Tederick.com: June 2006 Archives
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Our one-year Mamoversary came and went, but hey, Superman. Sorta feels like old times, don't it? Boy, it's amazing that in a whole year of doing this we still haven't figured out what the hell to talk about.
Apparently just to fuck with me, they cast a girl named Dakota to play Lyra Belacqua. I am very angsty about all this. Anyone got a picture?
Man, there are times when I lead a charmed life.
Like doing a 25-minute podcast about Superman, for example.
Like leading myself in and out with the classic themes by John Williams, soufully reorchestrated for a new generation by John Ottman.
Like right now.
I love the vending machine at my work. It is decisive. If you wait for more than a second between pressing the E and pressing the 1, it doesn't give you anything. It's a metaphor for life. Know what the fuck you want before you start pressing buttons, bitchholes. That is a key, key moral.
I am feeling somewhat emotionally overwrought. It was Superman what done it to me. Every once in a while a flick comes along that just opens up a perfect little window into the moment you currently inhabit in your life, and Superman was that movie for me last night. It sort of hit me where I live, and then kept hitting me where I live, and the sum total emotional whallop was so great that by the climax of the film I thought maybe I would lose it. Like, arm-flailing Freud-definining hysteria fit, and me with no uterus to boot. When the movie was over it was pouring outside like it rarely pours anywhere, and I wanted to make a dash for HMV, so I fucking ran for it. Matty Price followed me. Now bear in mind I was wearing a Superman t-shirt and running up John Street in a torrential downpour that was Bangladeshian in its dedication. (Yes, I have conjugated Bangladesh). People perched under awnings and in doorways were singing the Superman theme as I ran. I was soaked to the skin within three seconds of being out the door and into that weather. And man... I was happy as I've been in a long, long time.
MP was not so much the happy, and cursed my name many times as we arrived at the HMV and found it closed (and later, Chris would point out that the Chapters immediately next door to the theatre was, in point of fact, open), and all I could say was "I'm sorry. This is my idea of fun." And the moral of that story is that sometimes your friends look into the weird spikey shapes behind your eyes and think you're a damned looney but that's okay too because they're your friends.
Yes, I am bringing the evangelical meaning to every thing I write! BELIEVE!!
Man, I am so irresponsible it's like a genuine miracle that I haven't been stabbed by my own scissors while getting my arm ripped off from where it was dangling out of the bus because the guy who gave me candy took me in the back of the van and molested me while I recovered from not having looked both ways before I crossed the street.
How easy it will always be to dismiss him. The initial impulse will always be to look upon his paragon-like form, his chiselled features, his natural immutability, and see within him the very death of drama and storytelling itself. No god can be a protagonist. No superman can be accessible to we mortals. No link can be made between us and the guy in the flowing red cape... and if that's the case, who needs him?
I'm tempted to keep that picture of Hermione in the sidebar on the right for the rest of the site's existence. I love the sweet kibble outta that shot.
My friends, we are winning the war on comment spam here at Tederick.com. WINNING, motherfuckers. I don't even know why you spammers try any more. You will never, ever, ever, ever, EVER get one of your spam comments on my site. Not even for a microsecond. My tools improve by leaps and bounds every time you come up with some paltry new offensive. You don't stand a chance. We are winning. You are losing. Nyah nyah nyah.
Fun things to say on the subway this morning: "Everything was fine, until we got screwed by Jesus and his evil empire of pain." That's right, I put it on Jesus. I refuse to brook troth with any god-figure who is responsible for all the good stuff but ducks out of sight when life becomes annoying. Fuck that! Rise up against your Judeo-Christian oppressors, my friends! The time is now!
I wore my Superman shirt to work today. Today sure as hell was the day to wear this thing. Everybody gets a big grin on their face when they see Superman coming. There is something to be said for the instant iconic identification of Superman. It makes me happy. It makes them happy. It makes me happy to make them happy. I have had some damn good times wearing (and at least once, stripping out of) my Superman shirt.
Also I got a cool green soccer ball for free today and me and my friends spent ten minutes damn near destroying the office by banking it off walls and cubicles and (maybe, just maybe) computer monitors. So I'm pretty happy all-the-way-a-round.
The trouble with having the databasey blog (aside from the spambardment which... well... FUCK!!) is the tendency to start posts and never finish them. So I've got a handful of scraps from the past few days that were gorgeous elements of someday-will-be-longer posts, all of which are now widows and orphans. Poor little widows and orphans.
The other problem is that the fucktards at the Paramount lied right in my face when I asked them about whether there would be an IMAX screening of Superman tonight. (Them: "No." Truth: "Yes." Conclusion: "Lying whores.") This sucks harlot balls. But I spent today on my feet at a roadshow hawking a new personal data device which - I admit - I fell a little too in love with for a relatively non-yuppie sort of fellow like myself, so the ultimate outcome is that I probably wouldn't have the energy for the Man of Steel tonight anyway. For I am a man of limp cellophane.
Yesterday I had a stress test at the hospital. It was fun. Running on a treadmill is fun. I guess they don't have too many 29-year-olds in there because they kept asking me if I needed to stop. I said "I played 2 soccer games in the sun yesterday afternoon. Just warn me when you crank this thing up to a flat-out sprint." Which they never even did! What's more stressful than flat-out sprinting? Nothing. So why not test it?
The weird part is that I was stressed about the stress test. Actually I've been fairly anxious for the past week or so, for reasons I'm still having trouble nailing down. (Oh, I know what they are, I just can't nail them down. They skitter.) It's really pissing me off. It's that constant "book report tomorrow morning" feeling, with a tomorrow morning that will never come. I can't quite shake it. Remember back in the '80s when there wsa a book called The Joy of Stress.? I shoulda read it, maybe then all this stress could be joyful.
Instead I'm reading Lost (not the TV show, even a little bit), which is so stulteringly awful that I'm actually sort of surprised that it's a book, like when a director makes a movie so bad that you assume that such a feat is actually impossible because the guy is so inept that how did he know how to turn on the camera? Like that, only in book form.
OK that's it, gotta figure out something worthwhile to do before I pull my scrotum over my head and sing Rule Britannia.
Per the Rowling, here are my picks:
1. Ron. Sorry, red. It's been in the mail for a looooooooong time. (You didn't really think the H/R romance was gonna have a happy ending, did you?)
2. Snape. Even if he killed Dumbledore on Dumbledore's orders, personally kills Voldemort, and is completely redeemed by the end of Book 7, the Half-Blood Prince ain't gettin' outta this franchise alive.
3. Lupin. If you assume that she probably won't kill Hagrid after icing Dumbledore, one would then presume that she'll take out the last surviving Marauder instead.
4. Hagrid. Let's not be assuming too heavily now.
5. One of the Weasley twins. Thus leaving the other to survive, a broken shell of his former humourous self. Fun, innit?
6. Neville. Plenty of drama in having him go up against the witch who fucked up his parents, and lose.
7. Molly. Almost too mean to be withstood by humans, but then, that's sorta Jo's style.
8. Mad-Eye. Sure, but who would notice?
9. Luna. Has the flavour of a "random kill out of nowhere" death, of the type that Joss Whedon would be proud, and Matty Price would revile. But then, he ain't reading this book anyway.
10. Harry Potter. Realistically he should probably be a lot farther up the list, but I've got a feeling about this one. I think Harry gets a Frodo, not a Ripley.
I'm on my Mom's computer right now. She has a new wireless card and we're testing it out. In her bookmarks in Internet Explorer, third from the top, is "my son's web site." Yessir: the very Tederick.com. How cute is my Mom? More to the point: how alarming is that?! My Mom goes to my web site? If so (and thank goodness for this) she's never mentioned any of the... y'know... content. That's probably for the best. I've probably heard my mother say the word "anus" at least once in my life but the first time she says it in reference to my work, I'll retire to Bedlam.
Awwww! My MOM! Cutest Mom Ever.
(Wait she just asked my brother what "blogging" means. So I think we're in the clear.)
At this point I'm pretty much saying that I've gotta wear my outdoor hat every time I play soccer. Any time I wear it, we win. Tonight we played a double-header... and won a double shutout. A DOUBLE FUCKING SHUTOUT! A 7-0 win and a 6-0 win! I scored a goal in the second game that wasn't technically supposed to be a goal, I was mostly just passing to Tina... but then it was a goal. So I'll take it.
At the bar afterwards Demetre, Steve, Chris and I roughed out the rest of the Snakes on a Plane franchise. Goes like this:
First you have Snakes on a Plane. It does monster business and they want a sequel so they decide to go with Bears on a Plane.
The bears work great because they're fucking enormous and cause much plane-related destruction. But the fans really miss the original "snakes" conceit, so the third film goes back to basics, but with a new twist, by giving us Snakes on the Batmobile. It's two hours of Christian Bale in the full bat suit flailing his arms about trying to beat on snakes in the Batmobile while simultaneously maintaining control of the vehicle.
At the very end of the film he finally kills the last snake and rolls into the Batcave. He pops the hatch... and the camera tracks outward to reveal that the Batmobile is surrounded by bears. Thus setting up the fourth and final (?) film in the franchise, Batman Be Bears. Actually maybe they never even make the fourth film, they just leave it as a big fucking TO BE CONTINUED, BITCHES!!! to fuck with cinema-goers for the rest of time.
All right!
I put the Toht fan page back up. I took it down in the first place because forum wags were using the images for their signatures and hogging my bandwidth because they're FUCKHOLES. But fuck it, they're doing it for Jasper too and there's no sense in discriminating between my odd obscure fan pages. Toht & Jasper, together again. Somebody make a road movie. (Where one character is an animated old geezer and the other guy has been dead since the '80s. Hell of a film.)
I also finally got around to retouching all of the photos in the Absence album, which has been in the post for about a gajillion years (or maybe just five). Boy, the end result mighta been a shite film, but Absence remains the most fun I ever had shooting, and you can see it in each and every one of those snapshots. Even the ones where I'm screaming in pain. It's an earned pain, man.
Now all I gotta do is get SURVIV.ORg into the blog archive and we'll be all set.
I used "you gotta ease into that shit" again at work today. Like, without irony. It just popped out. Once again my brain seemed to think it was the actual proper response to the situation at hand. This time a pregnant woman banged her knee on her desk and cried out in pain. And I said "you gotta ease into that shit." I think it was even less helpful this time than it was the last time. What the fuck is wrong with me??? Why is that the first thing that pops out of my useless mouth every time someone does something that can least be served by the concept of easing into shit??? Am I functionally retarded or do I have the advice-giving skills of the average Dare cookie?
To facilitate easy blogging, today's events will be graded on a pass/fail basis.
1. Arriving ten minutes early for my appointment to get a Holter monitor for my heart only to find that the entire medical staff was in a meeting from which they would not emerge for an hour, after which they told me that it would be another hour of total wait time before I could leave, and yet somehow managing to convey the idea that this was, inexplicably, all my fault - fail.
2. Taking part in a surprise anniversary party at the office for a guy who wasn't let in on the surprise and was therefore in Barrie, but there was coffee and cake anyway - pass.
3. Hearing the woman at the Thai restaurant mispronounce "veggie" as "vaggie," and therefore (without even knowing it was Vaggie Friday) emit such phrases as vaggie soup and vaggie spring roll - definite pass.
4. Flirting with the married woman just because she really is the most humility-inducingly beautiful woman I have any regular contact with and hey, she don't mind - pass.
5. Moping about my life - fail.
Pussy euphemisms. Now there's a nice collision of contradictory phraseology. I think about pussy euphemisms a whole lot. Like when we were in the States and the hotel room had free "nap sacks" for the disposal of "sanitary napkins," which is sort of the godfather of all pussy euphemisms, even though it in fact describes items only pussy-related rather than pussy themselves. Or yesterday Helen was telling me how girls' bathing suits get sold with "hygenic stickers" over the inside of the crotch. You couldn't just go call that a vag-guard, couldja? Nossir. Must underscore the inherent dirtiness of the vulval secretions by throwing the word "hygiene" everywhere you see anything vag-related. And then of course there's my absolute, all-purpose favourite among the pussy euphemisms: the sheer number of women who can only, if ever, choke out that brilliant non-descriptive if forced to refer to their girly-parts at all: "DOWN THERE."
DOWN THERE. What the fuck is down there? Miners are down there. Australia is down there. Mola Fucking Ram is down there. Not exactly a connection to the goddess, is it?
When I was a kid, my parents were strict by-the-bookers: the items in question were called the vagina and the penis. No more, no less. Obviously everyone knows that this is the way you're supposed to go when raising kids, but even the other day at my office, a group of women (most of them mothers) were talking about how they just can't bring themselves to go "vagina" on their daughters, coming up with yet more pussy euphemisms like "flower" and "marigold" and "hot snatchy love box." (I think the latter momma was kidding.) Yeah, I realize that in technical medical terms it isn't even a vagina at all and we're all supposed to say vulva instead but I'm just gonna stick with what I know. I was raised with "vagina," and when I hit 20 I started seeing the sheer adorability of "pussy," and there's no denying that reading Cunt flipped my entire worldview in ways not entirely related to linguistics, but at least starting there. And that's the end of it. When I say "cunt" I know what I'm talking about. Can't know nothin' don't have a name.
Did I write everything on the blog today? Yeah sorta everything, huh?
As it turns out, you don't need some fancy USB 2 port to use your fancy USB 2 device. A USB 1 port can be fiendishly co-opted for the purpose. I'm sure other computer-savvy folk would have known this, but for me when I found this out I felt like I had harnessed the power of the gods. Still sorta do.
Last night I had yet another dream where my unconscious mind completely betrayed my waking mind. Thank you unconscious mind. I can keep my shit together a solid 74% of the time when I'm awake but when I'm asleep, you just go ahead and piss all over the birthday cake. I sincerely hope you die. I may poison you shortly with neurotoxic chemicals. Then who's the dean? Yes sir. So that dream put me in a fairly standard gloomy mood all day, which was increased by the fact that I haven't been hungry in over 48 hours and now I'm worried. In the past two days I've eaten a burrito, an ice cream cone, an apple, and a muffin. In two days. And let's just say that the janitorial department ain't exactly swingin' for the fences these days either. Maybe my subconscious mind and my too-conscious body are in some horrific collusion with one another to bring about the downfall of Matthew C. Brown. It would figure that they'd get up to nonsuch.
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I came home straight away because I had a bunch of stuff to do tonight that was piling up, like complaining about the duty on the Manfrotto stand I bought on Ebay, and signing my new lease, and dumping all the pictures off of my digital camera. At one point during this process I succumbed to temptation and took many pictures of my wang. Obviously, I will not post them here today, but they are pretty decent cock shots if I do say so myself. And that is the whole story.
Stupidly big day for comics; two of the best books on the stand, a new book by one of the best writers, a couple of ancillary titles and a relaunch of Wonder Woman. Cripes. I read too much of this shit.
What a little treat All-Star Superman #4 is. I just re-read the first three issues the other day and noticed for the first time that they're a complete mini-arc themselves, and indeed issue 4 is a lovely little stand-alone featuring a madcap capre for Jimmy Olsen, and an evil Superman. Pretty much flawless in its enjoyability. And after a heated debate with e-becca yesterday, who has revealed her Superman-hating stripes, a good Supes issue was just what the doctor ordered. My faith is confirmed. From here on, we will know Rebecca as The Evil Bex Luthor. Steer clear of her, she wears a Kryptonite thong.
Meanwhile, the other Luthor got featured in the third Superman Returns prequel comic, but this one was fairly gay. (Yes! I said "Gay!" In a derogatory fashion, and during Pride Week no less!) Yet more rehashing of Superman 1 and tepid musings on the interiors of Lex's mind. Honestly I can't imagine a single villain in the entire unified comicsverse who is as not-nailed-down as Lex Luthor. Every single incarnation of the guy, from the comics to the multifarious movies and television series (ahem Smallville ahem) is completely different. When you look at the Scarecrow, for example, you know that guy. You know Bullseye and Apocalypse and Geoffrey freakin' Wilder. But Luthor's been revised and re-edited so many times that I just don't know where he's coming from any more. What's that guy's problem?
Then there's Astonishing X-Men #15. Boy these things are starting to feel thin. I love 'em and all, but it always seems like we blaze through 22 pages in about 8 pages of actual story. So many pretty pictures, so little density. But that's okay, because Angry Kitty kinda rocked. And while I can't get entirely on board with English Schoolgirl Wolverine, I am all about Colossus kicking the shit out of Sebastian Shaw. It melts in your mouth and in your hand. Yet another AXM that I've read cover-to-cover thrice already.
OK, those are the key titles, I'll rip through the other ones because you're already sick of reading this. New Avengers #20 was pretty awesome with the Avengers kicking ass in Genosha, but I'm sort of tired of authors continuing to try to unravel the Xorn/Magneto clusterfuck. Leave Grant alone. Neil Gaiman's Eternals #1 was all right, but sort of over my head, and I'd read too many comic books by that point in the day anyway. And Wonder Woman #1 served my semi-annual need to see if someone can actually make a WW comic work for me. I guess some cool shit happened. I dunno... wonderful?
More tales of mystery and intrigue from the second annual road trip to Chapel Hill, North Carolina...
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Due to the weakness of the American dollar, Matty Price and I were, of course, looking for spending opportunities. After a commerce-free slog through Pennsylvania we entered West Virignia and saw, like a beacon in the eveningtimes, a great, rocky promontory above us which housed a Best Buy, a Dick's, and a Target. There was girlish screaming. Once we were in the parking lot, the lettering on a hot girl's ass indicated that we were proximate to the University of West Virginia, which no doubt fostered the rank Bix Boxness of the mall. I bought Star Wars action figures at Target for only six damn dollars apiece. We browsed digital cameras, though it would take me until two days later to realize that I actually have no ability to make an intelligent decision on such a purchase, and I would be better off just buying something already. And most heartbreakingly, we discovered that at the Best Buy, Criterion DVDs were on sale for $30 a pop. And I didn't buy any. I foolishly put a copy of Late Spring back on the shelf, assuming that every Best Buy in the South would have similar price schemes. And of course, though we visited another 6 Best Buys that weekend, we never found another single, solitary Criterion DVD, nor could we locate the original store on our way home. It disappeared back into the West Viriginian headlands like a mirage.
In our travels, we passed through Zelienople but did not stop at Bear Bottom Antiques, a regret I shall carry to my grave. We passed through a town called Harmony which was, originally, known as Murdering Town (!!!), but did not get murdered. We did, however, kill an hour and a half waiting for breakfast. They don't move fast in Murdering Town.
We did stop in Bland, but found it boring.
On the way home we hit a rest stop in Virginia, nestled deep in the mountains. I went and got a drink and when I came back to the (rented) car I saw a woman approaching me. She was in her early 30s, was stunningly beautiful, and was wearing a white tank-top that quite demonstrably proved that she a) was wearing no bra, and b) had very large, puffy nipples, which were biteable in their perfection. And I got caught out looking. How? Easy: I got into her car. Yeah, real smooth, Matt. I was so flummoxed by this vision of loveliness that I missed our (rented) car outright, and went to get in the driver's side door of her car, which she too was attempting to access. The kicker? Her 6-year-old daughter in the passenger seat. Woman now clearly thinking that I was trying to both steal her car and abduct her daughter, she jumped behind the wheel and took off so fucking fast that we literally couldn't catch her even flatlining 140 km/h for the next twenty minutes. She was on the horizon. She was gone.
Chapel Hill itself, in the daytime this time around, could not be more of a lovely place to visit. A dedicated college town, the "strip" as it were isn't really anything more than a couple of blocks... but the weather was sunny, the people were friendly, and this little slice of mid-South Americana couldn't have been any more enjoyable for a mid-afternoon stroll.
Hi Mom! continued to impress; we saw two screenings this year, both of them on Friday night. Clearly, I misjudged rather wildly when sending them Nuns That Fuck as my submission this year. I probably could have submitted literally anything I've made in the past five years and had a better chance of getting in, but NTF isn't their style. And their style? Awesomeness! I am monumentally impressed with the calibre of work that this little fest in the seeming middle of nowhere is able to attract. I would be nothing short of honoured to make it in next year... something I intend to attempt with vigour.
The first show was the outdoor screening, and was held on a parkade just after the sun had set, and could not have been more beautiful in a million years of trying. It was in this program that we saw David Chai's masterful Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot, which was easily my favourite of all the films we saw this year. The program also had Arno Salters' Playtime, a one-minute movie that put most of our one minute movies to shame. And for sheer artistic willfulness, I enjoyed Scott Ligon's film, Escape Velocity, a rather lengthy exploration of A.D.D. It's bloody brilliant for about ten minutes, and then (unfortunately) sort of just becomes a narrative about Ligon's life, without ever really returning to the basic connection between deficit-abnormal personalities and artmaking. But still very, very cool.
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And that being said, this would be a really good time to admit my hefty crush on the hotness of Amber Tozer, who is pretty hot when she's an animated standup comedienne in the Tozer Show movies, and is way hotter in real live digital paintcolours on her way-too-well-written blog. Damn hell yes damn yes. I sort of want to marry her a little bit. Or take her out for huevos rancheros.
Other highlights on the midnight were Losing It by Bobby Miller, which was sort of addled in its production for no good reason which was a shame because the script and principal performances were actually really good. There was something worthwhile in there that still managed to translate out of the awkward staging and ultra-ultra-ultra-low quality filmmaking. And there was Cats and Pants avatar Jennifer Matotek's Every Boy I've Fucked; yes, I went all the way to North Carolina to see a flick by a Toronto filmmaker that I probably could have gotten a copy of with 2 or 3 e-mails. But that's the fun. And the flick itself was, not surprisingly, boner-inducing. That woman is onto something. I'm gonna make a corollary flick called "Every Girl Who's Stomped On My Heart And Walked Away Smilin' Like They Was Christopher Walken Or Some Shit." And it'll be good, gorrammit.
At the end of the day, the three guys at Hi Mom! have been doing this shtick for nine years with no funding, no corporate sellouts, and no reason to do it other than the sheer love of the game. That's powerful to me, man, especially now. They've succeeded better than anyone could possibly imagine, seem to have spent the weekend ably buttfucking Worldwide Short's concept of "programming" with their endlessly inventive lineup of talent, and have made a true believer out of me. Honestly, when we set out for this trip, it was a gag, a dumb and pointless sequel. No longer. I will go back next year, and the year after, and the year after that. Hi Mom! is part of my life now.
This is what I did with the toys after the most recent big purge. Odd that it took me this long to get around to this, given that the alcove in my bedroom was one of the first things I liked about 3QF back when we looked at the place two summers ago. I got rid of the Jabba playset and just swarmed the action figures on the ground level. I created risers out of VHS tapes to put a few into more prominent positions. I kept the old Hasbro Vader and Jango 12" dolls in there because I like 'em. And then I made with the suspending, which is my very favourite part: the Imperial Shuttle, the Republic Gunship (loaded to the fucking brim with clones), Obi-Wan's Jedi starfighter, an A-wing, and Zam Wesell's speeder (with Anakin hanging on for dear life). Oh, and an Ewok hangglider for good measure. All of my very favourite vehicles in the whole darn saga, all crashing through space at once. I am very pleased with this.
Oops, forgot to post the Mamo! This is a particularly excellent Mamo because we're in Pittsburgh at the time and about as juiced up as you're ever likely to hear us. Mamo from the road! Yes boss.
"...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..."
While I was in North Carolina, clearly, I was gonna hit some benny. I woulda done it the first morning we were there except that I hadn't bought a camera yet, which stalled me until the Saturday. We ate at the 501 Diner both days, a little greasy spoon just up the street from our motel. Eggs benedict at the 501 cost about US$6.49 or so, which given the current strength of the Canadian dollar, makes it the cheapest benny I'll probably ever have.
Unfortunately, in this case I sorta got what I paid for. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with this benny, but there was nothing intrinsically right about it, either. What the Americans call "Canadian bacon" is ham. Just fucking call it ham, because it's ham. I know what ham looks like; I'm Canadian. Also, in this case, the eggs were slightly under-cooked, and the accompanying hash-browns were sub-par. At least the coffee was good.
The hollandaise erred on the citrussy side of life, but we've all made that mistake so I'm going to let it slide. At least there was plenty of it, which I always like; I want my benny to be essentially invisible beneath a shroud of saffron goo. But there's no getting around the fact that this benny is lucky to score 2 eggs out of 4. I expected better from the gluttony-driven insanity that is the United States of America.
The 501 Diner can be found at 1500 North Fordham Blvd. in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Good luck getting into the parking lot, it's tricky. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
As it turns out, I'm a writer. Some people are puppeteers, some people are fishermen, and I'm a writer. I don't know why it took so long for me to figure this out. I sort of always saw writing as a means to an end - wanna make a movie, gotta write it first, etc. Then at some point yesterday, I finally twigged to the fact that writing is the only common element of every single thing I love doing. It's why I scribble out pompous reviews of every single movie I see. It's why I don't ultimately care if subculture turns out to be a feature film or an (admittedly gorgeously drawn and rendered) undeground comic book. It's why I write a blog that is, as I have explained many times, for absolutely nobody's purposes other than my own. Even the podcasting is like writing in real time, writing as an improv variety show. It all comes back to the words. I love words. I have always loved words. I only dislike one word (crotch) but I fundamentally love about a zillion (right now it's serenity, Bellerophon, tweeter, and gorgonzola). I think I'm a good writer but not a great writer, and maybe someday I'll be a better writer or a worse writer, but I'll tell you one damn thing: I will be doing this, and probably nothing else with such exclusivity, for the rest of my life.
Boy, sometimes life just smacks you in the face with the big ol' "you're a pampered little dumbass with his head wayyyyyyyy too far up his ass" obviousness, huh.
While I was in the States I bought a digital camera. It is my first one. It makes the most excruciating "Hi! I'm a fucking digital camera!" chirp when you turn it on. Otherwise it's all right. The best thing about it is that its relative cheapness and utter point-and-shootness gives me complete license to be a really shite photographer. Which is... good?
On the phone with Bex just now, when she tried to shut down my building whinge about my dating life:
BEX: "You need to suck it."
ME: "I've sucked it more than enough, thank you very much."
BEX: "You need to suck it a little bit more."
I'm about ten unpublished posts behind here on Tederick.com, and it doesn't look like I'm ever gonna catch up the way things are going. New stuff keeps getting in the way! Stupid new stuff.
So to summarize:
I literally got done watching "War Stories" and then came upstairs to find out that there's a charity Serenity screening in Toronto on Saturday. Zippidee!
Andy got quoted in a Discovery article about Superman.
And the very best movie we saw at Hi Mom! (I will actually blog about Hi Mom! eventually, I promise) was Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot, and you can watch it right here.
Now I must launder.
The other day I got out of the shower and jotted the following down on a small scrap of paper. I recount it here for you in a fascinating glimpse into the quasi-obsessive Mattian mind, though I have had to blank out a couple of items that fell among the "too personal."
Secrets of Clean Living:
And as if in confirmation of the fact that this was a step in the right direction, two things happened yesterday: 1) I wrote a second one-minute movie on the subway on the way home, giving me a wide range of self-indulgence to work from; 2) I figured out what I want to do for my 30th birthday - I want to tend me some bar. Just like 2 years ago, and probably wearing the same Superman shirt. Eat that, plebes; it's gonna be glorious.
I've gone ahead and pre-ordered Alan Moore's Lost Girls from Chapters. I am sell-outy. The owner of the Silver Snail has made a firm commitment to not stock the book because his is a "family friendly" store (a "family friendly" store that stocks Preacher, Sin City, and at least one comic book where a group of hostages are made to fuck in an all-night diner by a mind-controlling sociopath before cutting their own throats, but I digress), and I'm sure I could find Moore's pornographic fantasia at any other number of fine Toronto-area comic shops come August, but I am damn lazy. And a little too excited about finally seeing the resexualized misadventures of Dorothy Gale, Alice in Wonderland, and Wendy Moira Angela Darling, thus eliminating my willingness to leave things to chance. Of course, if someone gets a burr up their ass about this content, then I suppose I'll be shipping illegal pornography via the Canadian postal system. Oh jail time.
And finally: with trepidation, I am stepping back into the world of the cyber-dating. I have to get myself less "hog-tied for options," as I put it the other day. Dating would be a lot easier if there weren't such a gall-darned plethora of disappointing womenfolk in the world. (I am sure, of course, that there is an equally large contingent of disappointing menfolk, but this is not within my purview, so please don't write in and complain about my gender bias.) Based on the last few days I'd say that you oughta need to have a license to have boobs. "Are you capable of carrying an intelligent conversation, and are over all of your teenage sexual hangups? Okay, now you can have boobs."
[Come to that, I suppose a license to bear dick would also be handy. "Do you solemnly swear never to stick this where it doesn't belong, use it to intimidate, or piss off a second-floor balcony? Okay, here's your dick. Do NOT circumcise it."]
And that's about all the dialogue I can think of today, Francis.
It's been in the breathe-hole for a while now, but finally, the specs have arrived on the Criterion re-issue of spine #2, and Matt's Favourite Movie #2, Seven Samurai. Motherfucker's gonna be a whopping three disk special edition. Looks like the Michael Jeck commentary from the original disk will be retained on the new one, making for easy switchies. Yeah, I already own it, and it weren't cheap the first time, and yeah, I am gonna buy it again. I'd buy it seven times if I had to. And then I'd fight a lonely battle in a driving rainstorm that would leave me face-down and naked in the mud. Why? Because that's what I do.
Wow. Two score previews today, the big ones, the ones that will undoubtedly fight it out for Score of the Year on my year-end movie list. Superman Returns and Pirates of the Caribbean 2. And which made me smile more: hearing Jack Sparrow's theme energetically reorganized by Hans Zimmer, or ... well, fuck, you do the math. If there's anything better than John Ottman's restaging of John Williams' classic Superman theme, I don't want to know about it.
Man. I am shaking down to my pearly whites right now.
Tederick.com is in North Carolina. You go away now.
I'm propackstinating. I got home about an hour ago and I just can't get off my ass to get my shit together for tomorrow. So instead, I'm propackstinating. I'm not even doing it particularly well because I seem to be unable to muster up the resolve to even do the things that are right in front of me on this very computer, like answering the e-mails from Bex and Macelod in my inbox, or drafting out the two or three blog posts that have been kicking me in the back of the skull. Nope. Propackstination is the watchword.
I got woke at 6 this morning by somebody's alarm clock (that somebody shall remain nameless), which actually did that thing where it incorporates itself into your dream before you realize that it's actually real. (Oddly, in my dream the alarm clock incident was blamed on the other potential party.) Went to work and made a merry sport of it; for all the attendant interest, you'd think I was going on a six-month cruise to Siam. I wasn't quite as irritating as Thundercracker before her trip last month, but I made a try for it. It was good, too, because my job stress has been high for the past few days. I'm up to my eyeballs in two projects, one of which I'm priming, so I'm happy to give it a miss for a few days while things sort themselves out, as they have a way of doing. I get worried when my mindspace is too much invaded by the hullaballoo of a job that is, at the end of the day, just a source o' the rent and the toys money. It seems to be very difficult for me to not seat my identity there. But I had a good walk and a good think last night in Withrow Park, and dealt mentally with issues of both job-stress and love-stress. By the end I even lay down in the grass and dreamed up some shots for Standoff, so on the whole I'm calling the balance paid. For now.
I closed everything up at work at 4:30 and headed downtown; I've decided (in the wake of the X3 bitchslap) that if I'm going to go to all this grief about liking Cyclops the best I really oughta get patriotic about it, so I'm doing a bit of reverse anthropology on the man, starting (appropriately) with the events leading up to New X-Men, which is where I came aboard (in the modern era of my comicdom, that is). No luck on the search for Cyke (neither the thus-named mini-series, nor X-Men v2 #97 and 98), though, so I must Ebay it. And meanwhile, thinking back to the not-modern era of my comicdom, Larry Hama his own self is gonna be at the Silver Snail in a couple of weeks. I gotta dig out my G.I.Joe #43 (the one with the grim reaper firing a machine gun on the cover) and get him to sign it. It was my very first comic ever. Fuckin' A, man. Larry Hama.
After the Snail it was Burrito Boyz and another new, even hotter Burrito Girl, and reading Civil War in the sunshine on Richmond Street, and feeling quite content with myself and the ways of the world. And now home, and propackstination, and here's the Darth Maul doll from Sideshow for those interested. I am, mercifully, not. Oddly, during the big sell-off last month, I sorta fell in love with my Hasbro version all over again. Not that I ever really woulda bought the Sideshow one anyway, because hey, I'm no Sith. But something about the goofy stoner expression on the Hasbro Maul's face really appeals to me. It's a renaissance.
I'm still going. I'm still refusing to pack. I'm still not writing back to Bex or Macelod. Shame on the Matt Brown! Shame! Surely there's a vagina around here I can write about. Or perhaps an adventure of Extreme Steve or his friend Probably Linc. I just went out on the back deck with my cat who turns into the most affectionate creature in the world, but only when she's on the back deck. The sun was setting bloody bright gold. It made my bedroom look molten and sexy. I'm free-associating now. Fuck. Propackstination... pro... pack....
No hour-and-fifteen-minutes of movie should cost $12 without at least making the 20th-century concession to a short film or two. Given that the plot is just a cypher for action, there's no reason it couldn't have cyphered a beat or two more.
Finished Half-Blood Prince for the third time, a.k.a. the Best Time Ever. Yeah. I love the toes off that book. (Yeah. I just cribbed "I love the toes off that _____" from Joss Whedon. Suck it.) I even managed to quasi-understand the Ron and Hermione thing for the first time... it actually works if you assume there are about six or seven dialogue scenes between them that don't actually get seen, or even obliquely referenced, in the book. In other words, it remains a Love Story With No Basis. But whatever, the shippers have had their day, and I am no shipper. (Although the basis for H/R's supreme defensiveness against one another just makes me scratch my head. One must assume that for such a relationship to work, Hermione would have to be so dominant she might as well go the whole hog and have Ron's wang in a leather leash. He is just so phenomenally foolish.)
Harry and Ginny continues to make me happy-dance, though, and you really can't do better than the Misadventures of Young Voldy. Now all my thoughts are bent towards Book Seven. I'm expecting departures. Big departures. Four horcruxes in less than 700 pages... no Hogwarts... the redemption of Malfoy and the redemption/destruction of Snape... all very tricky. I'm assuming Ron takes out Nagini in some sort of big final foo-faa while Harry goes after Riddle, but the other three horcruxes have to be Indiana Jonesed from all around the world... or at least, all around the U.K., with Ron and Hermione tagging along like X-Men. It's a lot to get done in one book. I sort of want JKR to give the title formatting the slip and call the thing Harry Potter Beyond the Veil, because as with all great final chapters (from Return of the King to Return of the Jedi, from The Odyssey to The Amber Spyglass), a trip to the underworld will certainly be required. (And a conversation with either Sirius and/or Dumbly-dorr, one presumes.) But other than that, I'm stumped. This is gonna be a monumental feat of sticking the landing. We shall just have to see.
Now I'm not entirely sure what to read next, although I continue to have a long backlog. Finding the right brick to stick in the hole in the wall, though, is tough. I'm committed to reading Don Quixote before the summer's out, but I am understandably nervous.
Did I really spend half a recent Mamo dissing Superman, or did I just dream that? Read this interview with Bryan Singer, it'll make you feel a whole lot better. (It sure fixed me.) I particularly like the part where he says he wants it to be the kind of movie that grandparents can take their grandkids to. I sincerely hope he's right about that. We haven't seen one of those in a long, long time. One of my happiest memories in my entire life is when my grandmother took me to see Last Crusade for my 13th birthday. I was worried sick about it. I had seen the flick already and I was absolutely convinced that there was no freaking way a 70-year-old Italian woman was going to enjoy a single frame of an Indiana Jones movie. But it was traditional for me to spend my birthday weekend at the grandparents' place up at Steeles & Yonge, and Indy 3 was playing at Towne & Country (now Centrepoint), and it was the only thing to do. And she fucking loved that shit. I think she enjoyed it more than I did. She laughed, she cheered, she talked about it all the way home. And I learned one of the most significant movie lessons of my whole life: it is one thing to make a movie, and another thing to make a great movie... but to create a demographic-defying classic that can be enjoyed by anyone from 8 to 80? That, my friends, is a true gift to the human race. Treasure those flicks, they ain't many.
I could summarize excitedly, or you could just go.
My adventures in the Canadian medical system continue. I saw a cardiologist at Sunnybrook today, and aside from the fact that I find being a 29-year-old with a cardiologist to be a truly creepy state of affairs (my stay in the waiting room was enough to make me feel like a pensioner), all went well. This doctor (for he is the third in the direct line of people trying to solve the various problems of my ticker, and the seventh or eighth such overall) reminded me a bit of Mr. Rogers... no that's not quite right... more like... fuck I dunno. Some guy.
We ran down the list of my potential causatives, and seeing it all out on paper like that and realizing that I really am the picture of health did more for me than any doctor's advice ever could. He checked my pulse at every vein on my body, from my head to my groin. And then he said that a) I'm the picture of health, b) I am safe to continue to lead a normal, active lifestyle, complete with drinking and soccer (though not necessarily combined), and c) he wants me back for more tests. This information seemed to conflict with the items previous, but that's medicine for ya. Ultimately although it seems unlikely that I have any sort of a "condition," the doctor would like to rule out the possibility that my run of arrhythmia was an early symptom of an underlying heart problem that might cause trouble for me later in life. So, in two weeks I get to go back and run on a treadmill for 30 minutes (FUCK!!!!), have my heart ultrasounded again (cold gooey KY, here I come), and then I get to wear a monitoring device for 24 hours which I fully intend to set off like a fire alarm with frequent sexual activity. So there, health care.
I took a fall at soccer today that completely reset my clock. I went sprinting in to snag a ball from a player, my foot connected with his on the reach, and BOOM - I went flying, smacking the earth with every square inch of flesh and bone I possess. I was pretty messed up for the next five minutes. And in spite of this, I totally loved that fall. I think there is some unseen value in having your body pummelled and pounded every once in a while. I think those Fight Club guys were onto something. There's just no way around the fact that as much as it can hurt or fuck with your physionomy, feeling the grassy earth reach up to smack you with 210 pounds of equal and opposite force is pretty goddamn divine in its own weird way.
We had a beauty game overall, and I cinched it by scoring our third goal off a nice pass from Linc that required only a hint of finesse to bounce the shot off the keeper and into the net. My finger went up, Mark jumped on my back, Lisa shouted something about my unseen skills, and I'd taken my requisite single goal on the season. The fact that we're in dire straits about getting a full team together for summer has me rather bummed, actually. After six games, it only now feels like we're finally getting into the rhythm. I want another twenty weeks of soccer!
Today on moviesTO, a couple of film festival previews, a review of Banlieue 13, and an opportunity for me to wet my pants with happiness when I figured out what my next podcast is going to cover.
Last night I dreamed that I was press covering the extraction of a small boy from a large hole in front of the new opera house at University and Queen. That's an odd thing to dream, isn't it? Especially because I have no interest in opera houses, journalism, or small boys?
And this morning, I threw away my bootleg Star Wars DVDs. I am on board with the Lucasfilm disks, unlike (apparently) every other Star Wars fan on the planet. It's stunning to me that these people can spend the last three years whining, word-for-word, "Just port us the laserdisks!" and then go this apeshit when it actually happens. "[whiny voice] We wanted annamorrrrrrphicccccc!!" Honestly, the whole thing has me so fed up I'm ready to burn my membership card. Fucking wankers.
It's amazing how much an upcoming road trip focuses one. Not on the big-picture stuff but on all the little nitty crap you wanna get done before you leave. I have a nice fat to-do list for home and for work over the next 96 hours, and it all feels achievable. Or at least, very listed.
3QF hosted another one of our mentally and culturally destructive double features (1, 2) tonight. I dubbed the pairing Extreme Iron! Extreme Iron!! Extreme Iron!!!, and matched asian berserker horror anthology Three Extremes against flawless spiritual masterpiece 3-Iron. (It was our third such evening, natch.) The whole thing was originally concocted to celebrate the release of Extreme Steve, but we are big procrastinating assbarges so it ended up being an informal going-away for Rwanda-bound Dave. It was pretty extreme. Actually I quite enjoyed Three Extremes even though I sorta hated the last segment (which disappointed me to a surprising degree given that it was made by one of my least favourite directors of all time, Takashi Miike). The first two bits, though, one featuring fetus-laden dumplings and the other a dude tied to a wall by a gigantic rubber band, were more my speed. I thought I was all on board with the other audience members, but when the lights came up we discovered that rarely has anything screened at the 3QF generated such utter dissent. Of the five people present, every single one of us had a radically different opinion of the relative merits of the anthology, with almost no overlapping sentiment at all. It got pretty extreme in there for a while. But then, thankfully, we watched 3-Iron, and Dave and I got to grin at each other time and again. Oh, mirth.
Next up: Prospero's Books vs. The Muppet Christmas Carol. Or something like that.
I got up just after the crack of dawn (actually it was 8:30) and my father and I tried for the cottage... but it was a damned shitty day weather-wise. I got to visit my pile of wood, though, which is mulching nicely, and otherwise I sat inside and read Half-Blood Prince, which I enjoy more and more, even if the Hermione and Ron thing still makes me a bit sick to my stomach. Mmm incest. I did some writing and some organizing and some thinking to myself, or at least, enough of these to notice that I really oughta be doing more of all of the above. Oh: and there was a hammock, for 25 wind-blistery minutes.
On the way home from the cottage we got stopped by a very long train, and I spent quite a bit of time considering a nearby horse and his rather prominent horse penis. I have to say, in the exemplification of the sheer pendulous magnificence that is the swaying cock, horse penis is hard to beat. It really gives you every single thing you want from a large penis, even insofar as it is, in fact, connected to a horse. As if sensing my prying glare, the horse eventually galloped away. Then the train was out of the way and we were gone, too.
Jeez they're still going downstairs, even as I write this. Extreme?
I'm very tired. 
Yesterday was a stunningly complex day at work, the day prior had its share of emotional upheavals, and tonight proved that too much rum and ginger ale and cookies makes the inside of your mouth feel like chalk. Now it's 2:30 in the morning and I seem to have lost the ability to type. Why am I still typing? Stop typing. STOP TYPING
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Yeah that's right: whence.
Better late than Mamo, I always say. As the summer wears on, Matthew and I start wondering if 2006 is just the plain suckiest summer season ever, and whether or not Superman can truly return.
This was a fatter week for comics: five issues. The leading pickup was Powers #18 which was actually released last week, and which I left on the shelf, having determined that I am "giving up on Powers." Well, that lasted. That lasted a whole five days. My biggest to-be-missed going forward was going to be the letter column, because it's a freaking highlight of my month to read Bendis kick the shit out of each and every person who writes in to his book. The book itself, I thought, I could live without. Well fuck it. I bought it, I read it, I enjoyed it more than any other single issue of this title I've read since.... uh... well in a long damn time. So I guess I'm damned to enjoy Powers. Fine.
Then there's the Superman Returns "prequel" comic. Ooh, I thought. No. Give me a fucking break! It's just a retelling of the first ten minutes of Superman 1, in comic form! Pretty, though.
Dark Horse coughed out a despicable Star Wars: Legacy #0, and I bought it because I wanted a bit of Wars in my life. Fortunately this thing has cured me of that affliction. A 25 cent "primer" on the characters and technologies of the upcoming Legacy arc (set 140 years after Return of the Jedi, yeah yeah yeah), this non-issue was sort of amazing in the degree to which it made me hate a comic I haven't even read yet. I am so sick of Star Wars fanboys trying to be cool. Hot babe Siths and pirate Jedi and red-armoured Imperial guards and callbacks to the stupid Yuuzhan Vong crap and the surviving elements of Timothy Zahn's early-90s hodgepodge. What a fucking mess. Tired of it, I am. These fanboy idiots complain about the flicks, but this shit is sooooooo much worse.
New X-Men #27 was damn fun, though. After six or seven issues of buildup, we finally got the big drag-out fight at Xavier's between Stryker's religious asswipes and the titular New X-Men. Aside from one dreadful plot contrivance that the writers actually used as an excuse to have three pages of Sooraya out of her burqa (and wearing short-shorts and a sports bra, no less), the issue worked pretty damn well. There's a part of me that is testy with ol' Joss for leaving House of M and Civil War so completely out of Astonishing X-Men; that part of me enjoys watching the New X-Men jump through the Marvel canon's hoops with such seeming elasticity. Oh: and watching X-23 kill stuff is hot. Real hot.
Finally, just for the hell of it, I picked up X-Men: The End: Book Three: Men and X-Men #6. Mostly because of all the colons. And because if it's the final issue of Claremont's final word on the X-Men, so I suppose I'm owing. My reaction? Same as when I was reading the first few issues of this 18-issue run... I don't have one damn clue what is going on here. Not one damn clue. Apparently I missed Cyclops getting wasted because he's got a big cigarette hole through his chest at the beginning of the issue... but that doesn't matter, because he pops up again at the halfway point. The end of the book has stuff that feels like mid-80s fantasy filmmaking mysticism, and not the good kind. What? Who? That's another reason I like my AXM: small team, coherent characters. I can tell you where each and every one of them is right now, and I haven't read the most recent issue since it was on the stands. Hank's in the lab, Logan and Kitty and Peter are in the kitchen, Scott's drooling incoherently on his bed, and Ems is nowhere to be found. That's storytelling.
Evil space robot Stephen Harper is looking to amend Canada's age of consent from 14 to 16. In point of fact I don't consider this an evil space robot sort of move; I think it makes sense, because the whole 14-year-olds-with-78-year-olds thing was creepy. What makes the amendment under discussion particularly interesting, though, is the fact that there will be a secondary element of the law that makes it legal for 14 and 15-year-olds to consent to sexual activity to people up to five years older than themselves - the legal equivalent, essentially, of saying that teenagers can have sex with each other but not with grown-ups. As far as I know this is the first specific legal sanction of teen sex.
On the other hand, the queer community was quick to point out that the age of consent for anal sex remains 18 years old in Canada. Aside from all the homophobic riffraff around such a decision, which is clearly just made up of outdated disinformation, there's an element of body imperialism in the notion of granting people control over one orifice before another. Legally, a 14-year-old girl can make the decision to have her vagina penetrated, but must wait another four years before she is presumed cogent enough to make the same decision for her bum. Such blatantly obvious legal disconnects are self-defeating in their own absurdity, but nevertheless, I still tend to admire (in the way one admires a particularly clever villain) the long-standing ways in which society illuminates their profound discomfort with the anus as a site of pleasure, and penetration. The "dark continent" of the human body, the ass hole remains a site to be conquered, rather than colonized; subjugated at extreme threat, rather than socialized normally. Laws don't particularly interest me any more, but the way in which they reflect the human subconscious and its myriad symbolic reinterpretations of the more powerful parts of our selves will always be fascinating.
To preserve their business, the oil companies somehow regressed the public opinion of the global warming issue from "global warming is a fact" to "global warming is unproven." They created reasonable doubt around a killer who had been caught red-handed. Yay for the lawyers.
A couple of weeks ago Dave and Chris were watching some sort of hockey-related doo-dah when I got home. They had just ordered a bunch of Indian food. I went into the kitchen to make my dinner, and had only been at it for a minute or two when suddenly I heard Dave scream in pain. I came running out into the living room to discover that he had grabbed a spoon by the spoon itself (rather than by the handle), after it had been submerged in extremely hot sauce, causing him to burn his hand. And my response to this crisis? I said:
"You gotta ease into that shit, man!"
In the weeks since the incident, this has become known as The Least Helpful Advice Ever Given. It is, in point of fact, an entirely useless statement that in no way assists my injured friend in either solving the situation at hand, or preventing similar injuries in the future. It is a complete and utter non-sequiter, and should be grounds for my dismissal from the ranks of Those Empowered To Advise. Mum shall be my word. "Ease into that shit." What the hell was I thinking?
(Written on the Day of the Beast but posted one day later to confound Satan)
I finished The Way the Crow Flies, at great relief to myself and others. The only problem? The ending was sort of awesome. Actually it was sort of beyond awesome. In its own way it was In the Skin of a Lion good. This is very much a 3-act book, and act three sort of transcends literature straight into Pure Art. Damn.
Because otherwise, I wouldn't smite this book on my worst enemy. The first two acts are absolutely excruciating. Act one, which I have mentioned previously, is let's rape all the nine-year-old girls. Then act two makes with the more funny because it's let's convict the wrong guy of raping and killing the little girl. My new boss saw the book lying on my desk at work and screamed a little bit. She'd been through the excruciating awfulness too.
And then act three. Damn.
For some reason I had it in my head that this book was exactly 800 pages long, and thought therefore that I'd snag an extra-long lunch and finish it off then and there; naturally on page 792 I determined that it continued on for quite a ways. Stupid, my brain said to myself. Nothing ever ends on the hundred. They go on a bit longer, or come up a bit short, every single time.
How can my new password's Password Strength be Medium (condition: orange) on Hotmail, but Strong (condition: green) on Gmail?
Internet, you confuse me.
Hulk is a flick that improves dramatically every time I see it. Like, doesn't just get better, but gets significantly better on each repeat viewing. I've now seen it three times and each time I think it's jumped two or three ranks on my "best comic book movies of all time" list. Stupid Ang Lee and his creating a movie for the generations.
Last night Bex and I sat on the stoop outside Lyra's laundromat and discussed the various rites of spring and our futures as qualified sex therapists. She has seen neither Hulk nor King Kong. I think the two films together would make a spectacular double-bill about the unrestrained male id, but it would also take a really long time since they're both really long movies. Clearly Kong would kick Hulk's ass but Hulk is bright green. Toss-up.
Being in the first part a daily collection of miscellany, and in the second part a complete waste of your time:
I've sort of randomly processed the fact that Deadwood has been cancelled; it seems odd that a show has been cancelled before its season has even started. (Actually, does anyone even know when Season Three starts?) But anyways, they've announced today that there will be a 4-hour finale to be shot and shown to conclude the saga. So that's good I guess. But I'll miss me my Bullock and his swingin' brass testes.
Soccer was brutal last night. We got our asses solidly handed to us 9-0 by the same team we tied 2-2 against just three weeks ago. What a difference an Eliopoulos makes. I don't know what happened, man, we just couldn't put it together. Under the depressing circumstances, Chris and I can hardly be blamed for spending much of the second half of the abysmal game staring at the girl on the next field over, who was wearing a red tank top with an extremely accurate "10" emblazoned across her chest. She really was.
Here's a picture of me at the cottage last August in those days of madness and grief following the break-up:
I call the photo "You broke my heart; I broke this tree." On the whole I do highly recommend a week of back-breaking physical labour as a means to dealing with an unexpected loss. However, be prepared for the difficulty upon re-entry. Once you get back to the city, you may in fact notice that everything's as shitty as when you left.
And finally, c/o my darling Macelod and re Lost: "i went out and watched the entire first season over the span of 4 days and now i'm obessesed. i have Lost dreams when i sleep. ohh, last night i had a Lost/x-men cross over dream where it turned out Magneto controlled the island. it was pretty awesome." And I reply: best theory ever. And reiterate my earlier "ONE OF US! ONE OF US!"
The Heart & Stroke Ride on the DVP was today. Here's what it said in my day planner: HEART AND STROKE RIDE - BETTER BUY A BIKE
So that's what I did!
She's a DeVinci something or other. The name isn't anywhere near as fun to say as "Kona Nunu," but whaddayagonnado. She's small, and ugly, and built like a brick shit house. (Sort of like a girl I used to take out.) We're just getting to know one another. But already, very, very much my bike. It was weird. I was about five minutes into riding to my parents' house and already it felt like my bike. It's a bit like falling in love again, so it will take time, and the sex will initially be awkward and unsatisfying. But eventually, look out. We is goin' places.
Places I absolutely will not leave the new bike:
I bought everything that goes with a bike all at the same time, which was fun. I said "I need a bike. And everything else." So I got flaps and lights and a lock and a helmet and a water bottle and new gloves and a bell (no eyeball 
) and also a bike. It felt like a very full day.
Feeling much better. I knew the mocking-mopey voice would do it. So I came home and I recorded me podcast yet again, and yet again for a movie I haven't got 'round to reviewing in the real world. I am as the beaver.
Click here to download the mp3.
Yeah that's right. I'm not linking you directly to the mp3 any more, I'm sending you to blogTO. Because you really oughta be going there anyway. They've just launched the new design and I think it's pretty sweet. And mine was the first post after the launch. So... suck it white boy? I guess?
I musta got goddamn angry in the last 2 months. I went back to yoga today for the first time since Cardio Fantastico!, and it really took the mickey out of me. From my muscles to my kidneys to my heartstrings to my poor battered soul. They warned me back when this all started, that yoga could unlock moods or sadness or things kept buried inside on a normal day, and for me this has always been true. Weird to think of my muscles storing old pain, like some kind of cellular memory or those trapped gases in layers of permafrost, waiting to be cracked and loosened back into the air again. I have been in a steadily worsening mood since last night, and yoga tipped the scales. By 3:00 this afternoon I was ready to spit black blood. I slunk out of the house, only managing to cheer myself up by saying "I'm gonna go to the coffee shop and read my Spider-Man comic" in my very deepest mocking-mopey voice. The mocking-mopey voice is key. It is very important, when moping, to have the shorthand to signal to yourself that you know you're just being a silly ass, but to enjoy it anyway.
I got stood up for the movie last night by Mark (whose excuse was admittedly impeccable) and for yoga this morning by Bex (who goes numb in various places on her body at periodic times). Meh, these things happen, I shouldn't be taking out print ads for new best friends. Mostly I'm just tired of being one of fewer and fewer singles among a burgeoning field of doubles. I don't really fit in so well any more. I'm the spare, the optional extra, and everywhere I look there's love and marriage and big fat Buddha bellies on girls five years younger than me. And I am so not cut out for the dating. I skipped school that day, apparently. Straight A's on everything else, but I was five years behind my class on the first kiss, five years behind on losing my virignity and having a real relationship and going on blind dates and having that first inevitable time when you're really ready to go for it and you get stomped, not out of any single thing you did but because you just plain fell for the wrong girl. On this kind of time-delay, my twenties have just plum sucked. I'm not so much tired of not having, as tired of wanting. Tired of following this impossible need, of being an addled twentysomething in a thirtysomething world. It makes me feel old and stupid.
This has been giving people trouble for a long time, in varying degrees, no matter my various efforts at verbal remonstration. Since this site is pretty much the only mode of discourse that I know all the people in my life will actually pay attention to, here it is, once more for the record:
1, and thereby most importantly: My cell phone is for my convenience, not yours. As my convenience is almost never served by cellular calls, my cell phone is almost never in use.
2, most seriously! I have a day job. Between the hours of 9 and 5 on weekdays, I am required to have my cell phone turned on. I am also, however, to be found stationed at a desk for at least 96% of that time. The desk has a telephone on it. Therefore, my cell phone is almost never in use.
3, quite significantly: My weeknight hours are largely divided between transit and home time. When I am in transit, my cell phone is unavailable. When I am at home, my cell phone is unavailable.
4, also numerical: When I leave the house for non-work related social activity, I may or may not bring the cell phone, as determined by the dictates of my convenience (see #1, above). If you know that I am out of the house for non-work related social activity and also that I have brought my cell phone, this is an outstanding time to use the cellular device as a means of contact for relevant information, things along the lines of "We're in the lobby of the movie theatre, where are you?" or "We spent the night having intercourse and you just left my apartment but forgot your hat on my bedside!" or "The downtown core is under attack by ballistic missiles from Venus, you should really get home as quickly as you can." These efforts at cellular communication will prove fruitful and welcome.
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And here's the page on The Da Vinci Code.
5200 words!!
Some of the info on the vagina page is incorrect, by the way, which I'll explore further in a future post. And some of it isn't so much "incorrect" as just "troublingly misleading." Oh, if only every low-life brat reading The Da Vinci Code on the subway this week were reading The Story of V instead.
[Trying this again after a horrifically embarassing false-positive yesterday]
Mamo returns to the patio and the X-men return to the theatres, and only one among the above is considered "a good thing." But it's sorta neat, I gotta say, to be back outside at Timothy's talking about the exact same movie we talked about the first time we were outside at Timothy's. Life is a big harmonious blumpy. Er, I mean, circle.
Chris-bitch has a new Chris-blog. Check it. And update your bitchmarks accordingly.
The other day I dreamed that me and the Redheaded Snailer were arguing about whether Goblet of Fire was a good movie, only while we were doing it we were actually in the stands at Hogwarts watching Harry compete in the Third Task. So that lit a fire in my head to watch Goblet again... and it was the first time I've actually been able to enjoy it. Yeah, it's still the worst of the lot. And it has the stupidest ending of just about any movie in the history of the universe. And Disappointledore could not be more disappointledoring. But... meh, who cares. Harry's in it. Hermione kisses him on the soggy head at one point for no reason whatsoever. And the three kids take a walk in the woods with Hagrid singing "Hoggy Warty Hogwarts." It's almost enough.
Continuing on from part 1...
There are a number of words that describe what I was like as a filmmaker when I was still in my teens. "Driven" is a good one. "Cocky" is generally appropriate. "Ambitious," because absolutely no concept was shot down as beyond reach, and invention was the watchword. "Ecstatic" applies too, because there was a fundamental joy that went into every single cell in my body whenever I was out there, doing that thing that I loved. In the identity storms of the teen years, I hung onto filmmaking like a life raft. Mark was the funny one; I made movies.
There was a kind of critical mass going on in those years, which has never been replicated since, either in my own films or in the rapidly decaying empire called Infinitely Brown Productions. Never even close. From when we made Centipede in 1992 to around Thanksgiving in 1993 when I showed Secret of Net to Mark, the lot of us (me, Mark, Adam, sometimes James, sometimes others, sometimes in combination and sometimes on our own, but always with the same two beaten up video cameras) must have made about a dozen movies or more. What's more, watching that 18-month canon, the visible growth in finesse and accomplishment is exponential.
There was enormous creative value in the interconnectability of almost all of the work. It all came from one big universe, the Infinitely Brown World, so the potential for cross-pollination, cannibalization, and outright (creative) incest allowed for a density of expression, a shorthand both comedic and narrative, that gave opportunities that simply don't exist in stand-alone work. It felt like we were making something bigger than any one thing, and the resulting mass always felt bigger than the sum of its parts. Showing one flick to an audience would get a good response, but showing five in a row was like setting off a stick of dynamite: there was power there. It was our own little Epic of Gilgamesh, and it was all about the funny, and about getting a bit further each time - each film bigger, each joke sharper, each concept wider. "Can we make a 50-minute epic about the life and death of Stanley J. Keramidas that involves time travel, a nuclear weapon, and some general thoughts on puberty in boys, all in three weeks?" "Yes."
Like I said, invention was the watchword. How can we make a dolly without having a dolly? A gondola made out of Schindler wire and Construx, that's how. André has some furniture dollies - ask him to bring those. Build a boom arm with a 2x4 and make a little basket on the front, just don't drop the camera! Hang off the front of the boat, what's the worst thing that could happen? It was silly and fun and it felt powerful. At night I crammed my brain with umpteenth readings of how they made Duel, and what Jim Cameron was like on the set of True Lies. By day I'd marshall impromptu production meetings in between classes. In the evenings, I'd walk in Sherwood Park, listen to music, and figure out the next shot. Shot by shot by shot by shot.
Something else about high school - that old adage about being a big fish in a small pond. If you're the only filmmaker in a 1400-plus campus, it's pretty easy to define yourself by it, and call yourself hot shit. When you swim down the river into the big-ass ocean? Sort of a different story.
Mark reacted to my admission to the York film program as though it were the greatest achievement in manifest destiny since the Jackson democrats took Oregon. I wasn't so sure. It took a few years before my anxiety was really quantifiable in terms of language, but I eventually came to understand that for me, there was something both fascinating and repellent about being in a formal education program for something that I had always considered my natural, inborn language. That's hubris, of course, and perhaps not an attractive thing... but it lies at the crux of everything that these "Absent Storms" pieces are about. I might have been arrogant, stubborn, narrow-minded, and pompous... but I believed.
I believed so completely that a) I could do anything, and b) that I was supposed to do anything, that I existed in a self-appointed state of artistic synergy that saw me, among other things, writing the definitive encyclopedic tome of my high school experience in a 180-page screenplay called 3A6; animating my own teddy bears in a shameless and self-affirming love-off to the cinematic god-figure that started it all, Star Wars; and adapting my favourite Shakespearean play into a romantic swashbuckler starring me, myself, and Stanley J. Keramidas. I believed, man, because I had never been told not to.
I don't believe any more. At York, I fought a turf war for my own artistic self-esteem, over the course of four long, bloody years. There was no definitive battle, no single defeat; some fields were won, and some were yielded. But by the time I graduated, I had lost the war. And Absence was my coup de grâce.
