The end
Thanks.
Tederick.com: March 2009 Archives
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March 26, 2009
March 25, 2009
"Will anybody ever read what we write here, after today? I am sure our writing will persist in the World Wide Web, but will anybody ever read it again?"
Ending up in a kind of soundlessly
spinning ethereal void as we all must,
per Ebert.
March 24, 2009
The best films of the decade
I'm a bit early, and obviously, towards the end of the year, I'll have opportunity to amend. But I wanted to get this in while the gettin' was still good:
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - every generation has "that film," and Sunshine is one of those, a movie which blows open the bounds of what movies can do and what they can mean to the people who see them. An elaborately constructed, fiendishly mischievous, and frequently unnervingly heart-accurate tale of the utter existential chasm of love. No, it never works out. So?
2. There Will Be Blood - whatever else every other movie has been, There Will Be Blood is not. It is something I almost never see: distinct. It is a work of art entirely of itself, of its own meanings and ideals, and powerfully and profoundly so for the people of this decade (and that one). Paul Thomas Anderson didn't exactly suck before this movie; yet he is speaking with an entirely new and ferocious voice here.
3. The Lord of the Rings - cast aside any griping about overexcited fanboys and a legacy of sweaty cosplay; these would be among the most influential films ever made even if they weren't also kickass pieces of cinema. The fruition of digital technology in moviemaking, the apprehension of fantasy as a foundational genre of modern storytelling, the elevation of the pulp to the dramatically mythic, the culture within a culture created by the DVDs' worm's eye view of every second of their creation, even the you-pick-the-flavour alternate versions... All wrote the book on how filmed entertainment would work in the 21st century. Oh, and the movies are kickass.
4. Brokeback Mountain - somewhat dismissed (or at least underestimated) upon its titter-inducing release, the gay cowboy movie still sets the standard for finely observed American drama for a decade that turned out to be surprisingly chock-full of such offerings (especially in the last few years). Is it the 70s again? Now given unexpected colour by Heath Ledger's death, the final five minutes of this film are among the most mournful ever lensed.
5. Lake of Fire - the most important film ever made on any topic of the complexity of abortion, Lake of Fire suffers the ignominy of having been almost completely ignored. You might be able to find it at a video store near you, but otherwise the discussion has been virtually nil. Under the circumstances, I hope I am not being too much of a paranoiac by suggesting willing (or unwitting) conspiracy: America simply isn't ready to have its hateful, patriarchal heart carved out like this. Should be required viewing for every human.
Special jury prize: The Prestige, the best fucking movie that is not on this list.
The 50 best films of the decade are still TBD, but that'll get ya started.
"Guys... where are we?"
Lost, as a series, is the answer to the question Charlie asked at the end of the pilot episode. It is the answer both literally and figuratively: literally, because the series will in its 117 episodes serve to answer this dangling question of the nature of the new reality that the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 find themselves in; figuratively because the current - though not eventual - answer for all our characters is, more simply, "lost." And because of this, the true willpower behind the show is slowly becoming clear. Some of the initial mysteries of the series - the monster, the Others, the walking dead people - will likely be answered, and others likely will not, but either way, the slowly-assembling understanding of the series as a whole is also showing it to be astoundingly, and almost frighteningly, prescient science fiction for the America of this decade. Not the stomp-around-the-world-and-be-jerks America, mind; rather, the existential quagmire of the regular people just trying to get back to some sense of "home."
"Guys... where are we?" framed what could be called the "aggressive expansion" period of the Lost mythology. For about sixty episodes following the moment Charlie posed that question to his friends (and to the audience), enigmatic clues that both seemed to widen the poser and define its answer piled up on a nearly episode-by-episode basis. Smoke monster, walking Christian, Walt with the birds, whispers in the jungle, Others and Dharma, hatches and numbers, magnetic chambers and time travel, the "magic box" that can create anything, seeing the future and flashing to the past, a man who does not age walking out of the jungle to talk to a man in a wheelchair who can now stand on his own two feet, etc., etc., etc., all circulated into a kind of orgy of creative unburdening that - with The X Files firmly in mind - might well have been going nowhere.
Our gaze was forced, instead, upon the characters; endlessly, relentlessly, past the point of annoyance and almost to the point of giving up on the show altogether, while the mythology elements (seemingly) spun their wheels. Three long years of flashback after flashback after flashback - some with enormous twists and reveals at their center (Locke and that wheelchair, the Ballad of Rose and Bernard, and I am still quite fond of finding out the meaning of Jack's tattoos), others barely elevating above movie-of-the-week (anything involving Sawyer and a con; anything involving Hurley and anything). Here, though, was a kind of unseen point - not just, who are these people? What do they mean? But more importantly, are their lives before this (or after, in season 4) actually better than their lives now?
Charlie's question - "where are we?" - was tantalizingly extended in the third season, once all concerned were relatively certain that our heroes were not, in fact, stuck in Purgatory or some other godforsaken Miltonian or Manichean construct. Locke's father - whatever the fuck his name was - said to Sawyer, "If this isn't hell, friend, then where are we?" offering, without a moment of knowing it, an even more cogent statement of the series' mission than even Charlie had in season 1. By tacitly dismissing ("if this isn't hell") the inevitable American religious interpretation from the list of what-is-the-Island contenders, Seward/Sawyer/Cooper/Whateverthefuck likewise positioned the true question at the heart of not just the show, but the world: if we are neither in heaven nor heaven's dry run, what are our responsibilities to the now?
The positioning of the now - in and around flashbacks and flashforwards and flashpresents - makes it all the more plain that in Lost, Lindelof and Cuse (and to at least an initial extent, Abrams) have created the great pop mythology of this decade of American life. The series arrived in 2004 - at the end of the first term of the Bush administration, three years after 9/11; a cogent point in time where this decade could be said to have formally defined itself through issues of potential environmental catastrophe, brutally dangerous geo-political co-existence, and even the sort of shadow conspiracy mistrust of higher-ups that marked the 1990s great mythos, The X-Files. On Lost, American culture is world culture - the nods towards globalism in the principal cast (at first, two Koreans and, more importantly, an Iraqi) are still so America-centric that one need not even notice that there was, apparently, only a single Australian passenger on a flight from Sydney to Los Angeles. (Even she was just trying to get to the States.) Everyone is America-bound in Lost, but no one is there yet.
But this is no Purgatory, and just as surely, the forward action of the first several years of the show - Jack's rational, strong-willed efforts to do exactly what one would expect of a leader in such a situation, getting the castaways off the island - was shown to be a false god. Jack got off the island, all right, and just as quickly (to us, thanks to that now-glorious 3-year ellipse that takes place between the parallel narratives of the final episode of the third season, "Through the Looking Glass") realized he should never have left. It is an understanding that, it seems, will come upon all of the characters over the course of the series. For Rose and Bernard, or more importantly for John Locke, it arrives almost immediately; for Sawyer, it takes a day of capering with the boys in the Winnebago (or perhaps an excursion to 1977) to make him realize that he's exactly where he wants to be. The further the series goes along, the more plainly irrational the rational desire to leave the Island becomes: because even with smoke monsters and Jacob and Others and Dharma sharks, who wouldn't want to be there, on that island, in that palace of perfect Hi-Definition green? Who would want to leave?
And certainly not us, either; the pleasure principle of Lost has now abounded our relationship with the show and turned it over into pure cultural synthesis. I once categorized, and dismissed, Lost as little more than visceral, visual pornography in television form, pure pleasure with no soul; and while my view at that time was embarrassingly short-sighted, it also held an element of recategorized truth. The frenzy of the visible, or of visual pleasure, is Lost's onscreen metaphor for the deeper reality of the Island and its relationship to all the castaways. Observe the simple democratic variation between off-island sequences and on-island ones. Off the island, there is less colour, less camera movement, less vegetation, less intrigue. On the island, the entire world is a big bright day-glo Pandora's Box of awesome, exploding in every direction in frenzied, hyper-acute action cinema. I know which one I find more appealing.
Remember: are their lives before this, actually better than their lives now? If the castaways are all "lost," then by admissions such as the above, so are we. And so Lost both furnishes the escape - for the characters, the attempt to escape the Island; for us, the escape, Narnia-like, through a wardrobe and into a perfectly actualized otherspace that is as glorious a fantasy as we could ever hope to imagine - and the analysis of the fraudulence of that escape. Why is Jack clawing, scraping, grasping to breach the boundary wall - to break through that audible "woosh" - that separates the Island from the flashbacks/forwards/presents (where everything is so horribly ordinary and plain and concrete) when he could be here, at this moment, in the Paradise of the Now? Who would want to leave this place?
There are two moments of pure exaltation on the show, and both are bound in the simple pleasure of being in the place that you are, and enjoying what you have. The first is the "Wash Away" montage at the end of the third episode, and the second is the "Shambala" montage that closes "Tricia Tanaka is Dead." No threat of afterlife here - what peace can be found is found, as the precisely-chosen lyrics point out, on the road to Shambala.
If Charlie posed Lost's first question and Seward/Cooper/Locke's Daddy posed the second, I think someone, at some point, will pose some variation of that last line - "who would want to leave?" - as the third and final question; the grand, spiritual epiphany. I've spoken before about Desmond's "you have to lift it up." I think I'm beginning to know what that line means, for the Lostaways, and for the rest of us.
March 23, 2009
The King of Carrot Flowers, parts 2 and 3
Now bearing firmly in mind that this is no longer the case, a few years back, there was a period of six weeks or so where I could not do dishes without starting to cry. I enjoy doing dishes: I find it very therapeutic. Well, the problem with therapy is that sometimes it loosens the internal knots sufficiently to allow a bunch of crap to come pouring out. I just kept losing it, about half a minute or so into feeling that warm water pour over my hands, the sponge gently stroking the plates. Like clockwork: dishes = tears.
At around that time, I also had what could be called an anti-religious experience. Call it a pure visual hallucination brought about by a toxic overdose of bad brain chemicals, but I actually saw something - probably the very kind of something that causes zealots to run to Christ, only in my case, it was divine proof of the absolute absence of anything. A few years on, I've certainly accepted that there was no pragmatic reality to any of the understandings I came to on that particularly hallucinatory day. But fuck, it was scary. In fact I'd say only two products of my mind have frightened me that much in my entire life. They work in a kind of neat parallel:
1. When I was a young teenager I had a dream that I discovered a nuclear weapon in the basement of my parents' house, with a countdown timer in the 20-seconds-to-go range. I crouched behind the washing machine and prayed to God to give me another chance at life, and at that moment, I woke up.
In rational terms, I had a nightmare and I woke up from it. In metaphysical terms, God did what I asked. That particular dream remains the single most vividly terrifying experience of my entire life, and the lingering (though foolish) questions about the nature of reality which subsequently haunted me, still sorta haunt me. I try not to think about it.
2. The aforementioned hallucination at the tail end of the summer of 2005, which gets referred to coloquially around here as "the great eye."
The thing is, I don't have any particular desire or need to live in a world without God. I don't think anybody does. I think that's why God was invented: we have fragile psyches which are, in a vast number of cases, possibly structurally incapable of fully understanding a universe without a divine creator/protector figure who has some ability to gather us, parent-like, into His arms and protect us from the Big Bad Nothing. (Sure, Gmork, the relentless terror-wolf from The Neverending Story, was scary... one of the scariest. But that raging cloud of dark absence, The Nothing, and the promise of utter existential annihilation it brings? A bit more on the nose than most people might think on first blush.)
I have seen things in my life that make me want to believe that I am being pushed in certain directions by a benevolent force of some design, be it almighty or otherwise. I have seen other things in my life which enforce with affirming dispassion the utter meaninglessness of it all. I believe in human beings, and I believe in our ability to create and associate meaning. (Look at all the mythic meaning I've created out of, 1, a bad dream, and 2, a misfiring synapse.) The reason I ultimately have to foreground our internal realities before any expectation of external intelligence is the peculiar pickling effects of the things that live in my own brain. I am, as discussed prior, occasionally prone to rather sensational bouts of chronic depression. In these instances, rationality itself unhinges from the spinal column of my soul. I suddenly become very, very aware of how little is actually tied to anything by indestructible means in the meathook reality of our lives. It's not a comforting awareness, but it returns with unsettling regularity often enough.
Inevitably, it's a hard thing to lose any thing that you love, and stay all the way sane. Anyways, it all turned out all right. And that, somewhat abbreviated for time, is the story up to now.
March 22, 2009
Lo, for the Consumers Distributing
When I was a kid, there was a store like no other, and it was called Consumers Distributing.
Consumers Distributing was Amazon before the internet. It was either so sensationally ahead of its time that one wonders if Jack Stubb was in fact a visitor from the future, or so permanently wedged in the intransigent spaces between true marketing trends that it was essentially the Laserdisc of its day. Consumers Distributing was shop-at-home shopping, where you still had to actually go to a store. But what a store.
Once a year the heavy, industrious Consumers Distributing catalogue - like a roided up Ikea catalogue, with extra sass - would THUMP on the door step, and it'd be off to the races. Given my age at the time (well, given my age anytime ever), the races was toys. To the toy section of the catalogue I would flip, and like Eisenhower planning D-day, I would chart out the accumulation of plastic men into my forces. After all, going to a traditional toy shop is such a horribly risky affair for a lad - will they have Dusty? What if they only have one, and my best friend Geoff gets his hands on it first? Who wouldn't want the sensational security of those gloss-bound catalogue pages, and their promise of systematic, gentlemanly shopping assurance?
Of course, it was never quite like that, but the ideal was beautiful. Off to the C.D. you'd go, and belly up to one of the geodesic kiosks littering the showroom floor; the catalogue would match the one you had in your house (you would already have memorized the relevant page numbers, to accelerate the process); the golf pencils would scribe the 6-digit code on the tiny slip of paper, and the guy in the wicket would take your slip into the back, and out would come your toy. Sometimes.
Well, there was the plot hole, anyway. Perfect idea; unreliable execution. After all, if (with catalogue in hand), you had to call the Consumers Distributing beforehand to find out if your 6-digit code was actually in stock, and tangible reality instead of a dream on paper, what separated C.D. from the animal magnitude of the Hudson's Bay Company, or Toy City? Nothing, that's what, save for the rank anarchy of the toy aisles and the bloodshot look in Geoff's eye when he - and you - realized simultaneously that there was one Dusty left, and it would be a foot race to determine who got it first.
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A few times a year when I pass Sunnybrook mall, where the former Consumers is now a drug store (? - and don't get me started on what happened to Boots), I can't help but become nostalgic over the brief window of time where golf-pencil buying was the sport of kings, just like I occasionally miss the feel of a big CAV laserdisc in my hand as I laboriously flipped it over to get to the next 30 minutes of analog-cum-digital content. The times, they were a' changin', and the weirdest and most amazing shit was constantly happening.
March 21, 2009
The best films of the previous decade
While we're on the subject, here's a list that's ten years belated.
- Fight Club
- Schindler's List
- Pulp Fiction
- The Matrix
- Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
Special jury prize: Heat
The same river twice
I had my first kiss on this day, a long time ago. Lot of distance between those two points, then and here, can't quite get my head around all of it. Life sometimes knocks you back, with the quantity of change. Countries and space and bodies and time. Been thinking about endings a lot lately - not the bad endings, just the "yup, this is done" factor of tying up a thing, and moving on to the next thing. Everything in constant flow whether you notice it or not, good to sit once in a while and take note of how even if you feel like you're standing in the same place, everything around you is still moving. And then you're back in it, and on you go.
I'll try to finish up a few things here on the blog and maybe watch some television, and then we'll see what else can get done around here.
March 20, 2009
The moral melancholy of Mrs. Venton
When I was in grade 9, my English class was made up of 27 boys, 3 girls. Our teacher was Mrs. Venton, and as the urban legend goes, she later went insane. In the hindsight of adulthood I can tell that, generally speaking, she withstood the unending onslaught of pubescent testosterone (the strongest, and stinkiest, brand of testosterone) with relative stability over the course of the 10 months in which we hollered, hooted, and kicked desks clean over in her miserable, third-floor afternoon English class. And yet, there is a seductive quality to the notion of Mrs. Venton's eventual, rumoured nervous breakdown. Confronted with the baboon-like yowling and staunch academic dispassion of 27 male bodies fitting and starting to find their way to full adulthood, she lost her cool more than once ("ya stupid fools!") and after we were done with her, she was never heard from again. Except for the legend, which stands thus:
Shortly after we were done with her, Mrs. Venton came upon a loonie which had been accidentally sealed into the newly-made hallway floor of North Toronto C.I., and went insane trying to pick it up.
I am relatively sure this did not happen. When asking Mr. Waldron about it years later, he said this did not happen. But lordy, lord, what a story. What a clear, precise concept: a grade 9 English teacher, nearly obliterated by we horrible, monstrous boys, confronted with a single immovable object and completely doing her nut trying to move it. It may not be "true," but it'll be true till the day I die.
March 19, 2009
Further up and further in
Well it's a long goddamned story, but here I am fooling around with live Twitter feeds on Tederick.com now. Not sure if I'll keep it - for one thing it's as ugly as fuck, and for another... well honestly, what's the point? (The script I used is here. And the mod I did on the tederick.com landing page is much nicer.) And my thoughts on the entire subject of microblogging are complex and ambivalent. But hey, it's always nice to know you can learn new things, and after a truly strange evening and having now proven that really any blog post at least should have the decency to exceed 140 characters, I'm out.
Oh, but click over to my Twitter page. How pretty is that.
The Grapefruit of the Decade
I just had the Grapefruit of the Decade.
It's so nice to be in '09, and to be able to clearly see so many "of the decade" commendations.
I have half a cold right now. It's driving me crazy. I would like to either have a whole cold or no cold, thank you. I don't do well with wishy-washy cold commitment.
March 18, 2009
Countdown is a better Star Trek movie than Nemesis.
And it's not even a movie.
Honestly - if you're gonna do a post-Next Gen thriller about Romulan politics, brisk action, and cold blue vengeance, this is how to do it. And if Abrams' flick is literally half this good, it'll be the best Trek flick since '91 by a country mile. What's really odd about Countdown is how well it seems to fit: it doesn't ignore or undo the Next Gen movies in any way (except for bringing Data back from the dead); it fully absorbs their emotional temperature and extends it, as if to say "yeah, those stories sucked. But the world is still viable for storytelling." What I'm about to say could not possibly have been the writers' intent, but... it actually even eats away at the logic of rebooting the Trek franchise altogether. Why go back in time, when the stories in the existing continuity can be this good? Ever forward, as the guy who played Chang said in that Dragnet movie.
Well frick. I'm all kerfuzzled now.
On the other side of the nerd spectrum I finally got around to watching the second episode of Dollhouse, in advance of this week's ep which is reputed by all to actually be "the one that is good." Well it better be. The premise remains as baffling as last time (why do these clients need the dolls? why?), but I'll tell ya what the real missing link is here: this is the first Joss Whedon series (actually, possibly the first Joss Whedon anything) without a single bit of humour about its own idea. There are comic characters on the show and the occasional one-liner, but there is absolutely no self-importance-deflating self-reflexivity around the ridiculousness of the concept. I can buy vampire slayers and space cowboys, as long as they occasionally realize how lunatic their concept is. This crew? Boring as a trip to the dentist. At this point I feel a fascination coming on - I am downloading further episodes, even now - but for now it's the fascination of seeing how and what and frick is going on here, that something this lackluster made it to air.
Man. When television was good. Remember? X-Files and Buffy and Six Feet Under and E.R.? And now True Blood and Dollhouse and... E.R.? (OH MY GOD, THE REUNION EPISODE. OH MY GOD.) I'd take a warmed-over episode of Alias over this shit any day.
Urban camouflage #2
This is me. I mean, it isn't, but it is, you know?
The Vivarium of Dr. Tesseract
Dr. Tesseract enters the vivarium. We could imagine that he is Daniel Cockburn, had Daniel never given up cocaine (nor never not started it in the first place), and after 15 further years of apathetic days and earthshaking night terrors. The glass walls are alive with fish. Tangerine on steel on neon blue. Above, birds shriek and shit, fighting the bats for dominance of the pittance of rude mealworms which infest the root-filthy vivarium floor. A baboon leaps, unbidden, to Dr. Tesseract's shoulder. The baboon asks: "Where is the hypercube?"
A couple of martinis after work makes me feel like one of the Mad Men. Whatever those are. I've never watched that show. But if I did, I bet it would be like that. The martinis were celebratory: we are declaring an end to the rough days, the all-or-nothing days, and going forward into the new thing, glad to have survived Workplace Survivor. Monday night, getting home before sundown for the first time since the fall, I sat on the couch in the gloaming and thought about the world, and then my lady came over and we got dim sums and watched Let the Right One In on shiny blu, every gently falling snowflake a distinct entity. The ultimate quiet Monday night movie, and it felt pretty good after all the noisy Monday nights (and every other nights) of the recent past.
Dr. Tesseract frowns. We could imagine that he is Chris MacLean, were Chris confronted once again by aesthetic inequity and the disturbingly imprecise vaguaries of True Chaos. Memory and anger collide in Dr. Tesseract's forelobe, and he smells bacon; being a staunch vegan and living in a tube under the sea, he has no language to articulate what he smells, and begins to become unsettled. He stares into the baboon's ageless, midnight-black eyes. No words are needed. "Well, then," the baboon says, "we're fucked."
Today I am working from home, building up a strategy for the big project that will take me into the fall, contemplating burritos or comic books or any of the other things I normally contemplate. I've got a bit of a cold coming on, but I'm not too fussed about it. The heating system in my apartment is doing its best to keep up with the shifting weather, and I am the same. In March, I only need a few days of sunshine to go back to appreciating how nice the grey ones are. Today will be drizzly, and springtime music, and getting shit done.
Dr. Tesseract panics. We could imagine that he is Jeff Szpirglas, were Jeff limbless (and on fire). In gracelessly attempting to gain the console platform he instead launches himself brain-first into the power supply bay. Arcs of light dance and play; the bats advantage themselves in the momentary distraction and decimate their avian counterparts. In the center of the firestorm, body rigid with current and immobile in the certainty of death, Dr. Tesseract sees with the pure sight for the first time in his life, just before the vivarium walls crack and shard, admitting the Pacific. With the pure sight, Dr. Tesseract sees Life - and it is so unbelievably angry.
March 16, 2009
We're taking it out a whole new door
Mamo, the show about movies and popular culture, is now available at RowThree.com, along with our traditional exhibition venues of Blogspot, Facebook, and the iTunes music store. That's four times the Mamo for the same Mam-low price!
Check out Mamo #133, And the result was apathy, here, and enjoy the dawn of the Golden Age of Mamo.
The spring in my stride
Today I am trying something new at work: walking slower. (I think this falls under slow down, so literally it almost seems like cheating.) The last few weeks (heck, few months) of hyperactivity around here have lead to a lot of charging-about. Well, no more! Now, when I go to pee, I am going to walk in a measured, relaxed pace, concurrent with my devil-may-care attitude and undone top button. (Unless I really have to pee.)
This weekend did a rather tremendous job of recharing my batteries, mostly thanks to Sarafina and I's "stumble upon" approach to planning our days. Lack of structure: it's worth it! Especially when it's sunny and warm and wandering around is just "nice."
On Saturday night I saw an 8mm highlight reel of Star Wars, edited by someone who had probably never seen the film, and it was amazing. Here's how I described it to Jason:
"It starts just after Ben's death, when the gang is blasting their
way off the Death Star. They get off the station and then it cuts to
Ben telling Luke about his father, and handing over the lightsaber.
Then it cuts BACK to the Death Star, just when the gang is ARRIVING at
the hangar bay (before Ben gets killed). Then they watch Ben get killed
AGAIN, and blast their way out AGAIN. And then - you guessed it - the
reel cuts back to Ben's hut, for Ben and Luke to argue about whether or
not to go to Mos Eisley. Then back to the Death Star. It's like a Moebius loop where escape from the Death Star is impossible. I think I had that nightmare once."
On the weekend I also saw Phantom of the Paradise, which is where George Lucas stole the idea for Darth Vader. No really.
March 15, 2009
Fearful symmetry
I am 8 or 10 years old. A movie is on TV. In it, a man is hanging from the ceiling of a cathedral by his fingertips. The wire beneath the plaster surface of the cathedral ceiling is cutting into his skin. The ceiling, or his fingers, give way and the man falls to the stone floor far below.
What movie am I watching?
March 14, 2009
This doll of Christian Bale tears shit up like a motherfucker.
Too bad I don't buy these sorts of things any more otherwise I would find this mighty compelling.
Little detour
OK Edgar Wright: I am calling you out. We need to get to the bottom of this thing, you and me, because my girlfriend pointed out that if Scott Pilgrim is successful and sequels are warranted, you are gonna keep coming back to my goddamned city and throwing everyone in the place into an unalterable tizzy. And that is unacceptable. I live here. I do my best to make a living in these stressful economic times. And I can deal with the fact that half the people I know are falling over their own feet for a chance to meet you, and I can even deal with the fact that you're making Scott Pilgrim in the first place. But on my days off, I go to my local comic book shop and must now listen to the staff wax philosophic about how much they would like YOU to pop by. So since clearly and officially, this town officially ain't big enough for the both of us, and since I obviously have no means to support myself anywhere else, it's time to meet behind the gym at 3:30 and see what's what. You know what gym, so don't play coy.
Today's wardrobe choices were inspired by: 70s cop. Matty Price was right (he's rarely not), I really shoulda watched Life on Mars while I had the chance. I guess it'll come out on Blu-Ray eventually.
Tell them how it went, Steve. OK, let's do it! Well, on the whole I would say that the last 2 weeks went exceptionally well given their complexity. I think I could have done a bit better at the tail end of this one in terms of really bringing it all to a meaningful close. But a lot of good teamwork got done at the j-o-b; I literally have 12 pages of notes and items to take forward, but action item #1 is getting my work/life back into balance now that the rough period is on its way to done. 7.5 hour days - it is possible. Bill Gates told me so.
It also occurred to me this week that I tend to be self-deprecating and embarrassed when I'm asked what I do and have to answer that I build online training for [insert and rotate company name here]. I presume that's not the optimal state, especially given that on a theoretical level at least, I am quite stimulated by what I do. It's just so far-afield of where most of my contemporaries landed; I feel like I'm Life on Mars, fuck the TV show. Mars is a ring of towers just east of the Scarborough Town Centre, a canopic ecosystem of jealousies and betrayals and lines in the sand. And yet occasionally, I actually get to tell a room full of people that our next project is gonna be named after the Egyptian frog goddess of fertility and resurrection, and explain why. It's not without appeal.
Last night was pizza and Eternal Sunshine and couch-bed; today was supposed to be spent getting my life in order. Instead, through the miracles of scope creep, Little Detour and I mostly just spent the day wandering about, enjoying the burgeoning springtime. So in other words, best day ever.
New band name: Kra-BOMB!-let.
March 13, 2009
Streetcar picnic
And we're out. I'd like to thank everyone for playing! We'll be back next week for more fun and excitement.
March 11, 2009
Reign of fire
Well, this is it - I woke up this morning sometime after five, and in the utter darkness, I had no idea where I was, who I was with, what day it was, what I had to do on that day, or whether I had to do anything at all. For about 30 long seconds, I was a newborn. And then I reassembled my life like Lego bricks.
2 to go.
March 10, 2009
Comic books and porno
Headache, maybe because it’s so grey today. Is my head “me gulliver?” Anyone know what a gulliver is? Clockworks reading this? Well I’ve got a pain in it, whatever it is.
In times of heightened work activity, I rescind the no-scone rule, and read comic books on my commute, because they are easily digestible (like stomach lining). Quick, tactile pleasure-experiences are more approachable psychologically than long-term storytelling or higher-brain analysis. I get up in the morning or get home at night, and Porno Guy is still watching porno… how did we never notice this? This much porno, this much of the time? though now he has drawn his blinds; they block about 45% of the porno, which still puts a generous 55% porno out into the world. Like a beacon for smutty superheroes, called forth by video images of penises on a screen large enough to make them the size of rotweilers. To the pornomobile! What do porno-superheroes fight – chastity? Or even worse depravity? I guess they could do both. They hold the middle ground.
The headline of today’s Metro (Toronto’s free transit rag) is simply “Math questioned.” I suppose the idea that the entire concept of mathematics was brought into doubt is amusing enough, but I rather prefer the notion that someone did away with Geography, and Math was brought into the station house for interrogation under the hot lights. But they let Math go (there was no motive). Math’s reputation is not what it once was but until Math does it again, Math goes free. This is justice?
Let the right one in… to your home! Last year’s vampire classic (last year’s only vampire classic) comes out on shiny blu today. Own it before that Cloverfield guy remakes it. Me, I’m gonna snap it up after drinks & apps with the work folk at Kelsey’s (yes Kelsey’s), and then go home and watch Yet More Lost, which is the other only thing my brain can handle in times like these.
March 9, 2009
Don't put your face somewhere your shirt can't smell
Down six of ten, and got that all-over tired, partly thanks to spending the morning slinging boxes and partly thanks to a rather productive afternoon. Came home, lay on the couch, fell asleep. Perfect. Then it was laptops, and Spaced, and Sarafina and I ordered Swiss Chalet using a $50 gift card I've kept in my back pocket for just such an "I have absolutely no desire to leave this house" occasion.
Now it's couch and writing and this feeling just right, and trying to trick my brain into going with the daylight savings, cuz there's 2 days of training tomorrow and Wednesday, and early gettings-up. But I'm about ready to call it the best night ever, so I'm not too fussed either way.
"You know, I think we'll all be a lot better off when [Edgar Wright] goes back to England." - me
I hate Feist
Like poisoned ashes in my ear stupid daylight savings grumble grumble give me my goddamned coffee.
The Benedict Chronicles: Flo's (Italian Meat-Lovers Benedict)
"...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..."
Flo's Diner in Yorkville had an Italian Meat-Lovers Benedict on the specials menu last Saturday. Since I am both Italian and a meat-lover (and no, those things are not mutually exclusive, homophobes!), I thought this right up my alley. It is a nice idea, and lord knows I never tire of Italian sausage (aaaaaaannd we're firing a gay joke per sentence now; this review will go well). So, in spite of what I would call the high end of pricing for an eggs benedict ($11.95), I went for it.
What was missing here was - wait for it - balls. You know what? If you're gonna go to the trouble of pairing delicious, spicy Italian sausage with a traditional eggs benedict, go all the way. Thin-slice the sausage and put it under the egg; revel in the collision of tongue-simmering spice with the fullsome flavour of pork. But no, the Flo's concoction puts two strips of sausage alongside the benny, and is otherwise an utterly standard benedict (albeit with crispy bacon in place of the usual peameal). The result is a moderate underwhelm on the potential of the piece: much more was possible here.
Tell them how it tastes, Steve! OK, let's do it! This benedict was not badly prepared, and in warmer economic climes I would probably be inclined to grant it a healthy three eggs even at the price. The poached egg was right in the batter's box of gooey goodness, and the hollandaise was lovely. But the unimaginativeness of the overall conception, coupled with what can rightfully be called a shameful scarcity of hash browns, makes $12 a joke for this benny, and knocks an egg off this meal's score. Two eggs out of four!
Flo's diner is located at 70 Yorkville Avenue, in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.
March 8, 2009
The fear
Sitting around in the apartment, doing contract work, whittling down what precious little weekend I have been afforded in between my two mega-work-weeks.
Here's what happened last night, and it still confuses and upsets me: at 4 in the morning (new time), I was woken by what I took to be gunshots. I then heard someone engaged in a heated argument. I don't think they were actually gunshots, but they were fucking loud, whatever they were; when they repeated 15 minutes later (four or five quick BANGS! in a row), the entire building seemed to shake. I think someone was breaking through a wall with a sledge hammer. (That's not a joke. That's actually what I think.)
Anyway, here's the confusing and upsetting part: I didn't do a goddamned thing. I was so panic-stricken by my upon-waking assessment of either gunplay and/or murder, that I literally sat in my bed and shivered, convinced that someone was going to try to break into my apartment with whatever the hell they were hitting the walls with. Whatever was going on (I think it was happening in the apartment directly below mine), it continued sporadically until about six in the morning and then it stopped. My fight-or-flight instinct stayed on "flight" i.e. "stay the fuck away from anything to do with this" until about ten a.m. today.
Normally, potential gunshots + angry shouting = call the fucking police, moron, doesn't it? I'm pretty disappointed in myself.
Having now completed the first five extremely enjoyable days of Sarafinapalooza 2009, I am padding about the homestead trying to get through significantly more webworks than I had banked on when receiving the assignment a week ago. The ground remains gritty underfoot. I think one of the principal reasons I identify with the cast of Lost so much is that I, too, live on a beach. Perhaps when Seasons 1 and 2 come out on blu-ray I will import a small sandbox and play in it. I could make a smoke monster out of old socks, and an Egyptian statue out of Zam.
Six hours later, and I'm done.
Watchmen
We are told Zack Snyder is a "visionary director," but what has he envisioned? I have no doubt that Snyder understands Watchmen-the-book, better than many people, perhaps. What he seems to lack, however, is any idea of why Watchmen would be great as a film.
March 7, 2009
Isis and Osiris
Well, having had more than my fair share of experience with the Egyptians, I feel rather like I should have been able to figure that one out on my own. I'm a dumb.
Way to call out Guyliner's eyeliner, Sawyer LaFleur!
The baby's clearly Jacob-related, so... which Shephard is it? Is it Ray?
March 6, 2009
Your father was captain of a starship for twelve minutes...
Sorry for the geekgasm, but there ain't no way around it, this thing gives me chills.
I would love it if that music were actually Giacchino's, but sources say it is not. Still if the flavour of the actual flick is anything like that, I can finally see why anyone and everyone who's seen the thing went hogslop-crazy all over themselves.
March 5, 2009
Nah nah nah
I have today off. So naturally, I am spending it scratching my ass with thoughts such as:
Did you know that on May 28th of last year at around noon, I turned a billion seconds old? And I didn't even do anything. Frig.
A billion is a big number. Think about that the next time Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End makes a billion dollars. The next time I have a billion-second-aversary to celebrate, I will be in my mid-sixties.
Did you know an asteroid nearly obliterated the earth last week? It's stuff like this that really gets up my skirt. WHERE ARE THE LASERS. The company I work for is in the process of building a new cross-country high speed network; perhaps they could install lasers on all the towers to prepare for the next asteroidal near-hit. That way if a big rock was coming at Canada, Stephen Harper (or someone intelligent) could hit the big red button marked "lasers" and KZZPOW! she gone.
We have a black president now. It's time we stepped up our concern level re: planetary obliteration by asteroids.
Whether it's giant 'roids, Skynet, or good old fashioned locusts there's something appealing about wiping the slate clean with a solid global disaster. I call it "the lure of the post-apocalypse." Admit it: you want to live in a desert world fighting for gasoline, or a water world fighting for cigarettes, or the emotional dystopia of Margaret Atwood's A Hamdmaid's Tale (if you got to buck the system and live). Economy? Fuck economy! Fuck money! Time was, a captain's job was simple: a ship could help you find work, a gun could help you keep it.
Why isn't the prologue segment from Firefly on any of the DVDs? It was nice.
And: is yesterday's commenting incident further related to the possibility that there are two Daniels, weaving in and out of this and an alternate universe, and that once again, one of them does not know which universe he is in?
Well anyways. Nice talking with you.
March 4, 2009
No line on the horizon
BLUE GUY IS STANDING 10 FEET AWAY FROM MY CUBICLE. This could be it, internet!
He's leaving... what do I...
FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BOLD!!
....okay I'm back. I'm okay. I followed him downstairs but then he just hung around talking to some woman for like ten minutes. I think he knew I was catbirding him, too. Blue Guy has eyes on the back of his blue head.
Frick. To be continued, internet.
Now lookit: there are more than enough ways for people to get instantaneously in touch with me. MORE THAN ENOUGH. If I get one more BlackBerry Messenger add request, I am going to throw spitballs at a person. Email to both my work and personal account, plus SMS, Facebook, and voice, all come to my BlackBerry. Adding a sixth contact mechanism through the same single device strains credulity. I am available. Enough already.
I must now regretfully declare the U2 of the 21st century a shitty band, which is a sadness to me, because even when they were shitty in the 90s, they were still kind of awesome. No Line on the Horizon = third boring CD in a boring row.
The day the whole world went away
Yep… that went well.
This morning I saw an ambulance with “emergency” written on the hood in the usual mirror-writing, except that the writing was also upside-down, because apparently in whoever painted it’s version of the world, Objects In Mirror Are More Inverted Than They Appear. What a fucking terrifying vision of hell that would be, if every time you looked in the rear-view the road was flipped skyward, but everything in front of you was normal? I’m nauseous just thinking about it.
Are you like me: do you just not care a whit any more about Watchmen, at all? I don’t see how anything that might be on that screen on Friday would be worth this quantity of noise. They offered me some of the character posters at the Snail last week, free, and I turned them down. If there was a way I could download the experience of seeing the flick into my brain without actually having to take the time and trouble to go to the theatre and do it, I would. Stupid event movies. Stupid everything-that-isn’t-Terminator-fucking-Four right now.
Today is the first day in about a month that there are actual half-hour cracks in my meeting schedule. Who knows what I will do with this new, strange freedom?
It is also the first day upon which, in a variety of matters and in no way related to the actual temperature outside, I can feel the springtime coming, with all of the things that come with it. And baby, you ain’t kiddin’.
March 3, 2009
Torque
Now officially getting high off the sheer speed of the thing, I am down day 2 of 10 exceptionally complex, hundred-task days, after which I intend to sleep deeply, and perhaps go for a nice long walk. It's quiet in the office after hours, and I am beginning to think I like it.
"Behold, one pissed as all fuck John Connor." - Harry Knowles
"Two winners and a loser is what we have. And that's unacceptable." - Me
"I'm Switzerland." - Co-worker #1
"What does that make me?" - Me
"You're Iceland." - Co-worker #2
"Great. So I'm not involved, but my economy is falling apart." - Me
BLUE GUY - caught on camera!
Christian Bale tears shit up like a motherfucker
and you're just lucky you get to watch.
Now: what don't you fucking understand? (Or, can you hear the zeitgeist bubbling?)
March 2, 2009
The word of the day is:
"Backhaul." Repeat: "Backhaul."
You have to lift it up (2)
Spent most of yesterday afternoon doing some goal setting - I now have an actual notebook starting with plans, goals, strategies, and a KKGI matrix, along with a second hardbound Napalm Journal in which to collect bits about Captain Napalm. Had dinner with my lady and talked out some of my thoughts. I feel better. I had a lengthy and surprisingly enjoyable dream about babies and moviegoing, which we will presume to be a good sign.
I had an hour to kill last night between events and yes, I watched bits of Pirates of the Caribbean and blissed out. Haven't done that in a dang long time. Remember when I fell in love? I'm a lucky feller.
Arrived at work today after a nice morning walk and a coffee, to a yet more vasty avalanche of shit, and am putting into place my overall unstated mantra to not get so sad about it. Things will be as they are; the flux is elsewise.
March 1, 2009
You have to lift it up
It's possible I'm going to have a heart attack. Like, soon. Can’t count the number of days of this hollow, malfunctioning feeling in my chest. If you're checking the blog over the next and there's a sudden cessation of new postings, it's probably because they didn't get me to the hospital on time. (Or maybe I won the lottery! Fuck all y'all!)
STRESS.
Things at work got bad. Really, really bad. They will get worse. This I know. In the home life, I am directionless and utterly without point. There's this movie I've wanted to make for (and now with the literally) ten years and I frequently do not make it.
This is, I presume, how one's life becomes one's life.
For a big watershed year where a lot of things would change and get decided, so far, I hate the living shit out of 2009. And where's my hoverboard, Zemeckis? I am getting mightily tired of waiting.
Somehow, things got to a very bad pitch here. The economic (and forthcoming environmental) recession is a poorly-transparent metaphor for the recession in life. I need a stimulus package of the soul.
Losturbation
This week's episode had a nice "tying up loose ends" feel to it as we get near the end of the show. Walt? DONE. Helen? DONE. Matthew coolest-name-ever-in-the-ever Abaddon? BEN DONE BLOWED HIM AWAY!
It didn't take a giant leap of creative logic to presume that Locke would be reanimated when he arrived back at the island, but it was nice to see nonetheless; we're finally at the point in the series where enough direction has been provided to be able to make the big guesses on how things connect. So, since it's Sunday morning and my tea has yet to steep, let's conduct a big fat Lost theorizemo....
Jack is Jacob, and Jacob is Jack. Been pushing this for a while and still strongly believe it: Jack's destiny is to ascend to a higher level of consciousness (he is, after all, the show's "ultimate" hero) and become more than human.
For the romantics out there, this (of course) means Kate will not "end up" with Jack (he is going to move to his higher purpose); it's been relatively obvious for a while that she simply is not in love with him, and is in love with Sawyer, and Jack is going to have to reconcile this (because he is still so very much in love with Kate). Kate and Sawyer will be together before series' end.
I believe that the show will have a "happy ending," i.e. the characters we care about will have their destinies properly fulfilled and not end up at the bottom of the Dharma mass grave with Ben cackling over them. This happy ending might be somewhat ambiguous in Jack's case - he is heading for a self-destroying, civilization-saving ascendence to a higher plane of consciousness, after all - but for the "regular humans," a happy ending is in store, one in which their base character needs and fulfillments will be answered.
For the ending to be happy in the eyes of the audience, Jin and Sun must end up together, healthy and happy. They're not alone: Rose and Bernard must also be together and happy. Since these two couples would probably differ on where they would need to be in order to be happy - Jin and Sun back in the real world with their baby, Rose and Bernard on the island with the total lack of cancer - it would seem that the series will end with characters either staying on the island or leaving it as per their own choice.
The island was always displaced in time. I don't know what changed when a) Desmond turned the key and b) Ben spun the wheel, but it seems more like the mechanism of being unstuck in time became altered or defective, rather than an initial unsticking itself taking place. There is a timeline on the island that roughly corresponds to the timeline of the real world, but time on the island (as in Narnia) moves differently - at varying rates of speed, for example - than in the real world.
The time mechanism will be engaged to resurrect various characters. I believe the Eloise Hawking "nothing can be changed" theory, itself, is going to be thrown down in the climax of this show. I can't believe for a second that any American television program is going to be about "you can't change what's going to happen to you." This is antithetical to the entire American way of life, so I think Daniel & co. - possibly by the end of their current 70s Dharmawalk - are going to figure out a way to actually change history. "Unstuck" individuals, like Desmond (and Keamy?), who are not subject to "the rules," might be key to doing this. The island is not finished with Desmond, after all.
In terms of the audience's satisfaction, I suspect Charlie is the strongest contender for resurrection, and I would not be surprised to see Alex, Claire, Ana Lucia, Charlotte, and Boone and Shannon. Eko will not be resurrected because he has already returned to a perfect, childlike state via his apotheosis in confronting the Smoke Monster.
The true identity of the Others, and of Richard Alpert, and their relationship to the Smoke Monster and the four-toed god, are the last remaining "big rocks" of the Lost mystery. The series has done an exceptional job of keeping this arc brewing for nearly five years without tangibly demonstrating many possible avenues of answer.
In the first episode of the second season, which I continue to think one of the most significant (if not the most significant) episodes of the entire series, Desmond meets Jack for the first time (?) and tells him, "you have to lift it up." I believe we are going to find out what that means.