Tederick.com: December 2005 Archives
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You know, all week I've been kicking around how to end this year of blogging. I wanted to give it a bit of a grace note, to tell you some things about what's become of me since this awful year started tearing down all the things that mattered to me. But... wallowing doesn't actually feel too important to me today. I think I'll save something for next Christmas.
Happy oh-six, everyone.
It was an interesting year for movies, with cataclysmic highs and lows, and very little middle ground. Some of the best "blockbuster" films ever made vied with some of the worst "serious dramas" I've seen in a long, long time for a slot in our "slumptastic" year, and more than a few sleepers sneaked through to make things interesting. Oh, and the little matter of the conclusion of the film saga that has dominated my life almost from the very beginning. Ultimately, this may be one of my most schizophrenic lists yet. We'll start with #1 and work downwards, because everyone already knows what's coming in first...
Simply for suggesting - nay, insisting upon - the creation of Mamo!, Matty Price would have been nominated for Tederick.com's Man of the Year. Few new initiatives in Tederick.com's history have made such an overwhelming impact on the landscape as Mamo - its creation has spawned a heightened interest in my critical work, a second podcast altogether, and to top it all off, it's just so incredibly fun.
What really made this year's winner go the distance, though, was his literal ability to do just that. So, he accompanied Jason, Chad and I to a Star Wars convention in Indianapolis in spite of not really being as overwhelming a fan... and then, just to prove that he really was in that for the sheer fun of it, he drove me to North Carolina and back in June, to watch a 50-second film of mine play at a film festival that nobody had ever heard of.
You learn a lot about a man when you're on the road together for a cumulative total of 45 hours within a two month time frame. You learn a hell of a lot more when your life completely goes to shit and he's one of the scarce handful of people who's willing to not only tell you when you're going batshit crazy, but also when you're not going batshit crazy: when the pain is earned, when the paranoia is real, and when you just might be doing better than you have any reasonable right to be.
Previous Man of the Year honourees include:
For making the greatest positive contribution to the Tederick.com environment in 2005, we are pleased to award Matthew Price the title of Man of the Year.
Did anyone else know that the lead singer of Rilo Kiley is the little girl from The Wizard? And if so, why wasn't I told?
Man, The Wizard. Never has a movie so awful been such a gigantic part of my life.
It's our very last Mamo of the year, and we close out 2005 just like everyone else closes out 2005: by making lists, dressing things down, and figuring out where we're headed. As with blogTO, I'm genuinely stunned and amazed at how well Mamo has made itself a formidable presence in my life. 2005 was great, can't wait to do it again!
Click here to download the mp3.
Stick around Tederick.com today, as I do the perennial end-of-year rollout, including Man of the Year and my top ten films for 2005. And, of course, the long-awaited opportunity to kiss this bullshit year goodbye. Did I say "kiss?" How about "kick hard in face?"
For the second time in two weeks my boss' boss (my support person's support person) sent the entire floor home at noon. If "entire floor" makes the gesture sound grandiloquent I should point out that including myself there were four people at work today, and precious little to do. So I skipped out at sunny noontime, went downtown, picked up some CAYA stuff I backordered last week, offered to adjust the Redheaded Snailer's bra strap, and navigated the murky waters that are Chapters' online returns policy. Then I came home and got an e-mail with the subject line "Just do her!" to which I could not agree more.
Now Brandy is watching Attack of the Clones, which thwarts my plans to watch Revenge of the Sith. Sigh. Instead, I shall burn Nuns That Fuck DVDs and await the arrival of my analogue porn.
I'm not quite yet at the point where my body doesn't think it's some kind of cataclysmic joke when my alarm goes off at 7:06 every morning. This is partially because I just haven't been sleeping well this week at all (last week was better, but this week I'm stressy) and partly because seven oh six?! Give me a freaking break!
Tea to get things moving, reading of blogs to see if anything is going on, and then perhaps blogging a bit myself, because I don't want to neglect my pretty little Tederick.commies. I'm attempting to manage this stage of my career without coffee, because down that road lies pain, but some days are harder than others. Well, that's true regardless.
Stupid week, a perfect conclusion to a stupid year.
"I've been looking forward to this." - Count Dooku
Waking up on not my best day ever, and walking past the line of newspaper boxes on the way to the subway and there she is. And that stomach-descending moment of - that must be her. And not having particularly ever wanted to see, or read, or know any of this. Like how the older sister was waiting across the street. Or the blow-by-blow accounts of the press camp at the family home. Or just how apallingly pretty she was. I don't deal very well with this sort of thing.
It's my last podcast for blogTO this year - so I wrap out some of Toronto's better 2005 film events, review Munich and Brokeback, and generally wax philosophic. It's interesting: this moviesTO dealie came out of an even bigger nowhere than Mamo did, and now that the ball is finally rolling at the general speed and cadence that I want it to, I'm fairly happy with things. It's getting far more challenging, obviously, with the workload now firmly in place, but I'm looking forward to seeing where this thing can go in '06, especially given the recent reaffirmation of the importance of keeping our content Toronto-centric.
Just a quick note to let all and sundry know that the repression has gotten to me. I retire to my bed.
Nowadays, every single person, place and thing needs to be lumped into an easily-identifiable category from which it can cause no trouble. Ennis and Jack certainly are not gay; they just happen to be in love with each other. This, of course, does cause trouble.
At this point I think I'm giving New Years the clean miss for 2005/6. Why? Because New Years sucks, that's why. It's boring and annoying and people get wayyyyyyy too freaked out about it. I've had me some good ones - like the one where I went to see Titanic, or the one with all the sex, or the one when I ate the entire plate of chicken wings after watching fireworks on the roof for twenty minutes, or the one where Mark and I wasted two whole boxes of After Eights trying to break them in half exactly like it happens in the commercial. But usually, it's such a non-event - and you spend your entire evening so ferociously aware that you're failing as a human being by not having a better time - that it just winds up being really irritating. A couple of years ago, in fact, I even left a party at 11:53 because I was so bored by the proceedings that I couldn't even be bothered to wait around for seven lousy minutes. I was on King Street waiting for the streetcar when midnight rolled around.
Hmmm... this became ranty.
Well anyways, yeah. I have no good plans and I am not looking for good plans. I may go to a movie. I may clean my room. I may build a fort out of old Kleenex boxes and chewing gum, and spend the night reading porno magazines and comic books while eating soda crackers and bopping my head to the Bee Gees. It's a rich tapestry of possibility. Or in this case, a bland curtain of relative levels of boredom.
Last night I was watching something on SexTV about the vagina, like a half-hour special or something, and so naturally they had an endless parade of shots of the vagina itself - usually a woman modelling on a swivel-table being shot from the mid-thighs to the belly-button, a.k.a. the Universal Vagina. It was rather startlingly beautiful, a true paragon of vaginadom to which all other vaginae would be compelled to look up at in awe. This sort of rubbed me the wrong way. The program itself made the point of how many women feel intimidated by the "pretty vaginas" they see (or don't see) in media, which rarely allow for the enormous variety and differentiation among the genuine articles, and here they're presenting their example as this ludicrously symmetrical work of abstract art with no visible labia minora, sparse pubic hair to offend the viewer's gaze, and a general rosy glow about the proceedings that was only enhanced by the cinematographer's rather comical fondness for putting a redhead between the model's knees and blasting away at the thing with 650 watts of light. (Which worked great, except that it made the inner thighs throb like Marge Simpson's glazed ham.) I mean sure, it was eye-catchingly pretty, but aren't they a hell of a lot more fun when they have a bit of personality?
Meanwhile, something I've been noticing more and more in the past couple of years (mostly because of living with Brandy), which has been drawn out even more by the release of Brokeback Mountain, is the number of women who are now unabashedly willing to admit to enjoying watching men making out. This was exemplified tonight by the sheer number of tittering girls at the Brokeback screening I attended, whose sole reason for being there seemed to be to watch Heath and Jack fuck on a mountain. I'm really pleased that this interest is gaining momentum in modern heterosexual culture. For my part, I never had any specific abiding interest in watching girls have sex with each other as opposed to straight porn, other than that it usually allowed for staring at two naked women rather than the de facto one. Watching Heath and Jake french and then beat the shit out of each other, at least, had the air of novelty to it.
I remember when I became particularly, and permanently, aware of my fundamental heterosexuality; I was 17 or 18, which probably means it coincides directly with the first time I fell in love - real love, not the aforementioned high school puppy love that got so satisfyingly brought to a close last week. When it happened, it was surprisingly liberating, given that I was essentially only reconfirming the supposed social "norm" into which I had always been raised; it nevertheless ran through me and continues to run through me and define the single most important goal - and lack - and opposition - and complementation (is that a word?) - of my whole darned life. It was also when I figured out that I could do whatever the fuck I wanted with boys, because it would never, ever matter in anything like the same way as the most basic interactions I would have with girls. It would solve none of my problems, if these problems are even solvable at all. I am set to a single course.
Nuns That F*** starts making the rounds this month; tomorrow it goes to Japan, Australia, and the Yukon, as well as down to North Carolina as this year's entry in Hi Mom!. (I don't think I'd drive down again this year if the film were accepted, but hey, I've been convinced before.) I'm still trying to bash my festival hotlist into shape for 2006 but at least I know what's due in January and can apply accordingly; it turns out that managing details like this are a lot harder when you've got a day job (unless your day job is particularly boring) so I guess we'll have to see how well I keep up with it in the next little while. Still, I'm excited about NTF; it's the only one of last year's works over which I can claim total copyright, and it's just so damn pretty. Hopefully it'll get a little play in '06.
Mmmmmmmmmmmovies.
Strangely, the worst part wasn't the footage from downtown or the interviews with the witnesses; the worst part was the videotape of the shooter in the back of the police car, with his head buried in the seat because he didn't want to be seen on TV.
Have the balls to show your fucking face, you worthless piece of shit.
Today I bought that tasty little NYX/X-23 hardcover I've been drooling over (stoopid comics but so damn pretty) and also used my gift cert to pick up Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, moving me within five disks of completing that particular director's available works on DVD. (At least until next month, when The Bad Sleep Well gets Criterionized.) Then I came home and blew a fat wad on Chapters.ca, using yet more gift cards to snatch up a couple of photo books I've been eyeballing for a few weeks/months. And tomorrow, I'll disintegrate the DVD Wave.
The miracle of salary, my friends. The miracle of salary. Ah, disposable income, how I've missed disposing of you.
At this point the plan is to write four scripts in 2006. Wait: no, it's actually five now, after a hasty and compelling pitch from Matty Price this afternoon. With the exception of that latter, all of these are scripts I've been percolating for various lengths of time, some longer than others; it's been a solid 18 months since I've been drafting anything on a regular basis, so it's going to be interesting to see if I've still got the chops for this sort of thing.
The projects are:
Feasability: not sure. Never done the day job / writing at night thing before. The math works in my favour: roughly 500 pages of script before the end of the year, with 52 weeks to do it in, means less than ten pages of writing per week. Since I generally write between 4 and 10 pages every time I sit down to write, I should be ahead of the curve; but then, I also make a practice of gutting huge tracts of work and starting over at various intervals. So I don't really know. Mongoose, at least, should be easily achievable by the end of February, but it's going to be a long road for each and every one of these before they're anywhere near readable.
Anyway, that's the plan. I shall continue to report in, with my progress.
Come on, who didn't love this guy? He was everyone from the organ-grinding machine gunner in Batman Returns to Jenny Calendar's uncle on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He was the crazed Dr. Kaufman, the single best part of Tomorrow Never Dies, and he was the only good thing about Ghost. He was in Fast Times and Cuckoo's Nest. Dollars to doughnuts I don't think you can name a single more distinctive character actor in the world - this guy had a face that was made by the almighty himself to bring out distinctive, memorable portrayals. I'm really going to miss him. I sort of just assumed I'd be seeing Vincent Schiavelli pop up in movies and television shows until the end of the world, and every single time, I'd get to go "Hey, I love that guy!"
Meal #4:
And now, to die.
I watched the 4-hour documentary on The Frighteners Special Edition DVD today, which brings to a close the rather lengthy period of my interest in this "holy grail" of behind-the-scenes filmmaking material. I remember hearing about the original laserdisc edition when I was in film school; in fact, as I recall, I even asked the school if they had a cop or were going to be getting a copy for educational use. (Naturally, they thought I was insane. It was York. Bluescreens? Digital monsters? No York student would ever need to learn about that.)
I never collected laserdiscs; it was well above my price range when I was a teenager and early twentysomething, although that was also (ironically) when I would have gotten the most out of materials like this, as my interest in (and knowledge of) filmmaking and special effects was increasing exponentially with every successive film I made (and remember, there has never been a more productive filmmaking period in my life than the years between when I was 14 and 17, in which I think I completed north of 20 projects). The Frighteners on laser was the grail because it was just so ludicrously pointless - here was a turkey of a film from a director I'd never even heard of, that nonetheless was being given an exhaustive, authoritative making-of treatment, in special features which more than doubled the length of the theatrical cut of the film itself. I wanted it more than sex.
How exactly Peter Jackson presaged the coming of a decade where an entire home entertainment industry would make filmschool-in-a-cans out of flicks as varied and pointless as American Pie and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is beyond me. What he achieves in the Frighteners doc is like a dry run attempt at what would make the Lord of the Rings DVDs great five years later; not just in the construction of the documentary itself but in slowly involving the personalities of the people behind the scenes in the storytelling of the making of the film. (Richard Taylor, Christian Rivers, even little Billy Jackson all get their first taste of fame on this documentary.)
That PJ somehow intuited that the personal process of filmmaking could be as equally represented as its technical side was the true revolution here; that we're still listening to the story, a decade later, is proof of that story's ongoing appeal and basic human reward. It never stops being fun watching people do such a good job at something that they clearly love so much. And if it makes the next generation of filmmaker geeks wet in the nethers, so much the better.
Meal #2:
Meal #3:
I got a bike! I am no longer bikeless. Well technically I am still bikeless but come spring, I am bikin' it up oldschool on a sweet ride c/o the 'rents. This is good news, though it also made me miss my old bike more. Like so many things, she went before her time. But my parents were absolutely adorable in their presentation: they drew up a "bike gift certificate" on a piece of cardboard, cut it into a jigsaw, and gave me the pieces in the tiniest little box imaginable. Well done.
Me and the sibs got our parents a DVD player and some DVDs. We got them one of the 5-disk changer jobbies so that they never have to get out of bed, ever again. It's an important stage in our plan to make them elderly. Then we get the sugar, then we get the power, and then... then we get the women.
Can't talk. Eating.
Meal #1:
And I'm told there's desert now. And Dylan Thomas and Pass the Mojo and watching my father buzz about like a hummingbird, now that he has fundamentally lost the ability to sit still for more than a nanosecond. And my brother has made a Christmas album with his friend Jeremy, which we've all been listening to all day. The cover of "Little Drummer Boy" is not to be missed.
And then for the lying about and going "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh."
Not surprisingly, we've had more snow in T.O. than I've seen in many a December, but when the chips are down and it's time to really go for it, the temperature creeps above 0, the snow turns to sludge, and the whole planet looks like God took a big diarrhea shit on it. Merry flippin' Christmas!
I'm off to the 'rents for a couple of days, with my unwrapped presents in tow. Must make cheetsa, sleep in the hammock-bed, and watch Frighteners special features till I'm tinselly in the face.
Munich is undeniably grey where Schindler's was black and white (har har), and bears the imprimatur of a filmmaker discarding artfulness in the search of truth... but for all the victories achieved here (and they are many), something remains elusive.
Today at noon my boss' boss (or rather, my support person's support person) came out of his office and sent the whole floor home early for Christmas. It was like a scene from a movie, with the hugging and crying and jumping up and down... and that was just at my cubicle. Which is finally a cubicle, by the way, with a computer and everything. I plan to populate it with hundreds and hundreds of astromech droids... because that's what I am now. I beep and fix hyperdrives. C'est moi.
I whiled away the rest of the day as best I could, with some Snailing and some moviegoing and some reading of funnybooks, and when I came home there were shinydisks in giftwrap waiting for me. (I'd say which ones, but that will only serve to panic the people who bought me the same ones, but failed to get them to me soon enough.) And one particularly ingenious sight gag in the tenth issue of Bear, involving an army of bobble-headed teddy bears and a particularly large jet turbine. I snorted coffee out my nose, and you can't put a price on that.
But alas, there's no denying that the holiday blahs have hit me at last. I've done a rather miraculous job, I think, of giving Christmas the clear emotional slip this year, but there's very little getting around it now: it's right in front of me, and it's making me feel the lonely more than I like. It hasn't been the best year ever, but the last month has brought some clear progress, so I'm trying to stay focused on that. Which will be a lot easier in about 72 hours.
Matt's ten-year high school reunion:
Mark and I riding the subway together like it was a semi-formal. Running into Sandy and Amanda of all people at Eglinton station, all four of us together again as though nothing had happened in ten years. Jody. Amelia. Sarah Pengelly, not a Pengelly any more. Dave Patterson. Gabor. Evelyn and Liz and eventually André. Me talking film production and holocaust tattoos with turbo-hottie Roneet Folman (Google, my ass). Dana Borcea. Jill Careless. Me telling Sarah Sweet that I was completely in love with her from grade 7 to 10, which may mean nothing to you people, but in the complete arc of the Matt Story is the moral equivalent of huffing the ring into Mount Doom.
Pollack. Shtern showing up and making it somehow feel like North Toronto again, just by seeing him there. President Choi. Jen Woods, looking exactly the same except for, you know, the pregnancy. Erin Oke and I reminiscing about Mr. Jacobsen lashing us out in grade seven for not being as smart as we thought we were. People who lost their virginities to each other seeing each other for the first time in ten years. Lyranda Martin-Evans and Josh Book within moments of each other; me achieving everything I set out to achieve. Aubray Lynas telling me that she'd always recognize me by the moles on my lip, which actually made me like them for the first time in a long time. Craig Brissenden, who looks nothing like Craig Brissenden.
Really interesting, all. Such a long way, and so close.
Can somebody explain to me why anyone in their right mind would willingly submit themselves to hymenoplasty? Doesn't it hurt enough the first time? Isn't it going to hurt enough the next time, anyway, without the additional tsuris of ripping through a reconstructed membrane of flesh?
Wait a minute, wait a minute... isn't virginity a state of mind?
I'll deflower another before the day is out, by gum.
About a month ago, the ladies of the Box had the rather ingenious idea of, instead of buying each other small cheap Christmas presents, pooling all of the money together and going dildo shopping at Come As You Are. They invited me along as the sole male representative. It turned out to be so much damn fun that not only am I going to babble about it here, but I'm going to clean up the language and post about it on blogTO, too. The world deserves to know that as holiday spending sprees go, you pretty much can't go wrong turning four horny girls (and me) loose in a sex toy shop with cash money in their pockets and a commitment to buy.
The Box girls were split down the middle on the merits of the Pink Passion vs. the Power Rabbit. Both of them are large, dominating machines of pulsating personal pleasure. They're both a little scary looking. Veininess was a serious turn-off on the Pink Passion ("I'd be afraid it would wake up and impregnate me in the night," Bex was heard to utter), but the Power Rabbit didn't sport the same split-finger clit tickler, which was a seroius bonus. I didn't take a final tally on who ended up with which one, but I think both of them were purchased by various members of the group. Nobody left there without some kind of vibrator, I can tell you that... not even me.
I went down there to get a Fleshlight because let's face it, I've wanted one for about a gajillion years and what's the use of getting a new job if you can't make with the silicone self-lovin'? What I didn't expect was that I was going to go hog-happy over the Splash, a nifty little solid plastic vibe. Talk about love at first sight. It comes in the most appealing shade of teal, and is just a damn decent around-the-house toy for both girls and boys. Has the best solid buzz on it I've felt in a really long time, too. That thing's a life-changer.
Because it's comic book day I also got a copy of Head, the comic book for lovers of cunnilingus, and the first issue of Dirty Found, which I've wanted for a really long time. Left the Bubble Bath Girls photo book on the shelf because it costs fifty damn dollars, but I'll go back for it sooner or later. Ditto on the Straight Girl's Guide to Sleeping with Chicks, which is almost too awesome to be believed. I know at least two people who need a copy right freakin' now.
After CAYA I went over to the Snail and bought more conventional comic books, and mixed them all up in my bag with the sexy ones like a naughty schoolboy. Also scored me some excited Redheaded Snailer conversationalizin' about The Chronicles of Narnia, which split the grin somethin' fierce.
Man, I could spend another couple hundred bucks at CAYA without even breaking a sweat. This is Christmas.
Wait, did that last post make any kind of sense? I can't tell. I might be too tired or possibly too dehydrated.
Dave has put up a link to the music video of his that I worked on a few months back, "Sun's Hanging Low," on his web site. I think it turned out rather spectacularly well (which is code amongst us Yorkies for "that thar looks like a professional done shot it!"), so check it out!
I got Serenity on DVD a couple of days ago and finally got to watch it tonight. Man howdy that movie's pretty. And I sorta get why it might have been so hard to write - the beats don't fall anywhere in the timeline where I thought they did; what I thought couldn't have been more than the last 30 minutes of the movie is in fact its entire second half, an hour in total. Certainly shows you something about the telescopic effect of heightening tension, and also why it felt like we'd crammed through so much plot - like, three and a half seasons' worth - into just 120 minutes of film. That's a damn well-written script that can actually fool the viewer's sense of time, pacing and plot structure. Nifty.
Right, the job. I haven't even told the damn story yet. Actually that's not true: I've told every single person I've come in contact with in the past five days the story; the problem is that (with my high school reunion looming on Thursday, among other things) I'm going to have to tell the story a whole lot more if I keep referring to the job here on the blog and don't actually make with the firm details.
I have accepted a position in the Continuous Learning department at T**** Mobility, as an e-learning development specialist. It's tasty. I'm working up a much larger / more expansive "about me" page for this here Tederick.com that will probably include details about my professional life (I just spelled that as "kufe" by accident, and I think "professional kufe" is a much better phrase), but for now that's what you need to know. E-training: the training of people via the e. Such are my duties.
"The golden claw" is what I call my left hand, which becomes vaguely claw-shaped after doing too much CTRL-C / CTRL-V work in the space of an average day. Which, I'm told, is gonna be one handy claw in the months to come.
I accepted the job last week, after a frenzied three weeks of multiple offers from multiple companies, which itself followed a few solid months of (as you loyal Tederick.commies already know) flat-out nothingness in the job-search department. Remember that whole "am I a lab rat?" discussion? That thing.
For this particular job I owe a gigantic debt of thanks to the Goldsteins, Brenda and Aaron. Brenda who said to me "you should really talk to my brother" and Aaron who, besides being said brother and also (vaguely coincidentally) a guy I went to high school with but haven't talked to in ten years, really went out of his way to hook me up with T**** when he saw an opportunity there for me. So they're the local heroes at the moment, and I'm sure my parents would cook them dinner if asked.
Today was Day 2 at the job, because I didn't want to wait until the new year to get started - no point in sitting around thinking about it for two weeks and then starting, especially given all the inevitable shakedown issues that have to get sorted out when starting any job. This way, I get to hit the ground vaguely running in January, having already cut my teeth, ribcage, and left big toe. Orientation's done, phone's on the way, and I'll have a fancy new NIP number in the new year.
So that's the job.
Today I:
Also, under miscellany: it takes 30 minutes to get to my job by TTC, or 40 if you stop at the Tim Hortons at Pape Station on the way in. And after 4 months of completely eschewing all instant messaging, it turns out that MSN is my very best friend. Whowuddathunkit.
Today I:
Mmmm fashnik.
It's very nearly our 6-month anniversary of doing Mamo, which feels sorta right and sorta strange, but an achievement nevertheless. To celebrate that, and also all things Kong, we've been plotting to do a "jumbo mamo" for the occasion. Clocking in at an hour and seven, it's our longest yet by a yard, and hey, we only got interrupted once!
(Don't mind me, I'm spiking a fever.)
I'm fairly exhausted, but otherwise in good spirits about the new job, the next two weeks, and the big 2006 megillah itself. More on that later, but given that '06 has gone and packaged itself so precisely (my contract ends on December 15), it's going to be an unusually distinct challenge to piece together what sorts of things I'm going to want to be achieving over the course of the year. Jeez, I might even have to have bona fide Resolutions, a policy I usually eschew in favour of a "don't wait till Jan 1 to set your goals" approach to life. But hey. I've done some preliminary work on it all, but more later. Right now I'm just hoping I have enough black socks to last out the week.
Tonight I shall prepare myself a sumptuous Kraft Dinner repaste, watch movies, and try to ignore my cough.
At this point, then, it can be clearly said that I'm only going to buy something if it's really good, if it's not only going to add something to the collection as a whole, but stands a decent chance of staying off Ebay for at least a couple of years.
Still standing after my marathon day yesterday; I managed to get all (!) of my Christmas shopping done in just 2 hours, which included a trio of Serenity DVDs for myself and my roomies, because heaven forbid we're not all equally represented in our Whedon collection. Also, I got pants. Good pants.
Then it was Giant Monkey Round Two, and then dinner, and then by the time we got to poor Meredith's Christmas party I was actually almost too tired to stand up coherently, so we buggered out, spent an excruciating 30 minutes waiting for a streetcar that never came, before cabbing it back to 3QF and calling it an it.
Last night at dinner I ran a little informal off-track betting about what would end up higher in my top ten this year, Batman or the giant monkey. I'm getting excited about this year's list; after nearly twelve full months of note-taking, it's finally looking solid. It will be published (as usual) at the end of the year. Films that didn't make the Top Ten that probably should have: My Summer of Love, Sin City, A Perfect Fake. Films that might yet make the cut and push other things out of the list: Brokeback Mountain, Munich, The New World. Two weeks to go, gotta see all three.
Meanwhile (new salary firmly in place), I am formally committed to finishing my collection of Kurosawa DVDs before the end of the year. I think I've got 6 to go, 4 of which are Criterions, so it won't be cheap, but at least it will be done, the scratching of an itch that's been tormenting me for the better part of a year. While I'm at it, I'll finish off my collection of Peter Jackson DVDs as well, which was 2004's goal. (Yeah, I dropped a goal. Eat it.) New shelf space will be purchased, credit card statements will be paid off, all shall be green and golden in the mercy of my means.
So here I am. I woke up this morning, rolled over, and set my alarm clock to 7:06 a.m. I'm going to spend the morning doing some writing, including filing my 2005 Toy Report. Later, there's a Jumbo Mamo to record, papers to sign, and movies to watch. It will be a good day.
My cousins are going to Cuba next week, so we had our big family Christmas dinner tonight; Uncle Joey did not set himself on fire, but we ended up playing a rather eviscerating game of Pop Culture Trivial Pursuit (with bonus DVD!) for about two and a half hours. As usual, music is none of my business (nor are fashion, fads, buzz, or sports) so mostly I just smirked when other teams couldn't come up with Dog Day Afternoon or didn't know that in Hearts of Darkness (the second-best film of the 1990s), Francis Coppola refers to Apocalypse Now as "The Idiodyssey."
I was hit by a striking dynamic, though, which I only really noticed for the first time this year: my family is currently spinning without an axis. My generation (of which I am the oldest of 8 "children") are by now well too old to be "children" in any capacity at all; many of us are, in fact, past due for all the normal tropes of heterosocial (that's my new favourite word by the way) life achievement: marriage, children, picket fences, etc. My parents got married when they were 24 and were pregnant with me by the time they were my age, so I pretty much grew up with the belief that I'd be starting a family by this point... a goal which, of course, I've given a clean miss. With no looming marriages or offspring anywhere else in my generation, it's going to be a while yet before the youngsters start making the family Christmas their sport-of-choice.
Meanwhile, the older generation (the six "parents") are now officially drifting away from being able to hold the comfortable center of the social dynamic in the family. They're in the place where, in any fair or rational universe, they'd be starting to be given a grandchild or two, to spoil rotten around this time of year; they should be guests at the Christmas party, made comfortable in the living room with some nibblies and a nice drink, instead of having to run the show themselves for their adultified offspring. The older genreation is being made to interact, somewhat gracefully, with my generation, on a playing field that can never really be made equal. We're too old to be kids, and they're too old to be parents, so we're all just sort of waiting for the next big phase of our family lifestyle, which hasn't arrived yet, and to my mounting regret, might not arrive for a while.
I'm not describing any of this as a particularly bad thing, obviously, just something I noticed. I think my family gets on rather extraordinarily well, actually, particularly compared to many other families I've seen. It's a shame we never quite seem to manage to draw ourselves together in any other capacity throughout the year, but I know that the spirit of the thing is there, nevertheless. I'm lucky that way.
Gather round, ladies and gentlemen, and witness a spectacular site: our amiable Jedi hero will now begin his formidable trials. Thrill to the wonder of not one but two Christmas parties in 24 hours, and the omnipresent possibility that Uncle Joey will once again set himself on fire! Watch our hero treat with a giant monkey for the second time, and bring the giant monkey carcass home on the hood of his Smrt car! Gasp at the Jedi's last-minute Christmas shopping exploits, as he tries to achieve in 3 hours what he has been unable to achieve in 3 weeks! Witness the provocative power of the young Jedi's mind as he socializes with young and old, male and female, in a complex and dazzling array of new and unusual environments, some friendly, some not! And at long last, behold the bravery as our carefree hero puts the "oy" back in "employed," the "ob" back in "job," by beginning his new position this very Monday, in a silver tower by a shining sea (of cars)!
And just to prove how truly powerful a Jedi he is... he's going to do it all with the beginnings of a nasty head cold!
It's been revealed today that various peepholes in the womens' washroom at Eglinton Station have been kept open for up to six weeks while lunkheaded TTC special constables attempted to use them to catch peeping toms. SIX FUCKING WEEKS!! As much as I have long believed that the TTC is one of the most reprehensible organizations in the city, this is a new low. Absolutely unbelievable. What, exactly, is the next downward step in their disrespect towards their customers? Flinging goose shit out of the guard car window at the people waiting on the subway platforms?
Tonight I was with April at the Second Cup at Yonge and Charles, talking about web sites and art. I had just finished telling her that for whatever reason - cosmic vortex, ungainly neighbourhood pressure, who knows - that particular spot is a very strange coffee shop and always has been; weird stuff frequently happens there. I was talking rather loudly on another topic, when a woman called out to me from clear across the room - "You're Jewish, I can tell. The Force is with us, man." I was wearing a Star Wars t-shirt (because when am I ever not?) so I replied "Well, you're half right, I am a Jedi, but I am not a Jew." She said that she hadn't noticed the shirt but "just knew," and insisted that I sounded Jewish and that therefore there had to be some part of me that was Jewish.
Still carrying this conversation across the entire room and quite loudly, I good-naturedly assured her that she'd got it wrong, and that there really was no Jewish in my family. She told me that by "part" she had meant my penis. Shoulda seen that coming.
I really don't think my penis is Jewish, circumcision scar or no, nor do I think that circumcision in general would automatically indoctrinate him into the tribe. If anything I'd say he's even more of an atheist than I am, because when he says "there is no God," he means it. He is not part of a chosen people; he may well be the Chosen One, but that just brings us straight back to Jedi. Anyways I didn't explain this to the Second Cup woman; she was already out the door like she'd found the Messiah and boy, I would love it if that were true. Satisfied that my original point had been proven, April and I went back to talking about web sites and art.
I'm really freakin' tired. A whole lot has just happened. I'll tell you tomorrow. In the meantime, I must be getting better at these things because as much as 2 weeks ago I said I'd done the best moviesTO podcast ever, today's installment beats it by a mile. Any podcast that almost makes you burst into tears (of the happy) while you're recording it must be a good thing. Today it's the Kong review (no spoilers this time) coupled with the Narnia review, and a bunch of other shit too. I'm really freakin' proud of this one.
Click here to download the mp3.
Someday I'm going to actually understand how syndication works, but it's not today.
Plenty of fun over at the Browncoats site, for those who still remember their password; today the A/V room is featuring a deleted scene of Inara teaching space whoring at Space Whore Academy. I suppose it'll be on the DVD, but that's a whole five days away! Mmm... space whores.
The only problem with the movie last night was this damn kid. First of all, he was literally running in an endless circle in the lobby beforehand - maybe 3 years old, asian, wearing a red jumper, and wheeling about for what had to have been ten minutes. He nearly crashed into me as I was making my way past him, and then (because he's a kid and kids are stupid) he continued his little circle and crashed clean into me again - took my bag straight to the melon, which he seemed to find utterly shocking. Then, in the movie, he screamed a lot, but not at the scary parts; he screamed with delight a lot, at pretty skies, or big rocks. Then later, his grandparents (?) escorted him out of the theatre as soon as we were off Skull Island, which for some reason pissed me off more: clearly the kid was too young or too undisciplined to be brought to a movie anyway, but now you're removing him from the theatre before he has to suffer the ignominy of watching Kong get shot off the Empire State Building? Is this how we're growing men these days? Why not show him the Blockbuster cut of Bambi while you're at it?
Bah.
So to prove that life is entirely cyclical, I once again find myself with a schoolboy crush on a Snailer. I don't go in much for schoolboy crushes... even when I was a schoolboy. (I look adorable in knee-high wool socks, though, I'll tell ya.) But hey, I have to work within my mien. And it doesn't really matter... with 2005 sputtering to a finish, I'm glad of anything that alleviates boredom by even 1%. These are such excruciatingly dull days. Even the great sources of what should be stress in my life no longer raise my hackles; I mock their hackle-raising abilities. I'm sure some great force will stomp upon me shortly, because I'm overdue for another beating, but until then I merely yawn and cast about for something pretty to look at.
Hang on to your armrests, because when this big beast changes course, it does it fast. King Kong goes from failure to masterpiece in, literally, one minute and fifteen seconds.
The most severe spoiler warning I will ever issue applies to this review. I know you already know what happens at the end of this movie; that's not the point. Believe me: in this King Kong, the surprises of getting there are like nothing you've ever seen. Don't ruin them for yoursef. Go see the flick, then come back and read my review.
Meanwhile, it's twenty after one in the morning and I've listened to the last six tracks of the Kong score four times just finishing the last three paragraphs of that sucker. Completely flipped my voice and style, and damn happy I did, because the "imperiouser-than-thou" bit was getting old.
Mmm... big monkey.
Sleep now.
I don't want to oversell this thing, because that's foolish, but there's also little point in hiding the degree to which I've just been completely fucked up:
It's a masterpiece.
There have been a precious handful of movies in my life where, when they were over, I literally did not know what to do with myself. They aren't necessarily similar in subject matter, gravity, execution, or even overall quality; just the fact that when they were done, I was completely stymied, leaving me with nothing to do but spend hours feeling every cell in my body tingle as the emotional residue slowly sunk inward. Tideland was one such film, recently. Temps du Loup, a couple of years ago. Schindler’s List, no doubt, and today, to my almost overwhelming surprise, I add King Kong.
I certainly didn’t expect this. As much as I have been looking forward to this film for months I never thought it could possibly impact me like that. It is a masterpiece. There are gigantic flaws in the picture, and it may never come to mean as much to me as Lord of the Rings, but it is a masterpiece. Peter Jackson was put on this earth to make that movie. I know this because of the bone-shaking degree to which it is art. Only art can disturb so profoundly, create feelings so instinctive, subconscious, irrational. Only art can fuck me up this much.
I promised myself I wouldn't sleep until I'd written my review, so a long night of deep fog is ahead.
Now that was some House, my friends. Some damn solid House. Except that he should have gotten fired at the end. But otherwise, nifty. And it might just be because I've been watching the crappy non-anamorphic Season One DVDs all week, but I thought that episode looked spectacular, from the gently falling snow to the harsh stubble on Dr. Foreman's head. And Dr. Cameron... man howdy, I could make a silk purse out of her.
With three really solid episodes back to back, I'm hoping that whatever strange malaise overtook the series for its first six episodes this season has drifted away. Maybe the whole Sela Ward thing was just a mistake, or maybe they all came back from hiatus totally freaked out by the success of Season One and got a bit too self-conscious about things; everyone seemed to be doing an impersonation of themselves (House particularly, half in the writing, half in the performance), which was first of all impossible, and second of all really strange. Now, finally, it's starting to click forward again. This is good. It's easily my favourite thing on the air right now.
Yeah, I'm that bored. Among many other things, the past couple of months have given me a residual hyper-awareness of my minute-by-minute emotional states. I'm not sure that such a thing is useful. I mean it's one thing to say "I'm a bit blue today," but saying "I've been feeling rather lackadaisical since about 6:30" is an entire order of magnitude too detailed.
I have a gigantic freakin' mess on my bed and around my bedroom, because I've finally brought all of the crap that's been scattered around 3QF for the past few days up into my room. I should really go do something about that.
In the meantime, internet, show me something.
Okay I'm back. For some reason, last week I bought an issue of Bear. Now it's staring at me. I still haven't read it. I suppose doing so might alleviate my boredom, but it feels like a bit too much work right now. So instead, I'm staring back. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. What's with the creepy red X? Oh. Because it's #10. What an adorable little bear.
The internet has shown me nothing. I have about fifteen stranger blogs that I visit regularly and right now they all suck. I depend on them to provide me with links that will make me look cool, and well... suck. Hang on, I'll check the blogs of my enemies....
...right where I left 'em. Good. I'm counting on those blogs to let me know when I'm about to be assassinated.
House is in eight minutes. I'm listening to the Narnia score for the fourth time today, and am nothing short of embarassed by how much I love the drippy Alanis song. I've only bought 2 Christmas presents, and they're both for people who I technically should not be buying presents for. Tighty whiteys, lame in almost every respect, somehow reach a new level of lame when they're lying discarded on a bedroom floor. Brandy lent me a copy of Jay and Silent Bob Do Degrassi and I have no interest in watching it. There's a shattered CD on my desk whose ultra-sharp edges are just ridiculously irresistable for some reason; I seriously doubt I'll stop fooling around with it until I actually have sliced my finger wide open. Stupid. Boredom = stupid.
Okay I'm going to go.
I suspect that had The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe been left to its own devices for a couple of years, Andrew Adamson might have come out with something (albeit smaller and less blockbuster-favourable) that would nevertheless have done a far better job of telling Lewis' careful, careworn tale of magical adventure. For what victories he has achieved here, though, Adamson wins my praise: there must be a bit of lion in him after all.
Click here to read my full review!
Still sporadically using exclamation points, I see. (Sigh.) It's earned here, though, because honestly, writing this one made my head split open and the goo run out. Toughest structure ever. But hey, that's where the satisfaction is, and that's why they pay me the big bucks.
Tonight on the podcast I wanted to talk about whether the Christian marketing of Narnia was working or not, but we also ended up going into the Dreamworks/Paramount deal in some depth. There was Geisha-bashing, there was Mega-Mamo planning, there was a hot girl over my left shoulder that kept drawing Matthew's gaze. It's Mamo, baby, and it keeps getting better.
Chris and I just now, watching House:
Me: Peter fucking Graves? I thought he was dead!
Chris: Yeah, like Richard Pryor.
Me: Pryor, man. Heavy.
Chris: Yeah.
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I've been at this thing a long time. From way back when I was ten and Narnia was the Best Thing Ever (alongside all the other Best Things Ever), to the summer when I was 20 and I had nothing better to do with my graveyard-shift summer job than scribble out 7 complete Narnia screenplay adaptations, just to see where the holes are, where the bodies are buried, where Lewis screwed up and where he really nailed it. I've lost the faith in the years since; one Dark Materials trilogy and one Lord of the Rings film cycle later and I've found the fantasy filmmaking I really want to see. But I'm honestly relieved and gladdened to find that there still is a giddy little ten-year-old around the vicinity of my liver's left lobe that is quivering like a jellyfish every time I look at the clock and think about heading on down to the theatre.
There's also the steady understanding that nothing I see in that theatre will compete with noticing that that ten-year-old is still down there. That's okay, too; at the very least, I get a really interesting review to write, and a few new things to think about in this new-formed vanguard of digital paintbox movies. I get to see what a fully-animated messiah lion really looks like, as opposed to the one that lives in my head (mine's bigger). I can't wait to see if Lucy's as good as everyone's saying (doubtful), or what Adamson chooses to do with Susan; Lewis clearly hated the character, frequently undercutting her with self-centered hissy-fits (particularly in Caspian) and, by the end of the series, having her become so obsessed with "lipstick and boys" that she's completely lost the ability to travel to Narnia altogether. We'll see if times have changed for the Pevensie girls, or if battle is still a game that girls don't get to play.
Yup, from the very beginning right to this moment, it's still always about the girls for me. They were always the characters I identified with first, the ones whose stakes mattered more, the ones who more clearly spoke my own mind in almost every fantasy novel and movie I've ever seen. The heroines are where I live. I've got one of my own now, in a fantasy trilogy that's long been waiting in the wings; I've got a 17-year-old vampire in subculture, a 13-year-old policeman's daughter in Blood, and a 10-year-old ghost in Glow, all girls, all patiently (if somewhat caustically) providing the vocal center of the things that I write; each of them the dark matter at the center of the system, around which all other things revolve, some obviously, some covertly.
Seeing as how all these heroines are just variations on the same theme, maybe someday I'll get far enough down this artistic track to actually be able to explain where the hell they all came from... who was their "first slayer," and why she won't leave me alone in my dreams. (She hasn't killed me yet.) Why it is that if I were going to pick a Narnia for my very own, I'd pick Silver Chair even over more-likely-favourite Voyage of the Dawn Treader.... because Chair has Jill, and Jill makes it worth it; she's not just my favourite character in the whole Narnian cycle, but regularly dukes it out with Lyra SIlvertongue and Hermione Granger for favourite overall. And let's not even start talking about Lyra, or why the four pages in Order of the Phoenix where I thought Hermione was going to die actually rendered me unable to see.
She's deep down in the core of me. She's always been there. She won't be at the movies until I put her there, and maybe that's why I've stayed away. I'm guiltily reminded that I have yet to pay my debt.
Things that Springfield has that a like-sized small town might not otherwise have:
A gorge.
A movie studio.
An international airport.
A river, a lake, and an ocean.
A mountain range.
A sea port.
A military base.
A single bridge out of town which, if destroyed, traps all citizens within the city limits.
Cletus and Brandine: husband and wife, mother and son.
How loud was your living room at around 8:07 last night?
Here's some fun: the For Your Consideration card for Ian McDiarmid's performance in Revenge of the Sith. It would be cool if instead of "For Your Consideration," it was marqueed with "Because Roeper Said So." Nevertheless, it would thrill me to bits if ol' Palpy actually got recognized for out-Star Warsing Star Wars this summer, with a villain performance that was actually not just really good, but also really freakin' effective. Ain't gonna happen, but I likes to dream.
Man, it must be cool to be Lucasfilm and to be able to pump your flick for every single category in the roster, likely or not. I mean, is Sith really going to walk away with a nod for Best Cinematography? (Here's a hint: I hear they used digital cameras! OH NO!!)
Meanwhile, across town, Paramount buys Dreamworks. I'll try to rant about it in Mamo tonight. I am now somewhat concerned that Sumner Redstone is legitimiately attempting to own everything. It's just that I have so many things around here that I like. He can have Zam, certainly, but the bear stays with me.
No actually, "hung over" was apt. I felt like such ass after the last post that I crawled back into bed, died, and having just now woken up again I feel like a million bucks. It's nice when you can still surprise yourself. Kaloo kalay s'more.
I won't say "hung over," but I will definitely say "overnoggified."
In the plus column, I received my first comment spam today. Kaloo kalay!
Tonight, Lise and Anthea (and Laura too, I suppose, though I've only met her once) threw a Nog n' Snog. Egg nog: yes. Kissing: yes. Brilliant idea for a party - we need more excuses to hang an obscene amount of mistletoe around a place and take any opportunity to pretend we're not a bunch of hands-off North American coolie types. I'd call the evening a success thereby; I rallied the 3QFers after our fit of holiday decking and we drank a bit too much rum and stumbled out into the snow making inappropriate references to the dimensions of various parts of our bodies both real and mythic. Once at the party the nog went mightily fast though I eked mine out with additional rum; at one point I snogged Dave Tebby though only briefly, and was suitably (if unrelatedly) rewarded when I picked up a copy of Star Jaws (by Will Eisner!) from Lise. Soon (and truly this never happens to me) it was really late before I'd even noticed, and we were caravanning home via various vomit comets, Christmas Event #1 (of 4) under the belts and percolating away.
I don't sleep particularly much or well any more; it's not really a problem because I remain comfortably alert and functional throughout my days. At night, I toss and turn for a couple of hours, bag maybe five solid hours of sleep, and then get up when the lying-down-too-long pain becomes too much for me. It's a system. Not sure it's a particularly good system, but (and here's the Main Refrain of 2005 again) it's the only system I've got.
Hence with the staying up till 1 talking about the Top Two with Chris and Brandy last night; hence with the Nog n' Snog tonight, hence with Mamo and blogTO and all the endless efforts at just cramming something a bit more active and involving into my life than the usual fields of snowy nothingness. You get to the end of your twenties and begin to realize that because of the person that you are or the kind of lifestyle that you lead, you've sort of diverted around the main vein of what you should have been doing or think you ought to have been feeling. Public Enemy #1 becomes the tag-team of Colossal Boredom / Negative Inertia that you've situated yourself in. And (see Main Refrain above, again) with little else better to do, you realize that you might as well be smashing as many of your icy prisons as you can.
So no, we are not "normal" people for starting a lengthy conversation about our social lives but ending up whinging about movies until the wee hours, but we're the only people we've got. (Refrain.) The trick (for me anyway) is not necessarily finding people of like mind, but finding good complementation, so that there's an ability to reach beyond, to find new throughways and shortcuts into different ways of thinking that might not have been easily visible before. Creative juice. The "muse" theory. Anything that kicks out the chair-legs of your stability and makes you swing, strangling or no, at this point must be better than sitting on the couch staring at the wall (which I've done as recently as 12 hours ago). Bully for the shattered houses.
A swing and a miss for Sideshow Collectibles on the second item in their new 12" Star Wars figure line; it's Anakin this time, and he ain't purty. I'm sure the clothes will be wicked and all, but why does he have to look like Mark Paul Gosselar?
It's a shame, because I was very excited by (and remain very excited by) the Jedi Luke figure with which they inaugurated the line, and I ordered mine within moments of its going public. The balance, at this point, rests on the shoulders of one Obi-Wan Kenobi. If they make a believer out of me, I'll follow them to the ends of the earth.
It seems, though, that Christmas is somehow related in my mind to R2-D2s. I have a little cluster of different-coloured R2-D2s on my desk (about eight of them) and they really bring out the holiday cheer in me. What's that about?
1990s:
1970s:
(I entered with "We are not normal people.")
And I have to speculate that God himself
Did make us into corresponding shapes like
Puzzle pieces from the clay.
"Then it is a good dream."
I'm putting Ben Wood in the links list because that kid cracks me up. And he's a better writer than I was at 24, let alone 14. Stupid precocious Woods and their precocious... uh... I'd better stop there.
I'm going to watch Seven Samurai again soon, I can feel it. You know how in the original Buffy movie she can sense that vampires are nearby because she gets menstrual cramps? It's like that. My uterus is throbbing a "Seven Samurai soon" staccato.
(No, this is not an invitation for you to come to my house and watch videos with me. Nor is it a plea for sanitized napkins.)
Complicating matters is the fact that Criterion is now hinting at re-releasing more fortified DVD editions of Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro. Which would be spectacularly annoying. Good if they put more installments of "It Is Wonderful to Create" on there, and good if they make the latter pair anamorphic at last (stupid Criterion!), but bad in most of the other ways. It is my grand ambition right now to finish my collection of Kurosawa DVDs in the very near future, and frankly, I'd appreciate not having to re-buy shit I already have as part of the bargain. But then, I am weak and lack self-control when it comes to abundant special features and improved commentary tracks.
Right now the plan is to wait until next week to see Narnia, because let's face it, there's no way in heaven that flick ain't gonna piss me off, so why not delay my irritation and enjoy the weekend? Kong's future is similarly in grave doubt due to an inability to plan a Wednesday screening until at least... uh... Thursday. Stupid busy life. I want my monkey.
From the journal just now:
I guess that’s the price you pay for negating the pain of your biggest problem by focusing yourself entirely on your second-biggest problem: once #2 is out of the way, #1 reminds you why you were hiding from it in the first place.
I would kill for some head space. I just can’t find any. There’s no rest, no vacation, no little mental mindwalk I can take for myself to shore up the defences and give myself a recharge.
So that sucks. On paper, though (real paper, not cyber-journal paper), today was a good day. Made some money, made yet more progress towards solving the aforementioned problem #2, even cooked - really cooked, for the first time in a very long time. ("Cooking" in this context means having to do more than add pre-portioned packets of something to something else.) And if it weren't for the late-afternoon sad-faces that knocked me down and made me sit contemplatively in the living room drinking a well-earned scotch, I'd have to call the eighth of December of this two thousand and five a base-hit success.
Stupid brain!
Just FYI, making mayonnaise with lemon=good; making mayonnaise with lime=way better. Similarly, making hollandaise with lemon=good, making hollandaise with grapefruit=possibly the best thing ever. That's right, lemon; you're a poor substitute in your own recipes.
This brings me back to my old question of exactly how the lemon became a food product in the first place. I mean, you have to imagine that billions of years ago, primordial man was looking about for something to eat, took the yellow citrus fruit down off the tree (in primitive Florida), took a bite and said "GORALK! ES TOOSOO MAGA PAY!!" which roughly translated means "This is inedibly sour." He would have told his friends, and the concept of lemons as being poor food products would have spread across the human pandemic for millennia to come. Lemons go untouched by man for tens of thousands of years. How is it, then, that sometime in the 16th century, probably in France, some chef said "You know what this fish needs? A bit of lemon." How would he have known?
(I do not exaggerate when I say that this problem has preoccupied me for at least ten years.)
I have been places and done things lately, or so it seems; maybe I've been nowhere and done nothing, but it certainly feels like my life has exactly two settings: "skullfuckingly boring" and "balls-to-the-wall frenetic," and the switch is now broken - permanently set in the latter position. I wouldn't mind a medium setting that just gets called "cruise." Yeah, that would be great. But no such luck.
Such it is, then, that when Chris came home yesternight and was amazed that the shower had been fixed, I had forgotten that the shower had even been broken... and I had presided over its repair that very morning. Ugh, that's not good. When your mind has jumped through enough hoola-hoops to make you think the stuff that happened six hours ago occured the week before last, you might have a few too many balls in the air. Let the blue one drop. (Keep the green one going, and any others you please.)
I'm going to try to coast out the remainder of 2005 taking advantage of what opportunities arise, and hopefully hit '06 hard enough to leave a dent. I'm not quite back on the road, but I can smell the gravel from here.
Hey, always follow the manual with a little oral. I'm funny that way. This week's blogTO podcast is largely Syriannish, with the usual news and DVD stuff, and promises of a better future. I really can't get enough of the sound of my own voice. (I blame Wil Wheaton.)
Click here to download the mp3!
Ewww, when did I start using exclamation points for that?
Syriana operates under the finest of despairs: no matter how bad you think it is, it's really a hell of a lot worse.
One of the nice things about the new back end here at Tederick.com is that it's just so much easier to work blogging into the regular workflow. Rather than having to drop everything and go into ol' HoTMetaL and then come back, I get to do it all in the browser while other stuff is going on. I'm waiting for a work page to load right now. When it's done loading, I'll go back to it and make with the billables. When it's loading again, I'll come off the clock back here. I love a conducive system. Truly, we are fulfilling our new credo.
Okay I'm back. Wheeee, this is fun: blogging about how I'm blogging.
It's nice to have work. It means I can actually think about going Christmas shopping later today without my hands shaking with rage. The tale of my future employ is far from concluded at this point, but opportunities this week are far more favourable than they were a week ago, and 2006 is looking sunny and warm. When everything is finally nailed down I'll tell you the whole sordid tale, except the parts that may be used to legally incriminate me. I hate being incriminated; it leaves such a rash.
God, my mouth tastes awful. Time to brush.
I got my iPod back today after a week of warranty service, and I was all excited and jazzed about having it back, and I was in Eglinton station reinstating my old settings and sticking my ear buds in to begin to listen to some songs, when the subway pulled in... and it was the iPod subway, inside and out. I love it when the world turns me into a living commercial. I wanted to strike a frolicsome "iPod silhouette person" pose.
When I was in high school we had the notion of brainfill, which was the then-current name for that thing that all teenagers do when they can't cope with the rest of the world so they just jack some music up really freakin' loud and thereby utterly disrupt their mind's ability to do any coherent thinking. Brainfill. Can last for hours and very, very effective at getting rid of the gremlins. I was brainfilling rather significantly today, and this is the part where I have to give the shout out to A Rush of Blood to the Head. I mean, a lot of people slag on the album and on Coldplay generally and honestly, I don't give a fuck about the rest of Coldplay per se, but Rush was (for me anyway) a perfect moment in time, and it always will be. And I was listening to it today on the subway and I realized that Rush has underscored three of the most important moments of my life in the 21st century. Possibly the three most important moments of my life in the 21st century; all (entirely accidentally, too) Coldplay-fortified (twice with "In my place" and once with "Clocks") in that way that made me feel like my life had slipped from living commecial straight into regularly-scheduled programming.
You gotta hand it to "Clocks," man; it may have been foolishly over-utilized on every single American television program at least once in the past four years (including mine), but I cannot personally think of another song in all creation that has such a specific ability to make you are living your life right now, and every single moment is dripping gently away.
Every once in a while, those whacky movie studios decide to give us critic-y types a clean miss and refuse to hold press screenings for an upcoming movie. Like Aeon Flux. It never works, and on this week's super-fortified Mamo, we might just talk about why. In between the gas.
Today I ate elk. It tasted like venison, which in turn tasted like beef, which itself tastes like meat. Mmm meat.
Honestly, though, I'm not so much behind meat. I just really enjoy making fun of vegetarians. I realize that if I went into my reasoning behind picking on vegetarians in any great depth, I'd probably discover that it's gigantically unfair and based on some innate inadequacy in myself, which is why I don't go into my reasoning behind it at all. I just leave it be. That way I get to keep making fun of vegetarians, and no one gets hurt except They Who Refuse To Dominate.
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I really liked the show at the beginning, because it was just so goofy. After a few eps, though, I became less and less enchanted with as it. Boorman kept acting like a smary little shit, and McGregor seemed like the world's biggest ADHD-addled spoiled brat, and the fact that it was very much EWAN MCGREGOR and his friend Charley and their disaffected Swiss camera-flunkie Claudio was a bit preening and irritating. I mean, it's lovely that we're all celebrities travelling around the world, but if you're not going to take yourself seriously in terms of the workload, nobody else is going to either, even the guy feeding you a steaming bowl of goat testicles in Kazakhstan. Not to mention the Russian mob boss who breaks into song after dinner while hoisting his AK-47 into the air.
Fortunately, the team has now reached Siberia and the proceedings have become appropriately mythic. They're in parts of the world where they're forced to use roads that haven't been used by anyone in years. They occasionally come to bridges that have gigantic, 40-foot holes in the middle of them because no one has come this way since the winter before and noticed that the river-crossing is no longer passable. McGregor's grown a gigantic, Faustian beard and looks like he's been to the ass-end of hell and back, and his attitude and demeanor have therefore become enormously more humble and agreeable. Boorman's actually stepped up somewhat and has stopped being Ewan's preening little buddy, showing himself to be more of a leader in his own right. (Claudio's still helpless.) But best of all, they're at a point in the journey where pretty much the only option available to them is to continue, no matter what obstacle is ahead of them. With "let's just give up" no longer an option, they have to find a way to solve every single problem, from broken fuel lines to man-eating bears to 10-foot walls of rock in the middle of the thoroughfare. The answers are brutal in some cases, masterful in others, but always come down to that last, great trope of human life: if you dismiss your illusions and focus on the task at hand, you can move a lot of rock.
Oh Hank. No, Hank.
It's sad, believe me, Missy,
When you're born to be a sissy
Without the vim and verve.
But I could show my prowess, be a lion not a mou-ess
If I only had the nerve.
Second time this week I've actually woken up from a dream crying - which I think beats the waking up whimpering that I'm told I was doing earlier this year. This time, some sort of temporal loop occured where Woogie was alive again, and so naturally we had to execute him again. Boy howdy, if you think killing your pet once is funny, wait'll you have to do it a second time. As Bex is fond of saying, "ow, my soul!" Then later on in the day (the real day, not the dream day), Adam and I were driving home from 3QF when we saw an identical black Smrt car about twenty seconds further along the road from us, and no matter what we did, we couldn't catch up to it. We quickly theorized that the other car was in fact us, twenty seconds in the future. Only it was an us from an alternate version of reality where our lives had been completely different for the past 25 years, except that now on this day we had both had to drive down to Canadian Tire to pick up a Christmas tree stand. And the twenty-seconds-in-the-future us had been at Canadian Tire twenty seconds before us, so when we found a Christmas tree stand with no price tag, it was because they had been there twenty seconds earlier and stolen the tag. Then they had gone down to 3QF twenty seconds before us and grabbed the spare stand from our closet and left us with the other spare Christmas tree stand, the one we didn't want. Those twenty-seconds-in-the-future guys are always doing stuff like that, using their temporal advantage to ace us out. And no matter what we did, Adam and I just couldn't catch up to that car. But it's probably for the best because if we'd met our future selves... well, Doc Brown wasn't wrong about that shit. He wasn't.
Otherwise it was a pretty normal day.
Things remain confused and unfocused. This morning while we 3QFers were sitting around in the kitchen debating the merits of planning your lunch immediately after having finished your breakfast, Brandy was heard to note that our household is like a sitcom, only without the funny. It's startlingly accurate. Everything feels bland and detached.
Fell asleep for no reason at around 2:00. Dragged myself out of bed and went to get a cup of coffee; came home and decided that the best thing for this general malaise would be to do a little spring cleaning.
Big mistake. Like the man said, "Don't look back... something may be gaining on you." Pictures of old girlfriends. My grandfather's research for the totem pole he never got to make. Old business cards. Certificates of Authenticity for long-lost collectibles. Endless sheets of goals from 2001, 2002 and 2003. Pics of Bex getting done up the bung by TJ's pickle-wang. Confining friends and ancestors to mylar-coated cardboard pages; putting them away, and then noticing the holes, where the things you never took pictures of needed to be. All the little gaps where the most important things happened, for which their exists no record, no evidence, no ghosts.
And scripts. An inhuman, unearthly mountain of scripts. A thousand pages of subculture drafts. Think about that: a thousand pages. Draft upon draft of the Robin trilogy. A Pound of Flesh, still one of my favourite things I never made (and never could), and August, the script I wrote overnight in six hours after seeing Trainspotting for the first time. The second draft of Revenge of the Jedi, the script I bought when I was a teenager to teach myself proper screenplay formatting. The complete final draft of 3A6, sealed in time on May 25 1996, and something I'll probably never have the courage to read again. The complete 4010 proposal for The Storm, one of those quantifiable moments when your life was supposed to go one way, and it went another way entirely, and you can never undo it without ripping away all the sticky webs of time and process that have made you all of the things you are right now, like it or lump it.
So much paper.
It's genuinely amazing how much random inertia a single life is capable of amassing. It moves, all on its own, without even a whisper of breath from you, and yet you couldn't stop it with a keg of dynamite and a couple hundred Saxon warriors. Sometimes you step aside, and look around, and you're on a little green hill a hundred miles from where you thought you were supposed to be, and that big son of a bitch is still rolling away in the wrong direction.
1. Pizza
2. Veronica Mars
3. Lots of little brownies.
Now that was some Lost, my friends.
The Box girls (Bex and TJ being the blog-represented among them) have come up with a rather ingenious way to get through the holiday blahs: rather than spending twenty bucks per person on a host of smaller presents for one another, they're pooling the funds and going Christmas sex-toy shopping at Come As You Are. Clearly, I live in the wrong household. (I mean, no downwards on Chris and Brandy, but 3QF ain't takin' CAYA anytime soon.)
The list of CAYA toys I could populate my tickle trunk with (well it's more of a tickle drawer right now) is as long as my... erm... right foreleg, but the big discovery of the past month came when Matty Price stumbled across the Liberator Shapes Bedroom Adventure Gear web site. Sex furniture. Seems so obvious, and yet. (Tell me that the Wedge wouldn't come in handy in just about any household.) Still, the furniture is just the warm-up act to the real stroke of genius: the line of portable, moisture-barriered throws for use in protecting furniture from fluid spillage. I mean, come the fuck on. (Literally.) How has nobody thought of this before? Just whip one into your kit, and bingo: sex anywhere, anytime. No more embarassing guest-room morning-afters. No more naughty rearranging of couch-cushions to conceal the unexpected tryst. Period sex unbound by the laws of stainage. It's a brave new world.
Between that and the iBuzz I'd say we're doing pretty spectacularly here, folks. Who wants to start a revolution?
My life makes absolutely no freakin' sense right now. What I said this morning notwithstanding, at some point recently - I am not sure of any exact date, though I suspect it was 4-6 weeks ago - I simply stepped aside and let this be the case. Whatever pain, anxiety, depression I was feeling in such great quantities must have blown what gaskets currently reside in my cranium, because a strange, detached peace has descended upon me of late. Most of the time, I just regard these various goings-on as being not unlike some great circus act, complete with sideshow attractons barking at me about things that go bump in the night and red-clad divas stripping down to nothing in the middle of the street just, you know, to do it. Honestly, there's a giggly astonishment about the far-fetchedness of the proceedings, like watching a bus hit a car which hits another car which flips over and hits two more cars and then falls off a bridge landing on a car, causing two other cars to hit that car and then cartwheel into a ravine where they land neatly upon a car... and then thirty clowns jump out unscathed and start trying to sell you dental insurance. You know, like that.
So, essentially what I'm saying is: don't ask me, man. I don't even work here.
Meanwhile, I'm reading From Hell, and I literally can't put it down. I've been avoiding Alan Moore for years, mostly because I'm afraid of him, but I had managed to accumulate a rather hefty stack of "indispensable" Moore items that begged attention, so I started with Killing Joke and then moved through Watchmen and Miracleman, and now I'm here. Best thing I've ever read, or near enough anyway. Reaching deep inside myself and twisting things around, and working on my mind and emotions in harsh, unexpected ways... the extraordinary placement of sexuality and the human body on the stage of the storyline... the rich, too-well-thought-out structures of history and myth being drawn into the Gull character.... the strange, post-hypnotic trance state that the story seems to go into immediately following each murder, each of which seem to come upon the reader not unlike a sexual rush before fliipping to the other side of the thana-coin to show all the dread that man is capable of. Blood in every frame of a black-and-white comic book. There's something really vampiric about it, actually, and I'm drawing that together with a bunch of things I've picked up in the Fighting the Forces essays... and I'm thinking about Jung a lot, and therefore The White Hotel, and suddenly "only connect" is as much a mantra as it was back in grade 11, back in good old 3A6. It's quite good, really. The mind is going to new places, even while the external world is turning somersaults. It makes me see the humour in the tragedy, the misery in the comedy, and the throbbing undercurrent of balance that lives in every single thing we do.
"I shall tell you where we are.
"We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind, a dim sub-conscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves...
"Hell, Netley. We're in Hell.
"...In order to escape, we must go further in."
The line forms on the left, boys.
Today is merely a day for sitting idly by and watching the universe be as weird as it generally is, because I officially don't have one damn clue what the funk is going on any more. I am therefore formally taking myself out of the game: I am content to merely observe for the time being.
Life is just a funny blending of experiences. And sometimes you take the day off.
Now that was some Lost, my friends. Also, notably, the first Kate-centric ep that didn't completely irritate me and make me wish they'd just shut up already. And I'm moved almost to tears that they didn't drag out the stupid "What did Kate do?" plotline for another five frickin' seasons. In terms of balls, too, you definitely have to admire the fact that when it came down to it, the big answer wasn't that she euthanized someone who needed euthanizing, or took the heat for a crime she didn't commit because she was protecting someone she loved. Nope, Kate blew a dude up. A lot.
And then with the hot frenching. Mmm... frenching.
The whole episode had a generally better flavour to it than just about anything they've done this season. It felt like oldschool Lost, when the island was actually mysterious and you didn't know what the fuck was going on half the time. We kinda got away from that when the show took its inexcusable five-episode detour with Ana Lucia Crazyface (boy is the gay community gonna be glad to have her aboard when she finally comes out), but from its very first frames, tonight's show was right back in the style that made this show so freakin' great in the first place.
This Year's Sayid continues to prove himself invaluable, as he and Michael demonstrated rather keenly that in their absence, the entire frickin' island somehow stopped noticing that pushing the button in the bunker is quantifiably insane. Having two people who have not yet been brainwashed by the Hanso-jumbo, just reacting to what's been going on, was actually fairly delightful. When Eko was all quiet and contemplative after seeing the film, I wanted nothing more than for him to stand up, go into the other room, and kick the processor until it was a mess of sparks and wires. But, no such luck... at least, not yet.
Most importantly of all, though, this was the first episode of the whole entire darn series (I think) that actually managed to find a way to use every single character in the already bloated-past-ludicriousness principal cast in an interesting, organic way. That alone should be worth an Emmy, right? I mean there's fifteen of them for cryin' out loud!
"Dad?" [cursor flashes till January 11 2006]