My city is changing again. Every so often I turn down a street and discover a new building or an empty lot that I'd never noticed before, and it occurs to me that a whole cycle of construction and destruction has wheeled around without me noticing, and now there's a puke-ugly car dealership lording it over the block where a row of old brick warehouses once stood. Or a crumbling old movie theatre disappears behind its facade and a grocery store unfolds in its place.
I'm sorry, I can't continue this. I have no internet right now at home. My ISP is staffed by bureaucratic assholes who like to make us wait for a week before sending out a technician to "hook up" our computer to the "internet". I use my oh-so ironic quotation marks in order to highlight the fact that he hooked up nothing to nothing, and that the internet is not being piped in to our new place. Now we wait for tech support to call us. That's right: we don't call tech support. Tech support takes our calls, fumbles around and then tells us when someone who knows something about IT calls back. Our ISP: run out of a guano-covered tarpaper shed in an abandoned lot.
Yes, I have the internet at work. That's where I am. But as I type I can hear the business manager and the legal affairs guy chatting away in the next room about contracts and sales and markets. And I have realized something: as decent folk as they are, as decent as all these employees and middle- and upper managers may be, as much as they smile and drink water from paper cups and ask me what I'm doing for the long weekend, I just hate them. Really. I can't think because the sound of their murmured voices in the next room squishes my brain until all the metaphors dribble out. I have jokes to crack and stories to relate and thoughts that I've been collecting for the last week at least, but the email announcing free Avril Lavigne tickets for management first and then employees if any tickets are left over swishes down like a giant broom and all is swept away.
On the plus side, our new place kicks so much ass that, um, there's sore asses for blocks around. Now that I think about it, our new place may not kick ass so much as commit a lot of sodomy.
Monday, July 25, 2005
Thursday, July 21, 2005
things we found in our new place
1. a shrimp beneath the stove. We poked at it, asked a few questions (how's the plumbing here? When does the building manager turn the rads on?) but it refused to answer. It had gathered its dust bunnies and was content to rest.
2. a pepper inside the freezer, and I don't mean open-up-the-freezer-door-and-there's-your-pepper, I mean pry-off-the-bottom-panel-and-there's-your-stanky-old-pepper-just-settin'-a-spell.
3. black feathers under the stove, fridge, inside the door of the fridge. I'm an understanding person, but black feathers? What were these people cooking up? Crow cake? Raven ragout? Blackbird blancmange?
4. Black mold in the freezer, which we killed with every single thing we had in our house that was remotely toxic, chemical, sharp, blunted, horsepowered, whatever.
5. an incomprehensible piece of high-technology lightweight plastic mesh clearly intended to cover something, but no object looks appropriate, so it must be a cover for some other equally high-tech piece of plastic. Whatever it is, it's meant to help outdoorsy types stay alive on the North Pole and at the Earth's core.
6. Speaking of the Earth's core, the stuff under the stove was clearly part of the mantle, that miles-deep impenetrable crust made of rock, metals and utter filth.
7. We also found the hollow laughter of the 'cleaners' who had apparently come by a few weeks ago.
8. Plus we locked ourselves out and had to use boltcutters to sleep in our appointed bed.
Moving.
2. a pepper inside the freezer, and I don't mean open-up-the-freezer-door-and-there's-your-pepper, I mean pry-off-the-bottom-panel-and-there's-your-stanky-old-pepper-just-settin'-a-spell.
3. black feathers under the stove, fridge, inside the door of the fridge. I'm an understanding person, but black feathers? What were these people cooking up? Crow cake? Raven ragout? Blackbird blancmange?
4. Black mold in the freezer, which we killed with every single thing we had in our house that was remotely toxic, chemical, sharp, blunted, horsepowered, whatever.
5. an incomprehensible piece of high-technology lightweight plastic mesh clearly intended to cover something, but no object looks appropriate, so it must be a cover for some other equally high-tech piece of plastic. Whatever it is, it's meant to help outdoorsy types stay alive on the North Pole and at the Earth's core.
6. Speaking of the Earth's core, the stuff under the stove was clearly part of the mantle, that miles-deep impenetrable crust made of rock, metals and utter filth.
7. We also found the hollow laughter of the 'cleaners' who had apparently come by a few weeks ago.
8. Plus we locked ourselves out and had to use boltcutters to sleep in our appointed bed.
Moving.
Monday, July 11, 2005
the first family plot
Me and The Lotus are bad people who want to ruin our future children's future. Here's how:
A year or so ago, in between assignments, I spent a couple of afternoons as an extra for the series I now produce. The show is an historical doc series that mixes interviews and archival footage with ultra-low-budget reenactments, and the producer plucked me from the extras talent garden because a) I was her friend, b) between trips I tended to sit at home in my bathrobe and let my brain go to cheese, and c) being an extra on the show pays slightly better than bathrobe sitting. Slightly.
It also helped that I bore a strong resemblance to the person I was playing, a Nova Scotian man (just like me!) who had lost his family to a fire in the aftermath of a storm (not like me!). I had been the one who interviewed him for the program, and my first thought upon seeing him was My God we look alike and then is he thinking the same thing? and then they're totally going to want me to play him in the reenactments.
Since months later I found myself dressed in a pair of ill-fitting pyjamas, choking on mineral oil smoke and pretending to be struggling for my life.
You'll be happy to know that I escaped through the bedroom window, slowly peeling away pieces of venetian blind until I was able to poke my head through the window. It's difficult to see in this photo, but what I'm actually clutching is an actual child.
Several days later I awake in the hospital, where the compassionate and well made-up doctor looks very very concerned. I am made of stone.
Now that I look at these photos again, I have to wonder: if I'm coming to after several days in the hospital, why is my face still smudged from the fire? Anyway, the doctor has left and now the nurse is compassionate.
They make the mistake of telling me that my family has died in the fire.
I thought I was a worldly guy, but I'd never had the experience of struggling in a bed and being held down by several strange women. Anyway. This next one is my favourite. I'm supposed to be yelling and grief-stricken, but I appear to be singing with a mask on. It's some kind of oxygen-deprived opera.
I whip my head around until the mask comes loose, and the scene shifts from Il Convalesci to Heavy Med Elvis.
After the stills came back from reenactments I selected a few from the duplicates and brought them home for The Lotus' amusement. She decided that we would slip them into our family photo album. Years later, when our currently unborn beans find these photos of agony and torment, they'll say, "Dad, what happened to you?" And then The Lotus will whisper "That was from Dad's first family" and close the album gently but firmly, as I exit stonyfaced from the room.
A year or so ago, in between assignments, I spent a couple of afternoons as an extra for the series I now produce. The show is an historical doc series that mixes interviews and archival footage with ultra-low-budget reenactments, and the producer plucked me from the extras talent garden because a) I was her friend, b) between trips I tended to sit at home in my bathrobe and let my brain go to cheese, and c) being an extra on the show pays slightly better than bathrobe sitting. Slightly.
It also helped that I bore a strong resemblance to the person I was playing, a Nova Scotian man (just like me!) who had lost his family to a fire in the aftermath of a storm (not like me!). I had been the one who interviewed him for the program, and my first thought upon seeing him was My God we look alike and then is he thinking the same thing? and then they're totally going to want me to play him in the reenactments.
Since months later I found myself dressed in a pair of ill-fitting pyjamas, choking on mineral oil smoke and pretending to be struggling for my life.
You'll be happy to know that I escaped through the bedroom window, slowly peeling away pieces of venetian blind until I was able to poke my head through the window. It's difficult to see in this photo, but what I'm actually clutching is an actual child.
Several days later I awake in the hospital, where the compassionate and well made-up doctor looks very very concerned. I am made of stone.
Now that I look at these photos again, I have to wonder: if I'm coming to after several days in the hospital, why is my face still smudged from the fire? Anyway, the doctor has left and now the nurse is compassionate.
They make the mistake of telling me that my family has died in the fire.
I thought I was a worldly guy, but I'd never had the experience of struggling in a bed and being held down by several strange women. Anyway. This next one is my favourite. I'm supposed to be yelling and grief-stricken, but I appear to be singing with a mask on. It's some kind of oxygen-deprived opera.
I whip my head around until the mask comes loose, and the scene shifts from Il Convalesci to Heavy Med Elvis.
After the stills came back from reenactments I selected a few from the duplicates and brought them home for The Lotus' amusement. She decided that we would slip them into our family photo album. Years later, when our currently unborn beans find these photos of agony and torment, they'll say, "Dad, what happened to you?" And then The Lotus will whisper "That was from Dad's first family" and close the album gently but firmly, as I exit stonyfaced from the room.
mixmaster, cut avaster
You have been boarded by the Dread Pirate Query/Return. I've realized that if my personality were a kind of sentence, it would have to be the nonsense sentence written in the passive voice. What kind of sentence would you be?
avast
One of the unexpected pleasures of using Microshaft Word is having its grammar checker moronically attempt to correct nonsense sentences written in the passive voice. I just wrote "You have been boarded by the Dread Pirate Yes/No" on a set of interview questions I'm editing, and I've discovered that a single click of the mouse can transform that into "The Dread Pirate Yes/No has boarded you". The active voice of that sentence makes it sound infinitely more like you're getting shagged by Aristotle.
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
the summer blockbusters
Revenge of the Sith - George Lucas and Peter Jackson duel to see who can make the longest contiguous multimedia entertainment franchise in history. Lucas launches a cheap but entertaining offensive with the original Star Wars trilogy. Jackson ducks and counters with Fellowship of the Ring. Lucas throws out a concealing cloud of Star Wars paperbacks. Jackson charges through the zone of pulp and dumps the mighty weight of the Two Towers on Lucas' head, but not before Lucas releases hordes of venomous Clone Wars episodes and Xbox games. Jackson shields himself with Return of the King, then reveals himself to be the mysterious Darth Slovenous. He jumps back in time and compels the midichlorians to create J.R.R. Tolkien out of thin air. Tolkien writes a terrifying battery of Middle Earth literature, runy looking scribbles, incunabula and napkin doodles, the combined force of which erupt from the past and flatten Lucas' formidable army. He is left with nothing but the Star Wars Holiday Christmas Special. Defeated, he becomes Slovenous' apprentice and takes the name Darth Throatpoucheius. They invade Iraq.
War of the Worlds - In a horrible alternate universe, Tom Cruise never became a celebrity or a Scientologist. Instead he ends up working as a longshoreman in New Jersey with a crappy house and a couple of ungrateful kids. Suddenly Xenu's forces invade and all those alien thetans that had been hanging around in human bodies are transplanted into giant underground machines. Their express mission: kick the living shit out of New England. The cradle of American liberty! Why they hate freedom is not clear, no clearer than the need to vaporize and vampirize people with Noo Joisey and Bawwston accents, but everything is made right when Tom Cruise kills Tim Robbins over a copy of Dianetics in a farmhouse basement. A bolt of lightning transfers the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard into his head. Suddenly a 1000 foot tall level VIII Operating Thetan spitting electricity, Cruise commands all the microbes of the earth to infect the maurading thetans with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He goes on to marry the Eiffel Tower in a same-stature union.
Batman Begins - On opening night there's a lineup to get into the theatre. You're herded through the garish neon-drenced lobby, shuffling from end to the other in a crowd of stinky 13 year olds. You duck under the rope to use the automated ticket kiosk, but all five stations are broken, each in a diferent way. Two of them have 'out of order' signs. After five minutes of trying to wring a couple of tickets out of the machines you duck back under and join your friends. At the counter you buy your tickets and a cheapass heart-shaped brooch to support cancer research. Somehow you're out more than twenty bucks already and you haven't even hit the concession stand. Once you get to the concession stand you find out that you're in the wrong lineup for the chili dog you wanted, so you follow the glum finger down to the lineup at the far end. After you order the chili dog you discover that they don't take debit or credit cards, but you can get gift certificates from the ticket counter. Close to murder, you send your partner off to get the gift certificates, which come in convenient denominations of twenty, twenty, or twenty. Finally you get your chili dog and your change - which is less than you thought it would be - but you've lost your friends, and now you have to pace up and down, scanning the dozen concession queues for the people you came with. Cranky thirteen year old girls stare back at you. One of them shouts Pervert as you pass by. Finally you spot your friends wrestling with giant bags of popcorn at one end. You all regroup by the flavoured popcorn shaker island. Everybody checks their tickets for the cinema. It's number 5, which means you have to pass by the freaky preadolescent automatons on the Dance Dance Revolution machine. It's like Village of the Damned with a techno beat. Once past the guy who rips your ticket in half and functions as a vector for the germs of every single person who's seeing the movie, you enter the theatre. A sudden profound blackness makes you stumble into the person ahead of you, but as your eyes adjust you make out the terraced rows of hunched figures crunching away on great tubs of food. The strange submarine light makes you think of a submerged pyramid in Atlantis, the popcorn eaters in the seats the ghosts of a doomed and slovenly race. Eventually you all find an unbroken row of seats somewhere near the back and you wade in, stepping on old popcorn kernels and the sneakered feet of teens too comatose with diabetic slurpee shock to register the contact. Once seated you realize that you have set yourself between two groups of people whom you know will talk loudly and slowly throughout the entire film. In front of you are a couple of stink-haired church of Satan wannabees who like to shout "Rip his skin off!" whenever the hero appears onscreen. Behind you slumps the weird remedial duo of Neophyte and Initiate, who explain the entire movie to each other in real time. For some reason the Neophyte has never heard of Batman, knows none of the backstory, and has not thought to find out about it until now. He will spend the film asking all kinds of questions to the Initiate, who will answer loudly and carefully, and as far as you can tell, incorrectly. Finally the lights dim and you settle in, chewing on cooling chili dog. First a commercial for soap. Then another one for detergent. Then a commercial for a car. Then another one for the army. Then a PSA telling you to donate to cancer research and to turn off pagers and cells. Then there's a preview for a story about one man's attempt to prove himself against the backdrop of the civil war. Then one about one woman's struggle to find the man she loves in outer space. Then another about a daughter who helps her mother find love in the big city. In the middle of a preview a gay character says something gay and everyone laughs. Martin Lawrence makes a face and everyone laughs. Heather Locklear swings a tennis racket into Tim Allen's crotch and everyone laughs. Will Smith kicks a woman in the face and that gets a big laugh too. Then a preview comes on for A Scanner Darkly, and it looks so fucking cool you could cry, and someone in the audience goes, "Man, that was weird". Then the screen announces Our Feature Presentation. It's in Digital Dolby Sound, so you spend thirty seconds watching an embedded commercial for Digital Dolby Sound. It's also a Warner Brothers film, so you watch the brief embedded commercial. And then, after all that, Batman finally begins.
It's okay.
War of the Worlds - In a horrible alternate universe, Tom Cruise never became a celebrity or a Scientologist. Instead he ends up working as a longshoreman in New Jersey with a crappy house and a couple of ungrateful kids. Suddenly Xenu's forces invade and all those alien thetans that had been hanging around in human bodies are transplanted into giant underground machines. Their express mission: kick the living shit out of New England. The cradle of American liberty! Why they hate freedom is not clear, no clearer than the need to vaporize and vampirize people with Noo Joisey and Bawwston accents, but everything is made right when Tom Cruise kills Tim Robbins over a copy of Dianetics in a farmhouse basement. A bolt of lightning transfers the spirit of L. Ron Hubbard into his head. Suddenly a 1000 foot tall level VIII Operating Thetan spitting electricity, Cruise commands all the microbes of the earth to infect the maurading thetans with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He goes on to marry the Eiffel Tower in a same-stature union.
Batman Begins - On opening night there's a lineup to get into the theatre. You're herded through the garish neon-drenced lobby, shuffling from end to the other in a crowd of stinky 13 year olds. You duck under the rope to use the automated ticket kiosk, but all five stations are broken, each in a diferent way. Two of them have 'out of order' signs. After five minutes of trying to wring a couple of tickets out of the machines you duck back under and join your friends. At the counter you buy your tickets and a cheapass heart-shaped brooch to support cancer research. Somehow you're out more than twenty bucks already and you haven't even hit the concession stand. Once you get to the concession stand you find out that you're in the wrong lineup for the chili dog you wanted, so you follow the glum finger down to the lineup at the far end. After you order the chili dog you discover that they don't take debit or credit cards, but you can get gift certificates from the ticket counter. Close to murder, you send your partner off to get the gift certificates, which come in convenient denominations of twenty, twenty, or twenty. Finally you get your chili dog and your change - which is less than you thought it would be - but you've lost your friends, and now you have to pace up and down, scanning the dozen concession queues for the people you came with. Cranky thirteen year old girls stare back at you. One of them shouts Pervert as you pass by. Finally you spot your friends wrestling with giant bags of popcorn at one end. You all regroup by the flavoured popcorn shaker island. Everybody checks their tickets for the cinema. It's number 5, which means you have to pass by the freaky preadolescent automatons on the Dance Dance Revolution machine. It's like Village of the Damned with a techno beat. Once past the guy who rips your ticket in half and functions as a vector for the germs of every single person who's seeing the movie, you enter the theatre. A sudden profound blackness makes you stumble into the person ahead of you, but as your eyes adjust you make out the terraced rows of hunched figures crunching away on great tubs of food. The strange submarine light makes you think of a submerged pyramid in Atlantis, the popcorn eaters in the seats the ghosts of a doomed and slovenly race. Eventually you all find an unbroken row of seats somewhere near the back and you wade in, stepping on old popcorn kernels and the sneakered feet of teens too comatose with diabetic slurpee shock to register the contact. Once seated you realize that you have set yourself between two groups of people whom you know will talk loudly and slowly throughout the entire film. In front of you are a couple of stink-haired church of Satan wannabees who like to shout "Rip his skin off!" whenever the hero appears onscreen. Behind you slumps the weird remedial duo of Neophyte and Initiate, who explain the entire movie to each other in real time. For some reason the Neophyte has never heard of Batman, knows none of the backstory, and has not thought to find out about it until now. He will spend the film asking all kinds of questions to the Initiate, who will answer loudly and carefully, and as far as you can tell, incorrectly. Finally the lights dim and you settle in, chewing on cooling chili dog. First a commercial for soap. Then another one for detergent. Then a commercial for a car. Then another one for the army. Then a PSA telling you to donate to cancer research and to turn off pagers and cells. Then there's a preview for a story about one man's attempt to prove himself against the backdrop of the civil war. Then one about one woman's struggle to find the man she loves in outer space. Then another about a daughter who helps her mother find love in the big city. In the middle of a preview a gay character says something gay and everyone laughs. Martin Lawrence makes a face and everyone laughs. Heather Locklear swings a tennis racket into Tim Allen's crotch and everyone laughs. Will Smith kicks a woman in the face and that gets a big laugh too. Then a preview comes on for A Scanner Darkly, and it looks so fucking cool you could cry, and someone in the audience goes, "Man, that was weird". Then the screen announces Our Feature Presentation. It's in Digital Dolby Sound, so you spend thirty seconds watching an embedded commercial for Digital Dolby Sound. It's also a Warner Brothers film, so you watch the brief embedded commercial. And then, after all that, Batman finally begins.
It's okay.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
just a good example of why i should't keep a weblog
Last week I went out and picked up out-of-town guests. Some had travelled a few hundred kilometres to get to my apartment, others had actually come halfway round the world! Imagine the specialness. Here's the guest list:
1/2 dozen Gala apples (New Zealand)
1/2 dozen oranges (California)
acorn squash (British Columbia)
seedless watermelon (California)
pears (South Africa)
bananas (Ecuador)
5 lb bag potatoes (Prince Edward Island)
2 lb bag carrots (British Columbia)
300 grams coffee (Guatemala)
1 bottle habanero pepper sauce (Jamaica)
1 bag 'Mayan Sweets' onions (Mexico)
And so on. With the exception of the bags of quinoa and couscous from the organic grocery store down the street, not a single item in my kitchen is grown or manufactured in the province where I live. Would I buy local? Heck yes. Would I be able to pay rent and clothe myself if I did? Heck no! Like the leader of the acting troupe in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, I can do rent and food without the clothes, or clothes and food without the rent, but food is compulsory. I'm aware that economies of scale, government subsidies and numerous sweet deals operate in favour of grocery store chains and the MegaAgriBiz that feeds them, but the relative cheapness of these goods still strikes me as dangerously false. How is it that apples from New Zealand run for twenty cents less per kilogram than the ones grown forty kilometres from my door? What kind of costs must be dispersed and reimbursed to maintain the monster supply chain that shuttles pieces of fruit from a tree in New Zealand to a swinging wire basket in my kitchen?
Whatever the intricacies of the system that keeps me in South African pears and Phillipine jeans, I do know that I'm living in a state of freakish historical luxury. If were to take stroll back to the the early 11th century and explain to William the Conqueror that I'd just eaten a vegetable ragout that had travelled a total of 8000 miles to get to my stomach, he'd probably turn white, shake off a few lice and hand me that newly acquired territory of his. He'd say, "What is the secret of your wealth and power, O Healthy One Without Obvious Signs of Rickets and Smallpox?" And I'd answer, "Rock oil. It's not just for lighting arrows and pouring off of battlements anymore". He'd say, "Mon dieu, c'est formidable! What vast resources do you command?" I'd say, "It's not me. There are millions of us, all living high on the hog off of cheap petroleum energy, exploiting labour in poorer countries in order to position ourselves at the termina of all supply chains". "Oh. So who's really in control?" "The companies that maintain and control the chains". "So you're a fabulously well-fed serf, then". "Well, I wouldn't put it that way". "No, of course not. I'll be taking back England now. Have a nice afternoon". "But I'm so straight of limb, bright of eye and fair of face". "Here, why don't you have an arrow for that bright eye of yours? C'est un souvenir". "Oh yeah? Here's some Mexican habanero sauce from the FUTURE, you condescending barbarian! C'est l'avenir pour vous!" "Mes yeux! Ils ont chaud!" "Yeah, that's the supply chain in action. Be glad I didn't bring a Kalashnikov".
Yeah, that's pretty much how it would it go, with me standing triumphant over William the Conqueror, clutching an uncapped bottle of Matouk's in my hand, while the Norman invader writhes at my feet in agony, clawing at his eyes. I wonder how knock knock jokes would go?
Me: Knock knock.
Will: My name is William.
Me: Yes, I learned about you in school. Knock knock.
Will: Sorry, is that some kind of insult from the future?
Me: Fuuuck.
1/2 dozen Gala apples (New Zealand)
1/2 dozen oranges (California)
acorn squash (British Columbia)
seedless watermelon (California)
pears (South Africa)
bananas (Ecuador)
5 lb bag potatoes (Prince Edward Island)
2 lb bag carrots (British Columbia)
300 grams coffee (Guatemala)
1 bottle habanero pepper sauce (Jamaica)
1 bag 'Mayan Sweets' onions (Mexico)
And so on. With the exception of the bags of quinoa and couscous from the organic grocery store down the street, not a single item in my kitchen is grown or manufactured in the province where I live. Would I buy local? Heck yes. Would I be able to pay rent and clothe myself if I did? Heck no! Like the leader of the acting troupe in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, I can do rent and food without the clothes, or clothes and food without the rent, but food is compulsory. I'm aware that economies of scale, government subsidies and numerous sweet deals operate in favour of grocery store chains and the MegaAgriBiz that feeds them, but the relative cheapness of these goods still strikes me as dangerously false. How is it that apples from New Zealand run for twenty cents less per kilogram than the ones grown forty kilometres from my door? What kind of costs must be dispersed and reimbursed to maintain the monster supply chain that shuttles pieces of fruit from a tree in New Zealand to a swinging wire basket in my kitchen?
Whatever the intricacies of the system that keeps me in South African pears and Phillipine jeans, I do know that I'm living in a state of freakish historical luxury. If were to take stroll back to the the early 11th century and explain to William the Conqueror that I'd just eaten a vegetable ragout that had travelled a total of 8000 miles to get to my stomach, he'd probably turn white, shake off a few lice and hand me that newly acquired territory of his. He'd say, "What is the secret of your wealth and power, O Healthy One Without Obvious Signs of Rickets and Smallpox?" And I'd answer, "Rock oil. It's not just for lighting arrows and pouring off of battlements anymore". He'd say, "Mon dieu, c'est formidable! What vast resources do you command?" I'd say, "It's not me. There are millions of us, all living high on the hog off of cheap petroleum energy, exploiting labour in poorer countries in order to position ourselves at the termina of all supply chains". "Oh. So who's really in control?" "The companies that maintain and control the chains". "So you're a fabulously well-fed serf, then". "Well, I wouldn't put it that way". "No, of course not. I'll be taking back England now. Have a nice afternoon". "But I'm so straight of limb, bright of eye and fair of face". "Here, why don't you have an arrow for that bright eye of yours? C'est un souvenir". "Oh yeah? Here's some Mexican habanero sauce from the FUTURE, you condescending barbarian! C'est l'avenir pour vous!" "Mes yeux! Ils ont chaud!" "Yeah, that's the supply chain in action. Be glad I didn't bring a Kalashnikov".
Yeah, that's pretty much how it would it go, with me standing triumphant over William the Conqueror, clutching an uncapped bottle of Matouk's in my hand, while the Norman invader writhes at my feet in agony, clawing at his eyes. I wonder how knock knock jokes would go?
Me: Knock knock.
Will: My name is William.
Me: Yes, I learned about you in school. Knock knock.
Will: Sorry, is that some kind of insult from the future?
Me: Fuuuck.
Monday, June 27, 2005
the fifty five list (arboreal edition)
46. The recent news story about the Ethiopian lions who guarded a distressed young girl from a group of men with forced marriage on their minds has convinced me that the suggestions of children's literature are absolutely true: that in the absence of adult humans, wild animals stand on their hind legs, don waistcoats and starched collars, and lead children by the hand into their twee little forest homes. There the lucky little children gain valuable wisdom about the world and have all kinds of adventures. Fortunately the animals of the wood are respectful of dinner time, so that children are always returned home by six o' clock, faces slightly smudged but otherwise unharmed. Not all animals are to be trusted: ferrets and stoats, for example, are often in the employ of unscrupulous rats who exploit the labour of children. Bears, beavers and foxes, on the other hand, are decent sorts who will invite children to tea. Crows may steal bracelets or even a shiny earring, but once a rapport is established they make lively companions and fine scouts. Hedgehogs are truculent but dependable. Snakes are poisonous. Badgers are covered in dirt.
47. I'm hoping all this is true, because I left my cousin on a camping trip a few weeks ago, and with any luck the animals will take care of him until I return for the July long weekend.
48. Are you paying attention? My real name is Aidan. If you don't catch it now, you likely never will, so back up a sentence.
49. When I was young I knew the names of trees. They were a part of my daily life, part of what I saw and touched and used, and as such the look of the trees, their shapes against the sky, the spread of leaf and bough and the number of scratches crisscrossing forearm and palm after I jumped down from their limbs, became bound to what we called them.
50. I knew chestnut trees by the spiky green pods that they dropped to the ground. Some were intact, others were marked by a long vertical split from which the chesnut peeked like an eye. I would go out with a plastic bucket and fill it up with husked chestnuts, glossy brown like a horse's neck. The best source of chestnuts was the Anglican graveyard up the hill from where I lived, which strikes me now as slightly gruesome (Chestnuts of the Dead!). Once I brought the bucket home, I would leave them in the porch and completely forget about them. Eventually they would dry out and turn the colour of cheap chocolate. Then I would throw them out and go back for another bucketful.
51. I knew spruce trees because I loved to climb them. They shot straight up, higher than the roof of my house, and I would scramble up their sap-soaked trunks and rest somewhere close to the top, where the trunk narrowed to its untenable point and the branches grew too thin for my weight. By the time I came down I was covered in hard yellow resin and my arms were scratched all to hell. Good times.
52. Maple trees I knew for the shape of their leaves, the smoothness of their trunks and their winged seedpods, which you could manipulate into little helicopters by opening up the joined halves of the wings, climbing up to some suitable height and dropping them back to the ground. They were as green as aphids, and if you played with them at dusk the green wings would hold the light as they whirred into the darkness.
53. I recognized oaks by the way their leaves spiked at the edges, by the veins that ramified to the very tips of the spikes. Acorns littered the ground beneath but I never collected them like I did chestnuts. Although once someone dared me to chew on an acorn, and by god I regret taking that dare. And once I remember cracking open an acorn and finding a worm inside, a little brown-black grub that seemed genuinely curious at the sudden rush of light. I threw it into the ditch and ran home.
54. There were tons of trees on my parent's property: the spruce that I climbed, pines that dripped with worms on strings in the early summer, willows that grew straight or dipped over in all directions. A pear tree that grew hard bitter pears, a crab apple tree against whose fruit I was repeatedly cautioned, a couple of plum trees probably planted by a previous owner. A juniper we planted in the front yard that was so small I could jump over it (soon it grew to a height of fifteen feet). A dozen or so poplars.
55. The city where I live now is mostly elms. Tourist brochures proudly announce that every single one of the 150,000 trees here was planted by hand. In the older neighborhoods the elms in regular rows arch above and form a natural vault, so that you are in effect walking through an huge outdoor room, a natural arcade. In the newer neighborhoods widely-spaced poplars grow, where they do absolutely nothing but say I'm not pretty enough to disguise how boring and ugly this place is, so please accept my apologies.
47. I'm hoping all this is true, because I left my cousin on a camping trip a few weeks ago, and with any luck the animals will take care of him until I return for the July long weekend.
48. Are you paying attention? My real name is Aidan. If you don't catch it now, you likely never will, so back up a sentence.
49. When I was young I knew the names of trees. They were a part of my daily life, part of what I saw and touched and used, and as such the look of the trees, their shapes against the sky, the spread of leaf and bough and the number of scratches crisscrossing forearm and palm after I jumped down from their limbs, became bound to what we called them.
50. I knew chestnut trees by the spiky green pods that they dropped to the ground. Some were intact, others were marked by a long vertical split from which the chesnut peeked like an eye. I would go out with a plastic bucket and fill it up with husked chestnuts, glossy brown like a horse's neck. The best source of chestnuts was the Anglican graveyard up the hill from where I lived, which strikes me now as slightly gruesome (Chestnuts of the Dead!). Once I brought the bucket home, I would leave them in the porch and completely forget about them. Eventually they would dry out and turn the colour of cheap chocolate. Then I would throw them out and go back for another bucketful.
51. I knew spruce trees because I loved to climb them. They shot straight up, higher than the roof of my house, and I would scramble up their sap-soaked trunks and rest somewhere close to the top, where the trunk narrowed to its untenable point and the branches grew too thin for my weight. By the time I came down I was covered in hard yellow resin and my arms were scratched all to hell. Good times.
52. Maple trees I knew for the shape of their leaves, the smoothness of their trunks and their winged seedpods, which you could manipulate into little helicopters by opening up the joined halves of the wings, climbing up to some suitable height and dropping them back to the ground. They were as green as aphids, and if you played with them at dusk the green wings would hold the light as they whirred into the darkness.
53. I recognized oaks by the way their leaves spiked at the edges, by the veins that ramified to the very tips of the spikes. Acorns littered the ground beneath but I never collected them like I did chestnuts. Although once someone dared me to chew on an acorn, and by god I regret taking that dare. And once I remember cracking open an acorn and finding a worm inside, a little brown-black grub that seemed genuinely curious at the sudden rush of light. I threw it into the ditch and ran home.
54. There were tons of trees on my parent's property: the spruce that I climbed, pines that dripped with worms on strings in the early summer, willows that grew straight or dipped over in all directions. A pear tree that grew hard bitter pears, a crab apple tree against whose fruit I was repeatedly cautioned, a couple of plum trees probably planted by a previous owner. A juniper we planted in the front yard that was so small I could jump over it (soon it grew to a height of fifteen feet). A dozen or so poplars.
55. The city where I live now is mostly elms. Tourist brochures proudly announce that every single one of the 150,000 trees here was planted by hand. In the older neighborhoods the elms in regular rows arch above and form a natural vault, so that you are in effect walking through an huge outdoor room, a natural arcade. In the newer neighborhoods widely-spaced poplars grow, where they do absolutely nothing but say I'm not pretty enough to disguise how boring and ugly this place is, so please accept my apologies.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
news
I've been reading up on the coming bird flu epidemic, with all those birds poised to send forth their microbe minions from the exotic Orient. What amazes me is how thoroughly and minutely this is now being covered by newspapers around the globe. Bird flu found in these birds; then those birds; then some more nearby; and now in a human being. Once this plague gets legs and bounds out of Asia to kill us all, the newspapers will keep pace with it, interviewing it at regular intervals, maybe fitting the damn thing with a pager so it can check in hourly. Larry King is going to have bird flu on as a special guest, and we'll all be able to sit in the comfort of our rec rooms, dens, backyard patios etc. and watch it attack Larry King on the air. When finally the plague has run its course and every human on earth has coughed out his or her lungs and fallen face first into a pile o' lungs, the last paper in the world will run off the presses bearing only the 50 point above-the-fold headline "EVERYBODY DEAD" and that will be that. And no one will ever know how a newspaper headline bearing the news of everyone's death got printed up with everybody already dead. But at least the news will finally be interesting.
time is a number if you read it right
Nighttime again. All the windows open, hot air invading the apartment. The Palinode and The Lotus reading in bed, aware of the flaw in their window strategy but willing to wait out the warm half of night. The Lotus looks over at the clock radio on Palinode's nightstand.
Lotus: I never realized that ten o' clock looked like one thousand.
Palinode: (looks over) Oh my god. You're right. I've never noticed that. It's a thousand just sitting there.
Lotus: That's so cool.
(They watch the clock for a few seconds, unaccountably fascinated. You think they're stoned, but no. They're actually fascinated.)
Palinode: And you know what? When it's one minute after ten, it's going to look like a thousand and one.
Lotus: You're right. It really will.
(They go back to watching the clock, happily spooned. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the minute turns over. It's ten oh one.)
Both: WAAAHH!
Lotus: It's a thousand and one!
Palinode: That is so great.
Lotus: Totally.
Palinode: But you know -
Lotus: What?
Palinode: When it hits two after ten, it just won't -
Lotus: It won't look like a thousand and two.
Palinode: Exactly. It'll just be a time. How does that work?
Lotus: I think it's the symmetry.
Palinode: Sure, there's symmetry, but other forces are at play here. There must be only a few times that look like numbers on a digital clock. We were lucky to catch two of them.
Lotus: What do you think the other times are?
Palinode: Good question.
(They go back to staring at the clock, but the joy has been replaced with anxiety.)
Lotus: I never realized that ten o' clock looked like one thousand.
Palinode: (looks over) Oh my god. You're right. I've never noticed that. It's a thousand just sitting there.
Lotus: That's so cool.
(They watch the clock for a few seconds, unaccountably fascinated. You think they're stoned, but no. They're actually fascinated.)
Palinode: And you know what? When it's one minute after ten, it's going to look like a thousand and one.
Lotus: You're right. It really will.
(They go back to watching the clock, happily spooned. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the minute turns over. It's ten oh one.)
Both: WAAAHH!
Lotus: It's a thousand and one!
Palinode: That is so great.
Lotus: Totally.
Palinode: But you know -
Lotus: What?
Palinode: When it hits two after ten, it just won't -
Lotus: It won't look like a thousand and two.
Palinode: Exactly. It'll just be a time. How does that work?
Lotus: I think it's the symmetry.
Palinode: Sure, there's symmetry, but other forces are at play here. There must be only a few times that look like numbers on a digital clock. We were lucky to catch two of them.
Lotus: What do you think the other times are?
Palinode: Good question.
(They go back to staring at the clock, but the joy has been replaced with anxiety.)
The forty-five list: subjunctives and the call of the frogman
41. The barest shelf in the cupboard of English language is the dusty one reserved for subjunctives. As a result our imaginations have gone hungry. The subjunctive mood, used to express attitudes and counterfactuals, has almost disappeared entirely from English, hanging on only in such phrases as "If I were a frogman" or "Had I gone to frogman college and become a frogman, I should be happy now" or "I demand that he give me the frogman costume and afford me due satisfaction on all frogman counts". With the subjunctive we witness language's finest hour, an inbuilt resource to the construction and habitation of imaginary worlds, opportunities to plot alternatives and live, if only in the mind, as frogmen.
42. Possible frogman examples to which we can all aspire: swimming - publishing - dissenting - just being
43. But by the Jesus don't you run afoul of this seedy bunch if you choose to be the frogman of your subjunctive dreams. I mean, check out the pose of the large frog. And then roll your mouse over it a few times. That's what they're about, oh yes.
44. Enough of the subjunctive. It has led me down a path strewn with the bodies of possible frogmen (maybe this is what the guy who made up English worried about when he was putting in the subjunctive mood, which would explain its paucity).
45. Really, that's enough.
42. Possible frogman examples to which we can all aspire: swimming - publishing - dissenting - just being
43. But by the Jesus don't you run afoul of this seedy bunch if you choose to be the frogman of your subjunctive dreams. I mean, check out the pose of the large frog. And then roll your mouse over it a few times. That's what they're about, oh yes.
44. Enough of the subjunctive. It has led me down a path strewn with the bodies of possible frogmen (maybe this is what the guy who made up English worried about when he was putting in the subjunctive mood, which would explain its paucity).
45. Really, that's enough.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
two fifths of a hundred (two fifths in the brain!)
The 100 list, from twenty eight with its ineluctable modality to forty with its even more ineluctable modality.
28. Put the The Iron Rose of Castille in your boutonniere and throw a Guinness down your throat. 101 years ago today in an alternate universe Leopold Bloom woke up, bought a kidney for his breakfast, read the paper on the toilet, tore up a love letter, went to the baths, took a carriage ride to a funeral, wandered into work at the newspaper, had some lunch and listened to music, suffered the insults of an anti-Semite at a pub, strolled along the beach and ogled a lame woman, attended a birth, met up with Stephen Daedalus, went to a brothel, came home, administered oral sex to his wife, fell asleep. Happy Bloomsday!
29. Finally the Catholic church across the block has made the necessary renovations to the cenotaph dedicated to those Unborn Victims of Abortion. Every day I would pass by and think When are they going to get those necessary renovations on? When is the Church finally going to spend more of their money on a monument commemorating those blobs of tissue? I bet those blobs are getting impatient in their heavenly incubators. Now, along with the mock gravestone, there's a little cobbled square about two by three feet in front of it, presumaby to make it more convenient and reverential for those who want to reflect or pray in front of the monument. They should go ahead and erect a statue of someone praying at the cenotaph. The Brain-dead Victims of Catholicism mourning the Unborn Victims of Abortion.
30. I want a monument to the undead victims of abortion as well. It's only fair.
31. Crudest example of unintentional symbolism I've ever seen: In the town of Kilgore, Texas, at one time a centre of oil production and now just another pause in the highway, a pumpjack nodded lazily away right next to a yard of unmarked gravestones. At first I thought they were drawing up oil from beneath a graveyard, which made me a bit sick to my stomach, but then I saw that the gravestones were simply for sale. If any heavy-handed polemicists out there masquerading as writers of fiction want to use this image, go right ahead.
32. Zombies are my favourite monsters, although I'm ready to admit that Buffy the Zombie Slayer would not be a very exciting series.
33. But a zombie-based version of Law & Order would be really cool. "In the world of the undead, zombies crave human brains and solve crimes. These are their stories". Starring Jerry Orbach.
34. Or you could have a show called Law & Order: Cutaways and Outtakes. "In the television production world, editors often cut footage so as to mock and humiliate both cast and crew. These are their pink slips".
35. Sometimes, when no one's around and the moon is full and high, I wander outside and curse Rapid City under my breath. Not that it needs it.
36. Last year I interviewed a South Dakota state politician (please let me know if I've written about this before). The interview took a couple of hours, during which he was polite, welcoming, charismatic and a pleasure to talk with. After the interview he showed me a photo album of himself shaking hands with the many politicians he's met over the decades. I saw Carter, Reagan, Colin Powell, Bushes Big and Little. But no Clinton. Eventually I asked why he had never shaken Clinton's hand. The man dropped his head slightly and said "I was sick the day that Clinton came through town". Then he raised his head again and said "Do you want to know what I think of Clinton?" Absolutely, I said. "Clinton is a whoremonger," he stated. "And his wife is a whore". That's when I realized that it was possible to lead a full and successful life and be batshit insane at the same time.
37. People either believe or discount global climate change, but I've yet to see anybody advocate for it. Who will take up the banner for rising oceans, ancestral virus outbreaks and massive crop failure?
38. Similarly, people either believe in or discount dire news of peak oil production, but no one's willing to stand up and speak in favour of it. Outrageous gas prices! Food shortages! World War III! The end of the industrial world! Who's with me on this one?
39. Oh sure, there's biodiesel, but I bet it's gross.
40. Themes enumerated in this installment of my 100 list include: all things uncanny, South Dakota, secular apocalypse. Law and Order. Oil.
28. Put the The Iron Rose of Castille in your boutonniere and throw a Guinness down your throat. 101 years ago today in an alternate universe Leopold Bloom woke up, bought a kidney for his breakfast, read the paper on the toilet, tore up a love letter, went to the baths, took a carriage ride to a funeral, wandered into work at the newspaper, had some lunch and listened to music, suffered the insults of an anti-Semite at a pub, strolled along the beach and ogled a lame woman, attended a birth, met up with Stephen Daedalus, went to a brothel, came home, administered oral sex to his wife, fell asleep. Happy Bloomsday!
29. Finally the Catholic church across the block has made the necessary renovations to the cenotaph dedicated to those Unborn Victims of Abortion. Every day I would pass by and think When are they going to get those necessary renovations on? When is the Church finally going to spend more of their money on a monument commemorating those blobs of tissue? I bet those blobs are getting impatient in their heavenly incubators. Now, along with the mock gravestone, there's a little cobbled square about two by three feet in front of it, presumaby to make it more convenient and reverential for those who want to reflect or pray in front of the monument. They should go ahead and erect a statue of someone praying at the cenotaph. The Brain-dead Victims of Catholicism mourning the Unborn Victims of Abortion.
30. I want a monument to the undead victims of abortion as well. It's only fair.
31. Crudest example of unintentional symbolism I've ever seen: In the town of Kilgore, Texas, at one time a centre of oil production and now just another pause in the highway, a pumpjack nodded lazily away right next to a yard of unmarked gravestones. At first I thought they were drawing up oil from beneath a graveyard, which made me a bit sick to my stomach, but then I saw that the gravestones were simply for sale. If any heavy-handed polemicists out there masquerading as writers of fiction want to use this image, go right ahead.
32. Zombies are my favourite monsters, although I'm ready to admit that Buffy the Zombie Slayer would not be a very exciting series.
33. But a zombie-based version of Law & Order would be really cool. "In the world of the undead, zombies crave human brains and solve crimes. These are their stories". Starring Jerry Orbach.
34. Or you could have a show called Law & Order: Cutaways and Outtakes. "In the television production world, editors often cut footage so as to mock and humiliate both cast and crew. These are their pink slips".
35. Sometimes, when no one's around and the moon is full and high, I wander outside and curse Rapid City under my breath. Not that it needs it.
36. Last year I interviewed a South Dakota state politician (please let me know if I've written about this before). The interview took a couple of hours, during which he was polite, welcoming, charismatic and a pleasure to talk with. After the interview he showed me a photo album of himself shaking hands with the many politicians he's met over the decades. I saw Carter, Reagan, Colin Powell, Bushes Big and Little. But no Clinton. Eventually I asked why he had never shaken Clinton's hand. The man dropped his head slightly and said "I was sick the day that Clinton came through town". Then he raised his head again and said "Do you want to know what I think of Clinton?" Absolutely, I said. "Clinton is a whoremonger," he stated. "And his wife is a whore". That's when I realized that it was possible to lead a full and successful life and be batshit insane at the same time.
37. People either believe or discount global climate change, but I've yet to see anybody advocate for it. Who will take up the banner for rising oceans, ancestral virus outbreaks and massive crop failure?
38. Similarly, people either believe in or discount dire news of peak oil production, but no one's willing to stand up and speak in favour of it. Outrageous gas prices! Food shortages! World War III! The end of the industrial world! Who's with me on this one?
39. Oh sure, there's biodiesel, but I bet it's gross.
40. Themes enumerated in this installment of my 100 list include: all things uncanny, South Dakota, secular apocalypse. Law and Order. Oil.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
the twenty-seven list (country music edition)
23. After having listened to a country music station this afternoon, it's clear that contemporary country is the worst popular music in the world. Nothing compares. '70s Eurovision contest music, anti-Hussein Psy-ops rap, bombastic save-the-world pop circa 1990: all come up looking good next to those performers of Rural Drag. Even Adult Contemporary has more style than this thief of bargain music bins. First I heard three Shania Twain songs in a row, each one sounding more or less like the processed technopop of the mid-eighties, with fake pedal steel standing in for fake Stax horns. After a commercial break I found out that none of the songs were sung by Shania Twain. Just a bunch of pitch-shifted girls aping the Twain formula. Next came a weird parade of musical styles, some soulful, some poppy, some folky, but none of them what I would call country. Not even that arena rock Garth Brooks style of country, which is bastardized enough.*
24. Record companies and artists have replaced the style and tradition of country with gestures: a little twang to the vocals, a few familiar chord progressions, out-of-love wailing from the dudes and so-in-love devotional chirps from the ladies. And of course, songs about good times in the non-existent country. Has no one noticed that the places celebrated by country music - the family farm and the good old small town - have rotted from the inside out? Even in Canada, which has taken slightly better care of its rural areas, towns have funnelled into cities and left their skeleton behind. In the States I've been to countless towns with centres so long dead that even the buildings seem dried out and tissue-thin, like dead seed pods dangling from the stem. What life is left in these places has sprouted up along the highway, where the predictable franchises and hotels service people from elsewhere on their way to somewhere else. Life arranged around a strip of limited-access highway doesn't provide much inspiration for an authentic pop vernacular, but it's got to be better than the asinine fantasy that country music records are pushing on us.
25. At one point a song came on that I actually liked. The melody was strong but subtle, the twang didn't sound put on, and the lyrics had a real note of wistfulness and longing, that plaintive cry for things departing that marks the best of country music. It sounded a bit like early Jackson Browne. Then I realized it was Jackson Browne. You know country music's got problems when it's borrowing songs from 1970s folk rock for its playlist.
*26. Garth Brooks fans I've met commonly defend him (without any prompting) by talking about his live show, saying "It's all for his fans that he puts on such a great show. He doesn't have to do that, you know". I never understood that: an entertainer that doesn't have to entertain? He just does it 'cause? I mean, I don't have to shit in the toilet. I could just do it on the floor. But I like to go that extra mile and aim for the bowl.
27. What is Garth Brooks doing these days anyway? Oh never mind.
24. Record companies and artists have replaced the style and tradition of country with gestures: a little twang to the vocals, a few familiar chord progressions, out-of-love wailing from the dudes and so-in-love devotional chirps from the ladies. And of course, songs about good times in the non-existent country. Has no one noticed that the places celebrated by country music - the family farm and the good old small town - have rotted from the inside out? Even in Canada, which has taken slightly better care of its rural areas, towns have funnelled into cities and left their skeleton behind. In the States I've been to countless towns with centres so long dead that even the buildings seem dried out and tissue-thin, like dead seed pods dangling from the stem. What life is left in these places has sprouted up along the highway, where the predictable franchises and hotels service people from elsewhere on their way to somewhere else. Life arranged around a strip of limited-access highway doesn't provide much inspiration for an authentic pop vernacular, but it's got to be better than the asinine fantasy that country music records are pushing on us.
25. At one point a song came on that I actually liked. The melody was strong but subtle, the twang didn't sound put on, and the lyrics had a real note of wistfulness and longing, that plaintive cry for things departing that marks the best of country music. It sounded a bit like early Jackson Browne. Then I realized it was Jackson Browne. You know country music's got problems when it's borrowing songs from 1970s folk rock for its playlist.
*26. Garth Brooks fans I've met commonly defend him (without any prompting) by talking about his live show, saying "It's all for his fans that he puts on such a great show. He doesn't have to do that, you know". I never understood that: an entertainer that doesn't have to entertain? He just does it 'cause? I mean, I don't have to shit in the toilet. I could just do it on the floor. But I like to go that extra mile and aim for the bowl.
27. What is Garth Brooks doing these days anyway? Oh never mind.
Friday, June 10, 2005
the twenty-two list
Onward to some higher number. Like Mercer, pelted by stones, we ascend with him to the peak.
18. Last night was our fourth wedding anniversary. Four years! Balloons fall.
19. For our anniversary, she gave me Henry Frankfurt's On Bullshit. Should I be paying closer attention?
20. I have taken a leave of absence from the genuine world and entered into the reenactment phase of my series. I leave my life at the door and plunge into a world of script breakdowns, call sheets, phone calls that end with me saying things like "Go back there and bargain them down" and "Yeah, that's a good rate if you're looking to blow the series budget on one half of one show". This is a world of pinched budgets and squeezed tempers, sudden reversals and insane rate quotes. It is a rectangular, compartmented world, like a submarine navigating a lattice. I'll be here until February.
21. A friend of mine who sends emails and expects timely replies, which I rarely give, asked me whether I was an imploder or an exploder. That is to say, do I struggle to gather myself together in the face of an urge to dissolve, or do I attempt to dissolve in order to unbind my too-solid identity? Perhaps the best way to put it is to ask: does your identity require corn starch or turpentine? Or do you like a nice starch and turpentine blend? And what do you think would happen to your laundry if you threw on a nice lather of turpenstarch? The friend who posed the question likely needs a daily soak in turpentine (and yet I mean that in a good way). I thought I'd deal with the question publicly because I spent so much time mulling it over. At first I had a long reply prepared that said I'm older now and I don't bother with such questions, I just am what I am, but that answer, I realized, had ridden in on a bullshit carrier signal (should I be paying attention?). The truth is that I need lots and lots of corn starch to keep my identity in check. Otherwise it spreads to fill whatever container it's occupying. Maybe this is why I'm the marrying kind.
22. At various points in my life I've longed for certain prostheses. For example, back between 1993-95 I lived on the sixth floor with a balcony that looked out onto a hipster-filled plaza opposite. I would sit and stare with growing resentment at the coffee sippers and emphatic gesturers, relishing the notion of scaring the living shit out of them somehow. One day I realized that I wanted a pair of leathery bat-like wings that would allow me to strafe them like an angered sandpiper (with leathery bat-like wings). I talked about those wings for months. Lately I want a metal arm with a clacky pincer, but the lack of backstory on my desire means that it'll probably pass in a few weeks.
18. Last night was our fourth wedding anniversary. Four years! Balloons fall.
19. For our anniversary, she gave me Henry Frankfurt's On Bullshit. Should I be paying closer attention?
20. I have taken a leave of absence from the genuine world and entered into the reenactment phase of my series. I leave my life at the door and plunge into a world of script breakdowns, call sheets, phone calls that end with me saying things like "Go back there and bargain them down" and "Yeah, that's a good rate if you're looking to blow the series budget on one half of one show". This is a world of pinched budgets and squeezed tempers, sudden reversals and insane rate quotes. It is a rectangular, compartmented world, like a submarine navigating a lattice. I'll be here until February.
21. A friend of mine who sends emails and expects timely replies, which I rarely give, asked me whether I was an imploder or an exploder. That is to say, do I struggle to gather myself together in the face of an urge to dissolve, or do I attempt to dissolve in order to unbind my too-solid identity? Perhaps the best way to put it is to ask: does your identity require corn starch or turpentine? Or do you like a nice starch and turpentine blend? And what do you think would happen to your laundry if you threw on a nice lather of turpenstarch? The friend who posed the question likely needs a daily soak in turpentine (and yet I mean that in a good way). I thought I'd deal with the question publicly because I spent so much time mulling it over. At first I had a long reply prepared that said I'm older now and I don't bother with such questions, I just am what I am, but that answer, I realized, had ridden in on a bullshit carrier signal (should I be paying attention?). The truth is that I need lots and lots of corn starch to keep my identity in check. Otherwise it spreads to fill whatever container it's occupying. Maybe this is why I'm the marrying kind.
22. At various points in my life I've longed for certain prostheses. For example, back between 1993-95 I lived on the sixth floor with a balcony that looked out onto a hipster-filled plaza opposite. I would sit and stare with growing resentment at the coffee sippers and emphatic gesturers, relishing the notion of scaring the living shit out of them somehow. One day I realized that I wanted a pair of leathery bat-like wings that would allow me to strafe them like an angered sandpiper (with leathery bat-like wings). I talked about those wings for months. Lately I want a metal arm with a clacky pincer, but the lack of backstory on my desire means that it'll probably pass in a few weeks.
Friday, June 03, 2005
the seventeen list
More listing of things for the pure fun of thing-listing. So let's get it on with that ordinal mania. Eight to seventeen.
8. Def Leppard is coming to play in August. Did I say play? I meant RAWK. Sorry, I meant suck.
9. Because I was hit on the head with a baseball bat as a kid, I have trouble finishing my
10. But I wrote a short story about being hit on the head with a baseball bat, which featured one character saying to another, "Ah bite me bag".
11. For the last week I've been in the office for 11-12 hours a day. I even ended up here on Sunday afternoon, palely haunting the hallways.
12. You who know me, know how lazy I am. Why work so many hours? It's a funny story involving all of my staff quitting on me within a week with notice ranging from two days to five hours. "Don't get me wrong, Mr. Node," they all said, notice in hand. "We think you're a good producer. You shielded us from a lot of bullshit here. It's the executive we don't like". So they stuck me with a series in full production, exposing me to the teeth of a howling executive body, and leaving me with their jobs to do on top of mine. Because they liked me and thought I was a good producer.
13. Currently I have a crew in Nova Scotia driving around and interviewing people. Every night I coordinate and write up questions for the next day (see 11 and 12). Once they return home I will celebrate with a bottle of Pine Sol and collapse in a bus shelter.
14. My first mascot is Evil Wizard, a plastic figurine I picked up for 99 cents at Humpty's Family Restaurant. He's dressed in a purple robe and cap, wears tiny little round sunglasses and sports a wand with a funky star glittering at its tip. He's more like a magical David Crosby than an evil wizard.
15. My second mascot is Dolphi, a perverse plastic dolphin fitted with human clothes and juggling three red balls (other Dolphi figures are similary frozen in other degrading street tricks). I nicked him from a basket in the lobby of the Novotel Mannheim. I have several photos of Dolphi posing in rural Austria. He juggles by the ancient church, he juggles in the graveyard, he juggles against the splendor of the Alps. He juggles in the Alpenglow.
16. My third and favourite mascot is Kogepan. He is my secret sharer, my homuncular twin. According to Kogepan himself, he's a red bean bun from Hokkaido who was baked too long until his skin turned dark. He ran away from the bakery when the taunts of the lighter red bean buns became too much to bear. After a nihilistic descent into smoking and drinking, he returned to the bakery of his birth to begin the arduous process of learning to be a better burnt bean bun.
17. On my first long trip, my wife (The Lotus) put a Kogepan in my carry-on bag as a good-luck charm. I have never removed him, and every so often he turns up in a search for keys or change, staring blankly up at me as if to say, "Where now, big burnt bean bun guy?"
8. Def Leppard is coming to play in August. Did I say play? I meant RAWK. Sorry, I meant suck.
9. Because I was hit on the head with a baseball bat as a kid, I have trouble finishing my
10. But I wrote a short story about being hit on the head with a baseball bat, which featured one character saying to another, "Ah bite me bag".
11. For the last week I've been in the office for 11-12 hours a day. I even ended up here on Sunday afternoon, palely haunting the hallways.
12. You who know me, know how lazy I am. Why work so many hours? It's a funny story involving all of my staff quitting on me within a week with notice ranging from two days to five hours. "Don't get me wrong, Mr. Node," they all said, notice in hand. "We think you're a good producer. You shielded us from a lot of bullshit here. It's the executive we don't like". So they stuck me with a series in full production, exposing me to the teeth of a howling executive body, and leaving me with their jobs to do on top of mine. Because they liked me and thought I was a good producer.
13. Currently I have a crew in Nova Scotia driving around and interviewing people. Every night I coordinate and write up questions for the next day (see 11 and 12). Once they return home I will celebrate with a bottle of Pine Sol and collapse in a bus shelter.
14. My first mascot is Evil Wizard, a plastic figurine I picked up for 99 cents at Humpty's Family Restaurant. He's dressed in a purple robe and cap, wears tiny little round sunglasses and sports a wand with a funky star glittering at its tip. He's more like a magical David Crosby than an evil wizard.
15. My second mascot is Dolphi, a perverse plastic dolphin fitted with human clothes and juggling three red balls (other Dolphi figures are similary frozen in other degrading street tricks). I nicked him from a basket in the lobby of the Novotel Mannheim. I have several photos of Dolphi posing in rural Austria. He juggles by the ancient church, he juggles in the graveyard, he juggles against the splendor of the Alps. He juggles in the Alpenglow.
16. My third and favourite mascot is Kogepan. He is my secret sharer, my homuncular twin. According to Kogepan himself, he's a red bean bun from Hokkaido who was baked too long until his skin turned dark. He ran away from the bakery when the taunts of the lighter red bean buns became too much to bear. After a nihilistic descent into smoking and drinking, he returned to the bakery of his birth to begin the arduous process of learning to be a better burnt bean bun.
17. On my first long trip, my wife (The Lotus) put a Kogepan in my carry-on bag as a good-luck charm. I have never removed him, and every so often he turns up in a search for keys or change, staring blankly up at me as if to say, "Where now, big burnt bean bun guy?"
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
the seven list
People do the 100 List. They do it all the time! It's a weblog tradition, right up there with those INFURIATING FUCKING QUIZZES (What Buffy character do you most resemble? What sort of shoe polish are you? Etcetera). People wholly committed to their weblogs do the 100 list, even after the initial passion fades. I'm envious, intrigued, wannaknowmore-ish about this ability to think of 100 things off the top of one's head. But:
I'm busy. Aren't you busy? Don't you people have lives? One hundred things? Here's my five or six list.
1. Cold pizza for breakfast. A salad and a coffee for lunch. A belated smack to the head and a long look in the fridge for supper. It's the Palinode diet! Use only as directed.
2. By and large I'm a together kind of guy, but as long as I can remember I've had a mind-emptying fear of calling strangers on the phone. Back in 1990 I ended up in a telesurveying job, soliciting opinions from strangers about life insurance, soda, and politics. The job was only mildly stressful, but every number I dialed brought on a stomach-clenching, forehead-beading, blood-cooling terror. A few years later I started work as a documentary researcher. I had to spend my days phoning complete strangers and eliciting their life stories out of them. The fear I felt was animalistic and unreassoning, filling me with a tide of adrenaline that forced my words out in a babbling rush when the stranger answered. Over the years I turned that glandular surfeit into a tool, planing down my words and tone to a smooth persuasive pitch. Today I'm fully confident that I can punch out a number and convince a stranger to do nearly anything that I require. My phobia remains as strong as ever.
3. NASA has recently announced its intentions to throw a high-powered laser into orbit around the moon. That, I'm proud to say, is my doing. I called them up a few weeks ago and worked on the secretary until she put me through to the Department of Lasers. They went ape over my lunar laser eye surgery scheme.
4. The L Word is a web of histrionic characters and melodramatic plotlines barely supporting these heavy, near-bursting globes of softcore lesbian sex. I've been watching episode after episode trying to figure out why people like it so much.
5. In my late teen years I thought that I was having a whole lot of sex, but when I think back and calculate the number of days that actually included sex, I realized that they didn't amount to very many. My memory had apportioned one subjective week of time to every day that featured an interlude of doing it. Because really, what else of note was I doing that week? And being a teenager, the sex wasn't all that great either. BUT IT WAS BETTER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE I DID.
6. My wife has given me a lasting hatred of the number six. I had never realized how horrible and puke-yellow the number six was until she pointed it out to me. Now I won't give six the satisfaction of a proper entry.
7. Once in first-year university, an attractive girl whom I'd recently met asked me how I was doing. I stopped, thought about it with a pensive look stretched across my face, and answered "Pretty good". She never spoke to me again. I later found out that my moment to think about her question had disturbed her. The kids today call it "getting creeped out". The obvious lesson: no one wants emphatic answers to phatic questions. I had crossed some kind of boundary of ritualized meaning and utterly ruined my chances of getting laid.
I'm busy. Aren't you busy? Don't you people have lives? One hundred things? Here's my five or six list.
1. Cold pizza for breakfast. A salad and a coffee for lunch. A belated smack to the head and a long look in the fridge for supper. It's the Palinode diet! Use only as directed.
2. By and large I'm a together kind of guy, but as long as I can remember I've had a mind-emptying fear of calling strangers on the phone. Back in 1990 I ended up in a telesurveying job, soliciting opinions from strangers about life insurance, soda, and politics. The job was only mildly stressful, but every number I dialed brought on a stomach-clenching, forehead-beading, blood-cooling terror. A few years later I started work as a documentary researcher. I had to spend my days phoning complete strangers and eliciting their life stories out of them. The fear I felt was animalistic and unreassoning, filling me with a tide of adrenaline that forced my words out in a babbling rush when the stranger answered. Over the years I turned that glandular surfeit into a tool, planing down my words and tone to a smooth persuasive pitch. Today I'm fully confident that I can punch out a number and convince a stranger to do nearly anything that I require. My phobia remains as strong as ever.
3. NASA has recently announced its intentions to throw a high-powered laser into orbit around the moon. That, I'm proud to say, is my doing. I called them up a few weeks ago and worked on the secretary until she put me through to the Department of Lasers. They went ape over my lunar laser eye surgery scheme.
4. The L Word is a web of histrionic characters and melodramatic plotlines barely supporting these heavy, near-bursting globes of softcore lesbian sex. I've been watching episode after episode trying to figure out why people like it so much.
5. In my late teen years I thought that I was having a whole lot of sex, but when I think back and calculate the number of days that actually included sex, I realized that they didn't amount to very many. My memory had apportioned one subjective week of time to every day that featured an interlude of doing it. Because really, what else of note was I doing that week? And being a teenager, the sex wasn't all that great either. BUT IT WAS BETTER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE I DID.
6. My wife has given me a lasting hatred of the number six. I had never realized how horrible and puke-yellow the number six was until she pointed it out to me. Now I won't give six the satisfaction of a proper entry.
7. Once in first-year university, an attractive girl whom I'd recently met asked me how I was doing. I stopped, thought about it with a pensive look stretched across my face, and answered "Pretty good". She never spoke to me again. I later found out that my moment to think about her question had disturbed her. The kids today call it "getting creeped out". The obvious lesson: no one wants emphatic answers to phatic questions. I had crossed some kind of boundary of ritualized meaning and utterly ruined my chances of getting laid.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
jedinomics!
Hey! You remember that scene in Star Wars '77 (I'll be fucked before I call it Episode IV. It was the first one.) when Vader and Kenobi are having that kind of lazy lightsaber duel, and Vader deals Kenobi a killin' blow, which gives Kenobi an opportunity to vanish and leave his cloak behind? You've got that in your head, all firm? Okay, because after Vader gives Kenobi a slaughtering and Kenobi vamooses into the Force and Luke goes "Argh no Ben," Vader pokes around at Kenobi's clothes all in a heap on the floor. At the time I thought Vader was thinking What just happened here?, being unfamiliar with some of the finer aspects of the Force, but after watching Star Wars '05 I realize that he was probably thinking Hot damn, people, I got me one those brown Jedi cloaks that are so hard to come by.
It is a rule in the Star Wars universe that all good Jedi fights start with a time-consuming shucking of cloaks. They talk a bit in their hooded cloaks, then the talking's done and the cloaks come off. Sometimes they leave their cloaks in a convenient location for post-fight retrieval, but usually they leave them on top of a volcano or in some hallway in a sub-basement of a disintegrating mining complex. Even if the cloaks are left somewhere convenient - a ship's bridge or a landing platform - it is part of the Jedi fighting code that each fight must end at least ten miles from its start point. If you start at one end of an impossibly long and narrow bridge, it is written somewhere in those heavy Bantha-bound Jedi manuals that you must fight the entire length of that bridge. And once you reach the end of the bridge, go fight on a pipe or something. Whatever happens, you have to finish exhausted, drained of spirit but victorious, in a place that's so far from your cloak that there's barely a point in going to pick it up. No, best to head back to Coruscant and pick up a new cloak from the Jedi Tuck Shop.
It is my belief that the one tragedy unexplored by Lucas is the obvious collapse in the Jedi cloak industry that the fall of the Council must have sparked. I mean, the original SW flicks showed a broken-down, hardscrabble galaxy in which local strongmen flourished under the oppressive rule of the Empire. People lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Robots appeared to made of old stereos and spray-painted trash cans. Compare that with the elegant palaces and cities of the pre-Imperium. Endless lines of aerial traffic spinning webs of commerce between cities and planets. Pomp and plenty for all. Certainly the harsh and greedy economic policies of the Empire must have funnelled a good deal of wealth away from many planets, but I think a more fundamental explanation is at hand: The pre-Imperial galactic economy was supported by a heavily subsidized trade in Jedi cloaks. After the Jedis got all massacred up, right down to the Paduan younglings and that one seriously hot Jedi lady, the cloak industry suddenly lost all reason to exist. Absurdly long supply chains crashed, local manufacturers everywhere went broke, the secondary and tertiary industries built around catering to the cloak industry's needs evaporated. Masses of people found themselves unemployed and forced into a life of slavery or crime. Into that void stepped thugs like that slimy slug guy from Return of the Jedi, and everything went to hell from there.
I'm aware that some of you out there haven't stopped by your megalo-viewo-plex to see the new SW, so I probably shouldn't tell you that Anakin turns to the dark side when Palpatine explains that Sith Lords aren't obliged to leave their cloaka everywhere. Then he gets his first paycheque and finds out that Jedis get paid in company scrip and spend most of their lives in debt to the Jedi Shop.
It is a rule in the Star Wars universe that all good Jedi fights start with a time-consuming shucking of cloaks. They talk a bit in their hooded cloaks, then the talking's done and the cloaks come off. Sometimes they leave their cloaks in a convenient location for post-fight retrieval, but usually they leave them on top of a volcano or in some hallway in a sub-basement of a disintegrating mining complex. Even if the cloaks are left somewhere convenient - a ship's bridge or a landing platform - it is part of the Jedi fighting code that each fight must end at least ten miles from its start point. If you start at one end of an impossibly long and narrow bridge, it is written somewhere in those heavy Bantha-bound Jedi manuals that you must fight the entire length of that bridge. And once you reach the end of the bridge, go fight on a pipe or something. Whatever happens, you have to finish exhausted, drained of spirit but victorious, in a place that's so far from your cloak that there's barely a point in going to pick it up. No, best to head back to Coruscant and pick up a new cloak from the Jedi Tuck Shop.
It is my belief that the one tragedy unexplored by Lucas is the obvious collapse in the Jedi cloak industry that the fall of the Council must have sparked. I mean, the original SW flicks showed a broken-down, hardscrabble galaxy in which local strongmen flourished under the oppressive rule of the Empire. People lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Robots appeared to made of old stereos and spray-painted trash cans. Compare that with the elegant palaces and cities of the pre-Imperium. Endless lines of aerial traffic spinning webs of commerce between cities and planets. Pomp and plenty for all. Certainly the harsh and greedy economic policies of the Empire must have funnelled a good deal of wealth away from many planets, but I think a more fundamental explanation is at hand: The pre-Imperial galactic economy was supported by a heavily subsidized trade in Jedi cloaks. After the Jedis got all massacred up, right down to the Paduan younglings and that one seriously hot Jedi lady, the cloak industry suddenly lost all reason to exist. Absurdly long supply chains crashed, local manufacturers everywhere went broke, the secondary and tertiary industries built around catering to the cloak industry's needs evaporated. Masses of people found themselves unemployed and forced into a life of slavery or crime. Into that void stepped thugs like that slimy slug guy from Return of the Jedi, and everything went to hell from there.
I'm aware that some of you out there haven't stopped by your megalo-viewo-plex to see the new SW, so I probably shouldn't tell you that Anakin turns to the dark side when Palpatine explains that Sith Lords aren't obliged to leave their cloaka everywhere. Then he gets his first paycheque and finds out that Jedis get paid in company scrip and spend most of their lives in debt to the Jedi Shop.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
vamos
Different places have different notions of going on vacation. Out here in Western Canada, where driving twenty hours in a rusted-out car with no air conditioning to get to a nice view of Devil's Tower is second nature, going on vacation usually involves a trunkload of belongings and a gang of sniping kids in the backseat. The destinations out here are the standard tourist hot spots of the North American West: Disneyland, Hollywood, Las Vegas. For the young and adventurous, there's the Winnipeg Folk Festival or Burning Man, but those are generally not family affairs. Instead, they're an opportunity for us to repeat the mistakes our parents made, namely the bizarre decision to get into a car and drive it through the fiery flat heart of the continent in mid-summer.
Back in Nova Scotia, vacations were different. The endless car journey was not as thinkable to a people raised in insular towns and cosmopolitan cities on the edge of the Atlantic. People either boarded airplanes or went nowhere at all. The few car trips that my family took seemed endless and hugely boring to me - there was no phrase to more torturous than 'the scenic route' - but we never left the province or spent more than five hours at a shot in one of our many Volkswagen Rabbits. Once we all piled into the car along with some out-of-town relatives and drove all the way to Cape Breton, highland home to the Celtic descendants of immigrant Scots. Cape Breton is one of those places, like parts of the Appalachians or Newfoundland, where 'authentic' 'culture' still exists and people in tarpaper shacks carry on their folkways. All I remember is the outdoor swimming pool at the motel, where swarms of mosquitoes helped themselves to my exposed body in the evening heat.
No matter where I've lived, though, everybody treats camping as a legitimate vacation. Why this is I don't know, since camping holds up exactly none of the criteria that a good vacation demands. Vacations involve relaxation and luxury, which camping does not provide - if anything, it demands greater work. They involve superior weather, which camping cannot guarantee or even shield you from. A good vacation promises refuge from insects, whereas camping is like handing out RSVPs to the vermin of your most Freudian nightmares. Most camping doesn't even provide the isolation that the uncamped would imagine. Too often, you find yourself in an allotted area, landscaped to accept vans and tents, little culs de sac and suburban courts of folks just trying to get away from it all. What amazes me most is that people will go camping no matter where they live, whether they're in the middle of a redwood forest or a loft apartment in Toronto. There's always somewhere to go where you can put up a tent and live like a caveman for a few days, generally amongst a crowd of urbanites hankering for a bit of that high-tech primitive experience.
So what's the appeal? When I was a teenager, camping weekends held out the promise of drink, drugs, bonfires and sex. Now that I'm older I can have me a drug-fueled drunken orgy for two in the comfort of my apartment. The only thing I can't get is the bonfire, but that's not such a bad thing, considering that somebody's sweater always ended up getting thrown in at three am. And you can never convince me that waking up in a tent, lead-limbed, stiff-necked and runny nosed, a knot of knowledge untangling in your head that you're a hundred miles from a coffee shop, is fun. No, camping seems to appeal to people for a couple of reasons: 1) reduced expectations and 2) justifiable but misguided dislike for the modern world.
I can get behind the reduced expectations. Too many tourist spots that promise untroubled leisure end up being a sticky mess full of ugly and elderly people all squeezing out a few drops of pleasure from the desperate dried-up bladder of their days. Las Vegas is a pheromonal wash of greed and horror, like a scrubbed-down Blade Runner; Disneyland will grant you the unpleasant experience of having your pocket picked by your childhood icons. Given those kinds of choices, it's not surprising that so many people plump for a grove of birch and pine and a cut path wandering into the forest. The squirrels may steal your food but they won't hand you flyers for escort services.
I think the genuine appeal lies in the control that people have when they camp. They're not shuttling from the world of determined productivity to the world of predetermined leisure. Instead, they're time travelers boring backward into history with an armature of polymers and high-tech gadgets. It's the ultimate projection of exurbia, in which people get to travel out to nature in their SUVs and sleep like pioneers in their their lightweight poly mesh sleeping bags and tents. Jackets of Gore-Tex, super alloy fishing rods with scientically engineered lures on the ends, advanced socks that wick away moisture and breathable boots. They've come with all their gear to have it both ways. Which is the dream of modern society anyway. And if the kids want to watch Shrek 2 on their battery-powered DVD player after the sun goes down, hell let them. What else are they going to do out here?
Back in Nova Scotia, vacations were different. The endless car journey was not as thinkable to a people raised in insular towns and cosmopolitan cities on the edge of the Atlantic. People either boarded airplanes or went nowhere at all. The few car trips that my family took seemed endless and hugely boring to me - there was no phrase to more torturous than 'the scenic route' - but we never left the province or spent more than five hours at a shot in one of our many Volkswagen Rabbits. Once we all piled into the car along with some out-of-town relatives and drove all the way to Cape Breton, highland home to the Celtic descendants of immigrant Scots. Cape Breton is one of those places, like parts of the Appalachians or Newfoundland, where 'authentic' 'culture' still exists and people in tarpaper shacks carry on their folkways. All I remember is the outdoor swimming pool at the motel, where swarms of mosquitoes helped themselves to my exposed body in the evening heat.
No matter where I've lived, though, everybody treats camping as a legitimate vacation. Why this is I don't know, since camping holds up exactly none of the criteria that a good vacation demands. Vacations involve relaxation and luxury, which camping does not provide - if anything, it demands greater work. They involve superior weather, which camping cannot guarantee or even shield you from. A good vacation promises refuge from insects, whereas camping is like handing out RSVPs to the vermin of your most Freudian nightmares. Most camping doesn't even provide the isolation that the uncamped would imagine. Too often, you find yourself in an allotted area, landscaped to accept vans and tents, little culs de sac and suburban courts of folks just trying to get away from it all. What amazes me most is that people will go camping no matter where they live, whether they're in the middle of a redwood forest or a loft apartment in Toronto. There's always somewhere to go where you can put up a tent and live like a caveman for a few days, generally amongst a crowd of urbanites hankering for a bit of that high-tech primitive experience.
So what's the appeal? When I was a teenager, camping weekends held out the promise of drink, drugs, bonfires and sex. Now that I'm older I can have me a drug-fueled drunken orgy for two in the comfort of my apartment. The only thing I can't get is the bonfire, but that's not such a bad thing, considering that somebody's sweater always ended up getting thrown in at three am. And you can never convince me that waking up in a tent, lead-limbed, stiff-necked and runny nosed, a knot of knowledge untangling in your head that you're a hundred miles from a coffee shop, is fun. No, camping seems to appeal to people for a couple of reasons: 1) reduced expectations and 2) justifiable but misguided dislike for the modern world.
I can get behind the reduced expectations. Too many tourist spots that promise untroubled leisure end up being a sticky mess full of ugly and elderly people all squeezing out a few drops of pleasure from the desperate dried-up bladder of their days. Las Vegas is a pheromonal wash of greed and horror, like a scrubbed-down Blade Runner; Disneyland will grant you the unpleasant experience of having your pocket picked by your childhood icons. Given those kinds of choices, it's not surprising that so many people plump for a grove of birch and pine and a cut path wandering into the forest. The squirrels may steal your food but they won't hand you flyers for escort services.
I think the genuine appeal lies in the control that people have when they camp. They're not shuttling from the world of determined productivity to the world of predetermined leisure. Instead, they're time travelers boring backward into history with an armature of polymers and high-tech gadgets. It's the ultimate projection of exurbia, in which people get to travel out to nature in their SUVs and sleep like pioneers in their their lightweight poly mesh sleeping bags and tents. Jackets of Gore-Tex, super alloy fishing rods with scientically engineered lures on the ends, advanced socks that wick away moisture and breathable boots. They've come with all their gear to have it both ways. Which is the dream of modern society anyway. And if the kids want to watch Shrek 2 on their battery-powered DVD player after the sun goes down, hell let them. What else are they going to do out here?
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
nosferatic extractor
A Japanese research team (who will stop these itinerant research teams that roam the countryside and terrorize the good people for food and lab equipment?) has developed a fuel cell that runs on blood. According to the team, the fuel cell can be used to power computational devices in artificial organs. This is nonsense. The logical application for for the blood-powered fuel cell is consumer electronics. Three fat kids can power an Xbox or a PS2 indefinitely with their blood.
It's an elegant system. The resource pipeline for the Blood Engine is parents, who supply children with crude soda. The children ingest the soda, allowing their digestive systems to refine the high fructose corn syrup into pure glucose, which is then injected into the blood stream in a diabetic cascade. An IV line pipes blood from the chilrens' arms into the power unit, where glucose is extracted and converted into electricity. A output tube carries the "grey blood" back to the children's bodies. Whenever the kids want to play a round of Halo 2 or Morrowind, they just connect the tubing to the shunts in their arms, slurp down a Big Gulp o' Coke and away they go!
Despite its versatitility, the Home Video Blood Engine does have a few disadvantages, prime among them being:
- it must be 'invited in' to consumer's home
- extreme sensitivity to sunlight will cause it to burst into flames
- in order to function at maximum efficiency it must be placed in a bed of its home soil from Redmond, California
- avoid driving wooden stake through centre of unit, even if power of Christ compels you
- accursed of God despite "green" energy profile
Units are expected to hit markets this fall.
It's an elegant system. The resource pipeline for the Blood Engine is parents, who supply children with crude soda. The children ingest the soda, allowing their digestive systems to refine the high fructose corn syrup into pure glucose, which is then injected into the blood stream in a diabetic cascade. An IV line pipes blood from the chilrens' arms into the power unit, where glucose is extracted and converted into electricity. A output tube carries the "grey blood" back to the children's bodies. Whenever the kids want to play a round of Halo 2 or Morrowind, they just connect the tubing to the shunts in their arms, slurp down a Big Gulp o' Coke and away they go!
Despite its versatitility, the Home Video Blood Engine does have a few disadvantages, prime among them being:
- it must be 'invited in' to consumer's home
- extreme sensitivity to sunlight will cause it to burst into flames
- in order to function at maximum efficiency it must be placed in a bed of its home soil from Redmond, California
- avoid driving wooden stake through centre of unit, even if power of Christ compels you
- accursed of God despite "green" energy profile
Units are expected to hit markets this fall.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
the argument from adulthood
I don’t argue much. As a consequence I’ve had to sit through many conversations with people whom I just should told have told to fuck off. People who are radically misinformed, people who argue from daytime television, people who sincerely believe in the tough lovin’ of an invisible daddy in the sky. People who ascribe to the colour of skin a hierarchy of inherent worth (but can’t figure out how they’re taking all the jobs). All the slackjaws who come out from under their rocks when your pour some alcohol out and jack up the background music.
Luckily I have friends who love to argue when faced with idiots like these, friends who chase strangers through the halls of their own assumptions until they’re driven out of the bar. For these friends, morons are meat. They’ve learned to transmute their convictions into a pastime, a game of meaning. Definitions and concepts are clarified, isolated and arranged for maximum enjoyment. Rhetoric is employed and deployed. And sometimes it’s just a bunch of drunken shouting, but the only people who really come away angry are the ones who shouldn’t have opened their mouths in the first place. It’s all incredibly entertaining, but I have trouble joining in.
In contrast to my aggressive friends, who show up spoiling for a disagreement, I view conversations as opportunities to agree with people. Partly this stems from the fact that I lost all arguments as a child; I refused to understand that logic and facts don’t work when people simply find you irritating or smug or physically short, and so it didn’t matter if I was in the right. Indeed, the more in the right I was, the less people wanted to hear it. Under those circumstances, the stakes for each argument were impossibly high, because I was arguing for my own worth in the social hierarchy of childhood. Which was pathetically obvious to everyone in my peer group (let no one suggest that nine year olds aren’t perceptive, albeit cruel, judges of character). Every time I argued a point, I was actually signalling Look at me! And who can bear such a spectacle, whatever your age?
So at some point I gave up on argument. Sometimes I catch people spouting bullshit, but then I think oh who cares and keep nodding along. Sometimes I adopt the supremely passive-aggressive technique of packaging my response in the form of an agreement but filling it with content that actually contradicts what they were saying. Usually, though, if I can’t possibly continue to agree without committing myself to some really untenable ideas, I disengage from the conversation, slowly retracting the landing hooks and kicking gently off until I’ve reached safe enough distance to gun the engines. Why should I hit this person over the head with my point of view? What good would it do the bullshitter to have his bullshit thrown on a plate and handed back to him? It probably won’t convince or convert him to my point of view. Nor can I think of much reward from argument beyond the satisfaction of being able to outtalk some poor bastard who’s blundered into cow-pattied pastures and lost his footing. And whatever happens, my nine-year old self thinks, I’m not going to win any friends by telling people what I think.
The older I get, though, the more that nine-year-old voice fades, and I become increasingly willing to step up and be the obnoxious ass I’ve dreamt of being. Last Thursday I ended up being that ass, and man, was it fun. I was taking part half-heartedly in a conversation that revolved around the question of Do You Believe In A Moral Evolution of Humankind. I threw my opinion in early on and left the wrangling to a few friends of mine and another fellow I’d never met, a soft-shouldered drunken customer service rep from a telecommunications company. For the record, my opinion was “No,” since in these arguments people say “humankind” when what they really mean is “a few wealthy industrialized nations with decent human rights records and centralized plumbing,”and the last truly great thing that people have done is extend the vote to women, and that was quite a long time ago now. I also found the term “Moral Evolution” so loaded with assumptions that I didn’t even know how to talk about it. I started to tune out. Eventually, though, the customer service rep put down his beer and said, with a wave of his hand meant to end debate, “Yeah, but in nature the weakest get killed off, you see. In the herd”.
Arguments from nature infuriate me. They piss me off so much that I will counterattack without regard for context. I had very little idea as to how the conversation had gotten round to this National Geographic moment, but I could guess. So I said to the fellow, “What do you mean?” He refocused on me and said: “You know, nature. The way it works in nature is the weaker get killed off and the stronger survive -“
“I don’t buy it,” I interrupted.
The guy looked at me. I could see the surprise in his eyes ripple outward, the slight loss of definition in his round unlined face. How could I not buy it? What’s not to buy? How can you not buy Nature?
So I told him. I told him that the “nature” he referred to was a series of received truths and quasi-religious bromides based on our cultural horror of being part of the world. I told him that he had seen “nature” perhaps once or twice in his entire life, that even once he left this city he was surrounded by farms, which are exemplars of controlled biomass, about as natural as a golf course. I told him that his attempt to explain human interaction in the framework of “nature” – in truth a debased Darwinism married to a primitive hierarchy of cultures – was reductive and fundamentally bigoted, eschewing as it does all the complexities of our social systems in favour of a brutal series of life-and-death encounters. In efficient, polite and forceful language I peeled back the guy’s assumptions and flayed his point of view without recourse to ad hominem attacks or Derridean jargon. The whole process probably took thirty or forty seconds, and then I was onto another topic altogether.
I’m not stupid. I doubt that I convinced the guy of anything beyond the speed of my mouth. Nor do I believe that I had entered into an evenly matched contest; he had wandered into one of my pet topics unawares and stepped on my toe. But it occurred to me that there was a time, twenty-five years back, when I was the weaker of the herd, consigned in the social Darwinist nightmare of childhood to the vulnerable and lonely edges. All I could do was shout to be taken in to the protective embrace at the centre, where fellows like this customer service rep would have stood.* Once I would have been arguing with him in order to prove myself to him. Now I was just pissed off and unwilling to brook received opinion. What I really wanted to tell him was that I was once on the outside, and that if the world really worked on a simplified ‘survival of the fittest’ model, I would never have gotten to this point, secure and grounded, well-married and successful, sitting in a pub and exercising my brain in the off-hours. Really, I needn’t have said anything at all.
*Yes, I’m aware that I’m adopting the very metaphor I’ve been reviling for the past five hundred words. Slugs can still feed a vending machine.
Luckily I have friends who love to argue when faced with idiots like these, friends who chase strangers through the halls of their own assumptions until they’re driven out of the bar. For these friends, morons are meat. They’ve learned to transmute their convictions into a pastime, a game of meaning. Definitions and concepts are clarified, isolated and arranged for maximum enjoyment. Rhetoric is employed and deployed. And sometimes it’s just a bunch of drunken shouting, but the only people who really come away angry are the ones who shouldn’t have opened their mouths in the first place. It’s all incredibly entertaining, but I have trouble joining in.
In contrast to my aggressive friends, who show up spoiling for a disagreement, I view conversations as opportunities to agree with people. Partly this stems from the fact that I lost all arguments as a child; I refused to understand that logic and facts don’t work when people simply find you irritating or smug or physically short, and so it didn’t matter if I was in the right. Indeed, the more in the right I was, the less people wanted to hear it. Under those circumstances, the stakes for each argument were impossibly high, because I was arguing for my own worth in the social hierarchy of childhood. Which was pathetically obvious to everyone in my peer group (let no one suggest that nine year olds aren’t perceptive, albeit cruel, judges of character). Every time I argued a point, I was actually signalling Look at me! And who can bear such a spectacle, whatever your age?
So at some point I gave up on argument. Sometimes I catch people spouting bullshit, but then I think oh who cares and keep nodding along. Sometimes I adopt the supremely passive-aggressive technique of packaging my response in the form of an agreement but filling it with content that actually contradicts what they were saying. Usually, though, if I can’t possibly continue to agree without committing myself to some really untenable ideas, I disengage from the conversation, slowly retracting the landing hooks and kicking gently off until I’ve reached safe enough distance to gun the engines. Why should I hit this person over the head with my point of view? What good would it do the bullshitter to have his bullshit thrown on a plate and handed back to him? It probably won’t convince or convert him to my point of view. Nor can I think of much reward from argument beyond the satisfaction of being able to outtalk some poor bastard who’s blundered into cow-pattied pastures and lost his footing. And whatever happens, my nine-year old self thinks, I’m not going to win any friends by telling people what I think.
The older I get, though, the more that nine-year-old voice fades, and I become increasingly willing to step up and be the obnoxious ass I’ve dreamt of being. Last Thursday I ended up being that ass, and man, was it fun. I was taking part half-heartedly in a conversation that revolved around the question of Do You Believe In A Moral Evolution of Humankind. I threw my opinion in early on and left the wrangling to a few friends of mine and another fellow I’d never met, a soft-shouldered drunken customer service rep from a telecommunications company. For the record, my opinion was “No,” since in these arguments people say “humankind” when what they really mean is “a few wealthy industrialized nations with decent human rights records and centralized plumbing,”and the last truly great thing that people have done is extend the vote to women, and that was quite a long time ago now. I also found the term “Moral Evolution” so loaded with assumptions that I didn’t even know how to talk about it. I started to tune out. Eventually, though, the customer service rep put down his beer and said, with a wave of his hand meant to end debate, “Yeah, but in nature the weakest get killed off, you see. In the herd”.
Arguments from nature infuriate me. They piss me off so much that I will counterattack without regard for context. I had very little idea as to how the conversation had gotten round to this National Geographic moment, but I could guess. So I said to the fellow, “What do you mean?” He refocused on me and said: “You know, nature. The way it works in nature is the weaker get killed off and the stronger survive -“
“I don’t buy it,” I interrupted.
The guy looked at me. I could see the surprise in his eyes ripple outward, the slight loss of definition in his round unlined face. How could I not buy it? What’s not to buy? How can you not buy Nature?
So I told him. I told him that the “nature” he referred to was a series of received truths and quasi-religious bromides based on our cultural horror of being part of the world. I told him that he had seen “nature” perhaps once or twice in his entire life, that even once he left this city he was surrounded by farms, which are exemplars of controlled biomass, about as natural as a golf course. I told him that his attempt to explain human interaction in the framework of “nature” – in truth a debased Darwinism married to a primitive hierarchy of cultures – was reductive and fundamentally bigoted, eschewing as it does all the complexities of our social systems in favour of a brutal series of life-and-death encounters. In efficient, polite and forceful language I peeled back the guy’s assumptions and flayed his point of view without recourse to ad hominem attacks or Derridean jargon. The whole process probably took thirty or forty seconds, and then I was onto another topic altogether.
I’m not stupid. I doubt that I convinced the guy of anything beyond the speed of my mouth. Nor do I believe that I had entered into an evenly matched contest; he had wandered into one of my pet topics unawares and stepped on my toe. But it occurred to me that there was a time, twenty-five years back, when I was the weaker of the herd, consigned in the social Darwinist nightmare of childhood to the vulnerable and lonely edges. All I could do was shout to be taken in to the protective embrace at the centre, where fellows like this customer service rep would have stood.* Once I would have been arguing with him in order to prove myself to him. Now I was just pissed off and unwilling to brook received opinion. What I really wanted to tell him was that I was once on the outside, and that if the world really worked on a simplified ‘survival of the fittest’ model, I would never have gotten to this point, secure and grounded, well-married and successful, sitting in a pub and exercising my brain in the off-hours. Really, I needn’t have said anything at all.
*Yes, I’m aware that I’m adopting the very metaphor I’ve been reviling for the past five hundred words. Slugs can still feed a vending machine.
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