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.

Posted by tederick at 11:17 PM in dreams & jedi antics & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by tederick at 6:55 PM in poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by tederick at 7:59 AM in j-o-b & poetical & shinybludisks
Permalink | Comments (2)

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

Posted by tederick at 10:18 PM in j-o-b & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I would just rather be at home watching Transformers, is all. Movie, television show, whatever; I could take Megatron out of the nerd case and play with him, too. It's all good as long as it transforms; as long as it ain't here, doing this. Some days - and these days usually occur in summer - your head is just elsewhere. Permanently, systematically sitting in the lawn chair of the mind, with sunglasses on and eyes closed. Trouble being, these days are coming faster and more furious than ever. You can only sit through so many PowerPoint decks where you're told that the new BlackBerry is targeted at consumers as well as business clients - hint for the non-indoctrinated, they all are - before you realize that you're bored outta your fuckin' mind.

So, me and Allison Reid lit out of Dodge, hit the 'Bizzle for an hour and considered the situation, and the situation considered us right back. It seems that you don't ever really reach a "turning point" per se, but rather make a series of intelligent decisions that slowly and inexorably trend you towards the place where you are now, good or bad (or utterly without bias). Then you wake up and you're 32 and HOLY SHIT, YOU'RE 32 and you're here, not there, and nobody ever even asked your opinion.

The other day I was on Demetre's set again - photographs forthcoming, though I feel this weekend's shooting did not lend the spectacular visual gravitas of last weekend's shooting - and I spent the morning as a deep-background extra in a funeral scene, talking to myself, and the afternoon as a P.A./set runner/man about town, Millennium Falconing a TTC bus and sort of trying not to get killed. These things are line with how I usually spend my Sundays. At around 4:30 I was in the parking lot of the Loblaws at Christie and Dupont, trying to start a car that would not start, and faced with about a 30 minute walk back to Demetre's place and the pizza that I had personally ordered but not yet had a chance to sample, and it sort of reminded me of an adventure, or at least a good time. The sun was going down. The movie got done, and now I'm surprisingly hungry to be on to the next thing, if and when and whatever that is.

Posted by tederick at 1:12 PM in j-o-b & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

Laserdisc is eulogized here. Funnily enough, I read that line in the last paragraph as "I'll always associate you with evenings of passionate love-making," and my brain didn't even flag it; of course laserdisc and great sex were related. I have no idea how: I was ten. But then, I didn't understand the sex in A View to a Kill, either. I just knew that it was important. When I was a fledgling(er) cinephile, I heard rumour of things like the Blade Runner director's cut or the three-disk Frighteners special edition; I had no means to ever see or encounter them, but I knew they were important, too. Porting all that shit to a DVD seems cheaper somehow. Laserdiscs are buried in the collective unconscious.

For Christmas I got Acme Novelty Library #19 from my mom; that is an utterly outstanding piece of art. The entirety of it can be read in a single day, and yet it wrecked me six or seven times. I want to read it all over again right now, and maybe make a movie of it, and maybe read it to my kids. Big, sad, and scary. How do people do that? Fuck, he marveled.

I owe about four emails back, though in the wake of last week's computer failure I am even more solidly committed to letting email go, altogether. People keep pinging me on BlackBerry messenger; I'm more certain than ever that there are more than enough ways to become instantly in contact with me, thank you, and the world needs no more. Solitude, clear-mindedness, the ability to think for eight seconds. These are the commodities now, though we're selling everything else instead.

Winter, man: it works its ass off to getcha. Something as simple as forgetting my security pass came close to unseating my entire day. Mindfulness, though; concentration; and don't let the door catch you on the way out.

Posted by tederick at 8:21 PM in comix & movies & poetical & shinydisks
Permalink | Comments (0)

Driving the sisters DiFelice home to Brantford in the midst of the third blizzard in a few days here in Toronto, on the way back I found myself on a long stretch of highway with no discernible edges, lane markings, or other cars. Like an endless hockey rink and I was the last man on earth. Quite a thing to see - and it lasted a while.

Going to bed now.

Posted by tederick at 1:30 AM in poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

This has been a rough week. Not bad, not good, just rough - crises and explosions and affirmations and kinship. Pulling closer. 2009 is going to be a big year, and lines are starting to form now which tell me a bit about what's going to be up for decision, and when, and by who. And even if the calendars don't roll over until Jan 1, it feels like '09 started sometime in the past few days. I wrote in my journal: "Really? This is my life?"

Posted by tederick at 1:48 PM in dr. jones & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, it's that time of year again, the time I become desperately nostalgic for the days of making movies when I was a teenager, back when making movies was a) fun and b) something I did. Y'know, Mark and Adam and Ryan and Caitlin and I made the third stab at Four Royal Flushes ten damn years ago this weekend. Ruttin' Thanksgiving... makes me all shivery. I often miss making movies, but more even than that, I miss making movies as a teenager, which is an entirely different order of experience for me and much more precious. Time to dig a few things out of storage and see if I can't actually make lasting digital copies of the fucking things this time around, in lieu of anything else...

Y'know, for a long time I blamed York for quashing whatever arrogant glee I used to have around spending my weekends shooting flicks in the back yard with Mark, but I think York really just existed around a life change, rather than causing one. At some point, everyone abandons grace for knowledge. And knowledge is a real kick in the pants in terms of that joyous, spontaneous expurgation of self into creativity. Not to lean too heavily on someone else's metaphor, but I used to be able to find my way down ladders in the dark. Now I have to think my way through every single step. But, taken another way, the things I get to do now are endlessly more interesting and enriching than the dumb shit I did back then. I miss the process a lot more than the outcome.

Saying of which, I finished Once Upon a Time in the North, and wanted to do very little once it was done besides sit on the train and look out the window. So I would say any book capable of doing that is a book worth reading, even if it was slight. Some things happened today and over the weekend which made me realize (as though it needed realizing) that I am quite good where I am, right now. Not that I crave stagnation or expect no change, simply that this is a good place, or better yet a good process, and I am goiing to continue on with it and see what does come next.

Posted by tederick at 3:23 PM in books & poetical & tederick films
Permalink | Comments (0)

On Friday, before the wedding, I was downtown anyway dropping off the rock star's dress, and I had about an hour to kill before I had to get dressed, so I went for a burrito - I am all about the halibut lately, belated obsession though that be. I hit the Snail en route, as is my custom, although nothing I read shipped this week so my pull bin was empty. But there it was as I came through the door: the Gargan action figure. Which here matters because, as mentioned previously, she is the last one.

It's actually been thirteen years, give or take. Thirteen years back I got off the Steeles bus outside my grandmother's condo, took a walk across the street (it was snowing), and into Toys R Us, because I'd heard that Hasbro had re-established the Star Wars action figure line - they were calling it "Power of the Force 2," the sequel/continuation to the line's failed attempt at continuing past Return of the Jedi, circa 1984. And... hey, what else am I about if I'm not about about that? So they had a few of the new figures there, including this Ben with a really long lightsabre, and they all looked goddamn weird and awkward but I bought the Ben anyway because he generally looked the most like a human and, c'mon, it's Ben. Then Light & Magic happened and I bought a few more, and then at some point in 1996 I was standing in that same TRU with Adam holding a Jawa 2-pack in my hand, and Adam said something along the lines of "I'll take one, you take one, we'll split it" - yes, these are two 20somethings here - and as far as I'm concerned, the deal was done. Something kicked off in both of us (though he turned back far sooner than I), and the avalanche began which, a baker's dozen years later, lead to something in the neighbourhood of six hundred of the things as a final tally - although right at this moment, over half of them are gone again. Still... six hundred. Droids and jawas and Jedi and pregno-Padme; Jabba aliens by the fucking bucketfull, so many that I even started making my own; and Lukes and Chewies and Slave Leias and Bens beyond measure; and insignificant characters, lord man howdy, how I loved the insignificant characters. Sio Bibble and this guy and Aunt frickin' Beru with her blue milk.

And this stated a bunch of other things too, what with Sideshow and Simpsons and really expensive pirates and I even have a vintage Toht, and one on card too, yeah. But the best of all of it was always and ever shall be Darth Vader with Removable Helmet, which they've re-made a dozen times since but never come close to making as cool as they did on the first try, the tiny piece of plastic in which a shred of my 10-year-old soul permanently resides. And that was in... 1997? Early '98? When the best year of your hobby is ten years back, it's time to look for an exit. Gargan seemed like a good fit - they tried to make her back in '85, but as I recall the prototype got shitcanned because she has so many boobies. Six of them! No self-respecting toy line should ever have a six-titted prostitute as part of its character line, one presumed, at least until whatever phenomenal conversion shift I myself was a part of in the late 1990s, when toys stopped being made for kids and started being made for me. They made Gargan, the Fat Dancer, and I'm out.

(If they ever make Bea Arthur, I'll come back.)

And with all that done, I came home with my action figure firmly in hand and, upon entering, found one of my Jack Sparrow dreadlocks lying on the floor in the doorway to my room. Thinking at first that Zam had - as is her way - destroyed something I cared about, I became riled, and then I had a look at the wig. And, in what can only be described as a rather perfect little Pirates of the Caribbean moment, I turned the thing over in my hand to find the back of it eaten out by grubs. Some unholy combination of the heat, the humidity, the age, or just the primordial fucking filth we now live in at 3QF, conspired to turn my custom-made Jack Sparrow pirate wig into a couple months' worth of food for a colony of mealworms. And as the thing literally decayed in my hands while I stared at - the sheer action of bringing it down off the shelf upon which it has sat since my rather lovely Hallowe'en, was enough to tear apart the few remaining strands maintaining the wig's shape - it ceased to be a thing, and became a former thing, nothing more than a cluster of digital photographs, really warm memories, and at least one Jack Sparrow bolt-in-terror moment when that damn Obeah woman asked for my number.

Here's the thing: I hang on to things. Tangible relics of stuff that otherwise live only in my head, or in my eyes, or on movie screens across the nation, literally clutter the very ground I walk on. My grandmother used to have a glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary next to her bed; I have a glow-in-the-dark King of the Dead. It comes to the same thing, which is a talisman by which to channel some inexpressible force that flows through my life; without the relics to hang on to occasionally, I become nauseous and indistinct. But this is, after all - and today was not the first time I have realized this - an imperfect solution to a larger problem, because all matter is so frustratingly impermanent and vague. I used to say there was something I liked about having a tiny, perfect Luke Skywalker standing on my desk with his lightsabre in hand, that it said something to something in me in a language beyond arcane. But that same relic melts, turns sticky, gets dusty and loses its colour, gets handed down to kids (because kids are supposed to have these things) or thrown out with the trash. Matter doesn't matter. These are all just signposts on the way to the larger, glowing somethingorother.

Posted by tederick at 3:45 PM in ADAM & arcana & death & galaxy far & pirates & poetical & toys!
Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm moving - and in answer to your next three questions, I don't know, no I'm not, and September 1st. This has kicked off a purge that will make all prior purges look like wussy little boy purges, a purge whose tally already rings five full contractor-grade garbage bags of stuff thrown away and two recycling bins; and this purge has only gotten started. The toys that I still own are now the survivors of a genocidal fire that has claimed fully 70% of their civilization, and makes tremble my books, DVDs, and comics, all of whom are also about to see Black Plague-level deaths. The short version: I (used to) have too much stuff.

Somewhere amid the rubbish, the bags upon bags of shattered CD-Rs, Episode I frisbees, and creased photographs of old girlfriends, are the VHS tapes. Lots and lots and lots of VHS tapes. They are the soul of the thing in a weird way - for the first time in my life, VHS tapes are beautiful. They are so goddamned odd-looking, the WALL-Es of home theatre, anachronous boxy-forms of pure functionality, before things had to be functional and pretty. (I hate Mac.) The tapes break at the drop of a hat (or a tape, down a flight of stairs, as at least one of my old Star Wars cassettes discovered today); they're also oddly indestructible in a way: I found a copy of Raiders with the back door broken clean off, which I had apparently continued to use faithfully for years. It still played fine, even this afternoon; I have factory-spec DVDs which lasted a tenth as long. Old VHS doesn't actually look too bad on the Bravia, and the warble of electronic noise is comforting and serene once worries about reference quality have been banished from one's head. And yeah, if I may indulge in being the last person to jump on the analogue bandwagon, there's something about the trundling hum of a pair of reels being slowly revolved while their thread of mylar slowly unveils its electrons that goes straight down to the heart of me. At the end of it all, film fetishism is not for me - I was a VHS baby. Streamers of celluloid run pale next to the taste sensations of that first Canon VHS video camera, whose recording deck hung saddle-bag like at my side while the camera itself had to be supported (with difficulty) with the other hand; the floor-to-ceiling library of tapes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (commercials painstakingly edited out); the beaten-up copy of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves that was, in fact, my first home video purchase. (I do not have the heart to replace it.) I have the theatrical cut of The Phantom Menace in VHS only; it will never exist in any other medium. I have decks of Tom Snyder and Letterman and Bob Ross; an episode of Young Indiana Jones where Old Indy still appears; two blissful camcorder hours on the back lot of Universal Studios in 1993. It's all wreckage, but it's still here.

Inevitably, this brings us to WALL-E. Officially, I no longer need to review films, because the Village Voice does it for me. (Other recent instances of "they said it better than I could say it myself" include The Last Mistress and Indy IV.). Unofficially, WALL-E is so much about
1) how obsolescence is a lie;
2) great, great, great movies;
3) love. Stupid, gorgeous, I-wanted-someone-to-hold-my-hand-and-now-she's-doing-it, love. And that's all I'll ever need from it, or anything else.

Posted by tederick at 3:21 PM in 3QF & i hate mac & movies & poetical
Permalink | Comments (4)

I took today off, sorta like last year when I took the day off after Pirates 3 came out, though it wasn't really about Pirates 3 then, and it wasn't really about Indy 4 now. Just circumstantial. Actually, yesternight was Sarafina and I's 6-monthiversary (seems like only yesterday it was phone calls to Japan and pancakes and Back to the Future and me shouting at Chris for some reason), but being as that she's all jobbed up and awesome, I'm spending the day on my own recognizance, reading Scott Pilgrim - which is excellent, by the way, boy do I love seeing Toronto in comic book form! - , listening to the Indy IV score, and drinking beers. And, y'know, figuring shit out. And I have a little plastic Russian man with a gun in my bag, because no movie can make me hate Indiana Jones. And the last of the breakfast-related key chains. And hope. Yeah.

So last night with the flick and the headache, sure, but like I said before, it was all good before I even went in the door, because I was with the people I like most. Right now I am trying to get reorganized on my overall physical and mental well being, due to the sudden and intense nature of my job life at the mo'. But having just sketched everything out in a variety of Word tables, I'm not too worried actually. As it turns out - and this should not necessarily come as news - things are going pretty well. I wish I was writing (well, something other than this blog anyway), and I wish I had a billion dollars. Otherwise... well, I'm humbled before the pile of graces. So... uh... thanks, universe.

Posted by tederick at 3:29 PM in comix & dr. jones & jedi antics & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

"It was a lot easier, the single life." - Chris
"Fucking upsetting as hell though, wasn't it?" - Matt

In the past two months, I have:

• Learned of two people connected to me who have been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome
• Read descriptions of three films (one fiction, two documentary) featuring principal characters with Asperger's Syndrome
• Been asked to play someone with Asperger's Syndrome in a film directed by someone with Asperger's Syndrome.

Inevitably, I feel a cold coming on.

Since lists are fun: in the past month, Teen Girl Squad has attempted to recycle the following items:

• A coffee maker
• Four sheets of cork.

(Two items pushes the definition of "list," I know, but look at those items!)

Teen Girl Squad is, unfortunately, coming to an end: Rachel is moving out next week, and Jessi's in France for the summer, so really it's just Two Dudes I Don't Know Who Live Downstairs Squad (2DIDKWLDS) for now. 2DIDKWLDS seems pleasant enough, and my semi-psychotic next-door neighbour is volubly glad that she will never have to worry about her 12-year-old son falling off the garage roof in another attempt at scoping out the oft-available exposed breasts. But really, sunbathing topless is so 2007; I'm going to recommend that 2DIDKWLDS take a page from the crazy old woman who lives behind us, and go the whole hog in the back yard every morning. Summer's coming.

My agenda book in grade 7 (and yours too, probably) was emblazoned with the epigraph, "If we plan to learn, we must learn to plan." Well, I don't plan to learn much but I certainly intend to do some serious plansmanship tonight. I feel, in the parlance of my people, a bit "unbalanced," like I've been driving down the same stretch of highway for a good while now, without really paying attention to the exit numbers. Time bloody well races on, doesn't it? I've been pretty blessed, these last few months, but decadence and chicken wings don't really eradicate the pervading sensation that I oughta check my mirrors every once in a while. I crave certainty about certain things, and uncertainty about others, and sometimes, I don't get those things. Those are the moments for zooming back, seeing the patterns to the land and the position relative to the whole. You get those chances but rarely, and there's usually something else about to happen anyways.... Make mental notes, set the priorities. Learn to plan.

Posted by tederick at 6:58 PM in 3QF & miscellaneous crap & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I dreamed about vampires and the Joker. Gotham stinks in the summertime; it was built over a swamp. I could never see the Heath-Joker's face; he was always walking away from me doing card tricks in his right hand, but I could tell it was him because I was just so excited by the outfit. Also, because of all the murders. The vampires hung out on the edge of the bayou, visible only by their glowing eyes, watching the Heath-Joker circle the empty hallways of Wayne Manor, looking for Alfred. I/Bruce was not at home.

Winter is displeasingly intangible. A few weeks ago Sarafina and I had opportunity to hug in public without a thick layer of overcoats and sweaters between us; the flush of actual tangible contact was shocking simply because (we met in November) we'd never actually done that before. Everything in winter is several saran-wrap layers away from being something you can actually lay hands on; it takes ten minutes to put on enough gear to go for a walk, and when you walk, you can't feel the ground. In place of gooey sweat pouring down your skin you have the layer of heated air created by hair standing on end. Even indoors - there's so much gear everywhere right now, all over my desk, all around me. Heavy backpacks, heavy boots, heavy headphones. A month from now I'll be flyin'.

I think I should like to go travelling, sometime this spring.

Posted by tederick at 9:09 AM in batman! & dreams & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

(I know based on the previous entry that this might seem like a thinly veiled manner of advising the world that The Void Has Returned. It hasn't. Things are actually pretty grapefruitlike right now. I mean... well, obviously. Where have you been? I am subtle... like a fox!)

Work-wise, there are some ripples in the water, mostly in terms of what I might be doing at the day-job, vs. what I am trying to be doing at the night-job. I spent another two long days in training this week - this time it was training training, fun! - but it didn't leave much of a hair's breadth for anything that wasn't directly related to Work Things Of Work Consequence. I want to write something for Sasha to draw, but it hasn't happened yet; I've made sixty pages of notes on Snapdragon, but I haven't incorporated them yet; I feel generally dusty. About the only constructive thing I've done in the last ten days is manage to clear all the crap off my old PC, mere seconds away from its total system failure. You heard it here first: Sabre is dead. Long live Queen Molly.

The anxieties around these quibbles are not improved by the fact that things are about to get harder.

I've had a pretty exhilarating couple of months. Closed a terrific year; fell in love. Everything's spinning now, much faster than before; we're in the faster water, closer to the middle. Big drenching sprays of happy, and a whole lot of dizzy. I'm content, and overwhelmed only in my fortune and the occasional tendency for so much other stuff to be going on that I can lose sight of the simple circle at the core. That happened a bit over the past few days. But this morning, I was sitting in class, kind of moping... and I spied Sera peeking out of my cuff, and I looked around the world, and I breathed. And it was fine.

Anyone wanna watch World's End?

Posted by tederick at 6:14 PM in comix & j-o-b & pirates & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

I came out of the house this morning and the world was dead silent, and completely white, from the when-did-that-happen? new snowfall on the ground to the pearly glowing sky, and all with the "hush, hush, hush." So I whistled, and smiled a lot, and walked down the middle of the street.

Happy new year, planet. 2007 was just dandy, wasn't it?

Posted by tederick at 11:17 AM in poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

Strikewatch: Day 4!: Tim Kring apologizes to Heroes fans! But when does he apologize to Heroes non-fans like myself? When's gonna be my time, Tim Kring??

Boy I bet at this point you're starting to wonder how long I can keep up this strikewatch nonsense.

I am in a very... complicated mood. It's pitch black out and snowing for one thing, and for another, I barely slept at all last night; these things tend to alter the emotional awareness. There was also something that Helen said about getting to know another person's body for the first time... she was speaking metaphorically... but it shimmered on the inside a bit, anyway. There are a lot of long, dark corridors ahead, and a lot of rich, powerful things happening lately, and the combination of the two can be a bit groundshaking. Lots of good, a little bit of sad, and tons and tons of complexity, challenge, and free will. Hmmmmm. Focus and concentration, and eventually, mastery. That's the key.

Look: I inspired comic art! (with the lamest, most obvious joke ever.) Still, for my druthers, that's a high compliment. I wonder if Debbie might lend her pen to Extreme Steve?

Home now for bed and cookies.

Posted by tederick at 4:20 PM in blogTO & poetical & tv
Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm feeling that. It's all stirred up thick and muckity and I'm just a kid! I don't know from corporate negotiations, bedside text messages, midnight parking arrangements or unlooked-for power brokerages of the personal or the arcane. And I certainly don't understand love. I know from action figures and THAT'S IT. I'm just keeping to myself and being watchful; it's enough. But these times, man. These times.

I'm tending to my garments in the meantime. I'm pleased to say that this winter will not be the last season on earth for my beloved Raiders jacket; the good folk at Wested are going to be re-lining and refurbishing the ratty old thing for an astonishingly small figure of money. At the same time, I'm looking for more hoods; I think I even want a hooded jacket. I came across no less than three hooded items over the weekend and will probably end up buying at least two. Hoods are integral to success.

This Thing Is Bigger Than The Both Of Us: The Secret of String, the longest title I have ever had for anything, will be screening at this year's One Minute Film & Video Festival. It's on November 22nd at the Bloor Cinema. I look to be in Vancouver right up till the morning of the show, but I'll redeye it back if I have to. Attend, won't you?

His Dark Materials is throwing me into near-paroxysms of joy this time through. I haven't read it in - what? - two years? Yeah I might become like Christopher Lee for Rings and just read this annually; I am just so freaking happy as I turn every single page. And making connections and asking questions and writing things down. I love this part of the story, where all the random characters just sort of ball up together, totally unaware that about seven hundred pages from now they're all going to save the world. Just think, the people currently collecting around you like lint might be your Scooby gang for the next apocalypse. Wild, huh? Except no one ever knows it at the time. Nobody ever says "the eight or nine of us right here, who didn't know each other from nobody ten minutes ago, we're gong to save the world." Well, since the only downside is that I might be wrong, I'm putting it out there: me and mine? We're going to save the world. Why not?

Posted by tederick at 4:36 PM in 1MFVF & books & hoodies & poetical & tederick films
Permalink | Comments (0)

I use the blog to organize my life and make it coherent. I write only to myself. Sometimes this is very direct and overt, like during TIFF, when the blog basically kept me alive - I could all the bits of chaos coming at me every second, and file them down to sensible (well, to me) chunks of narrative that could be uploaded, processed, safely databased and left for everyone else to see. Out of my head, into the green world. My journal functions entirely differently; the journal is history, while the blog is narrative. The blog is the screenplay of my life, one lousy bit of dialogue at a time. (I suck at writing dialogue.) And the only downside to organizing your life via a Movable Type database that can be sorted, searched, and easily referenced, is the uncanny ability to turn it into a map of all the patterns and dates, all the hopelessly myriad connections that do not exist in life, only in art. The boundary line is a scary thing - when does this stop being, say, a pair of Mickey Mouse boxer shorts that five hot girls bought me when I turned 16, and when does it attain the quasi-mystical status of a garment that I should have thrown away long ago, that still (miraculously) fits, that still pops out of the bottom of my underwear drawer with alarming regularity every two or three years but only at the exact right moment, to prove that it still has an eerie, effective quantity of whatever fairy dust made it what it was when I went to semi-formals with Mark back in grade 11. When the legend becomes fact, blog the legend - and try not to get caught out for all the simple, stupid ways every thing you say and do can seem only pale shadows of what was there in the first place. This silly, horrible world and all the beautiful things in it. Like the storm finally easing, like the best four months of my life, like the beginning of the next thing overtaking the ashes of the last. I notice. I can't help it. Up is down, dusk is dawn, there's a green flash on the horizon.

"There's just something about the 23rd of September." - me

"But you can't stop the change. Any more than you can stop the suns from setting." - Shmi Skywalker

"I'm going to bed, before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed. Or worse, expelled." - Hermione Granger

Posted by tederick at 10:53 PM in poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

You get broken down to every teeny tiny bit of yourself, live there for a while, and then in a few days, you'll build yourself back up fresh; defragmented. Today was the first day I forgot my tickets at home, the first day I got off at the wrong subway stop. I feel fine. I am an androgynous monkey-lizard swimming through a river of time. I am a gorilla riding a yak. The towers of this city shall be my Redwood trees; my skin is a map of the tattoos I haven't drawn yet. I am sexless; I am wind. I am a ranger. I am blood and oil.

Matty Price and I have started calling actors almost exclusively by the title of their most significant film - "Kick his ass, Die Hard!" "Hit that bitch with a frying pan, American Beauty!" "Direct the shit out of that film, Fitzcarraldo!" As with most things at this point, this is amusing only to us. Mongol is this year's Bugmaster (why? I'll tell you why). In this obscene wilderness you find a new kind of sense. Tiff (the person, not the festival) branded me the Silver Snail groupie today. I guess that means I've arrived. My eyes are clear.

In the limited moral universe of Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, the drama only stems from the question of what meaning is assigned a specific act before, and after, its execution. I side with Ewan McGregor: once you've killed, you'll still have to find a way to live the rest of your life; prison is irrelevant.

In the Antarctic waste of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, scientists prophesy the coming apocalypse; view us as day-players on a world whose interest in us is fleeting. In unintentionally direct retaliation to this, two scientists play electric guitars on the roof of their hut in the middle of the frozen waste. They bring the defining triviality of our species - art - to a place that cannot hear it, understand it, or record it for later use. They do it just to do it, and on we go.

I am sitting at Queen & McCaul, cross legged with my laptop, against a giant wall billboard for a competing laptop brand, wearing my blogTO t-shirt and blogging about TIFF on Tederick.com. I am this city.

Posted by tederick at 4:26 PM in blogTO & blood & poetical & the apocalypse & tiff 2007
Permalink | Comments (0)

I understand French. I understand Spanish. I stopped reading the subtitles five minutes into Chaotic Ana. The realization made me sick - made me want to put my head between my knees and think of my grandfather who is gone. I proceeded to have a massive artistic epiphany, and connect many lines in my head, even as I fought and weaved with a film that was as ugly as it was beautiful, as smart as it was stupid, as right in its every detail as it was in every single mistake it made. I don't know what the fuck any of this is any more. I went to the quad at Victoria College to have my traditional Tuesday afternoon freak-out, and promptly discovered that I didn't need to have one. That the thing deep down inside myself that is going to make or break the next 12 months of my life before ruling the next 120 years, was in fact ready and waiting. That I am, entirely, myself. And then the page turned again, and now I need to know exactly who is going to walk with me next. Are you ready to begin?

Last night Alan Ball somehow guessed I was a filmmaker and asked what kind of films I make... as usual I started with the "well, I guess you could say fantasy" line that I've been using forever but then I just switched it over and said, "actually, I guess I just make movies where weird shit happens." That's the new line.

Posted by tederick at 5:48 PM in poetical & tederick films & tiff 2007
Permalink | Comments (3)

Strangest thing, I actually got "the Labour Day feeling" today. The "oh my god oh my god another school year starts tomorrow" thing. Which is so entirely not the case - just an easy two-day work week and then I'm into the big show for ten days, and after that the future is far cloudier but I'm pretty frickin' sure it doesn't involve passing notes back and forth under desks, and broken-backed copies of The Stone Angel. At least, I hope not. Still, it feels like a beginning. My plans with Bex for the evening got scuttled, so I watched Bande a parte instead… and oh my god. I am in fucking love with this movie. The scene where they start dancing in the cafe and then the music just stops dead while the narrator talks about what each character is thinking... the run through the Louvre… this film makes me wish I was twenty years old and living in Paris, shooting black and white 16mm film out the back of a moving car. I got tweety-bird drunk, flushed in the cheeks delirious, just on watching this fucking movie. Halfway through the flick Jessi came up, borrowed some honey, and read me some poetry. What life is this??

I came up with a new script idea this weekend. A really, really, really fucking solid idea. It needs just a bit of percolation for the details, the structure's all there already, and then I think I'm just going to draft it out as hard and as fast as I can, see if I can turn around a draft in under a month. I need to go back on the 4 pages a day thing; I'm backlogging pages on Terra and Snapdragon. It's time to clear the gutters. Enough sewage.

Posted by tederick at 11:14 PM in movies & poetical & the process
Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in love. She's five years old, has red hair, and likes being carried everywhere.

Yup I'm pretty much on board with saying that every household needs a Gracie. I was at Matthew and Leah's cottage yesterday for the annual barbecue (which, by the way - bacon and cheese, in the patties themselves) and as I quipped early on, I didn't know if I was supposed to be the oldest kid or the youngest grownup but for whatever reason, the kids just swarmed me. Good swarm, though, not running-from-the-bees swarm. And I don't think I knew how badly I needed that until it was happening. I needed to spend a day on the beach with a pack of juniors. Playing volleyball, arguing about comic books, brushing hair with driftwood, telling really really really bad jokes, making sand castles, and smashing those self-same sand castles. Sure, when they decide to take you down en masse Mumakil style, it's a bit scary. But otherwise, excellent. This has solved many problems. Oh kids. Gotta get me some of those.

I'm going to do something I never do: talk about music. Guns n' Roses was on the cover of Rolling Stone this week because it's the 20th anniversary of Appetite for Destruction, which in my youth I would have listed as one of the Three Best Albums of All Time. In fact, there's a nice little quote in the magazine from Slash, where he lists off the great albums, the ones that literally changed lives, and then says that no matter what else happened, he got to be a part of one of those... and that means the world to him. This is me validating: he really did, it really was, and goddamn that really musta been something. So I've been listening to Appetite a lot this week. I don't think I'd been into it in at least three or four years and listening to it now was the first time that parts of it actually sounded dated to me - like I could put them in a specific time and place, instead of their being just the ephemeral sounds of my childhood and therefore unassailable as actual cultural output. Still, as has been the case every time I've left that CD alone for a while only to go back to it, my appreciation for it has grown immensely. Tracks I have literally heard a bajillion times - like, say, "You're Crazy," which we used for the prologue of Stanley's Life and is therefore permanently tattooed on my sound mixin' brain - got a bit of a reno in my musical headspace and came at me a bit fresh. That was sweet. And you know what? "Sweet Child o' Mine," for all its flaws, is still the single sweetest (and most accurate) song a man ever wrote about what it's like to be a man in love with a woman, and all the inherent shades and conflicts contained therein. I doubt that was intentional, but then the best shit never is.

Posted by tederick at 11:19 AM in comix & joss & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

Whaddaya think, maybe this is the next tattoo right here:

cuz up is sure as fuck down these days. Besides I could get a whole street cred for upside-down tattoo art. It could be my "thing:" I only make sense when I'm standing on my head.

"You and I think about this sort of thing too much." - Daniel Cockburn

"Aye! He's onto it!" - Barbossa

Posted by tederick at 10:40 PM in pirates & poetical & scars
Permalink | Comments (0)

Double that grin and give me another. The universe has a hell of an awesome sense of humour. (And dramatic timing! Wooooo.)

I can't sleep.

Hey, I heard about this a while ago but it's sort of driving me nuts: apparently the original intention in Pirates 3 was that if Elizabeth remained faithful to Will for the 10 years he captained the Dutchman, he'd be freed when he came back. Which is very specifically not what is said in the film (I've checked... four times); in the film, Will's fate is that he will have to captain the Dutchman for eternity and only return to Elizabeth (and Will Jr.) once every ten years. But apparently the deleted scene that contains the original intended concept will appear on the DVD, thus providing irritating non-canonical referencing for the folks who want to believe that it all turned out all right in the end. Isn't it so much better if Will is out there on the Dutchman for the rest of time? Like, he's there right now even? He watched Elizabeth grow old and die and his son grow up and his son's son grow up and so on and so forth, and all that time served as the guide for those souls lost at sea, because he had finally become a whole, individuated, selfless person? Isn't that what his story is about? That is a freakin' terrific end to that tale, not "she was faithful to him for ten years so he got out of jail free." Elizabeth got the Empress, Will got the Dutchman, and they pulled a Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor: "in one night, we loved a lifetime's worth."

Sorry. That's been kicking the back of my head for 2 months. I needed to vent.

Did you know there's a Simpsons MOVIE??? I know! Insanicrap. Well it's a pretty goddamn terrific movie, too, and that is heartwarming. It took 'em 18 damn years but they didn't screw it up. I mean there's no Jasper in the thing to speak of and it doesn't exactly rip America in half with incisive critical commentary, but it makes you remember just how much we love the Fab Five, and it has the Spider-Pig song, and Boob Lady and Alaska and Bart's penis and a truly definitive hero moment for Homer J. Simpson. That's pretty tight, Simpsons folks. Pretty damn tight.

Hmmm. Still can't sleep. (Obviously.) Maybe I should listen to the thrumming of Sebulba's engine... that always does me.

You know what? I've got a pretty good crew. Between the roommates and Teen Girl Squad and the Box and the e.team and the soccer team and the Yorkies and the FORPies and the fam and whatnot, I'd say we're fairly well unstoppable right now. We've pretty much got this fucking thing covered.

Posted by tederick at 1:27 AM in pirates & poetical & simps
Permalink | Comments (0)

I know, I know. I'm my hero too.

This was a pretty fucked up week, Internet. Yes I'm aware that the week does, in fact, continue tomorrow, but from where I'm sitting it's gotta be over by now. Some pretty spectacularly upsetting and disappointing things happened this week. And some pretty terrific things too. And yeah, I actually did burst into tears at Osgoode station at one point, and at another, a dude in the middle of the sidewalk yanked out his dick and started pissing at me - and at Super-Soaker strength, I might add. But it was in the aforementioned Whitby that I did something that was very precisely, defiantly for myself, and that, for the time being, steadies the waters.

Posted by tederick at 10:06 PM in photoblog & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

Everything is officially coming up Milhouse. I am just so goddamned happy right now.

Posted by tederick at 2:43 AM in pirates & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

I have to say, I have been performing some pretty spectacular hand-to-hand passes in the last few days. I mean, I think they're spectacular. Maybe I should go for broke and carve out a career as an illusionist. I could be the prestige!! Hey, that would have been cool, if the prestige in The Prestige turned out not to be the final component of a magic trick after all, but an actual person - the Machiavellian puppetmaster villain who was behind it all the whole time. "It was never Borden at all, Mr. Angier! It was the Prestige!" And the Prestige is played by Paul Newman, a prestige actor.

OK maybe.

At some point in the first twenty minutes of Japanimated coming-of-age fable Brave Story this afternoon, and for no reason directly related to the movie that I could detect, something good happened to me. I suddenly became far less negative about making movies, working my days at the j-o-b and my nights staring up at that big silver screen, crushing on unattainables and spending mornings and weekends breathing deep and running hard. Later on with the fierce evening sun setting and walking along Charles Street having just spent some minutes chatting to Amy and Stephanie about nothing in particular and on my way to a sinful Quiznos dinner with the Superman Returns score playing on my iPod, I realized what the exact feeling was: it was like my soul exhaled. Became loose again, shook free the must and started flapping in the breeze. And right about then my whole chest opened up and unlocked and all the needless stress shattered and flew away like plum blossoms, and I could see clearly. Felt good.

Then I went to see Zoo, which is about a guy who died because he made a horse fuck him up the ass. It was very slow and very creepy and very pretty and ultimately tremendously unaffecting, probably because I just can't relate. The most interesting thing about it was sitting next to a woman and a teen-or-twentysomething who I must presume were grandmother and granddaughter, seeing the movie together. I took my grandmother to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade; I sure as hell would not have been able to handle taking her to see Zoo. (Actual conversation exchange overheard: Grandma: "Started giving the stallion a what?" Grandkid: "A blowjob.") So bully for them for the bonding.

After that it was off to the Bloor for Manufacturing Dissent, but I took off after about twenty minutes. I just wasn't in the mood. I was way up in the crow's nest (by choice), and it was about a hundred and fifty fucking degrees up there, and I didn't want to spend another hour and change watching a movie that was, really, just a flick about an asshole being an asshole, even if it's an asshole I happen to like. Once they trotted out Noam Chomsky to explain something, I left. Only Noam Chomsky can explain some aspect of Americana in a way that both makes sense and is relatively horrifying, like when your dad explained to you what happens after you die. Noam Chomsky is like the dad who gives us the bad news straight.

Well I suppose that's it for this weekend, Internet. Thanks for listening.

Posted by tederick at 10:54 PM in movies & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

A girl I went to high school with died quite suddenly yesterday. Diagnosed on Saturday and gone on Sunday. Her sister is friends with my sister and I'm just sort of stunned and wrecked by the whole thing. She's the second of my graduating class to pass away in the last few years, and I just... well fuck I don't know what I'm trying to say here. Just that I'm sad. And also obviously that any of us who think we have a whole lot of time left don't have one sweet fucking clue about a single goddamned thing.

And there's also the Virginia Tech shootings, the worst gun rampage in U.S. history, which was one of those news items that sort of crept into my awareness by a kind of osmosis - first thinking it was something I'd heard about before, then thinking it wasn't a very big deal, and then slowly realizing just how horrific something like that really is and that you're standing on the edge of a cresting wave that's about to become the Big, Big Deal for a long time to come.

And that's about all the "powers of ten" I can do on death today. I'm sure a hundred thousand people also got killed somewhere else in the world today but I've officially reached my limit.

Posted by tederick at 7:09 PM in poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)

I fucking loved this movie. Holy crap I want to see it again right now. In fact, it's repeat-screening twice next weekend; I might have to skip one of my other Sprocktix and just go see Island of Lost Souls (that's what De Fortabte sjæles ø means, duh!) again.

For one thing, it roundly kicked Harry Potter movies' ass. All four of them, and solidly. And also: scarecrow. Maybe that doesn't mean as much to you (having not seen the movie) as it does to me, but it's a key point. And at the end? Out-Voldied Voldy. And at the very end? Almost out-Buffied Buffy. Yeah that's right. Yeah.

Uh, the other film was good too. I spent the day travelling around town from theatre to theatre, and listening to podcasts. Hearing Quentin Tarantino ape a point about Death Proof that I made on Mamo almost word-for-word gave me pause. Also wanted to give a shout out to Lord of the Geeks Wil Wheaton for reviewing the episodes of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation on TV Squad. That ain't for the faint.

Anyways. I spent a lot of the day sort of stewing to myself re: my previous post... symptom of the situation, I guess, which is that I am both a) relatively dissatisfied with a lot of the way things have currently fallen out in my life, but b) becoming more and more lethargic by the day about actually doing something to change things. As I get older my perspective widens out a bit and it feels like wisdom, but it's really not. It's just self-defeatism couched in the oh-so-attractive tropes of the power of experience. Well like I just told Rebecca on the phone, I don't know a fucking thing. Probably now less so than ever before. So... in lieu of sitting here feeling sorry for myself, I'm going to order a pizza, watch a movie, and await the dawn.

Posted by tederick at 7:35 PM in movies & poetical
Permalink | Comments (0)