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May 31, 2006
I... uh... still the Juggernaut.
Following on my prior, two addenda:
- I calculated out that $4 the TTC is going to give me back. It amounts to 2.6% of my lost wages from this week, or approximately 14 minutes of my time. Perhaps I shall invoice the union for the rest.
- My Timothy's has segregated the patio into smoking and non-smoking areas! And better yet, the cool, shady, leafy side of the establishment patio is the non-smoking one! WOO HOO!! WE WON!!!
This was my 500th post since the Movable Type switch. LAME.
I'm the Juggernaut, bitch!!
The TTC followed up their oh-so-hilarious illegal strike on Monday (for which they are now being sued for $3 million by the City of Toronto) by making me an hour late for work today, in a bungled attempt to run a shuttle bus service between Donlands and Main Station to cover a subway accident, wherein the aforementioned shuttle in fact took longer to complete than it took them to just get the damn subway back on line. In other words, by the time they had successfully brought me to Main Station, the trains had been running again for ten minutes. By the time they got me to Main Station, I could have walked there and back twice. And once again I utter the missive: utterly incompetent.
A grace note on the hilarity, though, was finding out that they're going to refund all Metropass holders $4 for failing to provide service during the strike. Wheeee! I'm gonna spend it on porn. God bless whatever lawyer thought this up to cover the union's law-breaking ass.
Meanwhilst, Toronto's anti-smoking laws get tougher today, but still not tough enough IMHO; the problem with driving all of the smokers outdoors, especially in the summer, is that it deprives we gentle non-smokers of the right to enjoy, say, a pleasant patio experience without choking ourselves silly on second-hand smoke... the avoidance of which, I thought, was the point of the law in the first place. There just seems to be a fundamental logical disconnect between smokers and non-smokers, wherein smokers will apparently never understand that when they blaze up around a non-smoker (inside or outside), their action will have a significant and direct consequence on the comfort and safety of the non-smoker. Really, I want us all to just get along, but inconsiderate people are rapidly becoming my least favourite thing about life in Toronto.
Yup. I'm a crotchety-ass, geriatric bitch. Fuck you!
May 30, 2006
I'm impressed you were able to write so legibly on your own butt
It is so hot that I was wearing my soccer shorts earlier to go do the Mamo and I swear my balls were actually hanging below the hem of the shorts. That's the fun thing about being a male in this heat - you get to see the lengths your body is willing to go to in order to preserve the testicle's sperm-making facility. And each and every time, I'm surprised. Each and every time, "Wow, I've never felt balls swinging around down there before." It is so fucking hot in my bedroom that you actually can't do anything but sit and sweat. I went downstairs and watched my favourite episode of The Simpsons, "Bart vs. Australia." It is my favourite episode in a very arbitrary way. It is my favourite episode because I needed something to say when asked, and it seemed like a good candidate. I think it's actually quite excellent. I think it has everything I'd want from a Simpsons episode (except Jasper). But as with all arbitrary pick-ums in one's life, there's an air of dissatisfaction about the proceedings, like a shotgun wedding or a gift with purchase. Yeah, it's shiny, but it's also just so much more clutter. Of course, being as that they're nearing 400 episodes, I don't get asked what my favourite is very often any more, because I think the critical masses are aware that in such a wide and varied field, such laser-like focus becomes meaningless. You know, someday, humans will be able to look back on what was wrought in 18, 19, whateverhowmany seasons of The Simpsons, and only then will they be able to grasp what the vastity means (or doesn't mean). Until then, it's beyond the human mind. Even efforts in enormous selectivity like Jasper Online - which was founded in order to restrict my Simpsons gaze on as narrow a part of that universe as possible - is so fucking big now that I can barely keep up with it. We are reaching infinite space. Folded time. Multiverses of yellow skin, overbites, and big, googly eyes, where all is meaningful and meaningless at the same time. The profundity of endlessness.
I may already be having tonight's fever dream. I swear my testicles are lying on my feet right now.
Man of Gondor
We're gonna need a bigger shelf.
Bad first dates
It's like Damascus out there today; I wore linen in response, and strode around the fountain-strewn garden quad of my office buildings speaking in a vague, T.E. Lawrence accent. It was fun. Unfortunately I did not get my Fraternité submission completed for today after all, in spite of my blog-enforced motivational push last night. At the end of the day, there just wasn't enough time to translate this kernel of a notion into a viable plan of attack for a 5-minute film. It's a real shame. I really oughta be on some sort of a mailing list. I keep finding out about these things way too late.
These commission proposals are a psychological nut cruncher anyway. I'll never make this flick (it was called Why Is Mine Not Like His?), just like I never made This Is What We Do after Charles Street turned it down. (Remember this rant? The "What was I thinking making an experimental film" rant?) It has all the acrid mouth-flavour of a bad first date; you come away a little depressed, and a little embarassed, and pretty goddamn sure you wanna get as far a-fucking-way from this whole concept as you possibly can. And this time I didn't even manage to flesh out my concept widely enough to have it be turned down by a jury of my peers, and I still want out. Yay motivation.
There should be more bad first dates in my life. I have to get a few more bad first dates under my belt. They're amusing and they make you feel like you're getting somewhere, even if they are also simultaneously (as I said) depressing and embarassing. But you can't make an omelette without breaking some heads, and when life hands you mayhem you make mayonnaise, and all of that do-gooder crap. So let's bloody well go.
I put in a really cracking solid day at work to make up for yesterday's shortfall, which was satisfying. And also, work has air conditioning and home does not. But now I must sling my bag o'er my shoulder and hit the heat wave face-on, lest I rot into a little linen-shod non-man. Adieu.
May 29, 2006
How I spent my TTC strike day
- Downloaded hilarious erotic videos of nudists getting caught screwing on public beaches.
- Washed my sweat-soaked sheets, in preparation for the many more sweaty sleepless nights to come.
- Watched the second half of Spider-Man 2 (ugh).
- Talked to Bex via the telly and postponed our Monkey Kong plans.
- Did several hours' work for my actual job, courtesy of the magic of "the internet"... yet in spite of having the option for the first time ever, I did not choose to work naked, as I so often assumed I would.
- Mailed the last of my Ebay auctions for this spring cleaning period. Overall I've made about $400. Most of that has NOT been re-invested into new toys.
- Went to the coffee shop and read New X-Men s'more.
- Made a last-ditch Hail Mary pass at the Fraternité call for submissions from Trinity Square Video, after having given up on it yesterday for lack of available time. (It's due tomorrow.) It's like that Simpsons episode where the snow day gave Bart the chance to cram for the test. Only it's about circumcision. I went to the coffee shop and longhanded out another page or two of script, and committed to finishing the rest after dinner.
- Got some good news from my manager.
- Gave up on my Trinity Square project again. Mostly because it's so goddamn hot in my room.
- Started to watch Daredevil... and then mercifully, realized that if I don't at least write this thing (the TSV project), it's gonna bug me. I and I hate being bugged. So I'm gonna write it, and sweat a litre or two into the seat.
- Starting now.
I am eerily clever at being sneaky.
I really oughta change the main password here at home. I changed the password at work last week with a new password that is so fucking clever, I giggle every time I enter it. Well maybe not "clever." Maybe more "awesome." But now I can't come up with anything for the home password that matches the work password's level of brill. And the home password and the work password can NOT be the same thing. It's against the rules. Of me.
Woe, woe!
SNOW DAY!!!
Great. Now it's just me and that damn bird.
May 28, 2006
Don't go into the long grass
I have earned my stink, and yeah, there's a boatload of satisfaction in coming home caked in your own dried sweat after a damn solid night of soccer. We held a nut-shrinking 2-1 advantage over our opponents in tonight's game, which was played with a sole sub and in heat that ranked a full 25 degrees hotter than the miserable climate of our previous foray, so bully for the good guys. Jeff took the first goal early in the first half, and Linc completed a beauty second, and if the bad guys' single goal was a bit disconcerting, it could be appreciated in that it was a perfectly played maneuvre - they didn't just score on us, they outplayed every single person between them and that goal and earned their shot, so well done. Everyone came to play, it was a big friendly laugh riot, sloppy and hilarious. Chris executed a pitch-perfect feat of physical comedy. I collided with an adorable blonde forward and promptly fell in love. And I tell you, I have got to get me a social life. Or at least, a social life that is more than just me going to movies with my friends. I'm not even lonely so much as being just so phenomenally bored. And as both directions of my subway journey tonight will attest, I'm clearly randy as hell and ready to play with anyone. I need a few good wingmen. I need a good opportunity and a chance to translate something into a play. It's summer already and I am so fucking tired of being inside! Running, jumping falling down. Sweating like a pig. That's the fucking ticket. I came up with a Trinity Square concept way too late to write up a proposal, I'm stuck behind a desk all week teaching cell phone salesmen to be better cell phone salesmen, I'm doing two podcasts for no money, I got no bike, no career track, no skin-on-skin contact... something's gotta give. Something raw and wriggling.
I won't even get into the Cyclops thing, or the shower thing, or the coffee shop thing. And definitely nothing on Starscream, wingmen, or Hermione Granger buttons. It's late and I have to go to work tomorrow.
Goodnight internet.
I don't watch TV.
It turns out that the television season is over. Boy, that one rocketed by. It seems only yesterday I was power-loading episodes of Season One of Lost at 6 or 7 a day to get over a bad breakup (hmmm... it was Deep Space Nine last time), and now the whole second year has come and gone in what seems like the blink of an eye. Traditionally at this point I'd do my top five shows for the year. But you know what? I only have two.
House won last year over Lost, but this year I'd call it a tie. I don't think either show was quite as good on the whole this year as they were last year, but they both also had better single episodes this year than they had last year, so call it a draw. I really can't pick between them; I can only say that they're the only two shows I genuinely give a fuck about on a weekly basis. As I've said many times before, and contrary to popular opinion, I don't watch much TV.
The Simpsons could hardly be put on any "top" list; overall it was a pretty crappy season, although there were three or four episodes that I'd rate absolutely outstanding. I also fell off the Amazing Race wagon this year; neither of the last two installments captured my imagination, and I'm beginning to get that icky, post-Survivor hangover feeling again, so this might be it for me. Family Guy was solid overall, but in its reincarnated state feels less like broadcast television and more like preexisting internet content. So for some reason it doesn't count.
The only new show I picked up was How I Met Your Mother, which is utter trash in every conceivable sense... yet I can't look away. It gives me dirty feelings inside, because like the Jedi once said, I know I'm better than this. And yet. Not with the looking away.
The PVR is empty, the DVD shelf is full, and life would be perfect if they'd just figured a way to put the second season of Lost on DVD in June, instead of October.
moviesTO #33: The Notorious Ellen Page
I spent the weekend with "it" girl Ellen Page, first at X3, then at Hard Candy, and now (for the audiobook lovers in my readership) you can skip the written reviews altogether and go straight to today's podcast to hear about both.
May 27, 2006
Hard Candy
Ellen Page's Hayley, particularly, is a cinematic phantasm who is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. Part crusading Little Red Riding Hood, part mid-pubescent Glenn Close, she is sublimely self-righteous and paradoxically loathsome at the same time, posing justifiable questions and unspooling unnecessary rants with the spunk and gusto of a Girl Guide desperately trying to make cookie-quota.
KILL THIS BIRD
There is a bird outside my window that is driving me absolutely fucking nuts. It's been there all day. It sounds like this. It woke me up this morning with that shit. It won't go away. I AM GOING CRAZY HERE. I would sic Zam on its ass except she's so fucking stupid she'd probably take a 3-storey header and kill herself. Fuck! Does anyone have a bird-killing gun of some sort?!
X-Men: The Last Stand
The Last Stand is flat, insipid, and ultimately self-defeating. Ten years after Batman Forever, it's nothing short of stunning to see the leading comic book franchise in Hollywood essentially make the same set of mistakes, all over again. Warning: heavy spoilers within.
It really bears repeating (review aside) that what's amazing about X3 is not that it's awful but just how thoroughly uninteresting it is. I actually sat through large tracts of the film with my head in my hands. There's nothing to see here, folks. Move along!
(But captioning the pics in my review was hiralious.)
May 25, 2006
My French is improving
Even though it's Pixar, and even though the trailer is currently only available in French... I already wanna see Ratatouille. Although dismissing thoughts of the techno song from our one minute movie last year is gonna be damn difficult. RATTA TOOI TOOI TOOI! RATTA TOOI TOOI TOOI! RATTA TOOI! RATTA TOOI! RATTA TOOI TOOI TOOI!
Did I forget my own point?
Last Lost entry and then I promise I'm done, but I realized today that in writing last night's post, I mostly pointed out the peripherals and forgot to throw in my main points:
- I'm liking Jorge Garcia's two billionaires theory. I don't know the exact architecture of this because I doubt Garcia has it precisely right, but the whole Hanso billionaire vs. Widmore billionaire idea is very interesting, with Daughter Widmore, Desmond, and the rest of the castaways caught in the middle.
- I'm liking the snow globe theory. Desmond's throwaway line at the head of the episode, combined with the snowy landscape at the end, makes me think that the island is just a gigantic biosphere buried in the Antarctic tundra, with that stupid little hut perched right on the top. But then, that would be crazy.
May 24, 2006
Your Lost discussion entry
Desmond blows up the hatch! Charlie gets a little Claire mackin'! Kate and Jack love each other and Kate doesn't love Sawyer! Michael and Walt leave the show, in the only plot point I accurately predicted! Sayid does a fat load of nothin'! Locke steals Eco's Jesus stick! That dude from Iraq was the dude in the hatch! The scary grey mud-covered islanders apparently worship Monkey Kong - as do I! Kate is walking along one minute and then she just opens fire on a couple of guys in the woods!! Locke, Eco, Desmond, Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Hurley are all big fucking question marks going into Season Three!!! The button was real!!! Shit happens - and yet doesn't happen - at the same fucking time, reminding us for the umpteenth time that Lost is beautiful fucking porno that makes you want to skip to the cum shot!!!!
But can anyone tell me what the fuck is going on?!
See Charlie mope here.
I want Jack and Kate and Hurley and Locke and Sawyer and Sayid and...
Oh my god. Lost action figures. McFarlane Lost action figures. Six ewey, gooey Lost action figures.
Really, the biggest joy will be the interplay with other toy lines. Seeing Sayid take on Geordi La Forge. Having Kate make out with Buffy. Sitting Hurley and Comic Book Guy down for a burger and fries. And Locke? He can wrestle the Alien Queen.
Hey guess what? It's Lost tonight! Everyone at the office is going apeshit on this one. The white board in my cubicle bears three simple words: SAYID IS NEXT. It's got everybody freaked out, even though I think it's far more likely that we'll be seeing Michael and Walt's curtain call tonight than everybody's favourite lovelorn Iraqi. Mmm Lost. Lost, Lost, Lost...
May 23, 2006
Written comprehension
I rarely give up on books. I walk out of movies a heck of a lot more than I stop reading books, and I rarely do that, either. I'm reading The Way the Crow Flies now, though, and it is sorely trying my patience. I was reading a lot of graphic novels this spring and I wanted to get myself into a real novel, something thick and depressing and Canadian, but I seem to have well overshot the mark. Crow is damn thick - 800 pages or so - and so fucking upsetting that I have actually lost the will to read it. Like a Pavlovian Homer, I am in full "beer bring pain" mode here. (Where beer=book.) (And pain=nausea.) Therefore, it is very, very Canadian.
The issue is child-rape. There is a lot of it in the book. Right now I am in the section of the book that I affectionately call All the ways that parents can mistake the signs of child-rape for something perfectly innocuous. And even this might not necessarily be so bad if it weren't for the degree to which Ann-Marie MacDonald actually seems to be having fun with us. She is setting up and knocking down expectations of a resolution to this interminable process of child-rape with such zest and vigour that I have begun to suspect that she's actually enjoying putting the reader through such an excruciating process of horror, frustration, and pain.
This is sorely trying my laissez-faire attitude towards art. Sure, we live in a world with child-rape. But when I'm on the subway on the way to work, do I need to live in the world of a 9-year-old girl having her hymen broken by her fat teacher, whose parents subsequently rejoice at the coming of womanhood that the blood in the undies represents? It's like a bad fuckng joke.
May 22, 2006
The White Whale
Today a great chapter of my life comes to a close, because I finally found the 2-disk Hannibal DVD, used, for $6.99.
Chris and I went used DVD shopping. It's amazing how much shopping you can get done on a holiday. I've been looking for Hannibal for at least 3 years at this point - wanting the DVD only for its commentary, which only appears on the 2-disk set (Ridley Scott gives great commentary), but not willing to pay more than $10 for it. Shoppers Drug Marts around the world taunt me with their $8.99 single-disk edition on the shelves. I have been to more used DVD stores than I'd care to count and every single time, every single time for three years, I have looked for Hannibal. And now, finally, it is done.
As I recall I actually found the film itself spectacularly entertaining trash, but who knows. I doubt I'll ever watch the normal-audio track.
After touring around Bloor and Yonge for a couple of hours I had done boughten The TerminalCollateral, The Constant Gardener (which I seem to like more than I thought I did), Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (which was the first horror movie I ever saw and therefore completely fucked me up for life), and the Martin Scorcese boxed set which was only twenty damn dollars at HMV. Oh, and I have a new white whale: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. I figure I'll pay no more than $17 for this, used. GO!
In spite of all this, as I've been saying to Matty Price recently, it really does feel like I'm coming toward the end of my DVD collection. Buy frequency is wayyyyyyyy down. I think I'll probably plane out into the 500s and never get much further than that.
Detox?
Three-day weekend should be the rule, rather than the exception. Why? Because right now, I can remember absolutely nothing of my job. I don't know what's on my Outlook calendar tomorrow. I'm not thinking about the two women in the office who I will do absolutely anything for just because they are so goddamned adorable. I have no real recollection of Friday, no general strategies regarding the week ahead, no work-related stress of any kind. Two and a half days later, and it's finally out of my head. But it took two and a half days.
Meanwhilst, after all the whining and bitching of weeks gone by, I've decided to give up coffee. Again. Well, maybe "give up" is a strong word, because that is both pointless and futile. But "cut down" would be apt. This is not heart-related. But when I got off coffee because of the heart thing, I shoulda pulled a D-Coc and just kept on going, because the first week was the hardest. I was free and clear and then I went and made myself all dependent again. And it's the dependency that bothers me, so.... well, let's just say I'm going to try to get down from 8 cups a week to 4 cups a week, and then go from there. 4 cups isn't enough for my body to be relying on coffee to keep me going through each standard work day, so it's a place to start.
Speaking of D-Coc: plans for Standoff are now formally moving forward, with Daniel and Demetre in the lead roles. I am tremendously excited about this. I'm randy as hell to shoot anything anyway, but this is a damn step above "anything." This is "something." "Really something," even. I may post the script sometime so that you can actually follow through the production on this one. Or I may merely tease. We'll see.
May 21, 2006
The Da Vinci Code
Everything in the film is So Very Serious, with Howard and his crew treating the material with the grave approbation usually reserved for holocaust dramas. The result - like holocaust dramas - is one stunningly unentertaining movie. There's no fun to be had in The Da Vinci Code. A gigantic, elaborate intrigue sprawled across half of Europe, involving CSI-like armchair investigations into the complete thread of Western human history... and it's boring.
Man, that one was a real son of a bitch. Three complete, start-from-scratch drafts and I still feel like I only got to about 75% of the mark. Still, I'm tired of thinking about this shit, so I'm done. Gotta get all warmed up to excoriate X3. (Biased? Never.)
The Benedict Chronicles: Lakeview
Most folk who know me know by now that for the last three or four years, I've been systematically ordering eggs benedict at any eating establishment where I find it on the menu. There was no higher reasoning behind this. It just seemed like a good idea... and I really like eggs benedict. Still, as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles...
Today I went to the Lakeview Lunch with Daniel, who's in town from L.A., and also Steve and Bridget, and Daniel's girlfriend Miriam. I ordered the benny. (So did Steve, although he was actually after the lox version, which was unavailable today due to some sort of lox shortage in the city of Toronto.)
Eggs benedict at the Lakeview costs $8.95, which is about what you'd want to pay for a benny; in fact I'd say this is on the high end for what you get at the Lakeview, given that the meal doesn't come with toast. The benny does come with home fries, though, which at the Lakeview means golden dollar sized slices of potato which have been deep fried. There is also a little cup of refried beans, but nobody ever eats those. Ever.
The de rigeur beverage accompaniment is a cup of coffee (for the flavour-match against the benny's various breakfasty goodnesses) and a tall glass of water (to rinse away the heavy salt content in a way that a cup of coffee could never satisfy).
I've had the benny at the Lakeview many times. Normally I'd call it a solid base-hit eggs benedict, neither the cream of this particular crop, nor in any way unsatisfying for what you're looking to get. Today my peameal was slightly overdone, though, which wasn't great. (Such an error is nevertheless vastly preferable to finding your peameal underdone, which can turn you off the whole meal.) Additionally, there was somewhat less hollandaise today than I've seen previously, so the cumulative effect was one of a noticeable dryness overall. I've had better, both at the Lakeview and elsewhere.
As I said earlier, the $8.95 seemed high for what I ended up getting... I'd call this a $6.95 meal, or possibly a low $7-ish. Two and a half eggs out of four.
Know a good benny? Comment away. Future installments will cover the mainstay offering at Sunset Grill, the so-fake-its-real midnight confection at Golden Griddle, and the continued search for my own white whale: that one, perfect benny served at Sharkey's in November 2004, after which it was never seen again.
The Lakeview Lunch can be found at 1132 Dundas West, at Ossington, 416-535-2828. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
And for the two people I didn't already send this to...
Clearly you've never been to Singapore
That's Jack in Pirates 3, and that's also very likely what I'll be wearing for Hallowe'en next year.
Mamo #44: It's Pus-Wheee-Dun, silly
Already this summer's run of Mamos is starting to look like a series of weekly apologies for my predictions for the top ten. Usually they're too high; now, with Da Vinci, I'm too low. Oh well. This was recorded several days ago, before the insanity really began, and lord knows what we're gonna talk about next time.
May 20, 2006
moviesTO #32: Tall Grande Da Vinci
I'm having all manner of trouble writing my review of The Da Vinci Code, yet rattling off a verbal rant proved surprisingly easy. Perhaps applying literary craft to the description of this death-of-all-literature is as impossible as Superman using a Kryptonite dinner set? Zwuh. But hey, dollars to donuts, my favourite podcast in a long time.
Anal Bex
Look what our friend in the Goo has been up to:
It's mostly just a re-purpose of the anal sex paper she posted on her site a whiles back, but nevertheless, that's a fucking masthead, my friends. I am so goddamned proud of that girl.
Season of lists
Purging toys is about the only time I ever get to listen to commentaries. I sift through my boxes looking for accessories, putting pieces together, and the only thing to do is listen to commentaries. The other day I was building Dumbledore's tower out of a box of 5000 pieces of miscellaneous Harry Potter Lego, listening to the Schizopolis commentary where Sodebergh interviews himself, and I came away damn near cross-eyed.
The big motivating factor for the current toy purge, Star Wars and otherwise, is the Sideshow dolls. I am now officially a "quality" over "quantity" man in the toy arena. This weekend I'm tossing some Star Wars 12" stuff from the Hasbro line up on Ebay, along with a bunch of Buffy stuff and maybe some Simpsons and Star Trek. Pretty much anything with less than an A grade isn't worth keeping any more because I'm not going to display it next to my A+ stuff anyway. So it is time for a purging. (This after he buys 5 Star Wars figures in one week.)
There is an issue on whether or not I'm going to cancel my order for the Sideshow Han Solo. Yes, I wanted it (and made mention of my desire here, before they announced the figure), but I'm not thrilled with the final, and there's a lot more coming down the pipe that I'm far more interested in (Qui-Gon, Mace, Sithy Anakin, etc.).
And then there's the question of future, unannounced stuff that I'll want to display alongside the stuff I'll be getting this year. The remainder of '06 is largely spelled out already (a Maul, a snow-bunny Padmé, and maybe 2 other unannounced figures, with Vader being a good bet for at least one of them... none of which, thankfully, are all that appealing to me), but already I'm imagining what other characters I would be unable to resist in Sideshow format:
- Commander Cody
- A decent orange-pauldron Sandtrooper
- Aayla Secura
- Any of yer Boushh, Bossk, Red-robed Palpy, Yoda, or Dooku would certainly appeal
- I recognize with a hint of irony that if they ever did a Jar Jar, I'd probably buy it to satisfy my own nefarious counter-cultural urges.
But as usual, mass becomes the issue. Too many is too many. Focus is key. Your focus determines your reality, moppet-boy! Stay sharp!
May 19, 2006
Vaginaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh
This week at my office and much to my surprise, there was some sort of annual health fair in the lobby and one of the booths was called Vaginaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh. (As in sigh of relief, not full-throated shriek of terror.) I think the image of a vagina, gaping its way through a wide-mouthed yawn, is both amusing and vaguely disturbing, but I don't think the training designers were necessarily thinking in that direction when they came up with the name. They probably just thought they were giving the vaginas of the world some much-needed relaxation. But then, there are better ways to do that.
The main attraction of the booth, besides the de rigeur birth control / pap smear / menstrual care elements, was a poll where they asked women to pick a word from a list that they felt best represented their vagina. There were words like "sexy," "private," "powerful," "intimate," "mysterious," etc. The weird thing is that no matter what you answered, you got a white feather boa. First of all: why a boa? Second: couldn't they at least have colour-coded them to reflect the meaning of the word each women chose to represent her cunt? Then again, Thundercracker pointed out to me that this would then make it possible to determine what each woman had answered, based on the colour of the boa wore around the office for the rest of that day. You would have been able to go up to a woman and say "'mysterious,' huh? What's so mysterious about it?" Which leads to smacking.
I wonder if an evil company is keeping a statistical list of the answers of every woman who passed through that booth yesterday, for use in some nefarious purpose. It fires the imagination.
Given that I work for a cell phone company it was nothing short of a rolling travesty that I could find absolutely nobody with a camera phone to photograph the Vaginaaaaahhhhhh booth, so that I could share it with you fine people. But them's the breaks.
May 18, 2006
EXTREME STEVE!!!! episode five
Big Fuckin' Hellboy down!
I came home to find that Big Fuckin' Hellboy had eviscerated himself all over everything. He took out six or seven other toys on his way down. His broken half-pieces lay mournfully in a pile of his own rubble.
Jesus, HB. She's pretty, but she's not that pretty.
Is it time to say goodbye to Big Fuckin' Hellboy?
Sunset
Man. The places we've been, the things we've seen. Three hunded and sixty-five days and it already feels like a whole other world, a whole other life, a whole other joy, a whole other loss.
Lordy, Lordy.
May 17, 2006
Absent storms, part 1
A few weeks ago, I went out for a long walk. I wanted to have a think about movies and the making of them, and where I'm at now and whether I'm going anywhere with this. I discovered to my stunned shock a few months ago that I haven't shot a single frame of video footage since the day before Kate and I broke up, which is almost certainly an utter coincidence but a fundamentally unnerving one nevertheless. And in this new, Office Job world I find myself in, I am concerned on a semi-daily basis about whether I'm ever really going to get back to the sort of creative juice I used to feel when I made films.
There have been times of great productivity in my filmmaking life. One of them was last year. But even last year, when I made what I consider to be one of my more solid bodies of work overall, there wasn't so much "drive" as "good opportunities" that lead to the windfall. I went on a road trip to a Star Wars convention; I made a great documentary. I got asked to make a music video; I made a great music video. I got mailed a bunch of useless Ewoks animation cells; I made a great one-minute movie. But, as I suppose is true of most art-bearing folk at some point in their life, there was (and is) the ongoing concern that the old passion has faded to a rusty glow, and won't fire up again. I wrote about it a while back in an entry about hunger, and it's hunger that seems to be missing, particularly now. I am in a strange nether-space, neither coming nor going. I have no goal, no long-term, no nothing. I have a paycheck that arrives every 2 weeks bearing six digits and a decimal place, and a general idea that I have to get back to my real interests someday.
So anyways. I was walking. And I was thinking about what I'd like to write next, because I don't think Glow has fully percolated yet and Mongoose was an exercise at best, and Blood Rose / Black Rose seems a bit vainglorious all things considered. For some reason The Storm popped into my head again, as I suppose it's bound to do every two or three years. I thought about taking another crack at the feature-length version of that script.
The Storm, for those who weren't around in '98, was the script I wrote to be my thesis production in 4010 Film, the final film production class in my time at York University's highly chaotic Department of Film & Video. It was a 20-minute concept piece, a slasher flick with no slasher, a lone surfer riding the Scream wave down to its ultimate post-modern conclusion. It never got made. In the years since, I've fooled around with it a few times, thinking that it's a decent untapped resource and that I should try to bang it into feature length. All attempts along this line have failed.
But I was thinking about it again, and feeling like it might be a nice project for the summer, so I decided to give it a whirl and went and dug up some copies of the earlier drafts, in both short and feature form, of the project - to refresh my memory and get my head back into the characters and overall shape of the plot. I read a few drafts on the subway on the way to work the next day, and my head was sort of slightly blown.
First of all, pretty much every draft after the very first draft, that initial short script back in August of 1998, doesn't really work. None of the feature attempts, and not even any of the revisions of the short script itself. With the exception of one minor modification of the ending that I came up with a few years after the fact, no subsequent revisions were worthwhile.
But that first script.
Damn.
There's something intrinsic to that original 20-page draft, that first attempt at the concept, that is so clear in its intent and so unmuddled in its execution, that it might well be a rallying cry for never mucking about with your initial vision on anything, because you'll probably just go ahead and fuck it up. Is there a lesson in all of this? No, probably not. But point be taken, that draft is fucking awesome. It should be a movie. And it never was.
The Storm, of course, never saw production in my final year at film school. Its prodigal twin, Absence, ended up being my thesis project, which at the time seemed a perfectly valid choice. The decision, for me, was between two projects that each satisfied one of two separate artistic yens I was under during that penultimate year of the 1990s: to either make an episode of My So-Called Life, or an episode of The X-Files. (Damn you Gabrielle Johnson to your dying day for coming up with My So-Called X-Files, and damn my own pride for never pursuing it.) Absence happened, and so did everything else, and that's all certainly fine. But I can't help noticing one thing:
There's everything I was, as a filmmaker, before 1999.
And there's everything I've been after.
And the two really don't compare. In some ways I often feel like the benefit of hindsight is telling me more and more over the years that the choice between Absence and The Storm was one of those crucial hinge-points, unrecognized at the time, where a life can go one of two ways, and every other event that follows that point will forever be influenced or coloured by that one seemingly innocuous decision. Something in my artistic self got squished that year. If the past 7 years of history are anything to go on, whatever it was never came back. It's the sort of thing that still sends me out on long walks to try to figure out the state of myself as a filmmaker, and makes me feel fairly shitty about how things have gone since film school. At the same time, whatever it was is also still alive enough to make me giggle like a molested pig when I come up with a movie idea that truly fires my imagination in the same way that conceiving Light & Magic ten years ago sent me ten and a half paces into the womens' washroom before I even noticed I was in the wrong place. Squished, but if I'm writing this, clearly not dead.
Absence. The Storm. Grudge match anyone?
Heal me, gimpy!
Earlier tonight over sushi Kate and I were saying that it would be ideal if they did an episode of House featuring my particular medical ailment, so we'd finally know what the hell is going on. (This vastly improves upon the usual advice of "you should consult Dr. House," because Dr. House is, in point of fact, fictional.) Well suck me sideways, because this very evening's episode of House was eerily all about me. Or it was for the first few minutes. A girl had an attack of arrhythmia for no apparent reason. Wolff Parkinson White was ruled out early in the first act. They did a cool-ass procedure where they mapped the electrical pathways of her heart. But then she started getting hallucinations about gross stuff like House's face melting like Toht's in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which hasn't happened to me yet. And later it turned out to be because she was a Katrina victim, which I am not. So I don't know what to think. At the very least I've got a lot to talk about with my cardiologist. He's gonna love me. "Dr. House said..."
Now all we gotta do is get them to do an episode about Bex's weird phantom numbness disease, and we'll be off to trot.
May 16, 2006
The last day
My grandmother died ten years ago today. I was going to write something about it here, because I never got to eulogize her properly... but I'm not going to. I'm not even sure I believe the sorts of things about death that I did when she died, which means I no longer even really have a clear view on what any of this (or anything else) means. Suffice to say that the life I had before she was gone was one life, and everything since then has been another, and to this day I can still be surprised by how strange and alien being "used" to this life can feel.
May 15, 2006
I am tabulated.
Today I filled out the census dealie. Unfortunately there was no box for "religion" so I was not able to enter "Jedi." Otherwise it went fine. It was a bit like the Newlyweds Game for roommates. I realized I know quite a bit more about Chris and Brandy than I thought I did. The only things I didn't know were their parents' places of birth and their office postal codes. When I was all done filling out the many, many boxes, I crumpled the form and put it under my ass. This is because Lise sent me an e-mail saying that the government contracted out the software and data processing
portion of the census to Lockheed Martin, and while it's technically illegal to skip the census, it's not illegal to crumple it up and put it under your ass so that it has to be counted by a human. So that's what I did. And it felt...
Floating down the Pacific
Is it safe to like Lost again? Two solid episodes in, and a hum-dinger of a season finale en route? Here's hoping. I have to say I really admire their new "find a hatch, open a hatch, explain the hatch all in one episode" policy, which greatly improves upon last year's "take thirty episodes to do it" approach. And Sawyer? That man's sexy. But if Kate and Jack don't make with one good - and highly explicity - fuck, and soon, I may turn away just as surely as I turned away from Clana back in Season Two of Smallville. I don't dangle well. And some vicarious sloppies will be a salve to my love-starved sex drive.
Anyways, here's a good Newsweek article about Lost being cool. And make sure you read the castaway theories on the island's big secret, because they're a hoot, particularly Holloway's assertion that the island moves around, "like the Death Star."
Meanwhile, my note remains the same: kill more people! Killing is fun! I suspect it's Sayid, because death in the Boone family is like AIDS and Sayid fucked Shannon, just as Shannon fucked brother Boone. (You could even argue that Ana-Lucia is part of the same death-line, given that she shot Shannon, and death and sex are the same thing, as per Claire Danes in My So-Called Life. And also the Greeks.) But the truth of all this remains to be seen. Stop pushing the damn button!!
May 14, 2006
I become so numb
Big fat pimp Kevin Smith announced today that Clerks II will grace us nearly a full month earlier than planned; it's now getting dropped on July 21st to take its never-gonna-be-number-one lumps against the Shyamalan flick. Fine with me, get to see it sooner. In like kind, Evening With Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder is finally being released on August 15. And along the lines of brilliant catch-lines to sequel titles, Smith invited the Askewies to come up with the tag for Clerks II, and here's what they came up with. My very favourite, obviously, is Clerks II: Fuck You!
Meanwhilst, there ist un trailer for Miami Vice that is stylish and excellent, more so than the last time. I love the stilted dialogue. Love it.
You know, if I could just spend the next eight weeks doing nothing but watching movies and getting high, life would be damn near perfect.
May 13, 2006
Ocean's Twelve
The rest is gobbledegook and nonsense, a team of talented artists (in the real world) playing a team of talented artists (in the film world), both of whom are just having a goddamned good time. There's a big mess involving a rival thief who wants Ocean to try to prove which of them is truly the best, and a natty bit of tomfoolery involving Damon getting hung out to try after Clooney gets pinched, and most breathtaking of all, a startling double-play where Tess gets to play Julia Roberts, instead of the other way around.
Sure, it took me 18 months of concerted effort to get around to it. But at least I got around to it!
Click here to read my review.
The red tent
Today Bex and I wussed out of yoga - more on that later - and went to the Yonge & Eglinton vicinity to eat What-a-Bagels and be commercial. While at Toys R' Us and while I was flipping through the latest wave of Star Wars figures (and wearing my yoga Obi-Wan Kenobi t-shirt, I might add), a phenomenally sassy 6-year-old asked me rather pointedly, "Do you even know these movies?" I turned sagely to him and said, "Probably more than I should." It slays me. There's a whole generation of ewoks out there who have seen Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, and probably don't even know that there have been Star Wars movies on the big screen going all the way back to when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Ah, age.
To whit, I came home and put a gigantic percentage of my Star Wars collection on Ebay. I've been thinning the herd for a while in preparation for this day. Now I'm quite satisfied. Should you wish to buy a Tederick.com artifact for yourself, here are all my auctions. Some Star Wars 12-inchers, along with a bunch of non-Star Wars stuff, goes up next weekend.
While at Starbucks (fie!) I decided that Bex's first novel will be called Five Years in the Goo, her second will be called Fake Passion Fruit Smell, and the third will therefore have to be Tiny Sassy People.
Right, the health thing: I really feel like a shmuck about it. I wussed out of yoga, and shifting Mother's Day plans have forced me to pull out of tomorrow's soccer game, and now I've also decided that I'm going to have to (very, very reluctantly) pull out of the Heart & Stroke ride this year. I still haven't found a bike I like, the damn thing is in 3 weeks, and it's a 50K. I do not have the ability to get into 50K worth of shape in three weeks, while holding down a full-time job. So... basically, Bugger McFuck. I couldn't be any more frustrated about this, and my overall state of activity right now. It just really, really pisses me off.
Nevertheless: on the street on the way home I found a Mister Men style button that reads "Mr. Bitter." Strangely, on the whole I don't feel "Mr. Bitter" these days. I even ran into the ex-girl with her new man-friend on the way home, and it was all various kinds of gross, and still I don't feel particularly "Mr. Bitter." Oh well, there's always next year.
Williamsgate
I had a dream where Matty Price and I went to see RV and discovered to our horror that it is in fact a modern classic. Not just a really good comedy but a soulful thematic journey with incredible meaning, texture, and depth. I woke up profoundly disturbed and wondering for the second time in 24 hours if I need to get the hell out of the reviewing game.
May 12, 2006
On insecurities and critical legitimacy
This morning I was reading Roger Ebert's review of Poseidon. (Or, Pusweedon, as I somehow continually refer to it.) It occured to me as I was doing so that this was a relatively recent occurance: reading reviews of films before I had seen them. I gave up doing that when I was about fourteen years old, not because I was afraid of being spoiled, but for a much cloudier reason: I was afraid of having my own opinion challenged. As a maturing film fan there were few things more agony-inducing than really enjoying (or really hating) a film, and then discovering that the prevalent critical opinion was different from my own. I would rail against those critics. I would tell long tales about how I considered them thoroughly unqualified to be doing their jobs. (Some of those opinions, vis à vis the staff at the Globe and Mail for example, have stuck.) All this was, however, a big smoke screen to cover my inherent insecurity: that their opinions were more legitimate than mine, and that they might be right, and I might be wrong.
Then last summer, we were all going to see Batman Begins, and Phantom flat-out refused to come up with us, in part because (as I recall) he didn't want the critical opinion of the group (particularly myself and Matty Price) to in any way erode his first reaction to that seminal film. It made me realize how successfully I've jumped the fence, without even knowing it: not only has my critical opinion become solid enough that I can read Roger Ebert's reviews without even a note of fear that his reaction will colour my own, but apparently my own thoughts on films have achieved the bulwark of legitimacy, that "educated opinion" level that separates the plebes from the pros, the amateurs from the celebrities, the home-schooled from the school-schooled. It's what my editor at blogTO calls the "authority" of my opinion. Earned it? Zuh.
Look, I've written five or six hundred reviews in the past four years. Over that time, I've gotten better at it, even though I still like to use ugly non-words like "gotten." But the first step on the road of being able to do all this was accepting a fundamental truth that most mass-market review readers don't necessarily grasp: that the opinions of film critics are just that - opinions. They might be bourne on the wings of wider experience but they're still just one person's personal ken. And even that wider experience doesn't make them any more legitimate than anyone else's thoughts on the subject. Art is subjective and instinctual, and if it works it shouldn't need a doctorate in film theory to be understood. Nevertheless, I must admit there also seems to be the somewhat creepy, and inescapable, fact that humans apparently enjoy being told what to think. We have a prevalent insecurity about our own opinions and an ongoing interest in seeing our beliefs validated by being incorporated into the hive mind. This being true, somehow I've developed a particular (if rueful) fondness for those occasions (The Phantom Menace, The Village, Spider-Man 2) when my opinion definitively opposes the prevailing cultural viewpoing on the subject. It's sort of fun, and sort of annoying, and sort of proves that I've still got my britches on and am willing to piss in them.
If my opinions have started to intimidate the people around me... well, I sort of wish that wasn't the case. It's a hell of a lot more fun to get into a shouting match with Chris or Matthew about a flick we disagree on (boy it would be fun to have the three of us go around on Lost in Space) than it is to see the pasty-faced worry creep into the eyes of someone who thinks one thing about a movie, only to discover that I think something else. (At work, for example, I've learned that countering someone else's generalized mention of a movie they like with a more detailed opinion of my own is fraught with danger.) Maybe I'll throw over the whole reviewing thing one of these days and go back to being a quiet DVD collector and film festival enthusiast. Or maybe my podcast will take over the world. As I often say to conclude these things when there's no other way to do it, "it's an endless stream of possibilities."
Die Nymphe
Today on vag Fridays, The Nymphs (Die Nymphe), a curiously compelling gallery of vag-centered art photographs by Sabine Modotti. I spent about twenty minutes trying to pick a favourite and then sorta couldn't.
May 11, 2006
EXTREME STEVE!!!! episode four
May 10, 2006
moviesTO #31: Impossible Missions
I get to piss on monkey boy! I get to piss on monkey boy!
The high cost of living
Yesterday I was crafting an entry called "Self-denial and the art of being a human," because I got to thinking about the notion of unattachment and its general cultural currency as a "good" thing (Anakin, Neo, Buddha) and I began to become very angry about the human belief that it is noble and righteous to let go of the things you care about. I was all set to blog the hell out of this thing - about passion and human attachment and silly, dirty loss - but then I had a 3-hour non-argument with Helen Anderson about this subject and many others, and when I got home no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't jigsaw the words into any kind of coherent sense anymore. Whatever was in my head had become vastly inexpressible, as these things often do; there was another such thing yesterday involving a tiny white speck on the outside of a large, rubbery red ball which was somehow meant to represent all of human knowledge. The great Marlow divide, as I often call it. We live as we dream: alone.
Then last night I had a dream. A very long dream, and a very nice dream, about someone I lost a long time ago. It was one of the rare such dreams that was not a nightmare, didn't bring up any old pain, but was just sort of an eerie accounting for what it's like now in my heart and in my head, if wishes and reality were somehow allowed to meld into the best possible form. Even now the substance of the dream has almost all but left me; I remember it ended with us watching a movie about Jack Nicholson, or maybe it was George Clooney. I remember the long-sleeve shirt, which was the same colour as the chai latte I had last night, and I remember what its fabric felt like beneath fingers. I remember the perfect interlocking puzzle-piece shape of an over-the-clothes snuggle. And I remember that when my alarm went off, the first thing out of my mouth was a very loud "oh, MAN!" because that dream was a) a dream, b) a perfect expression of everything I tried to blog about last night, and c) a dream. And dreams can't be blogged.
mamo #43: The Ick Factor
Watch (or listen to, as the case may be) one man completely recant his entire summer 2006 grosses picks in a single, solitary episode of Mamo.
Really, though, don't you think the world sorta needs me to be excited about Pirates of the Caribbean 2?
Click here to download the mp3.
p.s. I bought several Batmobiles yesterday. It is a pleasure I have not had previously.
May 9, 2006
I guess that means it's badly designed
Tonight I caught the logo for some show called Unan1mous on Fox. First I thought it read Urban Maus, which I took to be a new, teen-hip update of Art Spiegelman's MAUS. Then I thought it read Onan Mouse, which I figured was a comic book adventure story about a masturbatory rodent and his mission to teach masturbation to other rodents. After all that work I barely had enough time to correct myself with the real title before the ad went off the air, and no time at all to find out when this program airs. So I suppose it fails.
The last will and testament of Matthew C. Brown
Since there's almost 0% chance that I'm actually going to die today (I want no irony here, sir), and since hiring a lawyer is expensive and kinda dumb, here is my last will and testament, for future reference. Is it binding? I dunno. I'll be dead so I don't think I'll mind either way.
First of all: I don't want no fancy-pants funeral. I want a green funeral. Yes, I realize this makes me a big Sfoo poser bitch, but them's the breaks. No coffin, no plot, no embalmin', no nothin'. Put me in a bag, drive me up north of the city somewhere, find a tree. Dig hole next to tree. Put me in hole. How does this get achieved in this day and age in Toronto Ontario? Beats me. You're paying for the thing, you figure it out.
If you feel like slinging Tederick in the bag with me, go for it. If you'd rather hang onto Tederick for sentimental reasons, I understand; be aware that he enjoys single-malt scotch, Earl Grey tea, and the finest pipe weed, and that his reading habits are voracious. And you will hear about it if you get it wrong.
I give my parents full license to invite / not invite whoever they choose to the funeral reception. They don't have to like all of my friends, they're my parents, and they'll have enough to deal with already. Anyone they don't like can pray quietly at my non-grave the following week.
Stuff: let my movie-inclined friends have the pick of my DVDs in a single-day fire sale, where everyone who picks up a DVD must yell "Shinydisks galore!" (every single time). Then sell whatever's left to recoup funeral costs. Give Adam all of my Star Wars figures so that now he'll have twice as many!! Chad will know what to do with the comic books. Mark can work with Chris to figure out the best way to preserve the Infinitely Brown movies and every flick I've made since. Matthew gets full title and rights to subculture and will see it made, dammit, or I will haunt his bloodline all the way back to the Stone Age.
Journal: don't read it, it won't make you happy. Blog: keep it online for as long as you like, then replace with a single picture of me naked when I was a child, preferably with my penis in full view.
I am of sound mind and body. Make it so.
May 8, 2006
Detox
One of the things about the heart issue was that I inevitably ended up taking myself off everything that could affect my heart rate - no coffee, no booze, no chocolate, no sugar, no sex, no drugs, and I regarded the bums of pretty girls on the street with nothing less than the utmost caution. After two weeks of that particularly hell, I finally gave up on the coffee issue, because it was becoming suicide-inducing. Then I tried beer a few days later, but a pair of pints pretty much waylaid me, and not in a good way. I wasn't drunk, so much as just... well, waylaid. I don't know if this too was detox-related or if it was fatigue or stress or some unholy combination of the three, but it was the second harsh reminder in the last few days that maybe our bodies really aren't meant for all these chemicals. You shouldn't be able to stand something just because you've developed a tolerance for it. Right?
(Man, I miss chemicals.)
Also, I'm getting rid of a fuckload of toys this week. After Big Fuckin' Hermione showed up and then Sideshow Luke, I just sort of started to feel like if the toys in my collection aren't this good, they shouldn't be here. So I'm slaking off about a hundred Star Wars figures and change, before turning my attention to the Lego, Simpsons, and miscellaneous otherstuffs. There's a big glorious "hmmmm" in the notion of just binning all of it and starting fresh, but even with my Harsh Hat on I can't help but keep my favourites. Which, it seems, is a very big list.
May 7, 2006
In my day Squid Heads stayed in Jabba's palace where they belonged.
Fuck Jack Sparrow, clearly I gotta be this guy for Hallowe'en:
And I gotta have that look on my face for the whole day. That'll go over like fish tacos at the office!
Soccer sore
Ladies and gents, my legs hurt. Particularly the inside of my left thigh... it's murder right now. And like ripping off a scab or sticking a Coke can up your ass, it's such a satisfying owie. Soccer's back, and a) I survived without heart-related incident, and b) I had a great time finally stretching my legs for what feels like the first time in eons. The coordination's not quite there yet, and I goofed my best chance at a goal today (and missed my second-best chance), but on the whole the team performed stunningly well for our first outing in six months. We walked away at a 2-1 loss which nonetheless felt pretty fucking victorious.
At our last game in '05 Mark announced that he and Carrie were having a baby... and today, we met the kid. Time sure flies. Welcome to the world, Jack. We'll have to buy you a tiny yellow jersey. 
I made it into the Werner Herzog talk last night and had a bunch of fun with that, too; I sat right in the front row and asked a really nerdy question about some of the issues I had guessed at in my Grizzly Man review. He sort of ducked me, but that's okay. I didn't get to smell him (which for some reason was important to me), and I didn't get the handshake afterwards either, but probably better that, given that I'm valiantly fighting a cold right now. (If I'd touched him, I'd have headed this post "I made Werner Herzog sick.") But yeah: pretty cool guy, pretty cool talk, pretty cool Free Comic Book Day overall. I hit three stores, took my boys out for brunch, and bought a fucking gorgeous Japanese lolita book and some back issues I've been looking for. It was all actually enough to make me remember to stop whining about my life for a few consecutive minutes and enjoy the good times when they rear their uglies.
Fresh air and exercise, man. It never stops being true.
FUCK
I, of course, was intimately involved with a Fuckumentary back in the 1990s, so it might perhaps be gallant for me to recuse myself from this discussion. But then, a discourse on the word "fuck" is never going to be one of gallancy.
May 6, 2006
EXTREME STEVE!!!! Free Comic Book Day Edition
(this Extreme Steve was brought to you gloriously free in support of Free Comic Book Day)
May 5, 2006
This was a two-shower day.
What happens to a baloney sandwich that's been left in a desk unrefrigerated for three days?
I'm gonna find out come Monday.
I confess myself substantially alarmed.
Mission: Impossible III
Around the edges, though, it can't quite shake the veneer of suckness that has been with this franchise from the beginning. Somewhere along the line, somebody failed to notice that this particular TV show doesn't make for particularly great movies.
Synth flesh is still good flesh.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine met up with me on the street and said that she'd stumbled onto my blog after over a year of absence, just in time to read about my experiences buying a Fleshlight. She played off the usual "I didn't want to know you had a Fleshlight" vibe but then (like everybody else) she wanted to know how the Fleshlight... y'know... was. So here's the official Fleshlight Follow-up.
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THE WHY ANUS: Why not? The insides are built the same, but the outsides are a hilarious butthole. Self-explanatory. (I realize that technically this makes for a slippery slope on the whole "Vag Fridays" concept, since it is technically neither a vagina nor even vag-shaped, but there you go.)
THE WHEN: See here.
THE HOW WAS IT: I got into this thing expecting a pretty mild response. I really only bought the thing as a lark and to satisfy my curiousity; I didn't expect anything particularly entertaining about the Fleslight. Boy was I wrong! When used properly (i.e. warmed up to body temperature with warm water, slicked up with a generous quantity of ID lube, and with the end cap unscrewed enough to provide the proper quantity of suction, neither too much nor too little), this thing works like gangbusters. Is it a vagina? Clearly not. Is it as close as you'll get in a masturbatory scenario to simulating a vagina? Oh hellllllllllllls yes. My first time with the Fleshlight was so startlingly accurate to the vagina experience that I was actually left in a state of utter catatonic awe. I pretty much just collapsed and grinned for a good twenty minutes before I could do anything relatively constructive. (You may infer what the next relatively constructive act was.)
THE WHAT NEXT: Real vagina, obviously. The Fleshlight's fun, but I admit the novelty wore off fairly quickly, as one would expect with a nonresponsive automaton in the place of a thinking, breathing partner. You have to have your fantasy on hardcore to really make this thing work out. It's a "special occasion" sort of a deal nowadays, like everything else in the tickle trunk.
There. Aren't you glad you came to Tederick.com today?
Special guest stars
Tonight on the way to see monkey boy dance, I ran into my old downstairs neighbours from 863. You know, the ones from Sensitivity. We shot the shit for a little while; I have yet to tell them that their pyro shenanigans inspired a whole darn movie (albeit a one-minute movie). Unrelated to the whole heart trauma issue I told them that I have the strange feeling I'm going to die soon, because my life for the past three months has been like the final season of a television show - all of the old special guest stars are turning up with alarming regularity. People I haven't heard from in years. And it just keeps happening, over and over and over again. Every week, a new(old) face to goose up the ratings. "Remember Crazy Uncle Carl? Next week, in a Very Special Episode of Matt's life, an old friend returns..." I must admit, it is beginning to damage my calm.
Well enough about that, let's post us some pussy.
May 4, 2006
A river in Egypt
or "Misadventures of the Heart, chapter 2"
I realize I haven't been blogging about the heart issue, mostly because initially there was nothing to blog about, and then there was something to blog about but I wanted to wait for a resolution on it before giving the story, and then we went straight back to nothing to blog about. So I've kept everyone in suspense for two weeks. That was heartless of me. Heartless! Heart.
So let's back track a bit.
Thing 1 that happened: Absolutely nothing. By 3 days following the initial attack, I had visited my GP and had her pronounce that there were no physical signs that anything had gone wrong at all - that you literally couldn't tell I'd been cardioverted 2 days prior. My thyroid levels were tested again (normal), I was given some advice on what to do and what not to do, and left with the "wait and see." By the 1-week mark, I was more than willing to call the entire incident a random occurance, just one of those quirks of the process by which we all eventually decompose. (I'm dying right now. So are you.)
Thing 2 that happened: Unsolicited medical advice. It's a dangerous game and it really pissed my doctor off, but it was kindly meant so I hold no grudge. Over that weekend I got an e-mail from an ex-girlfriend's sister. Ex-sister is a doctor, ex-brother-in-law is a doctor, and they had seen my blog post (yes! Tederick.com saves lives!) and based on my EKG scans and general description, suggested that I might have a condition called Wolff Parkinson White, and that I should get myself checked out by a cardiologist ASAP. And thus, the Homeland Security alert level was raised from "Mango" to "Salmon" with flecks of "Heart Attack."
Thing 3 that happened: I got a second opinion. I went to my dad's doctor, who was also my grandfather's doctor, who I have been hearing about since I was a small boy and has now treated 3 generations of Brown family heart ailments. Second Opinion Doctor did another workup upon me, ran a second cardiogram, and is making enquiries to get me an appointment with a cardiologist to follow up on the matter. Upshot of Second Opinion Doctor, however, is that it is highly unlikely that I have WPW, and that it is highly unlikely that there is anything wrong at all.
Nevertheless, Second Opinion Doctor advised me today that it would be inadviseable for me to do the Heart & Stroke ride next month under these circumstances, which really pissed me off. I'm not entirely sure I'm going to go along with that until I at least know when/where the cardiologist appointment falls (it might be some time from now) and whether/if I should be playing soccer this season (I have yet to find out). But the DVP ride was one of the largest things I was looking forward to this year, so to have it potentially yanked from the table has put me in a toweringly bad mood.
And that is the latest on that. I tend to swing between amused, irritated, and utterly disinterested in the whole thing. It's my heart. It'll either kill me or it won't. I'd rather the latter thing.
Thick sleep
Last night I stayed up way too late watching Star Wars and ended up having a near-comatose level of out-of-it-ness in my short period of sleep. While I slept I dreamt a big cluster of:
- music
- water
- Kate (from Lost)
- Kate (from my life)
- the Battle of Yavin
- Zam (from my life)
- action figures
- Bex
- pants
But the majority of the dream objects cannot be named in human speech. There was a lot of swirling, though.
moviesTO #30: Kinky Docs
More, more, more. Lots more actually.
May 3, 2006
Out of nowhere Episode IV no let's just call it Star Wars.
FUCKING.
WAY.
How long has this been going on? How long have I wanted this? I don't even believe it. It doesn't feel real. If someone told me tomorrow that a fan hacked into starwars.com and put up that news story, I'd believe it.
But no.
No, it's really really real.
Verbage:
"Over the years, a truly countless number of fans have told us that they would love to see and own the original version that they remember experiencing in theaters. We returned to the Lucasfilm Archives to search exhaustively for source material that could be presented on DVD. This is something that we're very excited to be able to give to fans in response to their continuing enthusiasm for Star Wars." - Jim Ward
Praise Jim. Praise George Lucas for the disgruntled nod he probably gave in a board room two weeks ago when Ward begged him to let them release the biggest fan-wank in the history of fan wanks, a limited edition release on a format that will cease to exist within two years, forcing us not only to buy the 2004 editions all over again this year, but also to buy the 2004 editions and 1977 editions all over again in two years anyway. Praise the lucrative marketing gods, praise hypocrisy, praise every single thing that lead to this moment because I'm seeing Star Wars without the Episode IV in the crawl for the first time since I was two years old and god DAMN I couldn't be happier.
Han shot. We won.
Out of nowhere.
BANG.
BANG. BANG.
I'm actually still shaking.
What's the name of the word for the precise moment when you realize that you've actually forgotten how it feels to make love to somebody you really liked a long time ago?
A week or so ago Matty Price caught me reading Sandman - Season of Mists - and he told me that it was his favourite of the ten (eleven?) but that his friend preferred the following volume, A Game of You. They're earlier works in the run, and my perception is that they own the lion's share of the popular acclaim for the title... but neither of these are my favourite. My favourite is Brief Lives - or as I called it the first time around, "Dream and Delirium's mystical road trip to find Destruction (having left Despair behind)." Or more aptly now, "Morpheus takes his son's life, and is damned." We're still a full volume away from the reveal that almost stopped my heart two years ago, at the end of World's End when the characters see the Endless' funeral procession, but that funeral march begins here in Brief Lives, with a quirky, distant, painfully human meditation on life and death.
This was when I fell for Delerium, who (like River and Molly Hayes before her) was doomed to be one of those characters I didn't notice until she was very nearly gone. I guess I fell for Dream too; I guess I noticed that if I lost all of these things, the loss would hurt me. Intentional or not, it was a stunning exterior point on the interior thesis of the work, for those few moments when the comic transcended the page and entered my own life.
It's amazing (and sorta not) how much a book about dreams is actually a book about death.
(There's another more recent story, involving Death, rain, and Saturdays, that I'll save for another time.)
I sort of wish I'd re-read the Sandman last summer, in the midst of all my own grief and loss and despair. Maybe it wouldn't really have mattered; I do believe in timelines, and that if something really clicks it's as much a pattern of "when" as of "what," but it seems to me that something got lost in the two years since (?!?!) since I left Bearshark, and that a little part of it got lodged in this book. You know, like a Horcrux only not creepy. All week at Hot Docs they've been throwing up this pre-movie slide that tells us that "watching documentaries is like practicing to be human," which is such a self-serving and contrived little statement that I really pay it very little mind, but I feel a little bit of it anyway... the good art is the stuff that gets us over ourselves.. It teaches us that our singular view of our own importance is just an illusion, puts us back down with the common folk, and reminds us that this experience is a shared one. It's not a bad insight.
I like to wave at them as they pass by
Yesterday seems to have been dump-a-trailer-on-the-people day, as besides the Superman trailer, a spot for Casino Royale is up. It's flashy. It's not as good as the Y2K trailer for The World Is Not Enough which, in my humble opinion, is one of the five best trailers ever (especially because of all the lies!!), but still, it's very pretty. Unlike Daniel Craig, who is... stunningly neanderthal-like. I sort of don't want to look at him.
There's also the Pirates 2 trailer, if you can get it to download, which many people can't. It took me about 20 minutes. I remain unconvinced. The con is getting longer, but I won't believe till I'm sitting in the theatre, and probably not until the last reel, at that.
But I do loves me some Jack.
May 2, 2006
Have I missed the big reveal?
I can really feel it now - summer. Actual summer. Lazy after-school days and open windows and the air is still warm at dusk. Simple pleasures like fresh laundry, frozen fruit and good porn. And a stunning number of flowers in a garden outside which I've never actually seen anyone tend. Already my weekend feels like it was a hundred years ago, which fits given that it felt (at the time) like it was a hundred years long. Seven movies, lots of walking, one date, two beers, one really good bowl of soup. It was all right. It's making me feel the pain of corporate living a bit more than usual this week; I'm angsty and antsy and something's gotta give. The further along ago, the more I see exactly where Stand-off came from when I wrote it. I've got half of my props, and no clear idea of when I'll shoot it.
Free Comic Book Day is on frickin' Saturday! I'd forgotten all about it. Doubly shameful given that there's an actual Runaways title in the stacks this year, and a Runaways/X-Men cross to boot, and now my Saturday's looking chocolatey: sitting in the sunshine on Charles Street reading free comics and angling for a spot in the sold-out Werner Herzog talk. I'm already half there.
Over the next few days I'll be clearancing out some entries that have been sitting on the drafting boards for a while. What most people don't realize is that Tederick.com tends to get planned and written in advance, a process that has been made immeasurably easier by the implementation of an actual content management system. (The previous content management system was an unholy alliance between my three distinct notebooks, and my head.) There have been a few things piling up and the sag is starting to show in the storyline. The site is plotted in broad arcs - of which we are now in the seventh - and what surprises me is the degree to which entries feel missing if I've left them out or delayed them. One messes with structure at one's own peril.
On Sunday night I found something that I've been looking for for a very long time, and put it to rest. That night, I dreamed I was Luke Skywalker helping evacuate the Echo Base, one step ahead of the Empire. It was better than flying.
Alderaan
Did I completely erradicate Tederick.com's entry and comment library in my efforts to solve some of the site's technical problems? I most certainly did. (It's back now.)
Comment away, folks; there's nothing for it now but to reboot the site at my earliest convenient and re-import everything from scratch. Which I may do shortly, or in the distant future. In the meantime, comments have been re-enabled and pictures of all of our readers' nude forms have been added to their comment signatures. Yes, that's right. I had a file all along.
OH MY GOD....
May 1, 2006
Weekend Wroundup, part 2
And finishing off this weekend's festival coverage, here are four reviews and a Mamo:
Mamo #42: Young Peoples' Theatre
Man that's a lot of coverage.
Thank you for not commenting.
Commenting is disabled on Tederick.com for the next few days, while I conduct some much needed database maintenance. During this time, your old comments will vanish and then eventually reappear. Try not to panic. Panicking leads to hiccups.
Masturbate now - ask me how!
Remember that May is National Masturbation Month, which you can celebrate through a process that you were going to do anyway.
You can also stop by Come As You Are this month and get buttons! Who doesn't love buttons?
Have a happy slappy May.