the year.

I don’t remember exactly what convinced me that being apart on New Year’s Eve would be a low-impact, not-worth-caring-about exercise; probably the boring parties in the past. But I still found myself saying ‘No’ to attending her gig as the semi-audience, semi-date, semi-staff in definite terms.

“You can do it if you want to," I told her, "if it’ll help you get gigs later on down the road, but honestly I can't stand the idea of being in that park for that long, that way. I’ll freeze. I’ll be bored. And you’ll be in performance mode and that’ll be your evening from…what…7:00pm on? I can’t just stand there for that long.”

“It wouldn’t be that long!” she said. “And it’s all over by midnight. We could talk between sets, walk around the park, find coffee or…”

“I don’t know if that will happen,” I remember saying. I imagined the crowds, the other performers, the distractions and how, quite legitimately, an audience member (even your lover) isn't as important as everything that's required for the show itself. I could think of one hundred reasons for those walks and that coffee to be passed over in favour of something more important (soundchecks, tech problems, catching-up with past acquaintances) and I wasn't trying to hold this against her. I just knew the odds were against us actually having the kind of evening she was suggesting.

I finally said, “I know it might happen, but there are so many things that might come up that I don’t know it will happen.”

“I’ll try,” she said defensively. "I can promise you I'll try." She softened a little and said "I’d love to see you there.”

My office was having a party at a local pub on that evening; something close to a costume party (some offer of a few free drinks if attending in what the invite called “fancy dress”) and it wouldn’t be much more intimate than a cold park. It would, however, be warmer. And there'd be nothing to do but drink, dance, or park one’s self in a corner and talk over the din. It wouldn’t be performing or not-performing and everything that came with that.

“I’ll probably go to the party at The Poet’s Rest,” I told her. “You could be there by 12:30am or so if gig ends at midnight.”

“Probably not exactly at midnight,” she announced.

“Then come from whenever. Come for 1am.”

“We'll see. When do the bars close that evening?”

“Late. It’s New Year’s Eve,” I reminded her.

"I'll try," she said. And we moved onto another topic.
____________________________________________

The grey area begins here.

I remember that I didn’t want her to do it and that doesn’t mean I didn’t give her my blessing to go forth anyhow. That’s my fault.

If I took that as an opportunity to sulk, that’s also my fault.

I think I rationalized it as just being an just another evening with no particular resonance and I’d see her before or afterwards. But the resulting impact – the simple knowledge that we’d struck an impasse where she’d be much happier taking part in something with me as a spectator or employee rather than companion was depressing. And I realized that I’d rather spend the evening alone than as a guest she might pay attention between sets. This hung over me for the 24, 48, 96hrs between our rushed conversation and New Year's Eve itself.

I remember thinking This feels like a job. And I’m not paid enough for this. Which wasn’t fair. Or polite. It's just what I found beside me at my empty table over those few days.
___________________________________________

There was a blizzard on New Year's Eve. I'd run downstairs at pub to the bank of payphones to check Louise's messages on my answering machine where she'd mention how the tech was wonky and speakers were buried under garbage bags and snow and things were going to go much later than midnight, maybe she’d go out with the other performers for a bit if it didn’t look like she’d make it to the pub after all. There were enough maybes presented to me in that decidedly one-sided forum to be demoralizing entirely on their own and they compounded by the fact that I didn’t think any of them had a chance of going my way to begin with.

At midnight, somebody kissed me. A tipsy, smoochy kiss that became a gentler, licky kiss in very short order. It’s easy to be kissed on New Year’s Eve. I pulled away; she looked surprised then embarrassed and then found somebody else to give a quieter kiss to. I would rather have continued kissing her but it wouldn't have solved my problems, so I left the party early and tried not to feel resentful or sorry for myself. I don’t think I succeeded. But I slept easily enough.
___________________________________________

The phone woke me up at 4am. Louise wished me a Happy New Year. I returned the favour and asked her how her sets went.

“Busy,” she said. “And it was freezing. And I ended up following Margie around to one or two of the other sessions to help with their microphones and levels and just to keep warm. It’s probably good you weren’t sitting around; I wouldn’t have had a lot of time to chat. But I wish you could have come.”

“It wouldn’t have worked,” I told her. “You moved around a lot with Margie.”

“I know,” she said, “but I still wish you would have come.”

“You realize that you just told me that I wouldn’t have seen a lot of you.”

“I know,” she said, sounding exasperated, “but I still…”

“That’s why I didn’t go. You do understand that, right?”

We hung there for a few more minutes before she said “I should probably let you sleep” and I didn’t object. We each put down the phone and it was deeply quiet. Even the last late-night revelers had abandoned the streets under my window.

I sat in the silence and realized that despite efforts to the contrary, I couldn’t accept “I wish you were there” and “I wouldn’t have had time” delivered in one breath as one concept when she could have made a choice between them. I might have been worth the longing she implied, but evidently I wasn't worth the choice of not doing the gig.

That said, I had stayed away voluntarily, abdicating my right to feel shunned.

I kept thinking I’m not paid enough for this without quite understanding what the payment was or what labor I was offering. All I knew in those few bare hours of dawn was that I had been left alone on New Year’s Eve by somebody who claimed to love me but willingly chose to be somewhere else, insisting she missed me, while still staying away.

October 2011

Didn't see this coming

2011-10-21T12:43:00.018-04:00

The guy beside me on the subway is in his early to mid-20s, wearing a Ralph Steadmanesque t-shirt with Picnic at Hanging Rock printed in the traditional freaky Steadman script (think about the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas cover). The shirt itself is black, the printed colour something between unhealthy yellow and khaki and there’s a stylized etching of what one assumes is the titular rock with a woman falling/flying/leaping off the top in a Victorian-style dress. I can say with complete certainty that nobody else in our subway car has the same shirt under their jacket. I really wish I had a photo of it, it would have been worth the Why is this weird man taking pictures of a stranger on the subway? response from the locals. The t-shirt wearing guy himself is a clean cut sort and doesn’t resemble Hunter S. Thompson or Withnail or any of Steadman’s other grotesques, he just looks like a film major en route to class or his shift at a video store or whatever production house awaits his services as an underpaid production assistant.

Ralph Steadman is a cult figure. Picnic at Hanging Rock is a cult film. But putting the two of them in the same context for the sake of satire (or a really, really weird homage) is something I haven’t ever seen or would even have been able to imagine until this morning. It’s an in-joke for the shirt’s creator and the handful of people who can pull up both references on short notice. It reminded me of an old National Lampoon Radio Hour tribute to Last Tango in Paris by way of Gigi (Brando & Schneider’s rendition of I Remember It Well is a showstopper), or Christopher Guest’s small-town theatre impresario in Waiting for Guffman branching off into merchandising with a Remains of the Day lunchbox for hungry Merchant-Ivory or Kazuo Ishiguro fans.

This kind of humour is pitched at the wry chuckle for those in the know rather than the all-out guffaw from the great unwashed. To be in on the joke, you need to know that Steadman was Thompson’s artist of choice and that Hanging Rock is (in very small circles) famous for being a film about nothing where most of the nothing happens offscreen (suspected culprits range from ghosts to aliens to rampant existentialists). Neither Thompson nor Steadman would willingly sit in a screening room with it. The t-shirt pushes you to a place where you’re either impressed by the in-bred, in-jokey effort behind it or washing your hands of it while muttering ‘I wish I had as much time to waste as some people’ while you head to the nearest exit.

Me, I sort of admire the melding of minimalism and all-out gonzo (from a safe distance). I wouldn’t wear the shirt myself, but if it’s mass produced I’d love to hear from the marketing team that loosed it into the world. If Steadman doesn’t sue, I think they could whip up a t-shirt that depicts a decent Sound of Music pastiche in the style of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Whether drawn out of utterly misguided love or truly imaginative loathing, it would be one hell of an antidote to the film itself. The hills might truly be alive after all; be afraid.

October, 2011

A hot cup

2011-10-18T22:39:00.024-04:00

You're supposed to write 1,000 words a day to be a successful blogger.

Not gonna happen. And I'd like to know that definition of 'successful' anyway.

Been quiet recently.

Haven't had a clear train of thought.

That hasn't...

...stopped me before. I know, I know.

Write about anything that's on your mind.

Nothing other than craving a cup of coffee. And I can't drink coffee anymore.

Write about that.
____________________________________________

A Starbucks morning. “I’d like a cup of tea please. Earl Grey.”

The cashier says “Okay Captain Kirk, would you like a baked good or yogurt with that?”

“No thanks. And I think it was Captain Picard who had a thing for Earl Grey.”

The cashier pauses, rolls her eyes and says “Huh. Geek. That’s $1.27 please.”

She smiles as soon as I do, realizing that I’ve taken it in the spirit in which it was given. I don’t have any particular brand loyalty to Starbucks, it just has the darkest roast of coffee around my office and since I can’t drink coffee anymore, I walk in from time to time simply to inhale. The management (and customers) would probably think it weird for me to stand near the espresso press huffing the drawer for the spent grounds, so I try to limit myself to buying a cup of tea and not looking too wistful.
___________________________________________

I involuntarily stopped drinking coffee around 18 months ago. I don’t have a solid medical rationale for this. Travis suggested it was psychosomatic and I don’t disagree with him, although such low-level psychosis tends to be accompanied by a discernible trigger. But I can’t find it. If I’d been beaten up by a cardboard-cupped double-double or large latte on the way to school as a child and buried the trauma for decades (only to have it sabotage my love of coffee in my early 40s), you’d think it would at least introduce itself at the threshold of my consciousness and explain how the aforementioned cups managed the trick of locomotion and street-fighting.

I’d been drinking black coffee since I was 15, since Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin and Paul Newman drank it black and therefore I believed I could automatically count myself among their number if I followed suit (this was, admittedly, a stretch). My maternal grandfather reminded me of all of those people and as I child I loved the rich scent of my grandmother’s perked coffee on a gas stove. And my grandfather drank black coffee. I could steal a taste from time to time and, like most coffee, it smelled better than it tasted (especially so for my grandmother’s brew). But the association for me was formed: good coffee, properly appreciated in the right tough-guy fashion, had to be knocked back hotter than hell and black as sin.

This habit continued for 25 years or so, until a Friday afternoon when I realized that every cup of coffee I’d procured from the three local pushers to my office (a Second Cup, a Mmmuffins and a Tim Hortons) was nauseating swill to me. It smelled like coffee at first, but every mouthful of every blend would hang on my palate like coffee-flavouring that had been drowned in salt water or grease. I thought that my handy-dandy environmentally-friendly stainless steel mug was leeching residue from cups that had come before, but it was cleaned every night and stainless steel is usually pretty inert. Drinking from paper cups didn’t improve anything, and the coffee I made at home was worse.

Overnight, my body had decided that all things coffee related had become an emetic and should be treated with the associated respect (and avoidance). I wasn’t happy about this. As a four-cup-a-day drinker, I felt that the DTs were inevitable and I missed the flavor of the coffee that I remembered, rather than the coffee that was available to me. I took a wild guess and reasoned that not every coffee outlet had suddenly started selling a chemical-based ill-flavoured alternative, it was just me being weird. Not out of the realm of possibility on many levels. I just didn’t think it would manifest itself as an aversion to coffee.

I’ve survived. I’d always liked Japanese green tea and replaced my four daily cups with that. It’s allegedly better for me, it’s cheaper, and it allows me to feel very zen on short notice before I realize how anti-zen I am at the best of times. I will occasionally be able to knock back an espresso and the first swallow carries with it the glory of past days. The remainder tastes like coffee-flavoured plastic mixed with varsol. If it hits my gut, there goes the day. I can’t explain it, understand it, or hide it. Coffee unexpectedly let me down and donuts haven’t been quite the same since.
____________________________________________

You get off the subway at Eglinton station and get hit with waves of coffee. A Treats outlet, a Cinnabon and four strong blends along with espresso wafting out of a Second Cup in the station itself. I don’t indulge in any of it, but I camped out at that Second Cup often in my early 20s when underemployed, listening to the 3:15 to 5:00pm chatter and thinking that it might be fodder for short stories or a screenplay. All I got out of it was to become part of the 3:15 to 5:00pm coffee crowd and was enough of a regular that the owner started letting me pour my own cups on the honour system. Nobody believes this, including me; I figured that I either looked exceptionally trustworthy or sufficiently broke and caffeine-deprived that she was afraid to make me wait too long. For the record, I always paid.

I didn’t always pay at the Mmmuffins shop close to Exchequer, a former employer. I’d actually used them for catering a few times because they could put it together quickly, charged reasonably and even brought me in under their original quote when I was coordinating a staff function. It was run by two brothers, a nephew and an aunt. There was some friction between at least three of the four of them and the aunt (Russian, very pale with deep brown eyes) decided the best way to revenge herself was to give me free coffee.

I didn’t know any of this at the time; we’d chat in the morning, I’d get a black coffee and a muffin with my co-workers, we’d all make the same noises about how much happier we’d be on vacation, boy the traffic was terrible and have a good day and that was that. I don’t know how long it had been happening before I finally noticed that I received 3 loonies change for a bill of $2.85. I chalked it up to experience and had that same experience happen with her three more times in a week (it didn’t happen when the nephew was manning the cash).

I didn’t know if she was a lousy mathematician or whether she was just trying to be nice to me. Nobody had given me free food since I was 15 or so, when a girl named Stacy would flirt with me over the counter and slip me a large order of fries for the price of a small at a food court at Yonge and Sheppard. Their MO might have been similar, but the Mmmuffins aunt looked to be in her early 50s and seemed a bit advanced in years for puppy love to be a motivating factor. This continued for around two weeks before I noticed that my $2.85 breakfast was now garnering me $5.00 in assorted change. I was starting to turn a more significant profit. Which weirded me out. I didn’t want her to get in trouble and I thought that, as short cons go, this was about as short as one could manage.

The problem eventually took care of itself; I might not have been the only beneficiary of that franchise’s largesse. She went to work in the baking area and offered me the occasional grin. And the nephew told me dirty jokes about sailors and counted out the change properly with my morning caffeine fix.
____________________________________________

When you hit the corner of Yonge and Eglinton, there’s a Tim Hortons that is large and cavernous and two Starbucks franchises stand within half a block of each other. Each have their aficionados. I can’t tell them apart on short notice, although there are those who claim that Tim Hortons people stand for Canadian values and Starbucks people have too much money to spend on coffee. Some care about this deeply. Others have better things to do. I’ve seen businessmen in power suits gripping cups of each brand on their way to the office towers and they look pretty interchangeable to me.

I don’t understand the Tim Hortons junkies. I’ve never had a sentimental attachment to the place, although my father did, which dragged me into it temporarily. For the first few years after his death, I couldn’t set foot in an outlet without looking at the travel mugs and flasks while thinking He’d like that. Maybe for Christmas. Or Father’s Day. And the day would fall to pieces. No coffee is/was worth that.

This memorabilia-fixation might be more endemic than I’d previously expected. My son and I went to a garage sale a few years ago when I was still transporting him on a back carrier. There was a small Tim Horton’s branded Thermos on a card table with a few assorted dishes and bits of Tupperware. It was stainless steel, presumably unbreakable, and the perfect size to transport milk or juice in my son’s diaper bag. It also was the only unmarked item on the table so I wanted to be sure that it was actually on sale, rather than having simply been left there by an absent minded shopper.

I saw a woman who looked to be in her mid-50’s with graying curly hair and cat-glasses making change for a man buying a very old toaster. I showed her the thermos and asked how much she wanted for it. This was apparently a very difficult question. She stared at it and at me silently for a few seconds before asking “What do you believe that is worth?”

I shrugged and said, “Three or four bucks?”

She icily said “I don’t think you know how much that cost when it was new. That cost over twenty-five dollars.”

This comment caught the attention of a man in his mid-50s with similar graying curly hair and glasses with oversize 1980’s frames. He caught her eye and she gave him the same cold stare she’d given me. I looked carefully at the thermos over and found a few scuff marks on the sides.

“Is this thermos new?” I asked politely.

“Of course not,” she said.

“So…three or four bucks?” I suggested.

“Give him the thermos,” said the man brusquely.

They had another brief but intense staring contest. I readied two twoonies and made sure they were in the sightline of both individuals, hoping they’d see it as both a sign of good faith and the high end of my initial three or four buck offer. She finally took the money from my hand without looking at me and turned her back. The man cocked a snook in my direction which felt like he was saying I hope you appreciate everything I’ve just done for you and I made a hasty retreat. Something about that transaction meant a lot to at least of one of them, and blessings to all involved but really I just wanted a small Thermos and to carry on with my life.
___________________________________________

Coffee is matching shots of espresso and grappa while trying to play pool in university. Please note that coffee is an upper and grappa a downer; taken simultaneously you sort of go sideways. Coffee was a good excuse to have a date (“Do you want to have a cup of coffee or something?”), a good reason to stretch out the evening (“Just one cup? A fast one?”) and a consistent show of civilization. It smells welcoming. Even bad coffee at least means that somebody thought it was a good idea to begin with, and that somebody at least cares enough to offer you a cup.

Coffee demolished a tentative on-again, off-again relationship I had in my late teens. I’d called Amanda after a few days of silence (which had followed an evening of passion, so I had no idea whatsoever of where I stood with her) and it went like this:

Me: Listen, I’m close to the store. Do you want a cup of coffee after closing?

Amanda: Why?

Me: Pardon?

Amanda: Why?

Me: (unsure) Why…have…a…cup…of…coffee?

Amanda: (with complete sincerity) Yeah.

My time with Amanda had been sweet and weird before becoming all-out weird. This was exactly as much as I could take.

Me: Amanda, nobody says ‘Why?’ when asked to go for coffee! Normal, civilized people in this universe say yes or say no! You can use either word! But you do not get to say why! I will not function rationally around you ever again if you try to get away with saying why!

Amanda: Michael! I’m…

Me: Stand me up! Say no! You can even lie to me! Say you’re busy! Say you’re doing inventory! Say you’ve got a date! I very honestly don’t care! But for God’s sake, you have got to at least be able to know whether or not you want a cup of coffee!

Amanda: OKAY! YES! I DO! SHUT UP! I WANT COFFEE! OKAY?! OKAY?!

Me: GREAT! WHEN?! AND WHERE?!

We met. It was sort of a tense evening and the decidedly last date in our on-again, off-again paradigm. I thought she was nuts and she returned the favour towards me. It’s worth laughing at now. I don’t blame the coffee at all.
____________________________________________

Coffee is bags of oily beans from that place in Kensington Market. Coffee is boiled in a saucepan and poured over a sugar cube in the Turkish style by a Romanian friend from years ago. It’s the brushed metal machine my wife gave me when I was feeling broke and made outstanding coffee until the brushed metal was all that was left of it and the plastic innards melted away.

Tea’s fine. It does the job and has an honorable history. I don’t feel as much like Lee Marvin or Robert Mitchum over a cup, but I think I realized I wasn’t truly among their number by my mid-teens. When I have writers block I depend on tea, which (allegedly) promotes clarity of thought.

Tonight, it’s made me want to write about coffee.

You can dream, right?

October, 2011

Decade

2011-09-10T21:52:00.003-04:00

"The nearly 3,000 names of the men, women, and children killed in the attacks of September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993 are inscribed in bronze on parapets surrounding the twin Memorial pools...As part of the 9/11 Memorial’s official names verification process completed in 2009, victims’ next-of-kin made specific requests for names to appear adjacent to their loved one’s name (“adjacency requests”).

Some of these requests were for relatives, friends, and colleagues; others were for loved ones to be listed with people they may have barely known or just met, but with whom intense bonds were quickly formed as a result of shared response. Over 1,200 of these requests were made and all are reflected on the Memorial. In fact, these requests drive the ordering the groupings on around the Memorial pools, the affiliations within them, and in many places, the placement of the names themselves."

Greener pastures and bodily harm

2011-09-01T11:01:00.009-04:00

The further adventures of Ellis, a friend possessed of a dry wit and a healthy sense of the ridiculous. Monday morning’s email missives went like this, more or less verbatim:

Ellis: In the Middle Ages, Monday was usually the day each week when the serfs & bondsmen (i.e., peasants) spent the day working the Lord’s fields instead of their own. So the ‘I hate Mondays’ sentiment is nothing new. On Friday, we found out that Dimitri from Accounting is leaving Exchequer for greener pastures. Today, he shows up with a sprained ankle. Coincidence? You be the judge.

Me: Er…were these ‘greener pastures’ expanded upon by Dimitri, something like “I’m leaving Exchequer to take a new job at Kingston Empire?” Or did the powers that be just encourage him to limp towards the aforementioned greener pastures all by himself? I thought you were supposed to twist somebody’s arm to get them to leave, not their ankle…

Ellis: Nope, no idea where he’s off to; I need to check the HR policies for the bit about them breaking my limbs if I try to leave.

Me: I can see it now, the plotting amongst HR minions:

‘Hey - Ellis got another job.'
‘Competitor, or different industry?’
‘Entirely different.’
‘Okay. He’s a decent enough guy. Just in-grow one of his toenails on his last day and send him my best.’

Leaping topics, I caved and got an iPhone package for Abby and I. I still don’t understand the cult of Apple, and I miss being able to work around something if I don’t know how it works (such as accessing pages directly rather than being bounced to their mobile site), and the lack of flash support is depressing. But the apps are useful. Even the free ones are pretty good. It has an effective GPS, lets me download the Globe, the Star, the Post and Newsweek for offline reading, takes a decent photo, lets me do face-to-face video chat with Abby, surfs the web easily and quickly, has great sound quality as an iPod and plays videos quite nicely. You also have an iPhone so perhaps you can answer my question; can it make toast?

Ellis: Yes. Yes, it can. Go to the App Store and search on the word ‘toast’. Second hit is for an app called 'More Toast!' which allows you to make virtual toast (including bagels!) on your iPhone. With a variety of toppings.

Me: (after checking out the app) …oh my goodness gracious Lord. Somebody’s getting paid for this.

Ellis: Only 99 cents. It’s rated very highly. Apparently, as far as toast-making applications go, it’s quite good. And don’t roll your eyes at me. I wanted corn flakes.

Sept, 2011

Overheard at a newsstand

2011-08-25T22:21:00.005-04:00

"What do you call a person who pisses towards a funeral procession in broad daylight but won't look the widow in the eye?"

"I don't know. What do you call..."

"You call them a Blatchford."

Aug, 2011

The Burning

2011-07-08T16:55:00.067-04:00

Let’s start with The Burger King Incident, which doesn’t really deserve much attention. I’d mentioned it in a Facebook update and Patti suggested that I blog about it. I told her it wasn’t worth blogging. I’ve never met her, although she seems like a nice woman. She’s married to the brother of Jane, a friend from long-ago drama classes and high school and fellow-participant to everything that came with all that. Patti follows my updates because I'd commented on something that she'd posted, she bounced something back and we read each other's blogs and there's some degree of simpatico in our attitudes. It’s the 21st century equivalent of pen pals and it spurred the impetus behind writing about something that doesn’t really deserve much attention (see above). It will, however, eventually segue into something I do want to write about. Foundations take time.

I witnessed The Burger King Incident across four lanes of traffic on a recent Wednesday morning at approximately 8:23am. Two Burger King employees in standard uniforms (generic short sleeved shirt, polyester pants, nametag) escorted a guy in a Burger King costume (tunic, freaky mask with built-in crown, burgundy pants, odd yellow boots) out of their restaurant. They didn’t toss him onto the street exactly, but flanked him in such a way that it encouraged his departure from their premises in the universal we can do this easy, or we can do this hard sort of way.

Once the King was ejected, the employees stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the door and stared at him wordlessly. His Highness ignored the surprised passers-by and stood a respectful distance from his former minions to plead his case, perhaps hoping to be welcomed back onto his throne as the once and future king of fast-service dining. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but the employees were having none of it and after a minute or so the King headed west, maybe to the subway. I know of a Dairy Queen franchise a bit north of there, perhaps he was heading in that direction for solace in alternate regal surroundings.

Patti wrote:

Well THAT'S weird, I think you should consider blogging a story that might be behind that whole thing.

I didn't - don't - want to write about it because, appearances notwithstanding, it's not organically weird. His Most Royal Majesty was either a former employee trying to make a point, or a high school student or frat pledge believing that this stunt would make them a legend, or some truly demented collector of Burger King ephemera with a proud sense of accomplishment thinking This is my dream! for reasons I can't fathom. In any case, the incident collects itself fairly easily and the world goes on. Genuine, organic, hardcore weirdness can't be broken down quite so easily. Any explanations swarm and multiply into alternate scenarios that are no less weird or unfeasible than the event itself.

A few weeks ago, I went to a Lightbox screening of Toby Dammit and Suspiria and watched Guillermo del Toro complain about the pressures his producers put on him to downplay the weirdness in his movies and instill some sense of logic for American audiences. He was delighted by the fact that Dario Argento ignored that and distilled genuine horror in his films. del Toro said:

"It can't be explained. If it it's logical, it won't be horrific. "

He was referring specifically to the complete lack of sense, logic, or respect for coherence in Suspiria and Inferno, but it reminded me of at least one slow-horror moment where I couldn't quite attribute an incident to anything other than something without reason or tied to a reason I wanted nothing to do with. It wasn't scary per ce, but it matched del Toro's concept of illogical horror for me at the time. I've never quite forgotten it because it was weird and apparently a low-level secret on the part of the person who showed me. I'll write about it now because a guy in a Burger King outfit is eccentric, strange or ill-advised, but not weird.

You want weird? Read on.

___________________________________

I was 15. It was the summer of my grade 10 year. There was a girl involved. There are no romantic, erotic or nostalgic overtones around anything that follows.

Marnie was pretty and had long straight chestnut hair and features somewhere between Marcia Brady and (if cartoony freckles were applied) the female lead of an above-average road-company version of Anne of Green Gables. She had shown up, improbably enough, to a Dungeons and Dragons game I'd been invited to. It was also improbable for me to have shown up. I'd indulged in a lot of early adolescent geeky pursuits (sci-fi action movies, learning top 40 songs on the piano, bike riding, a Jim Morrison fixation), but D&D wasn't really a passion.

Stefan, a guy I'd known from a volunteer job the summer before, needed extra players. He was hosting some kind of event where three games/three dungeon masters would be running at the same time. I went for lack of anything else to do, only to discover that one of the dungeon masters hadn't shown up so there were only two games on offer. I barely understood the game in the first place, so I didn't mind waiting around and watching other players while munching junk food (this clip pretty much sums up every D&D experience I ever had - I was the guy asking about the Cheetos). Marnie was also between games so we chatted.

She was very pretty and she wasn't dressed in early 80s neon but in a nicely fitting black t-shirt, jeans, sandals. She'd wouldn't have been out of place at a Doors concert in '68 or a U2 concert in '82, that sort of look. I think I mentioned that being stuck in a basement was sort of cool, it was like John Carpenter's The Thing set in suburban Toronto and not Antarctica and there wasn't a shape shifting monster trying to kill us and replicate our DNA (I really hope I worded it differently than what you just read), but I was young and hormonal and given to stream of consciousness at such moments). Film geeks tend to find each other and Marnie and I talked about Carpenter and Blade Runner and A Boy and his Dog and the Star Trek movies and generally had a better time than we would have playing D&D.

Eventually, she said we should see a movie together. This was great - a chance for a date without having asked for a date. Maybe it meant I was cute or at least interesting. I found out she lived on the other side of town near a church where I'd been attending a youth group. We made a date for the following Saturday and she left the gaming session before I did.

"She dated a guy I knew for awhile," Stefan told me, "They broke up. She's an okay D&D player."

Not a lot to go on. I didn't care. There was a pretty girl, a warm summer, nothing else to do. Even if I didn't get anywhere with her (and I put my chances, as always, at 50/50) so what? It was a date and that was always a good thing.
__________________________________

I almost rode my bike to her house - which would have changed later events - but ended up taking a bus. She lived in a suburban house pretty much like all of the houses my friends' families lived in. I showed up an hour before the movie was supposed to start and she took me into her kitchen. Nothing unusual. She said she had an older brother, I never saw him. Her mother (who looked just like her, perhaps 25 years older) sort of nodded at me before heading out to go to a party. Marnie gave me a coke and we sat in her living room wasting time before the movie.

I finally suggested that we should leave if we didn't want to be late. She stood up saying "Give me a few minutes, I should..." before hesitating and looking at me carefully. She finally gave me a slightly shy conspiratorial smile, said “C’mere,” and led me by the hand upstairs into her bedroom. She asked me to close the door and gestured for me to sit at the edge of her bed.

I had no problem with this.

I also had no idea what to expect. In a perfect world, she might have suggested an abbreviated make-out session before the movie, which would have been more than welcome. I didn't actually think I was that damn charming (or lucky), it's just that I couldn’t imagine any other activity that required both a bedroom and the lack of parental oversight.

She said, “I’ve got to do something before we leave, so…you can watch, I’ll talk about it later. ‘Kay?.”

I nodded, maybe a bit disappointed. This was not going to be the unsolicited seduction I was so sure I richly deserved. Still, the odds had been slim to begin with and I really couldn't complain.

She reached into her dresser drawer and fumbled around for a minute before taking out a small ceramic dish with scorch marks in the centre. I assumed that she used it for incense. Then she found some matches in her purse, put them on the dresser, and went back into her purse to find something else. I assumed she had a joint or some hash. I wouldn’t have joined her – couldn’t handle the smoking and was terrified of the effects – but had no problem watching her. If this is how she wanted to go to the movies, so be it.

She finally pulled out a small pocketbook, took out a $10.00 bill and began folding it carefully. She started at the corners before folding it lengthwise a few times, turning it into sort of a rectangular pyramid that stood on its own base. Then she looked back towards me, lit a match, gave me another shy, conspiratorial smile, and set the money-pyramid on fire.

It burned slowly, which I found surprising. Smoke collected near the bottom at first and the sides of the bill blackened, rather than combusted. Then it burst into flame at once with a single, long orange flicker that swallowed the remaining paper leaving only ashes. Marnie stared at it with the intensity of prayer and wafted her hand once through the smoke before her concentration was broken and she turned back to me.

I was for dying to her to explain this.

She didn’t. She smiled sweetly and said, “Thanks. Wanna get going?” And we did.
__________________________________________________________

I didn't ask. I can't exactly say why. Shock, most likely. Even at 15, I knew that I wasn’t going to like any answer she’d give me. If this was a bizarre attention-getting device simply to mess with my head, I just wanted out. If it was some kind of ritual that she wanted to share, I didn’t need to know the practice/philosophy/religion it belonged to because it would be crazy and crazy begets crazy. I was hoping that Stefan and the D&D crowd were going to appear en masse laughing their asses off and Marnie would say You should have seen the look on your face! or whatever you say after a good practical joke. But we just walked to the Golden Mile and got in line for the movie (Buckaroo Banzai, which I’d already seen) and talked about parents and pay TV and private vs. public school (she'd gone to both).

The movie felt very long. When she put her head on my shoulder in what I thought was a 'puppyish, convivial way' (I had just read Gatsby for the first time so the quote was fresh), I shuddered. I was either too polite or didn’t have the guts to ditch her and run for the exit, so I endured the movie.

Outside the theatre, she asked me back her house for a coke and she looked soft and beautiful and like she really wanted me to go with her. It was exactly the kind of offer I’d been hoping for until she’d held the tiny $10.00 bonfire in her bedroom.

So I bailed. I mentioned that I had to get up early the next morning to mow lawns (which was actually true, if rather convenient) and she looked disappointed or surprised for a second and asked if she could call me the next week. I said “It’s a free country,” with a laugh, not really caring how she’d take it. She laughed as well and hugged me and smiled and I pointed out that the bus arriving just then was, wonder of wonders, my bus. It was heading west on Eglinton. It could have been going to Moosonee. I didn't care. We hugged again and I found myself gratefully alone on that bus.

Marnie never called. And I politely declined Stefan’s next invitation for an afternoon of Dungeons and Dragons.
___________________________________________

There's probably something truly banal in the background; maybe a back-of-a-Black-Sabbath-album high-school variation of white witchery passed down from a friend of a friend who had a cousin who supposedly knew about such things (I've known a few very nice Wiccans and don't want to piss them off, but I really don't think this is their bag of blessed be). Or maybe Marnie had a well-thumbed paperback that promised to teach the secrets of gaining wealth and making friends through voodoo or something along those lines. You can Google money-burning on your own time. I didn’t know anything about spellcasting when I was 15 and don't feel a pressing need to investigate it now.

The incident still has no visible means of support; it was mass-market voodoo or homemade spells or burnt offerings or simply something she saw in a movie and thought was cool. None of those explanations make it sane. And her desire to share the folding and flame is no less disconcerting than the insanity behind it. Her story is harder to explain than a former Burger King employee or a frat boy with a costume getting kicked out of a crowded restaurant during the breakfast rush.

I explained all this it to my neighbour who was furious that I didn't ask Marnie why she did it.

"Michael! You were supposed to ask! Find her! She's probably on Facebook! Try LinkedIn! You've got to tell me what the hell was going on!"

Not a chance. Crazy begets crazy. I deal with enough of the unsolicited variety. I don't want to invite it.

Horror isn't logical.

Worst. Date. Ever.

July, 2011

Match painting by Paul Hutchinson

A moment of silence, please.

2011-06-24T16:28:00.009-04:00

And Mr. Falk is gone. This clip below is interupted for some reason with a few seconds of the credits from Roger Moore's old 'Saint' series, but grit your teeth through that part to watch Falk at his best. You can scan the old Columbo episodes on your own time (I have them all), and you've got to admire his work with Cassavetes for its honesty. But for sheer other-worldly delight, it's worth watching Wings of Desire to see how the whole film is enhanced with his musings as an actor and simply for being himself.

In pace requisat.

Father's Day - Light

2011-06-19T14:49:00.001-04:00

Good enough for me, too.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Joel West

2011-06-17T10:39:00.004-04:00

Joel West is a comedian in Montreal. I've known him for over a decade through a series of mood swings and respectfully report he is a genuinely cracked soul. His audience-participation Facebook updates are hilarious and suggest his followers share the warp. It's only funny for anyone who's imagined the machinations of your average sleazy stripclub lapdance, but isn't that everyone? And it had to be shared:

Worst possible song for a lapdance:

- Taps
- Octopus' Garden
- Teddy Bear's Picnic
- The Monster Mash
- "Put them all together, they spell M-O-T-H-E-R..."
- Kumbaya
- Hava Nagila
- Theme from 'The Edison Twins' (which also might be the _best_ lapdance ever)
- The Chicken Dance
- Mother and Child Reunion
- Wagner's 'Ring' cycle
- "Skinnamarinky, dinky, doo..."
- In The Mood
- Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

Juvenile. Cheap. In dubious good taste. And I laughed for an hour.

June, 2011

No day is harder than the first

2011-05-30T21:29:00.010-04:00

The band is Sixteen Different Minds. I knew somebody in this band a long time ago; I followed the link from the ubiquitous Facebook and have been listening to it all day, thinking that it reminds me of something but I can't tell you what. It's a good something, that's as complex as my awareness can get. There's sweet harmony and simple production to it all, especially in the song Summer's End. I might just be a sucker from the lyric that's the title of this entry, and if so I'm a sucker. It's lovely stuff across the board. If you're reading this, seek it out.

Work for Matthew

2011-05-26T00:25:00.012-04:00

My son, who likes soap bubbles and is also very fond of trains.

Follows the original Matthew video from a few years back.

Visitations

2011-05-10T19:14:00.012-04:00

I don't remember the source of the theory that I'm blaming for my sore feet and light-headedness. Probably a high-school science textbook; it put forth the proposition that to properly imagine the concept of time, you couldn't simply see it as a roving instance of now that leaves nothing in its wake. It compared the whole of time and all occurrences within to frames on a reel of motion-picture film with an infinite number of frames projecting at an unimaginable rate (the standard 32 frames per second didn't apply).

I won't even consider the size of the projector that this unimaginably long film would require since that wasn't mentioned in the theory, but I'll repeat the central concept that each frame of film contains a 'happening' that is no less 'happening' 5, 10, 15 or 100 frames away from its initial instance; everything is always happening all the time with a loose collection of 'now' moments that add to the total. And if something ain't happened yet, just wait. It'll come.

No past and only a light sprinkling of present all in anticipation of a future that segues into the two previous concepts with almost musical grace and subtlety. The mostly-forgotten theory didn't take all the boring, tangible aspects of time (the stuff we eat, breathe, sleep upon and walk on) into consideration, or at least slid it so far under its theoretical umbrella that it was rendered irrelevant, but the consistently-occurring past and present concept stuck in my head and remains there despite my best efforts to dismantle it. It's the source of my Tuesday night walk from Yonge and Eglinton to Yonge and St. Clair, more or less straight down Yonge St. I spent a lot of time along the corridor, good and bad, and if time is truly concurrent rather than consecutive, it's possible that I might be able to walk past some rendition of myself, maybe say hi, maybe allude to the fact that things work out. Not necessarily for the best, or along the lines of what was anticipated at the start, but they do work out the same.
________________________________________

I can't find my father. He's been dead for almost 8 years by now, and not-finding him isn't really a great shock or a serious disappointment. But some aspect of my psyche will always scan the intersections close to his old office (and close to my present office) expecting him to walk past. This same aspect walked me downstairs into his workshop religiously when visiting my parents house, hoping for a few minutes of solitude away from whatever activities were happening upstairs, hoping that I could at least feel his presence. It's perfectly logical in an utterly misguided way; he spent time there in life, tied to the tools and the scent of sawdust. If he was there at one time, and the room remains the same, he must still be there. I just needed to be in the right corner at the right time, catch the same fall of light from the door where I saw him thousands of times before. He had to be in there, someplace. I just had to wait and look.

He didn't arrive. The room has since become a dusty workshop. T'was ever thus...right?

I start heading south on Yonge when I'm convinced that my father isn't waiting for me at Fran's. Come to think of it, Fran's isn't waiting for me at Fran's. It hasn't been at that intersection for over a decade. I had a friend who worked the bar there for a year or so, he'd drop plates of chicken wings at my table when I was working retail and broke ("Somebody left these in the kitchen, I brought them out here so they'd not bother anybody") and it went a long way. The loss of a greasy spoon doesn't take away too much from this lifetime, but the associations, the lunches, coffees, late night dinners with family are good enough to want the place to be open for a few minutes for some temporal version of the pop-in. I'd be delighted to have a cheeseburger in 1992. For a minute. Just for the fact it wasn't my own cooking (which I was sick of) and I was close enough to walk home to the decidedly ramshackle house I was sharing before the furnace started spewing carbon monoxide and felt like an omen to get the hell out.

Nobody got hurt, but the helpful gas company representative pointed out that the furnace was not only leaking carbon monoxide but methane from it's source pipe. He did this by painting soap solution along the pipe and viewing the resulting bubbles.

"That's not supposed to happen," he said gravely. "Wait here."

Then he left. I was standing in a basement with two gasses that were more than willing to help me die by either slow (albeit painless) asphyxiation or from a good old fashioned explosion. I waited until he came back a very slow 5 minutes later with something I can only describe as a rubber wrench, carefully using it to close the gas valve from the source.

"Call your landlord," he said. "We're not turning this back on until there's a furnace that passes inspection."

It was early March. Our landlords were in Florida. My housemate made the call, she later told me that Landlord #1's first response was "Who told you to call the gas company?" while
#2 was quieter and more concerned with a potential lawsuit. The furnace was fixed but my time there was done. It's a shame. The house was gorgeous and the woman who shared it with me in a platonic sense remains the most agreeable person I ever shared living space with. In the four years I was there, we never had a harsh word about each other.
_________________________________________________

This isn't getting me down Yonge St.

I walk past the overpriced Italian restaurant with the admittedly great food, the one without a name (only a logo) and whose staunch refusal to post a menu was legendary. They've recently condescended to posting a web address for reservations, but the size of the font suggests their hearts weren't into it. Further down, there's a wing and rib place I frequented with a buddy for his company rather than the ribs and wings (both leathery and inedible), the overpriced furniture stores with sulky owners, the spy-tech shop that keeps wandering across the street from location to location, the Thai restaurant that, under previous ownership, sent me into the street when I saw a fat sewer rat calmly walk across the floor, under a table, and into the kitchen. The former oxygen bar which was and remains the most stupid idea for a spa that I'd ever encountered, where they'd wash your left hand with a warm washcloth before putting the oxygen nozzle under your nose (they never explained the hand washing), assuring you that the oxygen was great to get rid of headaches (which I had lots of at the time) and gave you energy and helped you sleep and made you immune from hangovers and I'm sure they would have tossed in some mention of how it was low in trans-fat if they'd had time. I paid for it once out of curiosity, swore never to do it again but was lured off the street a second time with an offer of a free 'treatment' if I filled out a survey about the experience. It was identical to the first time, except the hangover avoidance wasn't mentioned. The space now belongs to a sporting goods establishment. It's a step up.

Reaching Davisville. The condo that never returned my calls and a series of apartments that were wide and well-lit and would have been perfect, but after asking for first and last month's rent, the landlord called us to say sympathetically that she'd forgotten she'd offered the space to somebody else. My wife wept on the phone as she was assured that we'd be the first people called when another apartment came open (we never heard from her again).

The hairdresser I went to for years and still keep in touch with, impossibly long ago. She was actually so nice and engaging that I kept my hair short for years because I'd drop by for a trim whenever I was depressed.

It's a brisk walk, but I haven't run into me, yet. I missed me by a few seconds here or there, finding coffee shops where I remember sitting in various states of employment or financial disrepair wondering How the hell am I going to get out of this one? and if I saw me, I'd at least try to radiate some sense of You'll get through it.

There's not much after Davisville. An office building where I used to work, a pub I frequented where the food was always lousy but the lunch crowd was lively. Further east, there's the untouched Italian restaurant where my sister hung out in high school, occasionally taking me along to sit and watch her boyfriend play pool on something at least one of them wasn't calling a date. If I walked across the railway bridge, I could end up at the brownstone (if that's the phrase; a 1920's 4 story building with original fixtures) where I lived after getting married, or the parking lot of a standard apartment where a good friend lived and I could jump through the hole in the fence to save 5 minutes worth of walking and probably get yet another scar on my wrist from the rusty nail I didn't see.

The last time this happened, it was probably 1997. I'd cut through the parking lot to get to work early and cut myself badly enough I thought I'd need stitches. When the blood stopped, somebody suggested that tetanus, while not a popular malady nowadays, was still pretty unpleasant and maybe I'd like to get checked out. I arrived at my doctor's office shortly thereafter and explained what happened. "That's interesting," he said. "Jumping through a fence. The last person I had here who did the same thing was 9 years old and was pretending he was Batman at the time."
________________________________________

I walk past Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. The dead are still there. They don't get out much.

By the time I get to St. Clair, I don't want to walk, don't want to go home, don't want to eat, don't want to be hungry, don't want to stop, have no particular reason to continue, and am wondering exactly where or what has brought me here. The ghosts around me aren't entirely unpleasant and I'm always free to get on a train and go home, but perhaps the sheer density of them has stopped me in my tracks. I could hit the nice Italian place, splurge on vitello limone and a side of pasta with the alfredo sauce that tastes faintly of walnut oil, but it will remind me of the time I was having lunch with my wife and my father was just heading into chemotherapy and the irrelevant, unpleasant, self-indulgent and downright sad fact that it was one of his favourite restaurants and he can't eat here because he will feel too sick to enjoy it or keep it down just hit me and I collapsed in the wake of it, sick at the thought and unable to explain why it suddenly meant so much, just then, over something as simple as a meal. My wife, lovingly, took me home and made the right noises and used the right logic and I never caved like that again. I could set foot in the place tonight, but wouldn't appreciate it any more than a hot dog at a street corner vendor. I'll wait for another time.

There's not much left before the ending. I find a cybercafe and let all this out in one burst. Lucy told me recently that You should edit yourself less. My wife and my mother in law are home chatting and I have a night alone. It isn't melancholy that brought me here or sat me down, maybe just that initial misguided theory about space and time. I can deal with me, most times. I get sick of me frequently. Occasionally, I want to give me a break. I don't need to return to the past, but maybe something close to ego or just a recognition of the swath of the karmic boomerang lands me in places I remember. You'll get through it, I fire into the night at myself back in whatever day suits the situation.

Then I just go home to the now. Now is always best.

May, 2010

343

2011-05-04T09:02:00.009-04:00

Bin Laden is dead. 9/11 is 10 years ago but not over. Posturing around it has always been easy. Everyone has a perspective, some from close up.

"...no less an authority than the CBC, in an article entitled 'Bin Laden’s Death Cheered by Americans,' claims 'the crowd [at Ground Zero] included people who live nearby, emergency workers, and survivors of the attacks....everyday New Yorkers.' So I guess it’s irrelevant that all of the media coverage I watched, well into the wee hours of the morning, showed hordes of college-age kids doing the yelling and the cheering.

Every once in a while a reporter would snare an actual grownup who’d lived through the attack--a retired firefighter with lung disease from working on the pile, for example--but the grownups weren’t screaming and yelling. They were talking about, for instance, 'remembering my 343 brothers' (those would be the firefighters who died in the attack, fyi). So the reporters? Not so interested in what the grownups had to say.

The kids made much better TV."

- From Alice in Newyorkland's blog.

G'bye, Sid

2011-04-09T19:12:00.007-04:00

"The real rift between Lumet and Kael came on 'a very difficult evening' when the two of them got involved in one of those boring conversations about the function of a critic. 'There were two other people present,' Lumet recalls, 'and she said to them, 'My job is to show him' -- pointing to me -- 'which direction to go in.' I looked at her and said, 'You've got to be kidding.' She said, 'No, I'm not.' I said, 'In other words, you want the creative experience without the creative risk.' And that was it. She's never written a good word about me since."

- From Sidney Lumet - The Reluctant Auteur in American Film, 1982

Network.

Fail Safe.

Bye Bye Braverman
(pitch-black and ahead of its time)

The Verdict.

Prince of the City.

The Seagull.
(a noble failure)

The Pawnbroker.

The Hill.

Long Day's Journey Into Night.

Serpico.

Daniel
(the irrelevance of history for the kids left behind)

The Offence.

Dog Day Afternoon.

1921-2011. Rest in Peace.

This week's rundown of cheap shots

2011-03-31T17:10:00.010-04:00

Harper now says ‘no’ to one-on-one debate with Ignatieff
From the National Post. It sounds a bit better than:

Harper ‘backing out’ of one-on-one debate, Ignatieff says

from the Toronto Star. In sadder news, the Globe and Mail points out that:

PM makes his regrets official on royal wedding
Rumour has it that somebody told Harper that the ceremony might degrade into a one-on-one debate and he didn't want to take the chance. On that topic, the Globe continues with:

Canada won’t put boots on the ground in Libya, Harper says
Why not? Did they invite us to a series of one-on-one debates? We can't get Harper's opinion on that because, as the Star tells us:

Harper taking only five questions per day from media
Five questions full stop, not debatable. At least the Post sees where the sun sets and suggests that:

In the West, the debate is Layton versus Harper
Until recently, at least. It possible that the east is looking a lot more accessible since at least they're avoiding the D word as not to offend somebody's delicate sensitivities.

March 31, 2011

For Printing

2011-03-25T15:26:00.005-04:00

Now that it's all happening, feel free to print this Gilles Duceppe quote (collected from CTV News) on a small piece of paper and hand it to the person of your choice when they start Conservative talking points about coalitions:

The alarmist Conservative talk was scoffed at by Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe, who has pointedly noted that Harper proposed defeating Paul Martin's minority Liberal government on its throne speech in 2004 and replacing it, with NDP and Bloc backing.

Duceppe revelled in the details this week, describing the Delta Hotel on Maissonneuve Boulevard in Montreal where Harper convened the conspirators.

"He was coming in my office saying, 'If Martin is going to lose confidence, what do you want in the throne speech? What would you like in the budget?"' Duceppe recalled.

April's going to be horrible.

Destruction

2011-03-13T12:53:00.004-04:00

Poster created by James White, on sale at Signalnoise.

All profits will be donated to Japanese disaster relief.

The Canadian Red Cross.

The Humanitarian Colalition.

Doctors Without Borders.

Dear Doctor George - Lukewarm Dead

2011-03-08T12:58:00.010-05:00

Dear Doctor George –

I’m a guy in his early fort...er...I mean I’m a guy north of thirty-eight who leads a pretty normal life except for the fact that I appear to have a medical problem. Every time I drink 3/4s of a bottle of Vinho Verde and eat around a two cups of heavily salted and buttered popcorn (popped in a pot, none of that microwave kibble) while watching The Walking Dead until 1:00am, I wake up and hate the universe due to the great pain in my skull. Could the wine or popcorn be poisoning me? Could I catch the Zombie plague from the TV?

Deeply concerned, Migranious
______________________________________

Dear Migranious-

This is a most unusual condition that you have presented. For the past several years, my colleague and spouse Dr. Jonie Falk and I have conducted extensive clinical studies, both laboratory-based and in the field, to determine the existence of a positive correlation between the consumption of Vinho Verde and post REM headaches. Our research findings (as published in the journal Imbibing Academics - Special Edition: Iberia Vol. 4.2) determined that the consumption of said beverage demonstrates only a statistically insignificant positive correlation. Given the rather large sample used to derive these findings, I can say with certainty that the cause of your malaise a tête is due to some external variable.

Please allow me to dabble in my professional hobby, popular-psychology, and posit the following notion: Your headache was actually caused by the voluminous and repetitive consumption of sub-standard visual media commonly referred to as Zombie Melodramaticus. You may not have noticed the initial symptoms such as snickering at poorly written dialogue, eye-rolling at patently unoriginal characterizations or even making sarcastic comments at laughable plotting such as the choice to have a character saw through his own wrist - rather then the 3/4 inch pipe he was handcuffed to - with a metal hacksaw.

I humbly suggest that you refrain from extended bouts of consuming this or similar media in the future and allow moderation to be your guide.

All the best, Doctor G

Continuations

2011-03-06T01:43:00.011-05:00

Souza worked with me at two different departments in a past job. She brought me tins of Portuguese olive oil upon request and kept candy in a clear dish at her desk for passers by. She was out of town when I stopped working that job and called me when she found out I was gone. "It is what it is, right?" I told her, careful not to violate a confidentiality agreement. "But everything was resolved fairly and there's no bad blood with anyone at the company."

It didn't explain a lot (including my side of that particular story), but it was a factually accurate statement and was exactly the kind of thing to say after things have been agreed upon and papers signed. Souza was a nice woman who knew enough to understand that you didn't ask for other details. She said she wanted to keep in touch, and we do. I didn't tell her about that base instinct (the one that I don't want to trust on any intellectual level) that was telling me You don't have to worry about losing your job in a straightforward but still not-quite reassuring way. When I was interviewing and networking and hit with the standard worries - money, career, future, self-worth or absolute lack thereof - the instinct would return with You REALLY don't have to worry about this while sounding like the advice of somebody in the know.

I was optimistic, but didn't quite trust it. Then I landed a good job with far less angst than I'd expected. It's a good fit. Occasionally, I even think I know what I'm doing. It's patchy. But it happens from time to time.
___________________________________

I get to work on a Thursday and have three and a half hours to get things done before heading to a seminar about managing Social Intranets. In the time before I go, I manage to create profiles for new hires, write some news messages and arrange some security settings. I track what I'm doing move-by-move and occasionally write down new procedures to eventually establish best practices. I time the complicated, boring set-up stuff to see if I can get it down to a science and be able to plot out how long I'll take to finish a project. It's not exactly exciting or creative; I've not been asked to translate bullet-point lists into articles and write précis based on two or three different pieces. It's meat and potatoes communication and web administration, but it's a straight line of work that I can do and record and build into measurable results.

I leave the office at noon. An out-of-office message refers calls to my cell. I've got a stack of business cards to distribute if I'm introduced to anybody interesting. I walk to the subway past the intersection at Yonge and Eglinton where my father walked to his office for over 20 years (only a few blocks away from my own) and I'm listening to ancient National Lampoon Radio Hour broadcasts on a bluetooth headset. I'm amused at the fact that, in the office, I'm paid to work, to tinker with HTML code and security settings and intranet communications and embedded video and communication plans. Out of the office, asked to attend a seminar, I'm being paid to think on behalf of my company, to assess information and see what we can use for business. It's a good sensation. I get out at St. Patrick station to walk to the hotel feeling like a grown-up, a turn of phrase I've loathed since I was a kid. Even then, I knew it was juvenile. But it's the only honest one that comes to mind, right now.
___________________________________

The first symptom of realizing one's age; you can't walk around your city without flashbacks. 90% of them are benign and carry no more weight than simple recognition. 5% strike a chord that lasts for a few minutes, or days, but won't bring you down. The remaining 5% are part of a crapshoot as to whether they will inspire you or open an old would. In practice, they simply reinforce the fact you never forget the things which change you.
___________________________________

I'm walking from the subway to the hotel that's holding the seminar. I pass an intersection where I took a few days of classes on a web authoring tool for my former job, delighted and mildly surprised that they felt I should attend. It felt good being downtown for a change of pace, rather than in the far west end. Then that job was drawn to a close and I was downtown a lot, interviewing, feeling put-out but still hearing that same You don't have to worry about this statement from somewhere indefinable. That might just be another crapshoot on the part of my psyche - a few hormones to the left or right and I could have spent the same time hearing the voice tell me I was doomed and to invest in canned food and shotguns. But it didn't - I carried on. That's where the prologue becomes irrelevant, at least for this instance.

On the street leading to the hotel, there's a tall condo. I had two friends living together there when they were happy. Something happened to that happiness and they moved out. She eventually married in the conventional way and had two children. He found somebody and they declared themselves married without the usual trappings and it worked for them so who is the rest of the world to judge? All of it meant a lot at the time; it turned into past-history so gradually that the initial impact of it all has faded from most people, except maybe from the two friends themselves. Less irrelevant than my prologue. You can always trace where you are from where you came.
__________________________________

I am navigating by very old charts. The hotel that's holding the seminar used to be a Holiday Inn (I think) behind Nathan Phillips Square. I used to play a grand piano there when I was 14 or so, on Saturday afternoons when there weren't a lot of people around and nobody seemed to mind. Every so often some employee would figure out I wasn't a guest and suggest that it was time to stop and I'd leave. I met a moviestar there, a tough guy who was sitting with an even bigger, tough guy to his right on a couch in that lounge. I approached him and told him he was a great actor, especially in that movie where he wore the mohawk and carried the gun. He didn't look impressed at first, then smiled, introduced me to his (I assume) bodyguard and told me he was always happy to meet somebody who appreciated what he did. I eventually stopped camping out there on Saturday afternoons, I can't remember why. It was a distant memory by the time I was 16 and a better pianist.

The hotel is now part of U of T and appears to be doing double duty as some kind of student meeting centre. It feels like a dorm, despite the meeting rooms and good carpeting. It has always been a weirdly laid out hotel, with escalators dropped in unexpected places and long walks down hallways devoid of doors. I find the meeting room and spend 90 minutes listening to theories about managing a decent social intranet. You can Google the term yourself, but the session was interesting for the faithful and I reconnected briefly with a guy named Geoff who I met in a networking session between jobs. We'd talked about his idea for being a Social Media consultant for people who don't have the time or inclination to leverage the medium for their own business or publicity; over a business lunch it became obvious that we were looking at the idea from two very different angles that didn't quite jibe, but we parted believing that the other person was a decent enough guy and did know his stuff, maybe something could come together at another time.

Maybe it did- I chatted with Geoff for a few minutes about his new job and mine and agreed to compare some notes about what we're both doing. I'm mentioning it here because the notion of networking always made my skin crawl - I spent a few awkward evenings at so-called parties where people handed out business cards and acted like it was desperately important to learn everything they could about me for future use. That wasn't the case with Geoff, or with this seminar, and it felt good being paid to be in a room with people on the same wavelength. Some of the points I made in the interview for my present job came out of my discussions with Geoff, and I told him so. Credit where credit is due, and all. And a nod to the whole networking idea; sometimes the system works.
___________________________________________

I also remembered doing very stupid in that hotel. I had attended a Parents Against Drugs seminar there when I was 18 or so, not as a speaker but as sort of a participant- I'd taken part in an anti-drug play in my last months of high school and that play had been filmed. Three cast members were invited to answer questions about it (the three who our drama teacher had been able to reach on short notice) and I was part of that lucky number.

By that time of the year, we were all sick of that particular teacher, of high school as a concept, and very sick of the show itself. So we arrived decidedly buzzed on a bottle of red wine that somebody had procured with their sister's driver's license. We weren't fall-down drunk by that point and had entered the headachey, this-wasn't-a-good-idea stage of coming down, nothing that a dark room with a video playing and lots of black coffee couldn't take care of.

I ended up being seated with the parents of a child - I think he was 14 - who dropped something mind-expanding after a concert and walked into heavy traffic to be hit by a car and killed instantly. It had garnered a lot of attention and everyone I knew seemed to know somebody who'd known this kid. I didn't intend any disrespect for the child or his parents, I was just buzzed and sitting at their table, wondering how this had happened and when were they going to start the video?

The child's mother had become a crusader for the drug-awareness cause. She was friendly, surprisingly lively and very actively working the table to see who was there and why. She moved past the other cast members and I rather quickly, offering sincere thanks for our efforts and letting us know that the show was groundbreaking. We weren't so sure, but we'd been doing it for months and were pretty much immune to any effect it might have on an audience. I was looking for coffee when the child's father spoke to me out of nowhere and quietly, not-sentimentally asked "Has my son's death made a difference?"

I don't know if anyone else heard it. He didn't look like this question was his conversation-starter, his wife was doing a very good job keeping the flame and he'd been rather quiet until that point. It was a valid question. I wasn't a good person to answer it. I wanted him to ask it to some kind of social worker in the room, somebody who'd give him an answer with statistics and interviews and case studies. I was very aware of the fact I was 17 and coming off a cheap-wine buzz and that I didn't come into the room expecting to be in front of that question. I didn't feel like my conduct was radiating the respect the situation deserved. It wasn't shame that hit me exactly (although it's here now) but a great sense of impropriety. I couldn't say We're here for a goof and to back up our teacher and didn't expect to find something so real, I'm sorry to a man who lost his son to the kind of dumb thing most kids do at that age. I wasn't the person he should have spoken to. I would gladly have confessed all and changed places on short notice if I could have thought of a better person to answer.

I was honest. I said "I think it's made a difference. I know a lot of people who are more careful now." I mentioned the people I knew who'd known or almost-known his son, how sorry they were. He nodded, not emotionally but thoughtfully. The lights dimmed and the video played. The child's mother spoke for a few minutes when it was over, and the cast and I answered a few questions about how it was workshopped, and it was done.

I have a son now, and the hotel brought it back. I did a few other truly dumb things in my adolescence (later to be supplanted by the dumb things of the early 20s), most of them only self-wounding. But that particular event convinced me I never wanted to be in that kind of position again, suddenly close to genuine tragedy after coming in expecting a quiet, we-got-away-with-it lark. Decades later, no disrespect was intended. That sentiment wouldn't have mattered when faced with a drunk teen, but it went under the radar. Mea Culpa.
___________________________________________

I walked out of the hotel and towards Holy Trinity Church beside the Eaton's Centre. I was married there eleven years before and wanted to walk in for a few minutes. The doors were locked, which I attributed to the clearly marked hours of operation on the door rather than some divine statement, and thought about my wedding. My wife and I are still speaking to around 98% of the people who attended, an above-average ratio for such things in some quarters. There's been a lot of deaths - two grandmothers, my father, an aunt and an uncle and family friends. My mother's bout with cancer actually began almost a month to the day after the ceremony, and I can track the events after that with striking clarity. I try not to focus on it on the train ride home. Things were good at the wedding. It's enough to hold onto that on bad days.
____________________________________________

I get to work the next day and am hit by the location again. I lived at Yonge and Eglinton, had friends who worked there, spent an inordinate amount of money at used CD chops there and visited my father for lunch there for before he took a job further downtown. I walked around the area in shock for the first few days, not unpleasantly but heavily. I've seen the store change for decades now. I still look for Edwards bookstore or Fran's. I had a girlfriend with an apartment and a pool nearby, I remember the route I'd take late at night sheepishly looking for the last bus home. When I told Travis where I was working, he said "That place is like the Mafia, isn't it? Just when you think you're out, they keep draaaaaaging you back in..." and he's not without a point.

I can't find anywhere I lunched with my father. Restaurants in Toronto turn over frequently enough that almost anywhere I think of as comforting and holding memories of him is long gone. One exception; the Granite Brewery on Mt. Pleasant and I can't set foot in it without wondering if he was nearby, maybe have a beer and a Caesar salad, a steak sandwich. I'd rather remember than be reminded.

There's better stuff too, of course. My son's afternoon school is at St. Clair and Yonge. I can meet my wife for a quick lunch or cup of tea after she drops him off. I called her from my cell on my first week at work around 1:30pm.

She said, "I'm just dropping off Matthew."

I said, "I'm looking down Yonge St."

She said "I'm on Yonge St."

She was two subway stations and around 4km away at the top of a hill, invisible to the naked eye. But I said "I can see you" and felt a great wave of relief. The interal voice said You'll be okay, as things past and present shape themselves into the foundation I stand on. And as stated earlier, sometimes I even think I know what I'm doing. It doesn't last. But I do.

March, 2011

Spalding, Gone - 'And Everything Is Going Fine'

2011-03-04T22:15:00.014-05:00

Most documentaries - even the good ones - will have a few moments of backstory in a formal ahem we're going to be exploring something here people sort of way to set up the next 90 minutes of programming. There's nothing wrong with that, and when properly applied it provides the context required to give the story it's due.

You have to be brave, utterly self-involved and indifferent to questioning masses to break that particular mold and it makes perfect sense that Steven Soderbergh has taken that approach to his Spalding Gray documentary And Everything Is Going Fine. Gray was brave, self-involved and indifferent to conventional audience expectations to his work (a few film ventures aside- he showed up in Beaches briefly, Garry Marshall being about as far from the Wooster Group as Bette Midler was from August Strindberg). I loved every frame of Soderbergh's film while not knowing if I can recommend it to anyone who's not familiar with Gray's life. It's all there, if you know how rather than where, to look; the Christian Scientist mother and WASPy upbringing in Providence, Rhode Island, the flailing of a young actor and the formation of the monologues that became his forum. It wouldn't be fair to call them his trademark; there are lots of monologists, few have ever nailed the form as honestly (often to a fault) as Spalding Gray.

If you need a précis, the film might not be for you. This doesn't mean that Soderbergh hasn't tried to make you welcome, it just means that the big finish occurs offscreen and it's that big finish that breaks the heart of every Gray afficinado who watches the film through watering eyes. The journey's more important than the increasingly inevitable destination; Gray's eventual fate was a motif that ran through all of his work, and seeing him succumbing to a not-quite-defined something near the end of the film is wrenching for everyone who knows how it comes to a close. Those in the know, know it. Those who aren't won't hear it from me.

If this all reads as overly cryptic, it's intended with respect. Soderbergh's tactic is to catch Gray at different points in his career through grainy video, shaky archival recordings and glossy network profiles that show him addressing the same points and memories from his life at different times in his life. Spalding in the early 80s might discuss his childhood backed up by a clip from Spalding in 2004 just after his accident in Ireland. It plays without the standard intro or narration or any additional context for those who don't know the basics, but even the uninitiated will be able to appreciate the wit and imagination of a born storyteller who transcended that particular cliché. By the time the clips become more recent and unrelentingly telling about his state of mind, it's impossible not to be struck with a sense of loss. Gray had a lot to give, a great deal of it screamingly funny and quietly, wrenchingly sad. It didn't have to end the way it did, but it's impossible to say that the seeds weren't planted a very long time ago.

I'm the perfect audience for And Everything is Going Fine. I was an actor when I saw Gray's first filmed monologue Swimming to Cambodia back in the 80s, I followed every cinematic and printed work he ever produced. A paramour in university told me once that I carried myself like Gray when I was acting and I took it as a great compliment, rather than worrying about the fact that I should be, you know, acting, rather than riffing on Spalding Gray. I knew everything before sitting down to watch Soderbergh's take on it all and still found myself in tears by the ending. I had an irrational, gut-response to it, not knowing if I wanted to horde every copy and distribute only to the Gray-faithful, or to hand it out at streetcorners along with copies of Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box and Sex & Death to the Age 14.

I've decided to take a third option: if you don't know Spalding Gray from a hole in the ground, see the film and Google him after the fact. If you're a Gray admirer, watch it and prepare to see it all melt away again. Detractors are as welcome as well- you'll get to see the worst of Gray displayed alongside the best without a narrator or talking heads trying to justify it all. Viewers of all stripes are welcome to take away from it what they will. For my part, I simply felt shaken. Come back Spalding. All's forgiven. We miss you.

- March, 2011

Dear Doctor G - Charlie and the Squirrels

2011-03-04T12:28:00.008-05:00

Dear Doctor G-

I’m not a follower of network TV, especially not Two and a Half Men which is a favourite of my 10yr old neighbor and my aunt in her mid-60s, thus representing the demographics so deeply desired by the producers. But the recent meltdown, weird self-aggrandizing and spectacularly unwise ramblings of the soon-to-be-bankrupt-or-institutionalized Charlie Sheen are not entirely dissimilar to those of a borderline sociopath I once knew (who I only believed to be eccentric, despite warnings from more perceptive souls) and the parallels are striking. At what point in one’s development is one supposed to stop believing that any level of karmic redress for past wrongs is past due? And does this have anything to do with the recent and exceedingly juvenile foundation of something referred to as Ford Nation by local enthusiasts, not to mention one’s recent discovery that a small family of squirrels have taken up residence in one’s attic, perhaps requiring an extension ladder, rat poison and application of chicken wire, putting yours truly into a lousy, put-upon mood? If one’s health is alright, one's child is developing at a steady rate, one's wife is happy with her job and one will be receiving a decent tax return, should one not stop flashing back to past exhibits of self-indulgent gonzo spurred by Charlie Sheen’s ramblings and delusions of grandeur?

Sincerely,
Boats Beating Ceaselessly Into the Past, in Toronto

____________________________________________________

Dear Boats Beating Ceaselessly Into the Past-

I fear that what you are experiencing has resulted from a trigger of sorts that, when pulled, fires a load of jagged memories from a wide-muzzled, psychological musket into the liquid, Narnia-like mirror that is your individual, pathos-laden, recollection or interpretation of people, places, and events, from a time when your future was, as penned and sung by the late and great Dr. Strummer of Drochaid a' Bhanna, unwritten.

Given the above, relatively simple diagnosis, my prognosis is for you to forego the application of poison within your domicile and seek out the services of a humane animal control professional who will gently remove the Tree-Ratticus With Good PR and relocate them to a more suitable environment. Conversely, you may initiate contact with a long lost misguided shooting enthusiast via a request to have him dispatch the family of squirrels with a borrowed pellet gun. Furthermore, I encourage you to put pen to keyboard and document this communiqué and resultant fallout in some sort of a public forum, perhaps a brochure or coloured pamphlet.

Yours in science and logic,

Doctor G

The Record (or why Bev Oda should lose her job)

2011-02-14T20:04:00.025-05:00

Bev Oda. Darling Bev, I'm sure, to the fortunate few. Pride of Durham. And on December 9th, 2010, she was...well, let's avoid the lawyers and just say she was inaccurate in front of a standing committee. But don't take my word for it...

From the 'Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development'

John McKay questioning Bev Oda about the appearance of the word 'not' on a CIDA document that appeared to encourage funding for Kairos.

Hon. John McKay (Scarborough—Guildwood, Lib.): Madam Minister, you've just said that you signed off. You were the one--

Hon. Bev Oda (Minister of International Cooperation): I sign off on all of the documents.

McKay: Yes, and you were the one who wrote the “not”.

Oda: I did not say I was the one who wrote the “not”.

McKay: Who did, then?

Oda: I do not know.

McKay: You don't know?

Oda: I do not know.

Later in the same interview, she says:

Oda: I cannot say who wrote the “not”. However, I will tell you the ultimate decision reflects the decision of the minister and the government.

Ah, December. Now, from February 14th's Globe and Mail:

"International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda rose in the House of Commons Monday to admit that it was on her order that the word 'not' was inserted in a memo drafted by senior public servants recommending she approve new funding for the church-backed aid group Kairos.

Ms. Oda...merely reiterated her original response. 'I did not agree with the recommendation of the department. I have always acknowledged that it was my responsibility. I made the decision,' she said. 'I would never mislead this House.'"

The Post's coverage on the 15th gives a little more context:

Margaret Biggs, CIDA president, and Naresh Singh, the other CIDA official, both signed off on the positive recommendation for KAIROS before it was sent to Oda for approval and subsequently changed.
“The ‘not’ was inserted at my direction,”Oda said in the House of Commons Monday afternoon. “Given the way the document was formatted, allowing only for concurrence, this was the only way to reflect my decision.”
Oda said she was sorry if some were led to conclude that she and the department agreed on the funding decision. She also said the way the case has been handled, “including by myself, has been unfortunate.”

I'm obviously not a lawyer. I'm just trying to figure out what kind of legal advice she got before framing this as a "I never meant to..." situation. And I have three questions:

1. Technically, was she misleading the Committee, not the House proper, so she can get away with saying she'd 'never mislead this House?'

2. Since she said in so many words, "I do not know" in December when asked who wrote 'not' on the document, she has just come out as somebody who did not reveal the truth. Is "I do not know" different in legal terms than 'I didn't do it?' And if so, how can she exploit this?

3. Why does this woman still hold a cabinet position?

I'm indifferent to Kairos. I actually respect the idea that the government can fund who they want to as long as they are upfront about it. They're free to add/pull financing as long as they take the hit. But pulling this kind of stunt without censure or without somebody having the common decency to call it unacceptable or the sheer gall to say 'Yeah, she did it, so what?' is depressing to me. It's tantamount to having a free ride - the idea that you can mislead or outright lie to a committee and call it, somehow, a misunderstanding, while surrounded by people who shrug it off and change the subject. We do what we want, enjoy it or suck it up is somehow more fair than It never happened. At least you see it coming.

If Ignatieff and Layton and even freakin' Duceppe don't call this out as an atrocity, I'm voting for Harper out of sheer spite. Better the devil you know then the devil who can't be bothered to phone it in.

Feb, 2011.

Diplomacy

2011-01-29T23:44:00.022-05:00

Where have you been?

Launching an intranet in a new job. Complicated, but not impossible. Just not the kind of thing where I want to come home and spend more time on a computer.

Isn't that what you've always done? So write about intranets.

Who'd want to read it?

That's stopped you, previously?

Point taken.

Write about something that sticks in your head.

__________________________________

Just the one thing tonight, something dropped by Rick (aka the DI) a long time ago when I was talking about holding a grudge. "That's one hell of a long tail to drag around waiting for somebody to step on, my friend."

Indeed. I was having lunch with Walter, a co-worker from a past job. He was looking to start a fight with somebody we'd both worked with in the past and I wouldn't take the bait. The somebody in question wasn't in that pub with us having a second pint of Stella, and I didn't feel like stabbing him in the back when his back was already just something to be glimpsed in a rear-view mirror.

"I think you could have been treated better," said Walter, "whether it's because you didn't stand up for yourself or if you were being screwed, I don't know. But you're smart. People appear to like you, damned if I know why. So you were screwed. Why not admit you were screwed and let him hav it, it's not like you're going to lose anything."

It wouldn't gain anything, either; I don't buy into somebody else's low-level discontent, even when it's skewed in my direction (Walter's a decent guy and his concern was genuine). I finally told him this: I answered to two managers that past job, at different times in different departments. On two occasions, there was a sudden death in my family. The first manager literally said "Go home. Call us when it's settled, take your time. I'm sorry for your loss."

The second manager was no less concerned on a personal level, but ran by the book. I told him about the death and he said "Do you know when the funeral is? Are you going to be heading out of town? You might want to call Richard to see if he can watch things for you. And maybe Carol on the West coast. Will it be more than two days? I think we can arrange something. Will you be gone tomorrow, or is the funeral later this week? I've got your mobile number and look forward to seeing you on Thursday, of course if something comes up I'm..."

Neither party was unsympathetic. Both acted within the confines of the terms and conditions of that job. Both offered a professional response. I simply know which one I appreciated more, which one made the experience easier for me. I won't praise one or call the other callous because it doesn't matter; it was two interpretations of the rules. For that matter, I won't absolve the one that didn't help as much simply because he was following orders, I just won't blame him for it. One approach made an already tense situation more tense. The other made it easier. Full stop. I can't change my response but it isn't worth complaining since we all knew the rules when we walked in.

Walter wanted a complaint voiced, processed and buried, but it wouldn't help. Not now. For me, its nothing more than a situation that was handled differently by two people. And, in every sense, it is over and done.

Another Christmas

2010-12-23T23:50:00.003-05:00

CanadaHelps.org. Because somebody might need you.

All the best to everyone.

Running the numbers

2010-12-04T00:05:00.041-05:00

I have a new job. I'm not at a financial institution for the first time in over six years and the shift from an itemized, highly-controlled environment to a small office is pleasant, if a bit jarring. I'm responsible for the intranet of a Canadian health care company, it's a good gig with good people, feeling much more satisfying than one of those 'lateral moves' one sometimes makes after their previous employer has 'gone in a different direction' or whatever other comment you're imagining between the quote signs. I can't complain and my commute has been shortened significantly. Another buzz phrase - the 'quality of life' factors with this job remain high.

I'm getting off the train on a Friday morning behind a bunch of early-teen girls. One trips and neatly face-plants onto the platform. She makes a really interesting noise and the situation isn't as neat as the initial trip. Two women and another guy and I (all of us clearly over 30) help her to get up, she's not crying but she's finding it hard to stand and there's a of blood on her face/clothes/the floor. It looks like she's broken her nose (as if Dr. Mike could automatically tell what that looks like) and it's a quiet, if unpleasant scene.

Her friends are responding much louder to the situation than the girl. We group together for no more than two or three minutes; one woman is helping the girl to stand while another one is trying to get answers from the girl's friends (such as 'Are her parents home? Is there somebody we can call?') and I’m beside her holding her backpack with my left hand and looking through my coat for a handkerchief or something to help slow the blood. The train driver must have called somebody because two TTC attendants show up very quickly. One of them hands tissues to the girl while the other one looks at me and the backback that’s clearly not mine (there are dangly sparkly things hanging from the zippers) and says, “You, you’re her father?”

I didn’t say anything but the look on my face must have said it all. The guy looked apologetic for a second then turned to the girl. Somebody said something about an ambulance being en route, they'd stay with the girl and we could be on our way. I gave the backpack to one of her friends, and she said thanks in a tiny, slow voice and I came to work, wondering if I really look like the potential father of a 13 year old girl.

Must be that damn grey at my temples.

Oh, and my age. That's a big factor.

The math makes perfect sense, of course. I know a lot of people my age with kids in their early or mid teens; I'm just so attuned to being the father of a five-year old that nothing else computes. And let's not disregard the whole 'denial' factor.

But it wasn't an unreasonable question on the part of the TTC guy. I might have gotten huffy about it and said "And a grown man isn't welcome to have pink spangly things on his Roots backpack?" but it wouldn't have helped anything.

The point remains; do I look that...old? And all apologies to various friends with kids in their early teens. You're not old. It's my dim awareness of chronology on the gurney here. I handed scalpels to Travis, a year or so younger than I, married with a new infant, and Burton who's married and has a new puppy, let them cut me open and do a post-mortem on my twitching at this little incident.

Travis: Well, its not like its unrealistic, I know people my age that are sending their kids off to freakin' university. Think about it: if you had gotten married and proceeded to breed right after you finished your undergrad degree...say at the ripe old age of 24 then you would have a 19 year university freshman on your hands right now, you'd be planning extended vacations with your wife, or you'd likely be divorced and hooked up with a 26 year-old grad student. Or maybe that's my alternate life. Anyway. To your point that you were surprised and a little offended that the subway man thought you were bloody nose's dad...well, dude, in most cultures around the world and throughout history, we'd all probably be grandfathers by now. Chew on that cud fer a while.

Burton: I prefer to think it was the deep reservoirs of compassion and empathy in your eyes that led someone to mistake you for the girl's father. Yes. That must have been it.

Me: You're kind. I actually had a nightmare that the kid would be dazed from the impact and remember Natalie Portman's line in Leon and mutter "He's not my father, he's my lover" or something along those lines. And that would have ruined my day.

(This is one of the most insane fears I've ever experienced. The odds of the kid ever having seen Leon was unlikely enough, let alone having it come to mind with blood rushing out of her nose. But I hate awkward situations, and I really didn't want to be explaining "No! Officer! It's from a movie! Have you seen it? If you haven't, I can get you a copy of the director's cut...and incidentally he's not her lover he's a hitman who...this isn't making it sound any better, is it? Maybe you should start with La Femme Nikita and...well, will I need a laywer? And of course this isn't my backpack!")

Travis: Speaking of aging without dignity... according to the Life section of this morning's Globe, I have a BMI (Body Mass Index as if you didn't already know what it meant) of 25. So that officially make me obese. I find this perplexing because I walk for nearly two hours and do fifty push-ups every day and I eat a pretty healthy Mediterranean diet. My chest is bigger then my 35 inch waist, which is a full five inches below what is considered obese according to the waist line standard. So how the eff can this be?! Granted, I haven't weighed myself in nigh on a decade... but I assume that I am still roughly 200 lbs. So this morning I started taking just one sugar instead of two in my coffee. So it begins...

(Aging without dignity has been a through-line in a lot of conversations I've had of late)

Me: According to this handy dandy calculator, I'm .1 into the overweight spectrum. 25.1% here based on 170lbs and 5'9. And I chase a 5yr old around. And sip miso soup 4 days a week for lunch (now, I had a bacon cheeseburger and fries with gravy yesterday, granted, but we're not talking about me right now we're talking about the mighty B to M to the I). Damn high-fallutin' rendition of the Special K pinch. I'll start taking Matthew to the playground more often.

Burton: Hey, get me - at 23.9%, I'm still within the parameters of "normal weight"!
That's oddly encouraging, given my diet of blueberry fritters and Chinese takeout. I've lost about 10 pounds since the puppy showed up, mostly from lack of sleep and chasing the little bastard around the house. And did you know that Bluetooth extenders make great dog toys? WELL THEY SHOULDN'T.

Travis: Doesn't seem fair. Aren't you people genetically predisposed to layer up
in order to be able to ward off those long, cold Siberian winters? Besides which, muscle weighs more than fat. Yeah... Thaaaat's the ticket.

Me: Mediterranean diet. Fish. All the heavy bones. You do eat the bones, don't you?

Travis: Oh wait...it's that nightly half tub of Haagen Dazs after Jonie goes to sleep. Dammit!

Me: Just re-purpose it. Did you know that all Haagen Dazs products work outstandingly well as a soothing body balm?

Everybody mutters their own variation of 'Golden boys and girls, all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust' when the spirit moves them. Sometimes it involves BMIs.

Dec 2010

Cocaine

2010-11-26T22:09:00.018-05:00

Professions, dates, names, roles and locations are scrambled; the rest is as sic as it can be.
___________________________________________

It's odd what returns to you. I'm watching The Trip, a Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon series where two gentlemen named Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (allegedly no relation) travel through the north of England reviewing restaurants and playing passive aggressive games about which one is funnier or more successful. Coogan books a session with a photographer (Marta Barrio) who offers him a line of coke in a quiet, casual fashion, with just a trace of you're-cool-with-this, right? snobbery. I'd been offered coke in that very same tone of voice a long time ago by somebody who was emanating the same passive aggressive vibe that Coogan and Brydon have based their comedy-drama on.

Michael Winterbottom is a good enough director to frame The Scary Coke Scene as a slice of life rather than a message of great portent. It doesn't telegraph bad vibes, just a character quirk. There's Barrio and Coogan and the coke, each with equal standing in a very short scene, and it's that equality that brought it back to me. She might as well say Here we are; just the three of us. Politely, matter-of-factly and simply not negotiable.

____________________________________________

I never travelled in druggy circles. I knew a few musicians who dabbled when it was either fun, part of doing business or simply available at whatever bar they were in at the time. I wasn't present for the best example of this, reported by a buddy who was sitting at a club between sets with the usual suspects; one eventually stood up and said "I'm going to the bathroom now, and I really think that Stan and Lou and Sarah and Dierdre should come with me." I knew those usual suspects and one of them shot himself in the foot at a live gig since the coke in his car was more important than the paycheque he was earning for that particular engagement. Another two of them either grew out of it or simply re-diverted their surplus cash towards their mortgage. No idea about the fourth - maybe she just found a new hobby.

I also knew a few dedicated potheads. 95% of them were self-righteous about it and insisted that it was neither unhealthy nor self-indulgent, usually after their fourth hit. 3% were occasional users (most likely referred to as 'mooches' from the previously mentioned 95%) and the remaining 2% is represented by Paul, who kindly offered me access to weed when I had family in chemotherapy (which I never needed to take advantage of, but the offer was supportive and well received). He never had a self-indulgent bone in his body. The cocaine contingent in my life were mostly friends-of-friends with the exception of Gary, who was dating a woman with questionable contacts (including a ringleader who kept a series of elaborate, expensive lighters in a special holster on his belt) who "...just give her cocaine sometimes. They don't sell it to her, they just give it. Really." His dabbling dropped off when he stopped seeing the woman and stopped being a short-order cook. Company you keep, and all.

Hettie was an exception. She'd landed a fairly significant role in Vancouver in one of those miniseries' that was shot simultaneously in two or three different languages. Her Spanish was good enough to nail down at least one market and her agent was ambitious enough to keep her running. She was a rising star by Toronto standards, but I still thought of her as the girl I'd met in a 10th grade theatre class and she was still approachable in that way to those who'd known her back in the day. I'd dated her friend Amanda on and off, and while we'd been off for a long time, I still warranted the occasional dinner invitation. I was 22 when we ended up in the same apartment, both of us early arrivals to dinner parties. Amanda was cutting bread and vegetables in the kitchen and Hettie and I were in the living room drinking tea and talking about film when she pulled 4 small pockets (her term) of coke out of her purse.

Miniseries notwithstanding, she was a Canadian actress, so the rest of the purse had subway tokens, a pack of Trident, and a conspicuous absence of cabfare. I'd not seen off-the-rack coke before, and these packets looked like they'd been wrapped by some kind of machine. They were taped together. She separated one, offered a slightly guilty smile and said "You don't...?"

I shook my head. "All yours."

She looked relieved for a moment and said "Amanda I love, but I don't want to explain this again. So, shhh." She held a finger in front of her lips and batted her eyes towards the kitchen. "I'd do this in the bathroom, but this isn't a movie. It's not pretty so you can look away if you want."

She rolled the pocket between her palms for a few seconds, pulled the end off and snorted half into one nostil. Then she coughed. Then she did most of the other side, smiled, shrugged, and handed me the bag. "It won't kill you."

"I couldn't afford it," I said, shaking my head. "All yours."

She kept looking at me, then towards the kitchen for Amanda, then back at me. "It's fine, Michael," she said coldly, lowering her eyes and suddenly, impossibly, being patronizing as hell in my direction. I remember a nurse convincing me to take a spoonful of cough medicine with the same look when I was seven years old. Hettie, the cute part-time model, musician and flamenco enthusiast was making her case for the coke in her purse. And what the hell was wrong with me for not taking any?

I offered a none-of-my-business shrug. She gave me a careful stare, put the remaining pockets in her purse and our conversation, relatively lively a few minutes before, was over. "I can smoke, right?" she said brusquely, taking a loose cigarette out of her coat. "Smoking's still okay?" and headed for the balcony. Amanda said something in bad Spanish, Hettie answered hin proper Spanish and I wasn't part of Hettie's conversations for the rest of the night. C'est la vie.

____________________________________________

This was twenty years ago; Hettie has a CD that you hear sometimes in coffee shops. She shows up on cable and on Facebook and still knows Amanda and is, by all accounts, a lovely person. Everyone grows up. Her coke stage is most likely long past, but her conduct over a hit at a party never left me because it was the first time I'd seen somebody look so disappointed at the lack of participation in coke. She wasn't hoarding it, she'd offered to share something that was very important to her and she felt she deserved a little respect, or understanding.

I didn't care that she was taking coke. I cared about the fact that the she was pointedly different before and after the hit. As bad as a drunk but not as sleepy. As self-righteous as potheads in the middle of an extended 'Alcohol's a crutch' speech. I didn't need to be at the receiving end of a don't be boring and don't look down on me riff. And decades later, 18 seconds of TV made my skin crawl in exactly the same fashion. As stated previously, it's odd what comes back to you.

Setting it up

2010-11-05T09:00:00.022-04:00

Continued from Letting it settle
_________________________________________

More on writing (not a lot more). This quote's perfect for anyone who's paid to do it in any capacity, from Joseph Epstein's essay Blood, Sweat and Words.

"H.L. Mencken used to say that any scribbler who found writing too arduous ought to take a week off to work on an assembly line, where he will discover what work is really like. The old boy, as they say, got that right. To be able to put words together in what one hopes are charming or otherwise striking sentences is, no matter how much tussle may be involved, lucky work, a privileged job. The only true grit connected with it ought to arrive when, thinking to complain about how hard it is to write, one is smart enough to shut up and silently grit one’s teeth. "

Mencken had issues (including some deeply unpleasant ones) but summed up the process quite nicely. I've had this printed and posted over my desk for the last six years. It follows me from job to job, a dose of perspective when letters aren't falling in line.

Letting it settle

2010-11-03T20:23:00.004-04:00

Why do you keep a blog?

It forces me to write.

Uh-huh. How's that working out for you?

...mixed results at best, of late.

One of those 'thoughts that lie too deep for tears' situations, or just otherwise engaged?

The latter's closer than the former.

Just closer.

Only closer.

What's it like to learn, earlier rather than later, that your words have forked no lightning, good-nighter?

Commonplace, really. But things to those who wait.

Good things?

Can't promise that.

Truth in advertising, at the least.

And the unexpected time off runs short

2010-10-18T23:13:00.003-04:00

...'bout bloody time. Let's just say the wheels ground slowly, but ground exceeding small. Regular employment to return next week and everything's fine. But enough about me...how's by you?

Three meals in stages

2010-10-10T21:47:00.013-04:00

One

A belated celebration for a friend's 40th birthday. "Come for dinner. I'll give you a steak."

- Consider the steak. Some sirloins triple-wrapped in the downstairs freezer, bought on a trip to Costco while on a buy-in-bulk-save-money binge. The idea of barbecuing them doesn't appeal and the standard bistro browned-in-butter, while tasty, has been done. This is a birthday. And we all live in a city. Gravy is usually something that comes out of a can, why not make something with sufficient gravy that it becomes an occasion rather than a $6.99 lunch special?

- Remember the Swiss Steak recipe from a Mennonite cookbook read at the in-laws while out of town. Remember also that Swiss Steak was something often served as a TV dinner in the 70s. But Mennonites don't watch TV and maybe the mealy, tough, buried in overly sweet tomato sauce variation never made it to them. Or from them. Vaguely recall that the Mennonite variation involved beating a cut of round (or marinating or simmering steak) thin, dredging it in flour, browning it in butter and cooking it in stock for...well, awhile.

- Rescind the original steak offer, slightly: "Still steak. But with lots of gravy."

- Receive reply: "Steak with gravy? Ye gods. Can it get any better?"

- Start looking for a decent recipe for simmered steak or Swiss Steak or something that doesn't involve an envelope of Lipton French Onion Soup mix tossed in at the last second. Come across a website of a nice Roman Catholic lady and remember that you've done all this a few months before when craving the gravy-rich meals that your nice German aunt made when you were a kid. Ignore most of the nice Catholic lady's tips except for the volume of stock and the cooking time.

- The night before the birthday meal, thaw two sirloins, beat thin with a mallet. This probably isn't necessary, the cut's tender enough not to need it, and you could probably have just cut them in half width-wise, but do it anyhow.

- Head out to a job interview the next day. Be confident that there's a frozen container of homemade dark chicken stock downstairs to provide a base for the gravy later that evening. Yeah, chicken and beef playing footsie in an enamel frying pan, there's probably something unholy happening here. Ignore any apprehensions.

- Get home, heat some unsalted butter in the pan, dredge the steaks in flour and pepper as the butter browns. Toss in one steak, brown both sides in the brown butter. Withdraw, toss in some minced green onion and mushrooms. When they look nice and soft, add the second steak and head downstairs to fetch the homemade stock from the freezer.

- Find instead, a small container of three bean chili. Tasty, but impractical for the situation at hand.

- Raid the pantry. Find a can of Cambell's beef stock held for just such emergencies. Cut the stock with 2/3rds water and 1/3rd red wine and pour over the browned steaks, mushrooms and onions. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and let simmer covered for 2 and a half hours. Take the steaks out at the end and boil down the gravy for a few minutes until it's thick.

- Feed hungry friend tender steak covered in very rich gravy. And a splendid time is guaranteed for all. Hide leftover gravy in the fridge for future use.

Two

- Thanksgiving Sunday. Drive to a small town on Lake Erie for a family dinner and a large turkey. Devour said bird and take your son for a long walk on the streets you walked with your grandfather when you were five years old. Try not to find yourself in 1973. More importantly, pay attention to the fact your son's minor cough is becoming a significant one.

- Drive back to Toronto with leftover turkey in tinfoil, salad in a cup and the beast's bones in a bag. Plan on replacing the dark stock you were sure was in the freezer.

- Make it home and steal away to a local and still open grocery while your wife gives the boy a steamy hot bath to clear his head. Stock up on enough celery, onions, garlic, and carrots to provide for a decent stock and decent soup the next day.

- Grab a poundof fresh ground beef for part three, but ignore for the time being other than putting it in the fridge.

- As for the bones, cut the half-standing carcass into sections, drop in a roasting pan with chopped celery, carrot, onion and garlic. Toss it all with a bit of oil and put it in a 400 degree oven for an hour. Flip them around once, then put back in for another hour. It all comes out vaguely caramelized and frighteningly dark. Divide the spoils between two stock pots, cover with water and let simmer until it's food, rather than simply burnt stuff in water.

- Cook down until it's good food and freeze most of it. Save some for the morning and give it to a sick little boy who needs something homemade.

Three

- Remember the leftover gravy in the fridge awaiting your appetite.

- Toast two slices of whole wheat bread, spread a very small amount of butter on each warm slice. Very small. Maybe a teaspoon.

- Divide the ground beef into two thin patties drop them on a hot pan with a very small amount of oil (half a teaspoon) and two shallots. Forget about them until you see red blood rising on the raw side, flip them over and find beautifully browned, almost crispy (but not burnt) meat looking at you. Make it happen on both sides.

- Find the leftover gravy in the fridge, it's a bit thick and cold. Add a drop of red wine and heat quickly in a small pan until it's warm and rich.

- Drop the now-cooked almost-crispy patties on the toast, cover with the gravy.

- The hot hamburger sandwich (call it chopped steak at a stretch) shared between you and your wife and a cold beer and a few potato chips as the scent of wine and stock and warm cooking fills the house. Another instance that's more than the sum of it's $6.99 lunch special parts.

- Consider your present situation. Dignified grey at the temples spreading to the rest of the scalp. Job interviews. And don't forget all the free-floating anxiety. But really, try not to worry so much. After all, everyone's gotta eat.

October, 2010.

Bold statement

2010-10-10T00:05:00.005-04:00

An admission of mild kleptomania; letter received at some time in the late 80s. She did stop stealing chemistry equipment, I believe, and eschewed the political affiliations.

More on that Ford fellow who's supposed to be the antichrist or a saviour...

2010-10-08T10:56:00.025-04:00

Unmitigated Drivel

"At the end of one council session a few months ago, I followed Ford out of the chamber. We hadn’t been introduced, and he didn’t know who I was. ...Ford, lost in his own thoughts, paid them no mind. He was looking at himself in the mirrored wall of the elevator, tilting his head from side to side, stroking his cheek in that caressingly feline way he touches himself, smiling approvingly. He likes what he sees. He believes Toronto loves him, believes Toronto can’t wait to be annexed into Ford Country. He may be right. I could almost hear him purr."

The end of Gerald Hannon's incomplete and occasionally bizarre Ford profile in Toronto Life (he brings up the feline angle twice, benefiting nobody other than cat fetishists). Granted, it's Toronto Life. You shouldn't have expected much. Hannon points out a few inconsistencies in Ford's council attendance (quoting only Adam Vaughan and Kyle Rae, not exactly Ford fans) and tax schemes (the math won't work), but primarily seems inordinately interested in Ford's family history and drops as much lurid information as possible with some excuse about Ford facing 'tabloid fodder.'

I care far less about Ford's family life than I do about his habit of skipping the truth, something Hannon doesn't look at too closely. He calls RobFord.ca a 'model of transparency' but misses the fact that robfordformayor.ca still lists his charity as having raised $100,000 for charity when the charity's administrator's revealed the number is actually $37,294.68 as of August, 2010.

Ford's site still claims $100,000 as of Oct 8th, 2010. I'll leave it to the reader to decide if the number actually matters, or if something's getting spun a wee bit thin, or if our potential Mayor or his best and brightest don't know how to call their webmaster. I just think it's more important that Gerald Hannon's kittycat fixation with everybody's favourite Rob.

Mitigated Drivel
Margaret Wente giveth and taketh away her true Ford sentiments in the Globe and Mail. She lists his pros and cons, often in the same sentence:

"Rob Ford is not nearly as smart as George Smitherman. But maybe that’s a good thing."

"The large and solid Mr. Ford has all the flair, intellect and vision of a block of concrete. He’s also the only candidate who seems to get what’s wrong at City Hall."

"Mr. Ford may be as dumb as a bag full of hammers, but the last guy was a Harvard economics graduate, and look what good it did..."

Ford's team is probably at the 'with friends like these...' stage in their relationship with Peg. They might want to read her piece about impulse control before firing off any missives. Peg might want to review it before using the term 'bag full of hammers' in print again.

Buzzkill

"(Ford's) success is a reaction to frustration with current Mayor David Miller’s hopeful rhetoric and the failure of visible change. Rob Ford won’t change things, in fact he promises to unchange them. He’s The Unchanger. He’ll stop the patronizing jabber. ('He talks like us,' said a voter. 'He doesn’t use words like partnerships and enhance.')"

Rick Salutin's 'Rob Ford and the Loss of Hope' also in the Globe and Mail. It's actually not quite as grim as all that, and makes an interesting point about the wild rhetoric of hope or fear. I deeply fear anyone who feels words like 'partnerships' and 'enhance' are offensive on a spiritual level, but maybe that's just me.

It was loss, not death, dude

"In the media, Ford has been described as everything from the death of hope to a one-night stand you immediately regret after getting drunk at a bar. That Ford’s opponents routinely employ such furious rhetoric to portray not just Ford, but his supporters, as 'angry,' isn’t just ironic. It’s hilarious."

Lorrie Goldstein in the Sun, pointing out some of the aforementioned wild rhetoric. He has a point. And yes, this is coming from the Sun. Make all the pot/kettle comments you need to, just keep them in your interior monologue.

I wasn't paying much attention

"When the subject turns to the havoc wreaked by amalgamation and his late father’s role in that debacle as an MPP in the Harris government, Ford plays the sympathy card, painting his mayoral competitors as unjust attackers of dear dead Dad. Groans fill the chamber. Someone calls him a crybaby. Ford sits stunned."

Enzo Di Matteo in Now Magazine, taking an evening's worth of debate and transforming it into over 790 words that lack details about what was actually said over the evening. It ends on what might pass as a 'zinger' in some circles; me, I just wanted the rest of the damn story.

Biting my tongue

2010-09-27T21:20:00.014-04:00

I worked for a small consulting/recruiting firm more than a few years ago; one of the things I wrote for them was a list of horrible responses to typical interview questions. I thought that the shock of the wrong answers would stress the importance of the right answers. Now that I'm interviewing again, I've got these worst-case scenarios in my consciousness and only have myself to blame...

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

No can do, compadre. You might find out too much. And then...could we truly be friends?

What has interested you about our company and makes you want to work here?

My friend, does anybody on God's Green Earth really want to work? Here's the thing. I've got these collection agencies calling me day and night, and these guys with baseball bats wanting to wring a little 'settlement' money out of me if you know what I'm saying...

What brought you to your current profession?

I chose this field as a cover for my covert operations. I'm a spy. Don't tell a soul. If questioned, say only that you briefly encountered 'The Squid' and you can't remember his face. Now...goodbye! (for full effect, run from the office covering your face with your suit jacket).

What are some of your strengths?

I'm a detail oriented, highly motivated and diplomatic individual who faces every challenge with a song! (sings) Work work work, don't be a jerk, there's nothing more fun than biz-ness...

What are some of your weaknesses?

Geez...are you sure you've got the time? And I hope you've got a strong stomach. Some of them get a little grisly.

Describe your work style.

I used to give 110%, 24/7. But my last boss told me that 75% was an ample percentage to cope with, so I split the difference and started giving 92.5% with an hour off for lunch.

What did you like about your previous job?

All those free office supplies. Look at this belt. It's made of paper clips. Free paper clips!

List your responsibilities in your previous position.

Hey. My first responsibility is to myself, babe

Why did you leave your last job?

I didn't really leave, per ce. I was chased away by my co-workers. They were wielding pitchforks and torches, screaming 'Unclean!' in my direction.

What can you offer this company?

(lift an eyebrow suggestively, lower your voice to a sultry, breathy purr) Let's just say I have an 'active imagination'...

What are your salary expections?

What do you make? C'mon, dish!

What can you contribute to our workforce?

By the time I show up at work bathed and dressed, I think you've seen just how brightly I can shine.

How do you handle stress?

(bring out a small sock puppet shaped like a rabbit) Mr. Bunny and I deal with stress very well, don't we Mr. Bunny? Yes we do...

How do you cope with conflicting deadlines?

Give me a cold martini and I can handle anything! Er...you don't have any martooney mixings handy, do you?

How do you deal with projects that didn't go the way you wanted?

Once I found somebody to blame, it was all good with yours truly.

September 2010

Bad optics

2010-09-24T14:16:00.012-04:00

Hey, it never hurts to ask...

"...royal aides were looking for a way to pay the queen's spiraling utility bills, which had risen by 50 per cent to more than 1 million pounds ($1.58 million) in 2004. A letter written that year and addressed to Britain's culture department asked whether the queen could get a community energy grant to upgrade the heating systems at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, the monarch's favourite weekend residence...the royal household was not initially aware that the money had been earmarked for low-income Britons."

- From CTV. Every so often, a right-leaning (most frequently) US politican will use the expression Welfare Queen. It's a hell of a lot more negative on the west side of the pond, granted. But c'mon. It just would have fit so perfectly here...

'Yeah, I am doing this. No, really!'

“...Mr. Colbert was mugging for and winking at the cameras. Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, seemingly miffed, suggested that Mr. Colbert 'excuse yourself' from speaking. Looking baffled, Mr. Colbert said he did not understand the question, and threw himself on the mercy of the chairwoman, who allowed that he should stay. On the whole, the mood of the hearing alternated between the serious and the absurd. (His spoken testimony departed significantly from his prepared text, which was straightforward and earnest.)"

- From the New York Times. Colbert has skewered the US right so perfectly with his truthiness schtick that it kills me to see him walk into a trap of his own making. The Fox crew will claim that Colbert wasted the committee's time and they're right. Politico is reporting unimpressed Twitters from both Mother Jones and the National Review, extraordinarily unlikey bedfellows without a tray of free B-52s backing up a Spanish Fly & Viagra sampler platter. Rep Conyers all but yelled "Stay off my side!" in his direction when the wind-up started. You can make a case for the 'awareness building' chestnut for as long as you want, but the tit-for-tat wheels have been put in motion and Dennis Miller or Larry the Cable Guy will be appearing in front of a sub-committee with tongue firmly in cheek within a few months. This helps nothing. Al Franken, Reagan and Fred Freakin' Grandy all had the good sense to be elected before spouting off in front of (or as part of) congressional committees, good on 'em.

And in this week's Ford-related election nonsense...

2010-09-23T08:03:00.032-04:00

"It is Oct. 26, the day after the election, and you wake in a hard, unfamiliar bed. Your eyeballs are congealed chip fat and your contact lenses have gone crispy. Your liver is en route somewhere. You appear to be missing a tooth. And there's something in bed next to you. It is the sweaty, beer-smelling oik from the bar last night. Of course, you'll say what you always say, 'As God is my witness, I will never ever do this again.' You won't have to, Toronto. He's there for four years."

- Heather Mallick telling me far more than I'll ever need to know about either her deepest fears or worst habits in the Star.

"Note the same disquieting themes, which also appear in her Ford column: a casually hateful derogation of the white race, the presentation of women as passive (juvenile, drunk, unconscious) objects prodded by disgusting men, and the notion that the people who have political views she disagrees with must be motivated by sexual inadequacy."

- Jonathan Kay in the National Post going over-the-top in a rant about Mallick stemming from her over-the-top about Ford. It takes a while to him to segue into her apparent distrust of the white race (he starts with 'white men' and sneaks to the race in toto) and it's a long strange trip on both of their parts. Mallick's drivel begats Kay's drivel. It's a good case for the existence of amoebic journalism, but 'good' is used here only in the broadest sense of the term.

"Any time anyone mentions Ford's name, the Star collectively looks like those guys in David Cronenberg's famous 1981 horror flick, Scanners, just before their heads explode."

- Lorrie Goldstein in the Sun, keepin' current.

"If nothing improves over four years of a Ford mayoralty, if transit remains just as crappy and the roads just as busy, at least Torontonians won’t have been forced to spend billions bringing it about. They’ll have the same city they have now, plus more money in the bank. How is that bad?"

- Intensely pragmatic or utterly lukewarm so-called endorsement of Ford from Kelly McParland in the Post.

"The red, white and blue colour scheme is a bit much—tax revolt, tea party, we get it—but at least it’s more engaging than the other signs (though we double-checked, and Thomas Jefferson never spoke about a gravy train)."

- John Michael McGrath dissecting candidate lawn signs in Toronto Life. Pantalone and Rossi get away with little more than a nod, but Ford's colour scheme supposedly evokes the Tea Party, Thomson's alludes to one of his earlier columns, and Smitherman's sign lacks structural integrity.

All of that said, there's at least one exception to the nonsense rule:

"Mr. Ford makes these untrue statements over and over at debates and campaign appearances. His rivals for mayor have corrected him repeatedly in public, but he keeps on trotting them out as fact."

- Marcus Gee in the Globe pointing out that Ford's numbers aren't necessarily based in reality. One can quibble about the price about a bike lane, but when he says that council put $360 million towards tearing down the Gardiner when such a thing hasn't happened, that's either one hell of a spin or an outright lie or the statement of somebody who honestly, truly and deeply doesn't understand how things work. I'm indifferent to most candidates so far, I just want somebody who knows that 2 + 2 = 4 and that the 2, the second 2 and the resulting 4 all exist in the first place.

Idle nonsense from earlier this year

2010-09-14T07:49:00.006-04:00

Between paint-splatters, online.
_________________________________________

Her: Wanna play scrabble? I'm bored.

Me: I'd be delighted but I'm painting my kitchen. There's yeast everywhere. Er...not as gross as it sounds.

Her: You sure?

Me: Bread. I was baking bread all night. My weird stress response.

Her: Ah. I prefer alcohol.

Me: Me too. But I have a child. I can't say "Here's a change of pace little fella, daddy's throwing up on you tonight."

Her: I suppose. Though it's been done.

Me: By Robin Williams among others. I stole the line. Wanna help me paint?

Her: Nah. I'll stay here under my blankee.

Me: Fine. You can come here and sit under a blanket and WATCH painting if u want.

Her: 'You' want. Don't use 'u' in place of 'you'. You're over 40. it's unseemly.

Me: I am? I'll get back to you on that if I accept it.

Her: Heh. In my mind you're still 16.

Me: In YOUR mind? Hell. In MY mind I'm still 16. Despite my best efforts.

Her: You're still younger than me, dude. I'm one month older. It makes all the difference in the world.

Me: On what plain?

Her: Yogurt?

Me: Astral plain, I meant.

Her: Astro plain yogurt?

Me: Very well madam. Would you like that with granola?

Her: Yes. And blueberries.
___________________________________________

...what can I say? It made me smile.

Sept. 2010

This week's self-serving and genuinely depressing mayoral race coverage

2010-09-02T18:55:00.010-04:00

"The circa-1850s St. Lawrence Hall has played host to many poignant moments in our city’s history. Monday night’s mayoral debate hosted by Heritage Toronto and the Toronto Historical Association was not one of them."

- Enzo Di Matteo in Now Magazine, managing to complain about a limp debate concerning "the preservation of our city’s history, be it cultural, natural or its built form." 739 words later, all we've learned is that Smitherman showed some conservationist cred, except that he didn't. Everyone else must simply have bored Enzo and he's paid it forward.

"Just before I went on holiday, I got a message from the Ford campaign, addressed as follows: 'Dear Joe Fiorito ‘Al Gosling Is Dead.’ That was the salutation, all on one line. Not “Dear Joe Fiorito,” but “Dear Joe Fiorito ‘Al Gosling Is Dead.’ That’s not just some dumb mistake. That’s sick. If you read this column at all, you know the Gosling story. Maybe you don’t care that an 82-year old man was kicked to the curb by this city’s community housing corporation — evicted for the flimsiest of reasons — and, while living in a shelter, he picked up a bug of some kind and died as a result. But I sure as hell care."

-From The Star. Full disclosure: I'm not a Fiorito admirer and I didn't follow his Al Gosling material until recently. But just knowing that somebody at Ford's campaign thinks it's important enough to footnote is, in and of itself, scary as hell. I don't think Ford had anything to do with this, it's probably the classic overzealous campaign worker that's in such demand 'round these parts these days. It's as depressing as the kitten-eater nonsense during McGuinty's campaign, which at the very least didn't feature a flesh-and-blood corpse as a punchline.

"At Toronto City Hall, the old leftist guard is on the rooftop preparing a landing pad for the postelection helicopters that will finally airlift the David Miller regime out of office."

- Terrance Corcoran in the National Post, dipping into a last days of Saigon thing at the start and end of 1,238 words. It doesn't work any better at the end. But the quiet shout-out to Rossi and shrug towards Ford ("What Mr. Ford brings to the campaign is attitude rather than policy") is a bit surprising. So is the idea that St. Clair Ave. looks like Poland before the Iron Curtain dropped.

Face it

2010-08-25T09:36:00.015-04:00

You love Rob Ford? You're not alone. You hate Rob Ford? You and a bunch of others. You haven't followed the news and you're wondering what everyone is either whining or crowing about? Here are some thumbnails:

"He is what he is and, unlike most people, makes no attempt to conceal it. What I doubt is that he is like you. Have the police been called to your home to resolve a dispute with your loved one? Do you have a mug shot?"

-Heather Mallick in The Star, either pointing out the obvious or going for the jugular.

"Anyone across Canada who considers Toronto a liberal (and Liberal) la-la land filled with sheep-like residents meekly accepting every new tax imposed on them, hasn’t been paying attention to its race for mayor. Suddenly, Toronto the Good has become Toronto the Pissed Off."

- Lorrie Goldstein in the Sun, finding yet another reason to use liberal and la-la land together.

"Those who like him, like him a lot. He clearly has tapped into an anger, a resentment, a bitterness that is out there about the state of affairs in the city — whether it is warranted or not, whether it’s an accurate diagnosis or not — let alone whether his prescription is the appropriate prescription.”

- Ryerson Professor Myer Siemiatycki quoted by Megan O'Toole in the National Post.

"Ford can’t win this race for mayor by being all things to all people. And no one knows that better than Ford. That’s why he keeps playing to his base, the narrow-minded bunch seemingly angry about everything and interested only in blaming someone, or something else for the current state of affairs. It’s the divide and conquer rule of politics."

- Enzo Di Matteo in Now Magazine sharing his blame-game theories.

"My hunch is therein lies the secret of Rob Ford’s appeal – for all his personal failures, he’s not one of them."

- Christie Blatchford in the Globe and Mail, not writing about her dog for a change. The piece is primarily about councillor expenses and Sandra Bussin's meltdown on John Tory's radio program, but it all comes back to Ford.

Windows and Mist

2010-08-12T00:14:00.008-04:00

Back to The Time On My Hands, for a minute or so. In fact, why not several minutes? By all accounts, I have them to spare. Of late, I've had to deal with a cranky car, an unsure job market, a major plumbing repair and an unsettling series of flashbacks to the last time I was between jobs, which was 2002 and it stretches back and into itself due to a truly unfortunate set of circumstances.

My father was sore but not demonstrably ill at the start of that summer. And I was out of a job. Nobody could have known how bad it was going to get - or how fast - but the simultaneous occurance of both incidents always reminds me that I could have spent some of that idle time with him, rather than being stoic and keeping to myself as I looked for work. I didn't want to bother my family with what I thought was a problem I was solely responsible to solve.

At any other time, this might have been a reasonable thing to do. Instead, it squandered what little time was left. By the time things got truly nightmarish on the health front (around September), I remembered the hanging hours and felt the clock had been started without me.

Any backwards glance through an unclear window is not going to be pleasing. The Psych 101 student of your choice could boil my recent twitching down into a few sentences: looking for a job at any time isn't fun and the subconscious mind looks for something to latch onto during the emotional whirlwind. 2010 is not 2002 in any sense of the term (emotionally/financially/professionally) but if I get the occasional Billy Pilgrim flashback it probably shouldn't be unexpected.

These range from the uncomfortable to the almost pleasantly nostalgic: my neighbour gave me a large bottle of Citra wine the other day. I drank a lot of it from 2001 to 2003 or so, it was the house wine at Teronni for awhile and it was a good all-around cheap table wine. I would bring it to my parents' house for Sunday dinners, insisting everyone take a small glass. "It's good for the blood," seemed as good an excuse as any. When I poured a glass the other day, the dinners - atmosphere - everything - consumed all other reason for a few minutes, combusting into nothingness as soon as it came.

After that, I needed a drink. Just not Citra. But myy wife and I finished it tonight with Pizza Nova pizza (which I haven't touched or craved in years) and wings. A treat eight years ago. Not exactly outgrown, but not in the too-tired-to-cook repertoire for a very long time.

Pizza and wine never killed anybody, not every glass has to be operatic. Tonight's was just thin and tasty and finally led to sleep.

Aug 2010

Clockwork, grey - 'Inception'

2010-07-28T22:05:00.090-04:00

I hate being warned about spoilers. I'm over 18, I can vote and hold credit cards and I get irritated when my wrist is patted gently by an unseen author whispering 'You might not want to read this next part if you want to be surprised, dearie.' I don't even want to dignify the process by avoiding potential spoilers while discussing Christopher Nowlan's Inception. But readers of a sensitive nature can take heart: I've racked my brain but I can't sum up the film with anything more complicated than well dressed operatives with unspecified skill-sets and dodgy financing sneak into your dreams to fiddle about. This process can fry any of the brains involved, but it usually doesn't.

Voila. It's nothing you haven't picked up from mind-reading genre flicks like Strange Days on the techie end or (shudder) What Dreams May Come on the dreamy, fanciful side (feel free to toss in Dreamscape or Brainstorm if you can go back that far). A few voices have suggested a Mulholland Drive influence, which I don't buy for a second: Lynch is millimetres away from absurdity at the best of times (brilliantly so, occasionally), while Nowlan is very aware of what he's doing and imposes rules and regulations (in terms of physics and dream-logic) with every frame. His influential-but-not-quite-real states of consciousness make it easy to toss a Matrix label on it, but it won't stick. There's a sentience behind the false world in the Matrix, while Inception stems from the reflective reality in the subconscious ramblings of dreams. It isn't about simulacra as much as psychological response and self-awareness, and how thin that awareness can be in the face of stimulus or the desire to relive (or avoid) a memory.

Or, not. It's also about suits, trains and the colour grey. The Dark Knight looked cold and metallic: Inception might have been lathed and polished rather than photographed. Nowlan's physician-like cool and spotlessly clean environments suggest he should think about healing himself before fretting about his character's fragile grip on reality. An outsider's advice: if you want your audience to spend time in a perfectly realized dreamworld, you've got to start somewhere that's pointedly dissimilar to that same world. Nolan avoids the obvious tactic of making reality grungy and the dream world especially fantastic, but the clean, minimalist lines of high speed trains and straight-outta-GQ suits appearing outside of the dreamworld are pretty much mirrored inside the land of nod (except for that On Her Majesty's Secret Service riff- but I've said too much). After the first hour, you almost feel that you've slipped out of Nowlan's subconscious and ended up in an after-work doze of his production designer Guy Dyas in the backseat of his limo on the way home from the studio.

That said - Nowlan should be commended for not making it all too dreamy. The rules are established early on through a minimum of exposition and some unobtrusively (but still exceedingly) weird visuals. The agents and their architects can tinker with dream logic and provide a forum for that dream to take place, but anything too unusual will activate the dreamer's subconscious and take them out of the dream. Perspective bends and landscapes impossibly fold themselves into new locales, but for the most part these aren't showy effects, they're just out of place for anywhere but a dream.

When the action really begins - a multi-layered dream penetration and the eponymous inception - every gear clicks into place on schedule, even when the dream rules get tweaked (rather than broken or ignored). It's essentially a beautifully made heist flick with some serious guilt issues hiding (and popping out from time to time) in the background. Nowlan takes it seriously and never cracks a smile, but he does prove that he has a heart if you wait long enough. There's a quiet 'live by the sword, die by the sword' message behind it all, finally boiling down to one's inability to get away from something in one's own head. Even if you vacation in another person's consciousness, you're still stuck in you. And when you least expect it, you might sneak up on yourself with the force of a freight train.

Inception is being lauded for being intimidatingly smart, but I don't know if I can agree with that definition. Complicated and intelligent aren't the same thing, and while I'm delighted that there's a sci-fi blockbuster that won't spearhead a Happy Meal campaign, I don't know if it's as clever as your average critic has hoped for after their collective horror at last year's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I'm not saying that Nowlan didn't spend Warner's $160 million wisely, but I almost want to cut his budget (and some of his script) to produce an even smarter, leaner product. I think about how 2004's Primer played with just as many unknowable concepts (short-term time travel and the nature of paradox) on a budget that would have only covered a portion of Inception's first-week catering bill. And Aronofsky brought Pi in on small-time loans and credit cards while questioning the mathematical formulae of random patterns and the unmentionable numerical name of God. If Nowlan's budget gets cut in half for his next film, he might be motivated to ram the same imagination and vision into something with more weight than a dream. I'll be the first in line to see it.

Both Primer and Pi riffed on unknowable premises without window-dressing; Inception is the best dressed window I've seen for a long time, all in almost stiflingly good taste. There's not a lot of colour or a lot of fun, but you can't help but respect the craft and consistency of the vision. When the dreams get too thick (or strangely motivated - think about the Bond comparison above) it strains the balance between Nowlan assuring us that these things happen, or shrugging and saying 'it's a dream, after all.' Like the best dreams, I've held onto the way I felt watching it unspool while not being convinced that any of it really matters.

On the flipside, that's the price of being a well-made clock; the mechanism (all those tiny gears) doesn't matter as much as the overall impact (keeping time in line). I'm sure Inception is exactly what Nowlan wanted to make, I'm just not sure if it's something that should have been encouraged outside of an academic exercise in dream-scheduling and invisible CGI. With Inception, He has built something with the clockwork, self-contained logic of a dream, right down to how your own perception (and lack thereof) populates that sphere. If it all fades rather quickly, then it's done its job. Some things can't be explained, just experienced. Like a good dream. Or a well-made representation of same.

Difference engines

2010-07-17T22:33:00.031-04:00

Without going into detail, I have time on my hands. This isn't exactly a bad thing, it's just a state of being that my rational brain believes should be graphed and charted and given a finite time span with loads of contingency tucked in around the edges. It's supposedly a time for reflection, but that's not working so well: I'm either staring at walls while assuming there's a mirror that I can't quite see (and believing that if I stand long enough, something will throw a little light) or I've become a low-level variation on a vampire that casts no image through any easily obtained, bog-standard looking glass.

The mechanics of this spare time are easily navigated (I've been taking my son to parks and reading lots of pull-up-your-socks publications) but some tabula rasa aspect hasn't slipped into place just yet, causing this not-unpleasant limbo to reveal signs of potential unpleasantness.
___________________________________________

I'm on Yonge St. at 6:30pm on a weekday night, walking downtown to meet Gene. I knew him a very long time ago as part of a church group; he writes and worked in computers and works in film and was the last person I thought I'd find myself having a beer with, although I'm delighted to see him. He got back in touch around a year ago through Facebook and we've chatted from time to time. The aforementioned time off feels like a good reason to have another beer and I'm en route to the bistro when time falls out of itself for a few seconds (if that explains the duration of a non-event). I start looking into head shoppe windows and spotting the kind of stuff that would have been sold 25-odd years back: what t-shirts attract your standard stoner since time immemoriam?

There's a handful of classics: today's AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin or Doors t-shirts would slip harmlessly past temporal sensors in the early 80s and they're still popular today. Three storefronts proudly offered Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon anniversary shirts, perhaps losing the fact that the 30th anniversary was in 2003. The shirts still sell. In those places at least, 2/3rds of the t-shirts rotate through Van Halen Inxs Stone Temple Pilots Pearl Jam Nirvana Beck NIN Weezer Eminem Marilyn Manson while the rest extol the virtues of Jim Morrison and that freaky Iron Maiden mascot and that guitarist in boy's school shorts. The structure of cheap crap re-forms itself from time to time but it's thin. In this context at least, nothing changes, nothing goes away.

July 16, 2010

2010-07-16T11:19:00.003-04:00

An early-30's guy in cutoff army surplus shorts and a yellow t-shirt that says Capitalism Overcomes All in red gothic script. A homeless Asian man lying in a torn heavily branded Raptors sleeping bag outside Union Station with a cardboard sign saying Needing money to get home to Winnipeg - God bless those blessing the poor - Going home. Oversized bottles of Kirkland Signature 99.9% germ-killing wipes everywhere around the lobby of a downtown office tower- even well-heeled corporations buy in bulk to save money. A tex-mex restaurant with a line of guys in their late 20's waiting to get in for beer steins of daquiris and 15-minutes-or-they're-free fajitas. The Toronto Star pointing out that 2010 is the hottest year in recorded history and a group of former system administrators behind me taking apart this supposition by asking if they'd taken Hiroshima or Nagasaki or that meteor that hit Siberia into the equation. One of them brings up Sodom and Gomorrah and the others laugh and say that biblical plagues don't count. Disasters past and present and ongoing notwithstanding it's clear and beautiful outside and if I wasn't otherwise engaged at being me at the moment, I'd probably enjoy it free and easy.

Things I've learned trying to clean up my life and associated mindset upon being granted some rather unexpected free time

2010-07-07T09:45:00.007-04:00

1. Wicker chairs that were forgotten in the back yard (for three months) can be cleaned of mildew, dirt and that weird creeping mold with a scrub-brush, bleachy hot water and dish soap, and the free-floating energy of somebody who has found themselves in a situation that includes some free time.

2. The foam rubber cushions of said chairs (with the accompanying mildew, dirt and creeping mold) can also be rinsed, squeezed out, and left in the sun to be made clean as new.

3. Bleaching the hell out of the seat cushions...well, you get the idea.

4. Wicker can be painted with Zinsser primer and restored to something you'd like to sit in. So. Project #1 complete.

5. The upstairs linen closet in my rather elderly house provided three layers of wallpaper to remove. Including the ceiling. Deep blue paint in a linen closet is supposed to keep your whites very white, so now it's blue.

6. The old bought-at-Lansing-Lumber-back-in-the-70's shelves that have been littering your dead father's workshop are just fine for a linen closet in 2010. The psychological impact of spending an afternoon reviewing the contents of that workshop, not so good. But c'mon. Free shelves. And a project to wile away the hours.

7. A twenty-five year old reciprocating saw works just fine. A brand new one costs all of 40 bucks which the imperial coffers can spare, but let's be stubborn and use the old one.

8. Damn, my garage needs a cleaning. I really should get somebody to do it.

9. The 'somebody' in question appears to be me.

10. My son has re-discovered the joys of blowing soap bubbles, my chairs are once again suitable for sitting upon without fear of becoming a science experiment, my linen closet will soon be organized in such a way that it accommodates linen, a vacuum cleaner and my wife's sanity since she will no longer say that the linen closet is a seething miasma of chaos existing only to drive her insane. It's a lovely summer day and, rather unexpected spare time notwithstanding, life is good. The overwhelming advice I'm receiving is "Shut up and relax, for a change." Amen.

Great.

2010-07-02T15:50:00.002-04:00

Well, yarbles.

July 3, 2010

Sightings and impressions

2010-06-20T15:55:00.005-04:00

The BMV store at Yonge and Eglinton has maintained the geek chic of its 2nd floor for the last 15 years or so and they still can't manage to get a copy of Philip K. Dick's Lies Inc. or The Unteleported Man onto their shelves so that I can read it for the first time since I was 12. I walk out with Dick's In Milton Lumky Territory, a collection of so-called Astonishing Stories edited by Michael Chabon and the William S. Burroughs reader.

I walk across the street to Chapters. Entire season runs of TV shows are on sale for $14.99 if your father is craving Three's Company or The Vicar of Dibly. And a cursory glance at the comedy section indicates that any book that has 'A PARODY' in uppercase printed on the cover is unlikely to be genuinely funny.

There's a homeless guy beside the RBC instant tellers on Yonge St. either blowing up a small rubber ducky or huffing some manner of solvent from within it while convinced he's disguised his habit brilliantly.

The trying-to-look-upscale Mexican restaurant still lines its basket of tortilla chips with industrial-grade paper towel and wraps its tacos in the half foil, half paper wrappers familiar to anyone who's bought a fast-food burger in the last 20 years. But the chips are fresh and not out of a bag and the tacos are on soft corn tortillas and taste of pork and lime and avocado rather than Old El Paso seasoning so good for them.

The Northern District Library is more or less untouched from what I remember at the age of seven when I took art classes there or when I was 14 and spent Saturday afternoons studying or when I was 22 and knew a girl near by and would camp out to read paperbacks until she made it back to her apartment and we could be alone. The structure, colour, rugs, lights, shelves, all the same. The microfiche viewers have been replaced by computers which are yours for a few seconds worth of time to type in your card number. And we're done.

38 years later

2010-06-15T15:37:00.008-04:00

"“The families who died should not have had to live with the pain and hurt of that day, and a lifetime of loss. Some members of our armed forces reacted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces. And for that, on behalf of the government—and indeed our country — I am deeply sorry”.

The New York Times.

The Guardian.

BBC News (Cameron's full statement).

The Belfast Telegraph.

A summing-up of the UK coverage.

Lightning strikes, and...

2010-06-15T11:08:00.007-04:00

Jesus statue fire damages estimated at $700,000

“I can’t believe Jesus was struck,” said his brother, who noted the giant Hustler Hollywood sign for the adult store across the street was untouched. “It’s the last thing I expected to happen.”

Whether you think this is a quirk of the weather, some kind of omen for the good people of the Solid Rock Church or a truly unfathomable endorsement for Hustler Hollywood will depend on your own convictions. Neither God, Jesus, nor Larry Flynt were available for comment.

Remains

2010-05-23T22:58:00.029-04:00

My wife restored a table today. It's very old but solid with sentimental value and varnish that turned to dust with a touch of low-grit sandpaper. That's the short version. The long one follows; those with an eye for detail are welcome to left-click the photos to enlarge them.
____________________________________________

The table is a old rickety thing built by my two eldest uncles on my father's side. My uncle George is still alive; my uncle Moody passed away a few years ago and my aunt recently sent a box of his books home to me. Most of them were my books originally, albeit briefly: a paperback copy of Dune which I'd given him when I was fourteen or so, some reprints of L'il Abner comics that I'd sent over a decade ago, VHS copies of Red October and The Rocketeer and others. She thought I'd want to have them. She's almost right. There's something almost endearing about having presents returned to me: she believes they mattered to him, perhaps they'll matter to me now. Maybe the knowledge that he enjoyed them will fill some of the space left in his absence.

The table, built by George and Moody in 1932, sat between my father's and Moody's bed for most of the 1940's and probably into the 50's. (the date above is written on the inside of the drawer in what looks to me like ballpoint pen, which wouldn't have been around in the 30's...maybe it was in pencil at one point and filled in by a well-meaning relative or maybe I just don't know ballpoint from ink from marker). The bottom rack was deep enough to hold a small radio (a crystal set, I believe) that the two of them could listen to through headphones when the rest of the household was sleeping. There's little to do in a small town after dusk, the radio must have been a comfort or a secret for two brothers and I wish I had an idea of its shape, appearance, sound. But Moody's gone and my father is gone longer and nobody left on this earth could explain this to me. All of that is gone. I have nothing left of that story but the table itself, which sat in the attic of my uncle's house for as long as I could remember.

It was given to me a few years after my father died, along with a 1920's dresser manufactured in Hanover, Ontario, from the same factory that at least one of my uncles worked at before and during the Second World War. I have a dining table, bought at random on Craigslist, from that same factory.

This probably stems more from my taste in furniture and the availability of antiques in Southern Ontario than from any spiritual message, but there are things that come built in with meaning and comfort: a long dining table bought from a stranger and a rickety piece built out of crates from Derbecker's General Store in Neustadt Ontario, circa 1932. I'd always heard that it was built out of orange crates: the faded stickers list Carnation which suggests evaporated milk but the word VALENCIAS is stamped in barely legible ink above it. The sides of the base show a label for a brand of apples.

The sticker on the side wasn't put there in my lifetime; I'll assume it was up in the 40's or 50's, an evangelical tract that would have been popular in my baptist family. The tract was sanded off this afternoon; the other labels were on the bottom of the table and remain. The photo here is the last I'll know of the old varnish and the tract and the idea of the table, built small and tall and of scrap by necessity during the Great Depression. I'm not sentimental about the way it looked but it's something of my father and uncle and it's mine. It's something that's not gone and knowing it's there helps me sleep at night.

A heirloom.
My dad's piece.
My uncle's piece.
An old table from the old store.
Something that, unlike people and businesses hasn't gone away.

Sanded, washed down with mineral spirit, painted black and topped off with a $20.00 piece of marble from a Craigslist purchase, it sits in my dining room and holds spare change, a wallet, cellphone, sunglasses and keys between outside jaunts. Jet black and nondescript with some old labels on the underside. I'll send the photos and recount the story to my aunt and my uncle George, the only two remaining of that family of five children. It's only fifteen pieces of very old scrap lumber, augmented with paint and a slab of stone. But it hasn't gone away. A few weeks ago I wrote about burning select old letters from a box in my basement from time to time, suggesting that entropy always wins. In a longer scheme of things, yes. In the relatively shorter run, sometimes you catch a break. This table should have been reduced to kindling at some point over the last 78 years, but for reasons I can't fathom it's found its way into my 1920's house in Toronto.

There's something gentle and hopeful in that, even if it's grasping at straws or sentimental. Unrepentantly, I hope that somewhere my father and uncle are smiling. I'm doing all I can from this end.

May 2010

Stand up and be counted

2010-05-23T09:30:00.009-04:00

I've had to replace my webcounter since the free service I was using decided to no longer be free. I didn't need to keep records of the whopping 15-30 hits per week that this site generates, but if I'd required them for research or some such I'd be fairly pissed off at this point.

That said: I assure you that the stats generated here won't be used against you. I won't tell anybody about your IP address, host provider, browser, operating system, time of connection, credit card number, phone number, favourite flavour of ice cream, the mechanics of finding that special tickley spot at the back of your neck, if you really sold your soul in grade seven by reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards on a bet, those exotic food, copious drink and rather dubious travel expenses submitted to the accounting department under 'snacks', that you not only voted for that fallen-from-grace politician back in the day but considered having their name tattooed on your left thigh in the event of victory, if you're still telling people you're trying to 'change the system from within' at your new job with a business espousing a lifestyle you once detested in others or if you've experienced a lifestyle change in the best Oprah fashion, those few stolen nights of bliss in University involving a six-pack of single-serving Henckel Trocken bottles & a pool toy & two bags of panko, how you extol the virtues of buying organic and the slow-cooking movement but still lace your tre formaggi with Cheez Whiz at dinner parties because you spent the afternoon watching CSI reruns, whether or not your rash is contagious or just a one-off, and that sometimes you ruminate on the fact that Eeyore is your favourite Winnie the Pooh character because he always looks like he needs a hug. Your secrets are safe with RiteCounter and me.

A short act of perfection

2010-05-06T11:18:00.010-04:00

"We were talking about some of the older castles in Touraine and we touched upon the iron cage in which Louis XI imprisoned Cardinal La Balue for six years, then upon oubliettes and such horrors. I had seen several of the latter, simply dry wells thirty or forty feet deep where a man was thrown to wait for nothing; since I have such a tendency to claustrophobia that a Pullman berth is a certain nightmare, they had made a lasting impression. So it was rather a relief when a doctor told this story — that is, it was a relief when he began it for it seemed to have nothing to do with the tortures long ago."

Two cheers for brevity (three is overkill). I have always wanted to be a short, concise writer who nails something with the bare essentials and walks away clean. I've clearly had only mixed success, despite having access to the works of masters. The Long Way Out is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's later short works: you can find the entire story here. It won't take you long to read and might take you years to forget. It's an almost perfect short story, clocking in at just under 1800 words and painting a perfect portrait of limbo. I read it at a relatively early age and keep hoping that I can put something across with such simplicity.

Nobody can accuse Fitzgerald of writing an 'upper' by any stretch of the imagination, which is pretty much what you'd expect from an alcoholic who was no stranger to sanitarium visits (both he and Zelda had their share of time in the wards). By the end of his story, you realize that 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' doesn't always work; 'ain't broke' isn't the same thing as 'working properly.' Sometimes 'functional' is the best you can hope for. At the very least, it beats the alternative.

May 2010

Expiation: Finale

2010-04-15T20:21:00.082-04:00

Follows Expiation: Prologue, Part One, Part Two, Entr'acte, Part Three.
____________________________________________

"I know this is late in coming but it's the only way I know,
hello it's me..."

-Lou Reed, from 'Songs for Drella' which has nothing to do with anything that's been discussed until now.

____________________________________________

The last part plays out pretty quickly. The Elora/Hannah/Nancy incident was concluded without loss of blood. Especially mine. Life went back to normal and other no less adolescent scenarios played out with different people pretty much according to schedule. T'was ever thus, right? Plug in the cliche of your choice: youth is wasted on the young, life goes on, memories are made of this, if I knew then what I know now, and of course that's why it's called a 'crush' because... if it felt good they'd call it something else. The earth remained largely unshattered. Elora reminded me that "You missed the part where..." and a long list of details that a) aren't germane to this forum and b) aren't my story to tell in the first place. I didn't forget them, just didn't think it was my part to recount them.

But I had forgotten the white roses; they showed up at my front door late in the week where they decided they were going to speak to me after all. I actually found the card a decade ago, scanned it and sent it to Elora in an email. It was at the bottom of a voluminous box of letters and assorted trash dating back to the early 80's and stopping in the early 90's when I either stopped collecting letters or everything segued into email. At the time, I was amazed that Elora knew I liked white roses. In fact, I'm amazed that I ever told anyone that I liked white roses. No deep significance here, I just thought they looked cool.

I liked the idea of forgiveness. Being at the tail-end of a comic-book collecting stage at the time, I considered creating a graphic novel based on the whole affair, somehow ending it with somebody saying "You are redeemed!" in my direction after I'd done something, well, redeeming. But I couldn't figure out what and couldn't draw to save my life anyhow. I don't think the world has lost anything as a result.

That box of letters/programs/ill-advised literature remains in my basement- I can't bring myself to throw it away. Call it emotional archeology. From time to time I brave a peek, choose some stuff to keep and others to throw in my neighbour's bonfire to guarantee that they're rendered truly unreadable and irrelevant before drifting into the stratosphere as so many atoms. Entropy always wins.
___________________________________________

A Facebook chat with Hannah:

I quoted you in my blog, you said I was allowed.

Yes, it was fine. Reading it made me feel like a human Moeibus strip. Your story - my story - her story...I am resisting the urge to dig up my diary and reread the MJD entries.

Oh Lord...RESIST!

I have often considered ceremonially burning that diary in the backyard. I can't think of a good reason I haven't except it would be fun to go to one of those nights where you read from your adolescent diary in public.

I keep letters for a scary long time. I probably have notes from you in a sealed box of high-school/early university correspondence and playbills in my basement. I'll leave it to the AGO when I die.

Nooooooo! Burn them! Burn them! But just so you know, the Elton John song "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" ALWAYS reminds me of you, me and a music practice room. In a sweet way. :)

____________________________________________

And on the flipside of the entropy issue, I played a lot of Elton John/Billy Joel at the time, it was poppy and good practice and the kind of thing that makes sense when you're fifteen. I don't remember playing it for Hannah. Things get lost over time. I remember lots of other things in that sweet way she mentions; chats, tea on a rooftop garden, trading tapes - yes. Less prosaic than singing "Someone saved my life tonight, Sugar Bear" in G-major, but maybe the same kind of sweet.
___________________________________________

And one last piece before the DH Lawrence reveal: my jacket. I had a heavy blue corduroy high school jacket with the word ARTS in capital letters on the back. And until a few months ago I was sure I loaned it to Elora in February so she could wear it on a class trip to Greece.

Call it cheap penance. I'd heard her complain that she was going to freeze to death on her trip, I offered my jacket. She said "Seriously?" and I handed it over. And I froze for around 2 weeks, layering sweaters over shirts. Chivalry wasn't entirely dead, as far as I thought. There was an implied message of I was a jerk, I'm sorry. Now you've got the double-lined warm jacket and I'm going to freeze for awhile. Mea Culpa. You don't have to like me but I know it's keeping you warm or something like that.

That's what I remembered, until recently. I didn't let a little fact that Greece is, for the most part, a fairly warm country most of the time dissuade me.

In a chat with Elora:

You could illustrate one thing for me - did my jacket enjoy Greece?

It had a better time in Holland.

I thought it went to Greece...damn...my senility is setting in?

I really liked having that jacket btw. I don't remember if I brought it to Greece. It was hot there. But I know for sure I brought it to Amsterdam over Christmas when I went to see my father.

It was Christmas? I thought it was February. I froze. I thought it might serve some karma. You probably could have kept it.

Heh, really? You didn't have a second jacket?

Nope. Sweaters and layers.

Why did I give it back? I don't remember.

So much for the inviolable truth of memory (mine, specifically). And I wish she had kept the coat. I think I said something like "It's probably yours by now" when she made it back from Holland (formerly Greece) and she said "Thanks, dude," with a l'il-sisterly chuck on my shoulder while giving it back. And life went on. Alice told me years later that Elora really did love having that jacket, but I thought she just told me to make me feel better. Maybe I was wrong. Not that anything matters now, but at the time it felt rather intense. Even (especially) the cheap music.

You gave me a tape of Don MacLean (with a little bit of Elton John, 'Empty Garden' thrown in to finish off the side). I played it over and over and over, had it for years, until it finally wore out. It was my second-most listened-to tape after the Kate Bush mix Ruby gave me.

I had quite the crush on you that night.

Funny old world. In hindsight, she could have kept the jacket and more.
__________________________________________

Ladies and Gentleman, DH Lawrence.

I didn't encounter the poem until I was sixteen or so, in an otherwise generic 12th grade poetry textbook with the occasional bright spot of Nowlan or Roethke. I read it, got to the end and thought I get it. Unfortunately.

Shall we get up to speed? Having whipped a log at a snake and regretting it, Lawrence settles into a good long sulk:

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

Once he brings up the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and that damn bird, I start to glaze over. And here I realize that any flesh-and-blood logic of the Lawrence fixation of times-gone-by falls to bits. I never promised that it made any sense. I didn't have a water trough to wait at, and Elora wouldn't like being compared to a lord of life or male snake at all. I didn't throw any clumsy logs (although muttering 'I can do better than all of you' under my breath on the way down a hallway is impolite at best and a karmic boomerang of epic proportions at worst). But I read that poem and was sure I had earned the last few lines in the way you earn a set of bruises for heading down the stairs too quickly, having chosen to damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead. I encountered it in countless English/Writing/Poetry classes through University and it always reminded me of Elora.

I don't remember when I stopped twitching at it; there must be a breaking point where it became irrelevant. Let's call it 20yrs back or so. But if the first memory of that poem is that it reminds me of being reminded of a girl, well; attention must be paid. Teen antics combust in daylight. Impact upon literature deserves notice, right?

In absence of the portrait, you can still write about the frame.

And say what you want about the albatross and underworld kings and overwrought TB-ridden Lawrence, his last line still hurts when you're in your teens and feel like you own it.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

As Elora said about her old diaries, How embarrassingly emo. :-P

___________________________________________

April 2010

Expiation: Part Three

2010-04-12T22:09:00.024-04:00

Follows Expiation: Prologue, Part One, Part Two, Entr'acte
____________________________________________

So why is this taking so long? asks nobody in reference to the story.

Standard reasons. Life, in toto. Chasing after an active 4yr old son. A 9 to 5 job and sleep and additional hobbies do take up the time. And generic writers block goes a long way as well. A very long way. A very very long...well...you get the idea. It's not like any part of this saga could be considered the greatest story ever told in the first place, so perhaps there's a natural reluctance to tell it.

Not to mention the greatest danger; any reminiscence told badly boils down to 'Wasn't I a rascal?' with a heavy-handed wink at the reader or 'Wasn't everything just awful for me?' with some life-lesson en route shortly thereafter. So. Let's just stick to the facts (through admittedly hazy shades of memory) and remember the original thesis to this essay: DH Lawrence's The Snake.
___________________________________________

A Facebook chat with Elora:

This is, all, ostensibly, about how you ruined a DH Lawrence poem for me for years. Or I ruined it. I'll know by part three. If all of this isn't too weird in the first place.

Of course it's weird. In a good kind of weird.

Taking her at her word, here we go.
___________________________________________

So I kissed the wrong girl. No. I kissed a nice girl. The problem was that I had been kissing her friend for some weeks before that. Notwithstanding, after one evening kissing Elora I was convinced that perhaps the time for kissing Hannah was done.

Politely done.

Sort of 'We had a great run, kid' done with a big-brotherly chuck on her shoulder kind of done.

Of course, I didn't think I'd actually get away with that. I thought that there might be a bit of, shall we say, unpleasantness at first and Hannah might sulk in my direction but, really, we hadn't discussed any hard-set rules for our relationship so (if pressed) I could point out the undefined nature of it all and plead not-guilty to any accusations of callousness.

And, of course, there was always the 'Now we're all adults here' speech that I had seen on TV enough times that I was relatively sure I could squeeze it out with a straight face.

(I mentioned in a recent chat with Hannah that I wasn't going to come across well in Part III - the above paragraph illustrates my concern pretty damn well)

There's a flip side to all this: I wasn't as cocky as it sounds. I wasn't actually sure of anything. The odds of Elora looking sheepish on Monday morning and rolling her eyes at the entire business was a likely scenario. Or Hannah and I would meet somewhere relatively secluded and work past whatever had spurred the low-level animosity from the week before and return to our making-out-in-secluded-corners-after-class arrangement until she got bored of it or me (which was the most frequent scenario in my teenage romantic life until then) or that she'd find out about Elora and I and shrug it off, hopefully muttering something along the lines of "Sure, go ahead, he's a great kisser" to Elora and we'd all be on our way.

'Hopefully' is a key word here.

I didn't think that any of it was going to play out too badly: mine was but a soul who's intentions were good after all (and influenced by The Animals, evidently) and hell, we were young. The future date with Nancy (which sort of started all this, flash back to Part I if you're into soap operas and want to catch up) didn't seem too likely, so at least that was one less thing to worry about. And I didn't think enough had actually transpired with Elora to hurt Hannah's feelings (we were, primarily, just kissing after all) and...well, flip in whatever other rationalizations you think would fit here. I probably used them.

One thing I was sure of: this wasn't just me trying to get some action.

Seriously.

I was astounded (and grateful) that anyone wanted to take part in any action with me at the time so I was loathe to wander in search of further activity. My teenage ego, remarkably, was on hiatus at the time. Events notwithstanding.

To toss something even weirder in the mix, I had first started paying attention to Elora when we were taking part in a full-town rendition of Orwell's 1984. Some genius decided to stage it across all of Niagara on the Lake as an event and our class attended. The evening was impossibly cool for a theatre class of teenagers, especially when one of the paid actors worked you into the story.

Elora's role was (in the best Winston and Julia fashion) to trip in front of me and slip me a note as I helped her up. The note read I LOVE YOU written by some stagehand between setups. I'd read the book. I knew where it came from. She sort of smiled when she did it and it felt like an odd flirt (which probably isn't the case; I'd forgotten about this until recently and think it's ridiculous to follow-up on the genesis of a flirt from the Reagan era). But at the time, I just hoped that somebody might slip me a note like that one day in whatever the real world really was.
____________________________________________

Monday morning, post-Elora: Brief meeting with Hannah. She didn't seem to suspect anything. I vacillated between feeling like I was getting away with something (in a negative sense) and that a new door was opening (in a good sense).

Late morning: Theatre class with Elora. She did not look impressed at all. I think I said something like "So, er, did that happen?" (which I was cribbing from a movie which I have long since forgotten about) and she said "Jesus I don't know, I've got class" and disappeared into the hallway.

Conclusion: Okay. At least they're both speaking to me. That settled, I stopped worrying. Temporarily. I didn't have a great deal of measured response in me at the time. I was either sure that I was in big trouble or that the whole thing was teenage melodrama (that I was, fortunately, somehow, immune to) and it'd all work out in the end.

From this point on, it all gets a bit hazy. The week passed without incident but I remember kissing Hannah at one point in enough detail that I thought it would be unwise to mention that I'd been kissing her friend. So - what's a gentleman to do - but not bring up the topic and return the kiss?

(for anyone who suggests that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, try chivalry on for size and see how easily it fits)

This isn't - or at least I thought it wasn't - as cold as it sounds. I didn't want to hurt anybody and, as mentioned previously, I thought that not-knowing what I was doing was a pretty good defense. I knew that I was going to see Elora on Saturday night (I forget what the pretense was - maybe another movie) and if I had the chance to kiss her quietly in a secluded corner somewhere, I would be very happy.
___________________________________________

Let's leap back to DH for a moment. He's still waiting for the gold (and venomous as hell) snake to back off from his water trough:

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

So far, so good. The reptile gets some liquid refreshment, DH doesn't need anti venom and he's had some company for breakfast. But he's...well...petty about it. I don't think that one can truly feel one has been dissed by a snake, but he makes a good show of it:

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

Or, in less flowery terms, imagine a sandbox spat between five year olds: you don't want to play with me and I hate you. Nyah.

Remember that.
____________________________________________

From this point on, I'm lost.

I remember my state of mind on Saturday (all in all, fairly contained) and remember meeting Elora at the subway station close to my parents house. We walked half way up the church path (which is not a euphemism for anything; the church path was a shortcut), sat a bench and kissed for awhile and I thought I knew what was going to happen next: she was going to suggest that we tell Hannah about us, Hannah would be pissed for awhile but Elora and I would be doing something new and it might eventually turn into something that explained to me why it felt so important.

But it didn't work out that way.

Elora simply informed me that her friendship with Hannah was more important than anything else including (read; especially) me and we had to stop what we were doing. There were a few more kisses and I remember holding very tightly to her as we parted at the subway. The scenario, however, was clear; friendship was more important than boys.

And as much as I liked the kissing/holding and so on, I really couldn't argue with her logic.

At least it ended quietly, right? Nobody started yelling. Especially not at me. It was over and I was thinking 'this will be hilariously funny in a few years.' It all felt rather silly. And I was determined to not be affected by it in any way.
____________________________________________

The following Monday: I'm not sure exactly what transpired over the rest of that weekend, but I met Nancy (remember her?) in the hallway and she announced matter-of-factly that none of them were ever going to speak to me.

"We've decided that you're not worth talking to," she said, "and the last thing you're going to hear from me is my telling you this."

For some reason, this wasn't as withering as she intended it to be. I also didn't take it very seriously. "Beg pardon?" I asked innocently.

"I said the last thing..."

"You're talking to me. I think you just blew your original position," I interrupted.

She didn't look impressed at my logic.

Well, I thought it was funny.

Tough crowd.

She glared at me and walked away. I have a faint memory of getting the finger, but Nancy probably wouldn't have done it. Lesson learned: I couldn't joke my way out of it. For that matter, I was slightly pissed that Nancy was pissed at me, especially considering the fact that we never had the date we were set up for in the first place. She was pissed at me on spec. I convinced myself that was insane and went on with my day.

A brief meeting with Hannah: I remember her repeating Nancy's reasoning to me and I didn't go for the punchline. She looked low and angry and that she didn't want to talk. I felt that she should at least have the common courtesy to scream at me. So that didn't affect me.

Elora was at her locker. She skipped Hannah and Nancy's speech entirely and wouldn't speak to me. I talked to her, said that this all felt stupid, said that I was sorry if anyone was hurt but I didn't - none of us - quite knew what we were doing. I really hope I didn't quote that line from Purple Rain about "I never wanted to cause you any sorrow," but it's not inconceivable (and I would have blocked it out by this time). And finally, upon being labelled as a cad, I turned my heel and shrugged.

To hell with this, I thought. I can do better than all of you.
___________________________________________

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

Remember that too.
___________________________________________

All of the above took place on a Monday, where I was still rolling my eyes at it. By Friday, I went the other direction. I was, indeed, a cad. None of them were ever going to speak to me, regardless of the several years left of high school that we had to spend together. I saw them walking past me in shopping malls in decades to come, staring at the floor or simply looking disapprovingly in my direction. And the stories - the scandal would grow. My soul was at risk. I had broken the unwritten rules of mankind. I'd been reading a lot of Ibsen and Chekhov for my theatre classes and I was feeling like one of the side characters, the ones described in side notes as "of little consequence" or "unwilling to understand his own limitations."

Most importantly, I was going to carry this shame to my grave. Or, in the moaning my subconcious was indulging in: I was going to carry this shame to my graaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave.
___________________________________________

The next Monday, it was all over.

Nancy gave me a letter saying that she'd like to start speaking to me again. Hannah (with one suspicious raised eyebrow) said, essentially, "Yeah, we're cool. I guess," and I felt it would be stupid to question it further. Elora gave me a coupon for a free night on a waterbed (self-designed) which I actually kept in a copy of Brideshead Revisited until my sister found it and asked what the hell I was up to in my spare time.

I wasn't going to carry anything to my grave. I'd been a jerk and, jerkdom complete, had either been a very lucky soul or they just decided that there were better things to do than be angry at me for the next few decades. Or maybe I'm remembering the timeline incorrectly; I certainly had motivations wrong. I told Hannah years later that she looked angry and Elora looked hurt. "It was probably the other way around," she told me. Two possibilities, neither one really matters in the 21st century. Rashomon-timing turns everything into something different years after.

And I never tried to redeem the waterbed coupon- I didn't know how serious the offer was. The the night on the waterbed might have involved little more than toy boats and singing sea shanties. Blessed with hindsight, I should have shown up anyhow. Even being laughed out the door would probably have been fun.
____________________________________________

Why DH Lawrence? somebody asks again.

I'll tell you next time. It'll bring it all to a close. Just remember- I never promised logic, only past experience.

Concluded at Expiation: Finale.

Sometimes I feel...

2010-04-04T11:10:00.005-04:00

It's the wrong holiday for the clip here, but the whole point of the clip is sort of disconnect. Pier Paolo Pasolini was probably the last person in the world who should have filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew - notorious libertine, Marxist leanings, cause célèbre of Rome, you know the drill. But he managed to get something on film that's never quite been matched - a literal rendition of the gospel that's anything but literal, down to the mismatched soundtrack (everything from American gospel music to African chorales) and eerie photography.

The scene below is a nativity scene, a million miles away from the three wise men and a manger on a dark starlit night. Pasolini went the neo-realist route and chose non-actors from the towns in Southern Italy where he shot. It's a very quiet religious film, so when the crucifixion happens it really hits you. Pasolini followed it up years later with Salo, which is about as profane as this one is sacred. So...yin and yang fulfilled?

Happy Easter.

Addenda behaviour

2010-03-31T16:14:00.004-04:00

Follows Lion behaviour
_________________________________________

Just a follow-up urged by those very few in the know; the stroke victim discussed by Bernie and the rest of us had died a few hours before that luncheon. We all knew about it when we sat down. The dangers of not maintaining good physical health, a low-sodium diet and frequent medical checkups were also put on the table by Bernie. Those of us who had lost family members to similar ailments held his sense of timing and perspective in low regard.

This relates to the few days between Bernie apologizing or trying to paint himself as unfairly persecuted. The reader can decide which one is warranted. I've heard that both sociopaths and narcissists lack empathy: Bernie didn't quite qualify. In times of stress, he felt intensely sorry for himself.

Respectfully - March 2010

Seven years

2010-03-29T21:17:00.006-04:00

A note from James today, on the seventh anniversary of my father's death from cancer.

Just something I thought you should know, even though you already know it. Your father was a kind and good man. You are living proof of this. Besides, how many men would stop to have breakfast after a snow storm with one of his son's 28 year old bum friends? Just a thought...

Thank you James.

Lion behaviour

2010-03-18T22:39:00.014-04:00

Follows Alpha Behaviour
________________________

There’s a postscript to l’affaire Bernie that either involves garden-variety rivalry or the true never-forgive-never-forget mentality that most people keep under wraps. Ellis was raised in a small town so I thought he might understand the mechanics of the secular service organizations that dot rural communities. I asked, “Are Lions Club members a bunch of vindictive bastards?” and while he suggested that rival groups might provide oversize stickers for the appliances they donate to the local community centre, it rarely goes much past that. I’ve never knowingly met a Lions Club member outside of Bernie (although I’ve got some Rotarians and Gyros among blood relations) and I’m not suggesting that their activities are anything less than entirely on the up-and-up. But given recent events, there might be some internal tensions between members that bleed through from time to time.

When somebody told me about Bernie stretching the truth in 2003 on a Lions Club online forum (with a helpful suggestion that I might want to share the news with my former Ministry compatriots), I ignored it. I wasn't adding fuel to a fire I wanted nothing to do with and hadn't started in the first place. But I'm not saying that Bernie's online missive wasn't an all-out lie. It was reported to me as something along the lines of I’ve stood on the deck of a ship and felt the spray of the northwest passage more times than my fingers and toes could count (in the real world, he'd visited once). So what? Bernie was free to embarrass himself or be proud of his actions on his own time. I wasn’t interested in his motivations and wasn’t about to register to that forum to read it myself.

Seven years later, a different co-worker from the Ministry (and fellow Lion, I assume) was nice (?) enough to send me a PDF of that forum page “so you can see it for yourself.” It’s nothing earth-shattering. The original report had been pretty accurate. Again: so what? My life hasn't been enhanced by seeing the original material. And the statute of limitations on any potential embarrassment over the entire affair expired moments after Bernie’s inevitable response of “Maybe I did exaggerate a bit, but the bigger issue is…” to his wife or whomever dropped the dime on him way back when.
___________________________________________

These bigger issues brought out so often by Bernie were on my mind when he invited me to dinner. He’d left the ministry a few weeks earlier, willingly but not without incident. He'd recently been part of a heated discussion at an office lunch about a colleague who had suffered a stroke. Bernie and he had never seen eye-to-eye: the phrase "It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy" was dropped and whether it was intended ironically (Bernie’s first defense) or simply a poor choice of words (his second take) or just a stupid thing to say (something he tried to laugh with, or laugh off) was irrelevant. It went over badly. He eventually apologized to everyone (save for the stroke victim) via text message, declared himself forgiven after flirting with declaring himself persecuted and spun the whole event as something we all could learn from. Somehow. The logic was a bit shaky.

His dinner invite to me was almost straightforward. “Claire and I are heading to Sarnia and the cottage,” said Bernie between sips of a rum and coke, “it might be a good opportunity for dinner if you and Abby are willing to dine with us.”

I didn't mind having a drink with Bernie: I didn't want dinner. ‘Willing to dine’ carried a faint whiff of burning martyr to it that I didn’t want to burst into flame. Given past precedent, I was relatively sure that any dinner would involve a store-bought entrée (from a proudly Canadian-owned retailer) and a long discussion about the value and the need for free markets and the inherent virtue in pull-up-your-socks determination and how tax cuts make jobs for everyone and perhaps a few slightly weepy asides about the truth of Gordon Lightfoot songs and a friendly reminder that Ralph Klein did just fine as far as Albertans were concerned, maybe the rest of Canada had better take notice.

Gordon Lightfoot tracks on the repeat-all setting did nothing for me (although far be it from me to judge another’s iPod fodder) and the tax cut/free market sermon gets tiresome (although hardcore, you-gotta-listen-to-me Socialists are just as boring as hardcore I’m-giving-you-the-straight-talk Capitalists in close quarters) and I’m sure dinner would have been tasty and the Niagara wine poured often and the rancor aimed at a generic them rather than me. I would have been welcome to contest their points as I wished; their evening of political theatre required some give-and-take after all. But it was going to be their theatre, their script, their schedule and Bernie & Claire would act as Producer, Director and Dramaturge. My involvement was destined to be something between spectator and parishioner as they delivered the Good News about whatever policy announcements were nearest and dearest to their hearts.

I didn’t have anything against Claire. And Bernie had shown himself to be a stand-up guy in the past. But I didn’t want to be politely reminded of the other side by a couple who were otherwise fiercely proud of their own one-side-fits-all approach to living. They were experts on changing topics if you questioned them too closely, becoming quite emotional from time to time, revealing their depths of devotion. When dinner becomes a call to action or, more manipulatively, a ‘we’ve got a lot we can offer’ meeting that ends in a gift of position papers and invitations to fundraisers and information sessions for investment opportunities…the event ceases to be a dinner.

I declined politely. He accepted politely and presumably went onto other potential guests.
___________________________________________

The forum post was reported to me a few weeks later by somebody convinced the world had to know. It meant little to me in 2003 and significantly less in 2010. But somebody’s held onto it for reasons I don’t want to think about. Fill in your own lions den joke on your own time if you must. I just report whatever finds its way to my inbox.

Perspective

2010-03-03T12:39:00.004-05:00

Declaring bankruptcy in Canada?

- You're a aberration.

- You're part of the crowd.

- Take heart. Things are looking up.

- Actually, things aren't going so well.

It's always nice to keep informed.

Expiation: Entr'acte

2010-02-25T23:28:00.024-05:00

Follows Expiation: Prologue, Part One and Part Two
____________________________________________

Before we get into the long-awaited by none Expiation: Part Three, let's refresh our memories about DH Lawrence for a moment. When we left him near the end of Part One he (or his surrogate in poetry-land, but let's take a leap into the aether and just refer to Lawrence's narrator as Lawrence, what say?) was flitting about in his pyjamas in a courtyard in Sicily somewhere close to Etna. He'd run into a snake at his water trough and had decided that he was just fine waiting for a few minutes before approaching said trough, because:

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

So to wrap up: an expat-Brit in his PJs doesn't want to get too close to the pretty gold snake for fear of becoming said snake's breakfast. The snake himself isn't too fussed about Lawrence and is far more interested in getting a sip of cool water on a hot day. It's Lawrence who's got issues. He's the one who's thinking that, what the hell, let's kill the snake. It's what one does, after all. A snake un-killed is a snake to bite somebody at an inconvenient time and ruin lunch at best and Christmas for their next of kin at worst. But Lawrence isn't quite into the whole violent approach either:

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

DH Lawrence the author, rather than his eponymous poem narrator, had a touch of TB once or twice in his life and fled to Sicily for the fresh air. Let's assume that TB patients didn't meet much of a welcome wagon in the days before advanced antibiotics and ol' DH was finding it hard to fill the hours in his cottage. If I were DH the author, I might be amused to see a snake at my water trough. Company is company, right?

As Lawrence the narrator, he can go a bit over the top about it:

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

Pay special attention to the word honoured. A gold snake might not be great news in close quarters, but is still a pretty formidable creature and something to admire if you're into beasts with an elegant sense of locomotion. As long as he wasn't getting bitten, having a snake around might be sort of cool. Of course, he's supposed to kill it or at least supposed to listen to those voices of his education. These voices inconvenience Lawrence the narrator, fascinated DH the author and messed with the head of a kid early in his grade 12 year because it reminded him of a girl. Or of being a jerk around said girl, to be precise.

Let's not get into that just yet. It's a long story that doesn't end particularly well in terms of logic.

Let's leap forward to the part after the next part, where the aforementioned kid was listening to too much Don McLean. Before Hannah and Elora and DH Lawrence and the rest, he listened to Crossroads a lot. It's contemplative early 70's folk music, the kind of thing one could sing while staring meaningfully into the middle distance. A pleasant enough bit of nonsense, tailor-made for teenagers who take things too seriously.

Given what happens next, the kid would have loved this video. Solitary imagery and the promise of great portent. All in 3min 40sec.

Followed by Expiation: Part Three.

Trolls and prostate cancer

2010-02-05T20:03:00.014-05:00

Jack Layton has contracted prostate cancer. Most of the comment boards on Canadian news outlets are filling up with messages along the lines of “Get well soon, Jack” with the occasional proviso of “I don’t care for your politics, but I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. So get well soon anyhow.”

It’s a free country and anyone who can type is welcome to leave their two cents, but when you cruise the boards you’ll see a lot of word-for-word cross-posting, sometimes under different names. There's either some very efficient posters out there or the Astroturf really does bloom 365 days a year. Cruise them for yourself and look for the trends; I’ve just chosen the ones that caught my attention.

Mildly snippy, from the National Post-

“I wish Jack a speedy recovery, I'd say god bless but that would offend the socialists.”

The old switcheroo, from CTVnews.ca-

“I don't care much for his cancer, but I hope his political views flourish.”

Let’s beat up the CBC, from CBCnews.ca-

“I'm just waiting for the CBC and the leftwing press gallery to start blaming PM Harper. What are they going to call this one - prostategate?”

Something barbed and not quite effective that invokes Nixon, from the Globe and Mail-

“I just donated $2 to help find a cure for cancer. In that Richard Nixon War on Cancer kinda way.”

Pragmatism, from the Star:

"No one is indispensable. The leadership of a political party in Canada is a full time job that requires all of the energy and time that any individual can muster. The fight against cancer will require all of the energy and time that any individual can muster. This is the time for Jack Layton to step down and allow someone else to take over. The NDP party is far bigger than any one individual. Jack is not irreplaceable. He should step down until he beats this cancer then he can run again for the leadership." (mirrored on the Post as well)

Those darn unions and I'm sorry but those darn unions, from CityTv.com-

At the announcement of Layton’s press conference:

"I hope he is quitting. I think I almost have it enough (sic) and will move out of Toronto too many unions."

After the cancer was announced:

"I put my comment before he announced his condition and I was shooting in the darn (sic) knowing consequences of dealing with unions. Just because it turned out to be worse than I predicted doesn't mean I am the bad guy. I hate to be right but more I hate unions and anyone supporting them."

Glass-half-full and crisis is another name for opportunity, from Rabble.ca-

“There will probably be an outpouring of sympathy and not to be too strategic about this - but older men are a demographic where the NDP really needs to do a lot better - so maybe this can open some doors.”

Everyone’s got an opinion, after all.

Political behaviour (crazy)

2010-01-28T19:59:00.095-05:00

"If they give you ruled paper, write the other way."

- Juan Ramon Jimenez, cited by Ray Bradbury at the opening of Fahrenheit 451

"Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy."

- Attributed to Richard Linklater, quoted by REM in the mid-90s and muttered by anyone on their way out the door from something they care about for centuries before that

__________________________________________

September, 2001. Post-9/11 by a few days. I worked with a guy who dryly suggested that Afghanistan be bombed with pornography and fried pork rinds as part of a war on culture (Iraq wasn't quite in the picture yet) and another who said that while 6,000 people might have died in the towers (this was the early estimation: the final count was half that and still cold comfort), he believed that 15,000 people had been killed that year by Nike and McDonald's and The Gap and other American interests.

I didn't take either suggestion too seriously. I thought the pork & porn approach was firmly tongue in cheek and the 15,000 dead represented a number pulled out of the air to embellish an ill-timed discussion about globalization. Neither suggestion accomplished much more than letting these guys vent some spleen. A lot of the early responses boiled down to two philosophies: the shock and awe types willing to 'turn sand into glass' and those convinced that none of it would have happened if Chomsky was President (I didn't even think he'd been a candidate) and that Nike/McDonald's/The Gap and assorted others had better be taken to task. The loudest reps from both camps adopted an approach that boiled down to "I want you to listen to me! I want to save the world!" with special emphasis on the first seven words in that phrase. Sufficiently amplified, it was difficult to tell those camps apart but for the company they kept.

Shock and tension doesn't bring out the best in anybody; free-form anger is a Grade A manipulation tactic regardless of where it comes from. You're guaranteed a wide audience when you're loud enough that people won't question your facts or motivations for fear of becoming that guy who's screaming at the guy who wouldn't stop screaming. You can always make a case later by explaining how you might not have chosen the right way to say what you said but your intentions were coming from an honest place. If it helps you sleep at night, so be it. I've used that approach myself. I've even been sure that I meant it.

All this came back to me upon realizing that almost nine years after 9/11, Pat Robertson still hasn't shut up and still creates his own reality. His deal-with-the-Devil comments are pretty famous by now (you can see them at the 30-second mark here), but his ride on the coattails of Jerry Falwell back in 2001 is a bit scarier to me. To be fair, it was Falwell who suggested that the 9/11 attacks could be traced to feminists, abortions, gays & lesbians and the ACLU as a whole. Pat simply agreed with him. And since he could make that leap of logic, it's not that far away from deciding that the Devil flattened Haiti.

Falwell sorta-kinda apologized in 2001 and Robertson said that his agreement had been taken out of context. Pat's Haitian response was a bit more oblique: a spokesperson for CBN pointed out that "Dr. Robertson never stated that the earthquake was God’s wrath," neatly sidestepping the fact that Pat's still claiming to know what the Devil's been up to of late.

Call me old fashioned. Call me a sucker for the reasoned argument. Show me the math. Make a case. When things get nightmarish, keep your powder dry. Blaming an earthquake on a deal with the Devil or framing 9/11 as divine revenge against gays, lesbians and the ACLU stem from the same place of crazy. Disgraceful then, depressing now. Ad nauseum.
___________________________________________

I once had somebody ask me Isn't it okay to have a crazy response to a crazy situation? (or words to that effect) and I've never been able to answer it properly. 'Okay' is a broad term in that context. 'Not unexpected' might fit better. And even with that proviso, crazy is still in the eye of the beholder. But that beholder is still bound by their own structure of sanity to decide what crazy looks like. And to realize that, regardless of intent, crazy remains crazy.

Looking at a different place of crazy (or maybe 'irrational' says it better): shortly after Pauline Kael died I received an email that boiled her life down to a few sentences. "It's a shame that Kael didn't use her position to champion women's causes related to film. Just having ovaries isn't enough." I read it, considered how badly I wanted the fifteen seconds it took me to read it returned to me, erased the mail and went about my business. The author of that sentiment (if not that slogan, I thought I'd seen it on a lapel badge or a t-shirt somewhere) didn't need my permission for his opinion. It wasn't my place to change his mind.

But I wasn't able to get past the dismissal of Kael as a woman and a critic simply for not fitting into the political box that he thought she belonged in. That was crazy. I was pretty sure that having ovaries was enough for any number of things and it struck me as patronizing to suggest otherwise. Having ovaries isn't enough to earn you the right to live the life you want? Did Kael really deserve to be labeled as an all-around disappointment to anyone since she had allegedly squandered her ovaries and declined an opportunity to serve as a mouthpiece for their movement? Wasn't she free to spend her time comparing Last Tango in Paris to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring instead?

I think the author considered the email to be a consciousness raising exercise rather than a casual observation and I was probably expected to engage. I was going to reply with a brief essay explaining how my grandmother hadn't fulfilled her potential in assuming a set of wheels and becoming a wagon. Or that Deborah Grey, capable of making u-turns to her advantage, might have been the best spokesperson for Greyhound that the world had ever seen. And Emma Goldman might have put her team-building skills into becoming one hell of a Mary Kay Cosmetics rep. None of these ideas were any less unreasonable than being disappointed in Kael's choice of inspiration, but I was relatively sure they'd receive a less than enthusiastic response.

I looked at the can of worms I'd been presented with and wondered if it might be magically transformed into a life-changing incident for everyone involved after a few dozen emails or a lively evening's discussion at the pub.

The odds looked pretty damn slim. I ignored the message.

Life goes on.

Jan 2010
___________________________________________

Preceded by Alpha behaviour, Employment behaviour & Worse employment behavior, Mousey behaviour, Naked behaviour and Tactless behaviour. And that's that.

A clip - Truly, Madly, Deeply

2010-01-08T07:16:00.005-05:00

It's a rather dark piece of whimsy: Nina's husband dies. Then he returns in the standard movie-magic sort of way (only she can see him - we think) and their love is untouched by the ravages of death. Unfortunately, Jamie's a forthright sort with strong political beliefs ("I still attend meetings," he says self-rightously, referring to his proud stature among the other dead activists) and he's got horribly cold feet and has been staying up all night watching movies with his friends. His dead friends ("'Fitzcarraldo' or 'Five Easy Pieces?' Right. We'll take a vote...").

All you need to know from this clip is that he and his dead dawgs decided to informally renovate Nina's flat. Jamie never liked her old carpet and is in the process of explaining why it should simply go when Nina pitches a fit and throws his dead buddies into the street. Or back into the void. Or something. He can't understand why this is an issue for her and she can't explain why it's important to have her own things and her own life. It's a run-of-the-mill lover's quarrel and she loves him no less for it, but it's not...ideal. It's not what you remember when you crave the attention of your dead husband.

And it has been, on some level, planned by Jamie. The scene below represents the best of the late Anthony Minghella. Jamie loves Nina but, well-remembered or not, is quite dead (side-trips to this world notwithstanding). He knows it. And she thinks he has a horrible Spanish accent and she can't quite let him go, but still understands that she has to.

Part of a misguided New Year's resolution

2010-01-05T16:25:00.015-05:00

This is the most embarrassing meme I’ve ever been talked into, but what the hell. Admitting you have a problem is part of the process, right?

The ten turns of phrase (or clichés) which I overuse on a weekly (if not daily) basis are…

In no particular order of frequency:

1. That’s our due diligence.
2. Bastards. Bastards all. (inspired by Hunter S. Thompson, often muttered in disapproval)
3. Fair enough.
4. I’ve had a lovely time. But this wasn’t it. (blame Groucho Marx for that one)
5. Can I borrow you for a minute?
6. We can have the best of both worlds if…
7. God has mercy. (said most often with an ironic shrug in response to something unpleasant - occasionally thrown out with sincerity in response to something unexpectedly merciful)
8. The worst thing that’ll happen is…
9. Near enough for jazz.
10. Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

C’mon. Post your own top ten and join the fun. Who could resist?

Habitual holiday message

2009-12-24T11:49:00.017-05:00

"I'm not philosophical about Christmas," I said to Abby.

"I don't believe it," she said. "It'll come to the surface after those few layers of 'meh' get peeled away."

It's not like this lack of introspection is a loss to the world as a whole, but it was a bit surprising to me. I had just launched a newsletter, had to figure out travel plans, desperately wanted a few quiet days with family and hadn't thought much further than the logistics required to do as little as possible for the duration of the holiday. The best I can manage thus far is to call a truce against whatever's been bothering me for the last 90 days and recommend the rest of the world do so as well. Take advantage of everything being closed and quiet or indulge the few places that are serving really good Thai food and are open when you're bored.

If you're in a giving mood, you might want to think about this:

“The Ontario Association of Food Banks says there's been a record increase in the number of people turning to food banks in the province since last fall…The association says the economic downturn has made this its most difficult year, with the number of people served reaching historic highs.

There's been a 19 per cent spike in the number of people turning to food banks since last year — compared with an increase of 11 per cent in 2008 and 10 per cent during the recession of the early 1990s. In all, the association says 375,000 Ontario residents use food banks each month, even though one third of people in those households are employed. Many food banks have not been able to meet the increased demand, with one in four reducing the amount of food distributed in their hampers.”

- CBC News, Dec 1, 2009

In lieu of presents (and in response to the oft-repeated statement "I've got too much stuff" from various family members), everyone is getting a year-long donation to the OAFB via CanadaHelps.org which helps you to do that sort of thing monthly. It supports a variety of Canadian charities right across the political spectrum, and in These Difficult Economic Times it won't go unwelcome. Just my two cents worth. And before this sounds too sanctimonious, I'm also coveting a LG Blu-Ray player at my local Best Buy. Full disclosure's always so embarassing.

Operation Eyesight was the favourite charity of my uncle, who passed away a few years ago. I maintain a donation in his memory. Both of my parents have been affected by cancer, I've made donations to the Cancer Society in the past but food banks seem more urgent this year. Karen Selick made a case against them in the National Post a few years ago that got under my skin; her case boiled down to them being inefficient and therefore should be eliminated. The whole hunger/unemployment/need aspect sort of fell by the wayside by her estimation (part of the larger problem that didn't get a fast cure) and yeah, there's got to be a better way. Agreed. Until then, you've still got to eat. Somebody does, at least.

As stated earlier, it's Christmas. The faithful can drag out the Dickens, dust off Dylan Thomas, dig out the long-past Christmas cards or photos or keepsakes or simply whatever image they hold of the season and try not to dwell (as unavoidable as it feels) on whoever is gone or simply lost from you. Allow a few hours for the unabashed sentiment (good or bad) and then look around at the present. My wife is making beeswax candles in the next room. My son, with a slight cold, is running around happily and I've made chicken soup with fresh carrots and celery and garlic and a little pancetta to brown it all at the beginning. I'm seeing family Christmas Day and the 27th. Nobody's sick this year. Everyone kept their jobs. There's enough for everyone and some left to share. That counts as a holiday for me.

Post-script, 1:07pm:

"What are you blogging?" asked Abby. "Something happy?"

"Let's call it happy," I answered.

"That'll do," she said cheerfully. "As long as it's happy."

'Tis the season.

Dec 24th, 2009

The second shot went into the foot of an entire political party

2009-12-15T18:01:00.004-05:00

This needs no introduction. Wait. Maybe it does. Some webmaster or some publicist or simply some screener saying "No. Really. This'll be great. Any publicity is good publicity. Let 'em scream. It's just a joke."

Inexcusable. Juvenile. Self destructive. Potentially harmful. Needlessly malicious. Providing fodder for their opponents and bringing the entire party down with one stupid gesture. Rabble and the National Post are weighing in with pretty much what you'd expect so...if you like that sort of thing, enjoy. If you're revolted, you're not alone.