Well, for those of you who consult this blog periodically, and have noticed it recently somewhat devoid of any new content, you would be forgiven for thinking I had fallen off the face of the planet.
NOT SO.
I am busily working away at a new blog, devoted entirely to creative writing! Check it out: http://farthestworld.blogspot.com
I am very very happy about it. I mean, not all of it is gold, or whatever, but the mere fact that I am writing short stories, and consistently, and not entirely despising the finished products, is quite possibly the closest thing to an artistic dream come true that I have ever felt.
So please do read it, and don't hesitate to write comments about it! But be kind. Remember, I'm still a neurotic jew, and I develop complexes very easily!
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Monday, March 26, 2007
Some Literary (Self-)Criticism
So I'm not thrilled about my last post. I think, mostly on account of it being sort of journalistic, an artificial structure that I am not familiar with and cannot really handle well. But reading over it has gotten me thinking about a few things.
I won't remove it, first of all, because I feel that part of the appeal of blog-writing is its spontaneity, its extemporaneous quality. Things enter the mind and are published almost as quickly. This is both wonderful and atrocious - my prose here is more energetic and varied than in any other context, at the serious expense of editing and revision. Everything is a trade off.
So I will keep it as sort of an awkward testament to the Spirit of Blog. But in another sense I find it quite interesting. I attempted, especially towards the end of it, to play around with language, to effect a kind of stylistic simulacrum of decay. I think I failed abominably, but that's beside the point.
Or maybe it isn't. Perhaps the point that has me riled up, even minutely, is the sort of hack-neyed, ad hoc quality of the latter section. Using ellipsis to simulate ellision, broken spacing, omission of entire phrases to represent sections torn out or illegible. I mean, it has a very heavy-handed quality to it. Don't get me wrong, I don't give a damn about the piece, but what troubles me is the spirit behind it.
There's an amateurish approach to writing that seeks to elicit a particular response, be it comedic or emotional, without the use of subtletly or guile. The amateurish writer sits down and hammers out text with entire sections in bold face capitals, multiple exclamation marks, and abrupt caesuras. I shall attempt to demonstrate:
Judith SWERVED the car quickly away from the precipice!!! She was TOO LATE - the wheels spun out over the gorge and half the chassis began to GRIND into the - YAWNING PIT OF DEATH!!
Okay I'm obviously exaggerating here for effect. But imagine something along these lines, only toned down a bit in respect of its more superficial excesses. In all other respects, particularly in terms of grandiloquence, prolixity, verbosity, or whatever you want to call it, amateurish writing tries to grind and squeeze every drop of sentiment from the reader. There is no concern for style or grace, or the careful manipulation of context and language to produce a particular result.
Such writing is often called "masturbatory", a term I take quite seriously in that it has more than once been used to describe my own writing. What does it signify, aside from the obvious self-gratification? It is above all symptomatic of an author's profound and persistent disinterest in the reader - in his or her potential reactions or desires upon encountering your work. Naturally, it is patently impossible to tailor a written work to every possible taste; that is not my point, in the least. We must always write from our guts, from a point of interior strength and energy; we must always attempt to harness that fleeting, vaguely intuitive sensation of flow, beauty, artistry, and moment.
But there are times when we write exclusively for the pleasure that our own prose brings us. I have experienced the following phenomenon many, many times: I begin by writing something that I am convinced, just as the words grace the page, is pure gold. Don't be mistaken, I'm not confused by delusions of grandeur, but as I write I become nevertheless enthralled by my own use of language. However, as time progresses, and as the psychic distance between me and my own creation grows, deepens, widens, I become cold to it. Turns of phrase that I had previously considered brilliant become, well, increasingly mediocre. Average, tepid, stale, or worst of all - ineffectual.
The first moments of writing are the most self-serving and egoistic. The truly humble writer is one who can brave his (or her) own feeling of disgust at the garbage his fingers created, and return to the page again, and again, and again. Revision is the negation of ego. To create and then discard your work, heedless of quality, is little more than arrogance.
Yet, the whole situation is a bit more complex. That initial moment of ego, the narcissistic first-contact with the page, has in the past enabled me to overcome the horrible fear of failure that cripples all creative output. There is a huge danger associated with writing, and above all publishing. It is not at all surprising that so many writers become infuriated when their work is described as autobiographical. It is precisely this that I, as a writer, struggle to move away from. Writing is annihilation. What kind of power can someone have if they, in their creation, are always bounded to some essentialist, authorial self? The act of manipulating thought and language emerges from the ego, from whatever fractured and discursive "unity" of thought the mind can perceive itself as having. But for it to be of any merit, this art, it must separate itself severely from that point of origin, and delve so deeply into something foreign, even alien, that the point of contact between author and work is explosive and profoundly mystifying. The exposure of unity to difference is defined, in my mind, by mystery and wonder - and the best writing is precisely that which embraces the dissolution of stagnant forms.
In the end I need to find a productive harmony between my own persistent and inescapable ego. My vanity is absolute - there is no way to excise this self-serving element from an act of creation so intimately entangled with my own mind. What I can do, however, is struggle against the amateurish impulse to "just create", to hammer onto the page some brazen and childish thing - not in content, but in form, since I will always cherish the most immature of sentiments (laughter, absurdity, and irreverence). The best I can do, for now, is perhaps to take my own vain self-awareness - and all the ridiculous intensity of thought invested in the recognition of how wonderful I am, qua writer - and transform it into a meticulous self-awareness of the work of art. In simple terms: the less I think about myself, the more I can think about what I create.
And maybe, just maybe, in time I can find that precious space of wonder that is about neither the self, nor the art, but something more and deeper.
I won't remove it, first of all, because I feel that part of the appeal of blog-writing is its spontaneity, its extemporaneous quality. Things enter the mind and are published almost as quickly. This is both wonderful and atrocious - my prose here is more energetic and varied than in any other context, at the serious expense of editing and revision. Everything is a trade off.
So I will keep it as sort of an awkward testament to the Spirit of Blog. But in another sense I find it quite interesting. I attempted, especially towards the end of it, to play around with language, to effect a kind of stylistic simulacrum of decay. I think I failed abominably, but that's beside the point.
Or maybe it isn't. Perhaps the point that has me riled up, even minutely, is the sort of hack-neyed, ad hoc quality of the latter section. Using ellipsis to simulate ellision, broken spacing, omission of entire phrases to represent sections torn out or illegible. I mean, it has a very heavy-handed quality to it. Don't get me wrong, I don't give a damn about the piece, but what troubles me is the spirit behind it.
There's an amateurish approach to writing that seeks to elicit a particular response, be it comedic or emotional, without the use of subtletly or guile. The amateurish writer sits down and hammers out text with entire sections in bold face capitals, multiple exclamation marks, and abrupt caesuras. I shall attempt to demonstrate:
Judith SWERVED the car quickly away from the precipice!!! She was TOO LATE - the wheels spun out over the gorge and half the chassis began to GRIND into the - YAWNING PIT OF DEATH!!
Okay I'm obviously exaggerating here for effect. But imagine something along these lines, only toned down a bit in respect of its more superficial excesses. In all other respects, particularly in terms of grandiloquence, prolixity, verbosity, or whatever you want to call it, amateurish writing tries to grind and squeeze every drop of sentiment from the reader. There is no concern for style or grace, or the careful manipulation of context and language to produce a particular result.
Such writing is often called "masturbatory", a term I take quite seriously in that it has more than once been used to describe my own writing. What does it signify, aside from the obvious self-gratification? It is above all symptomatic of an author's profound and persistent disinterest in the reader - in his or her potential reactions or desires upon encountering your work. Naturally, it is patently impossible to tailor a written work to every possible taste; that is not my point, in the least. We must always write from our guts, from a point of interior strength and energy; we must always attempt to harness that fleeting, vaguely intuitive sensation of flow, beauty, artistry, and moment.
But there are times when we write exclusively for the pleasure that our own prose brings us. I have experienced the following phenomenon many, many times: I begin by writing something that I am convinced, just as the words grace the page, is pure gold. Don't be mistaken, I'm not confused by delusions of grandeur, but as I write I become nevertheless enthralled by my own use of language. However, as time progresses, and as the psychic distance between me and my own creation grows, deepens, widens, I become cold to it. Turns of phrase that I had previously considered brilliant become, well, increasingly mediocre. Average, tepid, stale, or worst of all - ineffectual.
The first moments of writing are the most self-serving and egoistic. The truly humble writer is one who can brave his (or her) own feeling of disgust at the garbage his fingers created, and return to the page again, and again, and again. Revision is the negation of ego. To create and then discard your work, heedless of quality, is little more than arrogance.
Yet, the whole situation is a bit more complex. That initial moment of ego, the narcissistic first-contact with the page, has in the past enabled me to overcome the horrible fear of failure that cripples all creative output. There is a huge danger associated with writing, and above all publishing. It is not at all surprising that so many writers become infuriated when their work is described as autobiographical. It is precisely this that I, as a writer, struggle to move away from. Writing is annihilation. What kind of power can someone have if they, in their creation, are always bounded to some essentialist, authorial self? The act of manipulating thought and language emerges from the ego, from whatever fractured and discursive "unity" of thought the mind can perceive itself as having. But for it to be of any merit, this art, it must separate itself severely from that point of origin, and delve so deeply into something foreign, even alien, that the point of contact between author and work is explosive and profoundly mystifying. The exposure of unity to difference is defined, in my mind, by mystery and wonder - and the best writing is precisely that which embraces the dissolution of stagnant forms.
In the end I need to find a productive harmony between my own persistent and inescapable ego. My vanity is absolute - there is no way to excise this self-serving element from an act of creation so intimately entangled with my own mind. What I can do, however, is struggle against the amateurish impulse to "just create", to hammer onto the page some brazen and childish thing - not in content, but in form, since I will always cherish the most immature of sentiments (laughter, absurdity, and irreverence). The best I can do, for now, is perhaps to take my own vain self-awareness - and all the ridiculous intensity of thought invested in the recognition of how wonderful I am, qua writer - and transform it into a meticulous self-awareness of the work of art. In simple terms: the less I think about myself, the more I can think about what I create.
And maybe, just maybe, in time I can find that precious space of wonder that is about neither the self, nor the art, but something more and deeper.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
True Journalism
Wouldn't it be fantastic to project ourselves into the future and retrospectively discover a post-apocalyptic newspaper article nestled in the obliterated remains of a once-magnificent city... an article like the following!
March 23, 2043
Giant Wolves Attack Park in Downtown Vancouver
by Naomi Blitzen
VANCOUVER - Three enormous wolves, each roughly half the size of a city block and about two stories tall, attacked a group of helpless parkgoers in Queen Elizabeth Park this morning. Twenty three people are reported dead, and at least another fourty-two were rushed to the nearby BC Children and Women's Hospital for immediate treatment. More than a dozen remain in critical condition.
The wolves appear to have been hiding in the Vandusen Botanical Garden, nearby to the west, and dashed into Queen Elizabeth Park at approximately 7:30am. Parkgoers were taken entirely by surprise, and most of the reported deceased belong to a Tai Chi group called Subtle Movements, which meets regularly on the south-western edge of the park.
"As soon as we saw these big [expletive deleted] wolves charging into the park - and I mean holy jesus they were roaring and snarling and I thought holy [expletive deleted] I'm going to die - well as soon as we saw them we just started running like all hell," reports one victim, Jim Basmuth, a superintendent in one of the nearby buildings. "Everyone just lost it and started screaming and tearing off and stepping over each other. I mean it was like total carnage."
The first four police officers to have arrived on the scene are also among the dead. "When officers Bartuzzi and Cannelli arrived there, they naturally began firing at the animals. I mean, we really don't have any training for this. They saw the giant wolves, and what are you supposed to do?" explained Police Constable Bernard Artaud at a press conference earlier this morning. "Of course, the wolves turned on them. They honestly didn't have a chance."
More officers arrived on the scene, and a perimeter was quickly set up around the park. Soon after, the military arrived with two tanks, several support helicopters, and a number of armored personnel carriers. According to numerous witness accounts, the wolves seemed entirely uninterested in the show of force around them. "They just sat down near each other and started, oh god, you know... munching," reported one witness. "The worst part," said another, ashen-faced, bystander, "was when they, jesus christ in heaven... when they started throwing the bodies in the air and, well, catching them."
The police and military perimeter was gradually tightened around the wolves. Large shock-transmitting weapons were mounted on trucks, for the purpose of stunning the enormous animals. Unfortunately, once the perimeter came to within 50 feet of the wolves, they began growling, stood to their feet, and simply bounded over the line of vehicles. Weapons fire from the military appears to have had no effect.
The wolves were last spotted heading down E 33rd Avenue towards the eastern edge of the city. The national guard has been contacted, and the entire city has been placed on high alert. A city-wide emergency bulletin was aired, urging all residents to remain indoors until the danger has been averted.
"I hate that I have to feel like a prisoner in my own home!" Complained Melissa Benins, who lives near the park where the incident ocurred. "I mean, how the hell did these wolves get into the city anyway?"
Officials believe the wolves swam in from Fraser river, to the south, and crept through the streets during the night. Driven by hunger, they attacked the first large cluster of people they found in the morning. Dr. Benjamin Wiscoff, a leading Caninologist at the University of British Columbia, commented that, "Wolves will not generally attack humans unless they are driven to it by severe hunger. It seems entirely reasonable that wolves of this size would have a very difficult time meeting their dietary needs, and so would be driven into the city sooner or later, out of necessity."
***************************
And another article -- scorched, frayed, ink faded, more recent yet worse for wear -- might reasonably be found underneath the twisted remains of an old newspaper dispenser. Its fragments could well read:
ay 14t , 043
Giant Wolves Continue to Plague Western Canada
by Betty Norbitz
VAN..OUV.R - Since the first attack many mon..s ago, so small by comparison to today's onslaught, the wolv..' numbers have continued to grow. Wolf sightings are a daily ocurrence, and attacks happen severa times a week. In Kelow a,
......... three hundred dead......................no reasonable expectation of retaliation
.......... small glimmer of hope ............. community pushed to the edge of despera.... ................. electrified a wolf water supply and brought one of th.. ..... down ..............
........................... much jubilation .................. .nfortunat.l.y, cut short, when the tow. hall .................. by an undetermine ....... of wolv.. .
More cynical observe.. ..............., "...... almost like ...... strange breed of wolf vengeance .........."
..S. Military forces ...... refuse ... offer assistance, owing to their own infestation of ...........
March 23, 2043
Giant Wolves Attack Park in Downtown Vancouver
by Naomi Blitzen
VANCOUVER - Three enormous wolves, each roughly half the size of a city block and about two stories tall, attacked a group of helpless parkgoers in Queen Elizabeth Park this morning. Twenty three people are reported dead, and at least another fourty-two were rushed to the nearby BC Children and Women's Hospital for immediate treatment. More than a dozen remain in critical condition.
The wolves appear to have been hiding in the Vandusen Botanical Garden, nearby to the west, and dashed into Queen Elizabeth Park at approximately 7:30am. Parkgoers were taken entirely by surprise, and most of the reported deceased belong to a Tai Chi group called Subtle Movements, which meets regularly on the south-western edge of the park.
"As soon as we saw these big [expletive deleted] wolves charging into the park - and I mean holy jesus they were roaring and snarling and I thought holy [expletive deleted] I'm going to die - well as soon as we saw them we just started running like all hell," reports one victim, Jim Basmuth, a superintendent in one of the nearby buildings. "Everyone just lost it and started screaming and tearing off and stepping over each other. I mean it was like total carnage."
The first four police officers to have arrived on the scene are also among the dead. "When officers Bartuzzi and Cannelli arrived there, they naturally began firing at the animals. I mean, we really don't have any training for this. They saw the giant wolves, and what are you supposed to do?" explained Police Constable Bernard Artaud at a press conference earlier this morning. "Of course, the wolves turned on them. They honestly didn't have a chance."
More officers arrived on the scene, and a perimeter was quickly set up around the park. Soon after, the military arrived with two tanks, several support helicopters, and a number of armored personnel carriers. According to numerous witness accounts, the wolves seemed entirely uninterested in the show of force around them. "They just sat down near each other and started, oh god, you know... munching," reported one witness. "The worst part," said another, ashen-faced, bystander, "was when they, jesus christ in heaven... when they started throwing the bodies in the air and, well, catching them."
The police and military perimeter was gradually tightened around the wolves. Large shock-transmitting weapons were mounted on trucks, for the purpose of stunning the enormous animals. Unfortunately, once the perimeter came to within 50 feet of the wolves, they began growling, stood to their feet, and simply bounded over the line of vehicles. Weapons fire from the military appears to have had no effect.
The wolves were last spotted heading down E 33rd Avenue towards the eastern edge of the city. The national guard has been contacted, and the entire city has been placed on high alert. A city-wide emergency bulletin was aired, urging all residents to remain indoors until the danger has been averted.
"I hate that I have to feel like a prisoner in my own home!" Complained Melissa Benins, who lives near the park where the incident ocurred. "I mean, how the hell did these wolves get into the city anyway?"
Officials believe the wolves swam in from Fraser river, to the south, and crept through the streets during the night. Driven by hunger, they attacked the first large cluster of people they found in the morning. Dr. Benjamin Wiscoff, a leading Caninologist at the University of British Columbia, commented that, "Wolves will not generally attack humans unless they are driven to it by severe hunger. It seems entirely reasonable that wolves of this size would have a very difficult time meeting their dietary needs, and so would be driven into the city sooner or later, out of necessity."
***************************
And another article -- scorched, frayed, ink faded, more recent yet worse for wear -- might reasonably be found underneath the twisted remains of an old newspaper dispenser. Its fragments could well read:
ay 14t , 043
Giant Wolves Continue to Plague Western Canada
by Betty Norbitz
VAN..OUV.R - Since the first attack many mon..s ago, so small by comparison to today's onslaught, the wolv..' numbers have continued to grow. Wolf sightings are a daily ocurrence, and attacks happen severa times a week. In Kelow a,
......... three hundred dead......................no reasonable expectation of retaliation
.......... small glimmer of hope ............. community pushed to the edge of despera.... ................. electrified a wolf water supply and brought one of th.. ..... down ..............
........................... much jubilation .................. .nfortunat.l.y, cut short, when the tow. hall .................. by an undetermine ....... of wolv.. .
More cynical observe.. ..............., "...... almost like ...... strange breed of wolf vengeance .........."
..S. Military forces ...... refuse ... offer assistance, owing to their own infestation of ...........
Sunday, March 11, 2007
What a Dream
Okay, so I pretty much just woke up after having the most amazing dream. It was a weird fusion of "Lost" and "Alice in Wonderland". It began with someone who looked remarkably like Hercules, from that live-action television show, knocking someone unconscious (which happens a lot in Lost), hurling them over a waterfall (and themselves bodily thereafter), crawling up the river bank onto the shore, hoisting the comatose body onto a shoulder, and tearing off into the jungle. Scene I!
And of course this was all supposed to be like the exciting and mysterious events happening to non-central yet nevertheless startlingly heroic characters somewhere else on the Island. (Aside: I write this energized from glorious dream-filled sleep, whilst listening to Berlioz' Dream of the Witches' Sabbath, which is so phenomenally appropriate to the impending contents of my dream that I am giddy with the awesome aesthetic wonderfulness of it all.)
So anyway, Hercules and captive, and quite possibly other runners-along (whose faces and identities remain somewhat ambiguous, but were undoubtedly heroic), find some kind of burrow with magical properties and dive headfirst into it. These people did everything with gusto! Anyhow, after diving underground, they become prisoners of some weird Cabbalistic underworld community with a strange ice queen. The details are a bit fuzzy, but I do recall stalactites, corridors, and frenetic dancing.
Okay, so anyway, cut to other characters. Scene II. These were children. I think a boy and girl of like 12 or 14 (which is where the dream became very Alice in Wonderlandish). Oh yeah, and there was a talking bushy white dog, with tremendous sagacity that the above children invariably ignored.
But the dream wasn't from their perspective per se. I think it sort of passed by them in third person, and then became first person, whereupon I, myself, became the hero. This was the really cool part. But anyway, I'll get to that.
So these kids are like wandering around this forest or swamp or field, the details aren't really clear, and they happen upon this crystalline tent structure, and of course step inside it. There's a throne sitting there, in the middle of this room, and the room is conjoined to another room by a constricting pink spiderweb-like mesh, that only small mole-like creatures can pass through, and they can only pass through it because they are carrying beautiful purple-pink flowers that, with that special breed of dream-omniscience, I knew were intoxicating and particularly special. And so, as the moles went to and fro through the mesh, the fibres would tremble and constrict and stuff, widening to let them by.
So, moving on, the kids are in this room, and are looking around and stuff. Then the aforementioned ice princess steps in and starts talking to them. About wonders, and duty, and how there is an exciting life for them through the tunnel. The kids get weirded out, but are of course naturally curious, and start to approach the tunnel. The unerringly sagacious dog steps in and says, "No, let me examine it first. It may not be safe." Which he tries to do, and is instantly snatched up by the weird mesh and transported to some strange subterannean prison, no doubt to be tortured and tickled into a hapless state of merely faithful, not sagacious, dog-servitude. The children, quite understandably, totally fucking flip out and make a dash for the exit, which is instantly blocked by a cloudy gossamer fabric, which is in fact only superficially gossamer and really quite strong on the microscopic, uber-magical, fibrous level. And it expands to fill the little gaps to the side and below, when the children try to squeeze around it.
And then, strangely enough, Hercules appears behind the mesh and starts pounding on it, to no avail. Much hysteria, much sobbing, and then end of scene.
Cut to ME! This is the cool part! So I'm in this weird maze of rooms and corridors, all underground, all dark and dank, all very seriously dangerous and potentially ready to FUCK YOU UP in horribly creepy and disturbing ways. Like, there were these teenagers, different people than the aforementioned kids (I think, if I wanted to make a plausible back-story, other hapless young travellers-about who fell into the Ice-Queen's trap and have wandered her black and heartless domain for many years, longing for home), who passed by these mirrors and were helplessly drawn towards them. They passed through them, only to step right back out... but always aged, different, sadder, frightened, a little bit closer to death. And always unable to mention what happened behind the mirror, or how long they had been there. And, perhaps strangest, was that the other people, after walking a bit and comforting their rejoined companion, would always step into another mirror a little further along, heedless of the obvious horrible fate that awaited them on the other side. What I loved about this dream, though, is how minimalist it was. I've had dreams like this in the past, but only like a fragment of the coolness, and instead of two or three people drawn into mirrors, it would be an infinite column of helpless souls, for whatever reason -- and this always precipitated a tired dream-nausea, the kind where you just get sick of the sheer endless mind-crunching repetition of the one particular dream-aspect that your brain has fixated on. Not so in this dream... it kept changing, one wondrous thing to the next!
Okay, so I wander through some more rooms, which frankly have kind of blurred and been forgotten (I am amazed I remember as much as I do), when I find myself in this long corridor. It's very narrow, and there are thick metallic doors with spikes and skull-holes and pointing things and leather straps and all manner of creepy looking materials. They practically SCREAM do not enter. I walk the length of the hall, and notice there are like six doors. Exactly six. I get to the end and there's a plaque on the wall that reads, quite clearly, "There is only one door that leads from this room." I was like, "Shit." Which one? They all look so evil! So I walk back a bit, thinking, "Fuck, this must be like some horrific nightmarish version of the Price is Right, and I gotta choose the right demonic door, or die." But then I think, no way man, that shit's for morons. I see a little panel between two of the skull doors, right in the middle of the room, and it seems slightly loose at the base, as if pulling away from the wall - so I kick it! Sure enough, it opens, revealing another corridor! YES!!!
I run through, and I swear to god I'm thinking to myself, "Man, I'm smarter than the average bear!" So this corridor runs about 15 feet before widening into a little rectangular alcove, and who do I meet there? MOTHER FUCKING DERRIDA! Only it's not true life-size Derrida, but a short gnome-ish replacement Derrida with the amazing mass of white hair and a tiny notepad. He is scribbling frantically on his notepad, and I'm thinking, "Holy shit, this dream is amazing, it has Derrida." So I stoop down and start talking to him, and of course he's clearly a nutter, and is writing out the letters of his name, which actually spelled something weird and vaguely Czech, like Huertek Seuzok, which frankly did not conflict at all with his being Derrida, and he was conducting some intense numerology on the letters of the name, whereby he added up all the alphabetical numbers corresponding to each letter, which produced something insanely beautiful or weird or inexplicable, and of course I kind of lost the thread of what he was going on about and kept wandering. But holy shit!
So then, honestly, my dream had this amazing cinematic brilliance to it. It CUT, like CHANGE SCENE, and I swear to god it switches to this image of a little garden in a field, with forest in the distance, and everything is obscured by this thick wavy hazy blue, as if there's like a dome of translucent energy hovering above me, or maybe it's because I'm inside the head of an encephalopod, but in any case the blue is really beautiful and surreal like this Japanese photo I once saw of tall spruce trees in winter, seen through a colour-filter. And it gets weirder! There are these little root-shaped holes in the soil, with rooty tendrils writhing above them, scattered all over the garden... and this army of carrots in the distance is charging and bounding towards the waiting tendrils, and they JUMP IN, and the perspective switches a bit to half-above, half-below ground, and I get to see the roots writhe up and into the carrots and then some rabbits or moles or whatever crawling up through the earth to snatch them, presumably for dinner.
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS.
Next scene: Dinner with strange, highly cultured, talking underground mammals! I am here in this beautifully ornate, lavish, GORGEOUS dining room, with a stunning silky table-cloth spread over a massive dark rich mahogany table, cabrioled legs with swirly densely carved patterns, and magnificent plates with shimmering designs. And my mouth is watering, because I know I'm here for dinner (oh yeah, and I need not mention that the end of the dining table vanishes into darkness... along with the fully illuminated room, which has walls, furniture, pictures.. it all just disappears into nothingness). So I'm just about to sit down and enjoy what will no-doubt be a splendid meal, shared with my rabbit-person friends, when one of them stops me and points to a picture on the wall, which is a picture of his family - all animals of some kind - enjoying their meal around this table. I instantly understand, though am a bit hurt: no people allowed at the rabbit dinner table. I feel a little sad, but they very kindly usher me into a smaller room with a much less ornate table. They join me for dinner, and the patriarch or top-bunny sits at the head, and starts telling me about some of the food, as I pick it up.
So I get these plastic tube-like things... I mean I think they were plastic, but maybe they were alabaster. I'm a little puzzled by them, but then I understand that they contain pure oyster flesh, which I suck down without much hesitation. A bit salty but otherwise good. I think I did vaguely recall being vegetarian, but I didn't want to offend my guests by refusing food.
Oh yeah, I forgot, right before being seated one of the rabbit-women tells me they're having breakfast... but I know for some reason that the time is 9:30pm. Which doesn't seem to bother them at all. So I ask them what they eat when they wake up, and this really throws them for a loop - so I sort of back off from the subject, not wanting to upset them.
Okay, back to the table and meal! What a wondrous feast! They brought out this platter of what looks like these kind of spade-shaped pastries, kind of dark, almost black in places, a bit lighter in others. Splotchy colour distribution, but with a nice floury texture. I grab one and start eating, and it's delicious! It's got a very subdued sweetness, kind of like Pain Sucré, but only more doughy and just overall tastier. Kind of dense but not overly filling. They informed me that they were called Sukroses, and they only served them at awkward or unpleasant dinners. I nodded happily, not seeming to care that this very probably referred to me.
There was another dish of similar looking pastries, only a bit larger and flatter, which were savory. They tasted a lot like baked Thyme pastry might taste... very delicious, but not sweet at all. I preferred the sweet ones, and took another.
And then I noticed the tablecloth. It had these complicated spiral patterns that were like holes in the cloth, but probably weren't in fact holes because, really, they covered the entire cloth and that would seriously disturb the structural integrity of the fabric, and plus they had this beautiful mosaic quality... very multi-colored and intertwining.
So the patriarch-bunny is standing across from me and smiling jovially. He says that I should trace my sensation into the fabric, and I do this while sucking down another oyster. Sure enough a little pattern traces itself into the cloth, imbued with my emotions and memory of the recent experience. He then explains that it takes them several hours to re-experience all the patterns, but I should try one! So, of course, I run my finger through one... it's really intricate and the pattern is a bit hard to follow, but gives me this really refreshing kind of water-swimming vibe.
And then I wake up! What a wonderful dream.
And of course this was all supposed to be like the exciting and mysterious events happening to non-central yet nevertheless startlingly heroic characters somewhere else on the Island. (Aside: I write this energized from glorious dream-filled sleep, whilst listening to Berlioz' Dream of the Witches' Sabbath, which is so phenomenally appropriate to the impending contents of my dream that I am giddy with the awesome aesthetic wonderfulness of it all.)
So anyway, Hercules and captive, and quite possibly other runners-along (whose faces and identities remain somewhat ambiguous, but were undoubtedly heroic), find some kind of burrow with magical properties and dive headfirst into it. These people did everything with gusto! Anyhow, after diving underground, they become prisoners of some weird Cabbalistic underworld community with a strange ice queen. The details are a bit fuzzy, but I do recall stalactites, corridors, and frenetic dancing.
Okay, so anyway, cut to other characters. Scene II. These were children. I think a boy and girl of like 12 or 14 (which is where the dream became very Alice in Wonderlandish). Oh yeah, and there was a talking bushy white dog, with tremendous sagacity that the above children invariably ignored.
But the dream wasn't from their perspective per se. I think it sort of passed by them in third person, and then became first person, whereupon I, myself, became the hero. This was the really cool part. But anyway, I'll get to that.
So these kids are like wandering around this forest or swamp or field, the details aren't really clear, and they happen upon this crystalline tent structure, and of course step inside it. There's a throne sitting there, in the middle of this room, and the room is conjoined to another room by a constricting pink spiderweb-like mesh, that only small mole-like creatures can pass through, and they can only pass through it because they are carrying beautiful purple-pink flowers that, with that special breed of dream-omniscience, I knew were intoxicating and particularly special. And so, as the moles went to and fro through the mesh, the fibres would tremble and constrict and stuff, widening to let them by.
So, moving on, the kids are in this room, and are looking around and stuff. Then the aforementioned ice princess steps in and starts talking to them. About wonders, and duty, and how there is an exciting life for them through the tunnel. The kids get weirded out, but are of course naturally curious, and start to approach the tunnel. The unerringly sagacious dog steps in and says, "No, let me examine it first. It may not be safe." Which he tries to do, and is instantly snatched up by the weird mesh and transported to some strange subterannean prison, no doubt to be tortured and tickled into a hapless state of merely faithful, not sagacious, dog-servitude. The children, quite understandably, totally fucking flip out and make a dash for the exit, which is instantly blocked by a cloudy gossamer fabric, which is in fact only superficially gossamer and really quite strong on the microscopic, uber-magical, fibrous level. And it expands to fill the little gaps to the side and below, when the children try to squeeze around it.
And then, strangely enough, Hercules appears behind the mesh and starts pounding on it, to no avail. Much hysteria, much sobbing, and then end of scene.
Cut to ME! This is the cool part! So I'm in this weird maze of rooms and corridors, all underground, all dark and dank, all very seriously dangerous and potentially ready to FUCK YOU UP in horribly creepy and disturbing ways. Like, there were these teenagers, different people than the aforementioned kids (I think, if I wanted to make a plausible back-story, other hapless young travellers-about who fell into the Ice-Queen's trap and have wandered her black and heartless domain for many years, longing for home), who passed by these mirrors and were helplessly drawn towards them. They passed through them, only to step right back out... but always aged, different, sadder, frightened, a little bit closer to death. And always unable to mention what happened behind the mirror, or how long they had been there. And, perhaps strangest, was that the other people, after walking a bit and comforting their rejoined companion, would always step into another mirror a little further along, heedless of the obvious horrible fate that awaited them on the other side. What I loved about this dream, though, is how minimalist it was. I've had dreams like this in the past, but only like a fragment of the coolness, and instead of two or three people drawn into mirrors, it would be an infinite column of helpless souls, for whatever reason -- and this always precipitated a tired dream-nausea, the kind where you just get sick of the sheer endless mind-crunching repetition of the one particular dream-aspect that your brain has fixated on. Not so in this dream... it kept changing, one wondrous thing to the next!
Okay, so I wander through some more rooms, which frankly have kind of blurred and been forgotten (I am amazed I remember as much as I do), when I find myself in this long corridor. It's very narrow, and there are thick metallic doors with spikes and skull-holes and pointing things and leather straps and all manner of creepy looking materials. They practically SCREAM do not enter. I walk the length of the hall, and notice there are like six doors. Exactly six. I get to the end and there's a plaque on the wall that reads, quite clearly, "There is only one door that leads from this room." I was like, "Shit." Which one? They all look so evil! So I walk back a bit, thinking, "Fuck, this must be like some horrific nightmarish version of the Price is Right, and I gotta choose the right demonic door, or die." But then I think, no way man, that shit's for morons. I see a little panel between two of the skull doors, right in the middle of the room, and it seems slightly loose at the base, as if pulling away from the wall - so I kick it! Sure enough, it opens, revealing another corridor! YES!!!
I run through, and I swear to god I'm thinking to myself, "Man, I'm smarter than the average bear!" So this corridor runs about 15 feet before widening into a little rectangular alcove, and who do I meet there? MOTHER FUCKING DERRIDA! Only it's not true life-size Derrida, but a short gnome-ish replacement Derrida with the amazing mass of white hair and a tiny notepad. He is scribbling frantically on his notepad, and I'm thinking, "Holy shit, this dream is amazing, it has Derrida." So I stoop down and start talking to him, and of course he's clearly a nutter, and is writing out the letters of his name, which actually spelled something weird and vaguely Czech, like Huertek Seuzok, which frankly did not conflict at all with his being Derrida, and he was conducting some intense numerology on the letters of the name, whereby he added up all the alphabetical numbers corresponding to each letter, which produced something insanely beautiful or weird or inexplicable, and of course I kind of lost the thread of what he was going on about and kept wandering. But holy shit!
So then, honestly, my dream had this amazing cinematic brilliance to it. It CUT, like CHANGE SCENE, and I swear to god it switches to this image of a little garden in a field, with forest in the distance, and everything is obscured by this thick wavy hazy blue, as if there's like a dome of translucent energy hovering above me, or maybe it's because I'm inside the head of an encephalopod, but in any case the blue is really beautiful and surreal like this Japanese photo I once saw of tall spruce trees in winter, seen through a colour-filter. And it gets weirder! There are these little root-shaped holes in the soil, with rooty tendrils writhing above them, scattered all over the garden... and this army of carrots in the distance is charging and bounding towards the waiting tendrils, and they JUMP IN, and the perspective switches a bit to half-above, half-below ground, and I get to see the roots writhe up and into the carrots and then some rabbits or moles or whatever crawling up through the earth to snatch them, presumably for dinner.
WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS.
Next scene: Dinner with strange, highly cultured, talking underground mammals! I am here in this beautifully ornate, lavish, GORGEOUS dining room, with a stunning silky table-cloth spread over a massive dark rich mahogany table, cabrioled legs with swirly densely carved patterns, and magnificent plates with shimmering designs. And my mouth is watering, because I know I'm here for dinner (oh yeah, and I need not mention that the end of the dining table vanishes into darkness... along with the fully illuminated room, which has walls, furniture, pictures.. it all just disappears into nothingness). So I'm just about to sit down and enjoy what will no-doubt be a splendid meal, shared with my rabbit-person friends, when one of them stops me and points to a picture on the wall, which is a picture of his family - all animals of some kind - enjoying their meal around this table. I instantly understand, though am a bit hurt: no people allowed at the rabbit dinner table. I feel a little sad, but they very kindly usher me into a smaller room with a much less ornate table. They join me for dinner, and the patriarch or top-bunny sits at the head, and starts telling me about some of the food, as I pick it up.
So I get these plastic tube-like things... I mean I think they were plastic, but maybe they were alabaster. I'm a little puzzled by them, but then I understand that they contain pure oyster flesh, which I suck down without much hesitation. A bit salty but otherwise good. I think I did vaguely recall being vegetarian, but I didn't want to offend my guests by refusing food.
Oh yeah, I forgot, right before being seated one of the rabbit-women tells me they're having breakfast... but I know for some reason that the time is 9:30pm. Which doesn't seem to bother them at all. So I ask them what they eat when they wake up, and this really throws them for a loop - so I sort of back off from the subject, not wanting to upset them.
Okay, back to the table and meal! What a wondrous feast! They brought out this platter of what looks like these kind of spade-shaped pastries, kind of dark, almost black in places, a bit lighter in others. Splotchy colour distribution, but with a nice floury texture. I grab one and start eating, and it's delicious! It's got a very subdued sweetness, kind of like Pain Sucré, but only more doughy and just overall tastier. Kind of dense but not overly filling. They informed me that they were called Sukroses, and they only served them at awkward or unpleasant dinners. I nodded happily, not seeming to care that this very probably referred to me.
There was another dish of similar looking pastries, only a bit larger and flatter, which were savory. They tasted a lot like baked Thyme pastry might taste... very delicious, but not sweet at all. I preferred the sweet ones, and took another.
And then I noticed the tablecloth. It had these complicated spiral patterns that were like holes in the cloth, but probably weren't in fact holes because, really, they covered the entire cloth and that would seriously disturb the structural integrity of the fabric, and plus they had this beautiful mosaic quality... very multi-colored and intertwining.
So the patriarch-bunny is standing across from me and smiling jovially. He says that I should trace my sensation into the fabric, and I do this while sucking down another oyster. Sure enough a little pattern traces itself into the cloth, imbued with my emotions and memory of the recent experience. He then explains that it takes them several hours to re-experience all the patterns, but I should try one! So, of course, I run my finger through one... it's really intricate and the pattern is a bit hard to follow, but gives me this really refreshing kind of water-swimming vibe.
And then I wake up! What a wonderful dream.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
A Little Wayward Writing
It has only ocurred to me in retrospect how ridiculously (and unintentionally) full of sublimated Freudian imagery my previous post is. Kind of hilarious to me, now, that I look upon it. Incidentally, for anyone reading this blog through my Facebook feed, you won't get the full ASCII effect unless you visit the blogspot page.
Anyway, been a wretchedly long time since my previous post, and the remaining unrelated bits about my New York trip are rapidly becoming ancient history, though still well worth telling. Too bad that's not what I'm going to do today.
Was thinking about how writing, and language, and in particular English (for me, at least until I properly learn French), has this wonderful potential rhythm and cadence and lyricism, and how really rarely it is exploited in ordinary speech, and even your run of the mill generic prose. So I was thinking about trying my hand, absurdly, foolishly, self-indulgently, at crafting a little bit of, well, I suppose you might call it... poetry. But, bah, labels. They're not worth the paper they're printed on.
So today I just wanted to see if I could, you know, fool around with my own internal perception, my own "palatal" conception, of cadence, of rhythm, of flow and sonality.... and determine whether I can, perhaps with some luck, produce a fragment halfway... erhmmmm... well, you know what I mean. And, whatever you do, please don't take the following too seriously.
The Troll Who Lost His Way
There was a troll, once upon a day, who felt the ground upon his way, and in his act of feeling lost his trail through fleeting fitful glimpses of the ceiling, the dusty draughty fitful fleeting glimpses of sweet sky-filled ceiling, which wistful, wanton, wondrous misty sight that sailed into his eyes, went whither when it could and would, and did take from him his sight, said troll, now made unseeing, and he, unfeeling, left lonely listless leering bits of sadenned, madenned, hurt and tearing, bits all verging on the meaning of becoming ill and searing, all this felt while fraught in tarnished badlands, old and bleary, blistered weary, sadenned by the deadly dreary death-filled heath and hearthless fear-inducing blasted busted bested crested nightmarish nested homes of vicious, mongrel wispsy men and things all dead and scarry, snarly spiteful spitting acid seething creatures full of hate and bile, clinging long along the walls of crumbly cracked and splintered halls, and falling castles and towers tall, old things all, and always falling, down into the splintered bramble-crackly and fire-eaten, storm-wind beaten, wounded, wimpering, haunted, helpless, heathen bogs and fogs and windy paths 'twixt broken logs, down and down, he, sightless, fell, this trollish beast who meant no harm and by and by broke his arm, and leg, and teeth, and neck and back and tore his skin and split his limbs, and there and then upon a blackened, blasted, burned and wasted, sharp and painful mound of hay, he lay and lay and sighed and stayed.
Day in and out and out and in, the days passed long and harsh and thin, and man and woman, beast and bird, passed by the broken troll, now burned and bruised and beaten, all sick and sad and eaten, all lean and mean and all alone, they passed by him one and all, and built above him stone by stone, by wood and beams, by sweat and blood and tears and fear, a tower tall and great and wide, and step by step the tower rose, each step above the one before another testament to wealth and more, and prosperous kings and queens and lords gushed gold and gems and treasures for this tower that, above our troll, just grew and grew in fame and lore, but always in that place remained, beneath the dark and musty base, below the lowest stone and brace, a single, broken, unwanted troll, hurt and sick and all disdained, a troll who, one sad and distant day, his fingers down upon his trail, his mind and soul both torn and frail, glanced upwards till his eyes did fail, and then forever lost his way.
Well, there it is. I have no fucking idea what it means. Hope you liked it!
Anyway, been a wretchedly long time since my previous post, and the remaining unrelated bits about my New York trip are rapidly becoming ancient history, though still well worth telling. Too bad that's not what I'm going to do today.
Was thinking about how writing, and language, and in particular English (for me, at least until I properly learn French), has this wonderful potential rhythm and cadence and lyricism, and how really rarely it is exploited in ordinary speech, and even your run of the mill generic prose. So I was thinking about trying my hand, absurdly, foolishly, self-indulgently, at crafting a little bit of, well, I suppose you might call it... poetry. But, bah, labels. They're not worth the paper they're printed on.
So today I just wanted to see if I could, you know, fool around with my own internal perception, my own "palatal" conception, of cadence, of rhythm, of flow and sonality.... and determine whether I can, perhaps with some luck, produce a fragment halfway... erhmmmm... well, you know what I mean. And, whatever you do, please don't take the following too seriously.
The Troll Who Lost His Way
There was a troll, once upon a day, who felt the ground upon his way, and in his act of feeling lost his trail through fleeting fitful glimpses of the ceiling, the dusty draughty fitful fleeting glimpses of sweet sky-filled ceiling, which wistful, wanton, wondrous misty sight that sailed into his eyes, went whither when it could and would, and did take from him his sight, said troll, now made unseeing, and he, unfeeling, left lonely listless leering bits of sadenned, madenned, hurt and tearing, bits all verging on the meaning of becoming ill and searing, all this felt while fraught in tarnished badlands, old and bleary, blistered weary, sadenned by the deadly dreary death-filled heath and hearthless fear-inducing blasted busted bested crested nightmarish nested homes of vicious, mongrel wispsy men and things all dead and scarry, snarly spiteful spitting acid seething creatures full of hate and bile, clinging long along the walls of crumbly cracked and splintered halls, and falling castles and towers tall, old things all, and always falling, down into the splintered bramble-crackly and fire-eaten, storm-wind beaten, wounded, wimpering, haunted, helpless, heathen bogs and fogs and windy paths 'twixt broken logs, down and down, he, sightless, fell, this trollish beast who meant no harm and by and by broke his arm, and leg, and teeth, and neck and back and tore his skin and split his limbs, and there and then upon a blackened, blasted, burned and wasted, sharp and painful mound of hay, he lay and lay and sighed and stayed.
Day in and out and out and in, the days passed long and harsh and thin, and man and woman, beast and bird, passed by the broken troll, now burned and bruised and beaten, all sick and sad and eaten, all lean and mean and all alone, they passed by him one and all, and built above him stone by stone, by wood and beams, by sweat and blood and tears and fear, a tower tall and great and wide, and step by step the tower rose, each step above the one before another testament to wealth and more, and prosperous kings and queens and lords gushed gold and gems and treasures for this tower that, above our troll, just grew and grew in fame and lore, but always in that place remained, beneath the dark and musty base, below the lowest stone and brace, a single, broken, unwanted troll, hurt and sick and all disdained, a troll who, one sad and distant day, his fingers down upon his trail, his mind and soul both torn and frail, glanced upwards till his eyes did fail, and then forever lost his way.
Well, there it is. I have no fucking idea what it means. Hope you liked it!
Friday, February 9, 2007
The Metaphorical Submarine of Destiny
I suppose I should mention, to those who happened upon my earlier post concerning the inevitable disastrous collapse of my entire post-secondary education (most likely in a giantesque bonfire of elaborate and highly pretentious papers on Dante, being the most readily available source of kindling in the College of the Humanities), that in fact the situation HAS BEEN AVERTED. The large, metaphorical submarine that symbolizes my
**
***
*****
PRODIGIOUS LEARNING
*****
***
**
has narrowly missed the deep and frightening Underwater Rock Face of Much and Unwanted Scraping and Puncturing (aka FAILURE).
Here, I shall diagram it for you.
Before:
Now:
As it turns out, the cause of my spontaneous existential crisis -- which had me entirely convinced that I would not only fail to graduate, but live with my parents for the next thirty years, turn morbidly obese, become the first human to contract an STD by watching television, and slowly decay into a pile of wretched human misery -- was, wait for it, A TYPO. Yes, god bless them, the registrar's office mistakenly reported that the due date for my final transcript from Athabasca university was Feb. 15th. It is, in fact, May 1st.
This means I can continue along my happy little academic journey and become all the things I mentioned above, only with a DEGREE to stare up at wistfully as I pull another creamy Joe Louis from the nearby fridge with my extensible mechanical appendage grafted to my waist with high-tech sweat-resistent polymers. Golly, isn't the future just dazzling?
**
***
*****
PRODIGIOUS LEARNING
*****
***
**
has narrowly missed the deep and frightening Underwater Rock Face of Much and Unwanted Scraping and Puncturing (aka FAILURE).
Here, I shall diagram it for you.
Before:
#@
- - - - - PRODIGIOUS LEARNING #@ EVIL ROCK FACE
#@ (FAILURE)
Now:
- _
-_ #@
P #@ EVIL ROCK FACE (NOW THWARTED)
R #@
O
D
I
G
As it turns out, the cause of my spontaneous existential crisis -- which had me entirely convinced that I would not only fail to graduate, but live with my parents for the next thirty years, turn morbidly obese, become the first human to contract an STD by watching television, and slowly decay into a pile of wretched human misery -- was, wait for it, A TYPO. Yes, god bless them, the registrar's office mistakenly reported that the due date for my final transcript from Athabasca university was Feb. 15th. It is, in fact, May 1st.
This means I can continue along my happy little academic journey and become all the things I mentioned above, only with a DEGREE to stare up at wistfully as I pull another creamy Joe Louis from the nearby fridge with my extensible mechanical appendage grafted to my waist with high-tech sweat-resistent polymers. Golly, isn't the future just dazzling?
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Cinema of the Future!
Well, it's been a week since my last post. Which probably means this blog thing has become, at least inadvertently, a weekly event. I mean, for good reason, what with my being in Ottawa, and the marked increase in interiority this seems to bring about. Gone flashing lights, hello endless winter of the soul! Hah.
What's happened? Well, a lot, really. I suppose I shouldn't be too unhappy, since where else but in Ottawa can you see someone biking in -20 degree temperature, at about midnight, with an accordion strapped across his chest? I wonder where he could possibly have been going?
MOST PLAUSIBLE SCENARIO POSSIBLE:
Tall, mustachioed gentleman, wearing a crushed purple velvet suit, hair all pomade-slick: "ORDER! ORDER! ACCORDIONS AT REST! Welcome all to Ottawa's first official Underground Marxist-Leninist Winter Accordion-Biker Festival!"
"HERE HERE!!"
"We are gathered here today, in this large abandoned government warehouse - with wheelchair access for Stevie -"
"HI STEVIE!!"
"to HERALD THE DESTRUCTION OF CAPITALISM! PLAY ON COMRADES! PLAY ON!"
But in all seriousness, there's a lot of stuff. It has ocurred to me that it is simply no longer viable to ramble on and on interminably, you know, factoring in as I have done (with complex mathematical and statistical measuring devices) the precise duration of a typical person's attention span. So, for a change, I will attempt henceforth to keep my rambling short, sweet, but considerably more frequent.
Wonder how that'll work out.
To begin (and end) today's ramble, for it is my intention to linger on the subject of New York until I've exhausted my supply of delicious memories (no, honestly, the food! the FOOD! if you could only eat these thoughts!), today's topic will be:
DREW'S MOVIE REVIEWS!
Well, I considered using the ever-more cutesy "REVIEWIES", but then felt the last shred of my masculinity disappearing, and so I didn't.
In New York it was my ambition, since it is truly the CITY OF LIGHT
(being all flashy and blinky and stuff, and did I mention I am particularly awed by all things shiny and flickering in nature? especially when they loom above you like tall, glimmering tombstones)
to attend as many excellent films of no fewer than 5 stars in quality.
Internal Philo-Art Snob: "You know, Andrew, that whole 'star' rating thing is entirely arbitrary, and stems from a bloated economic infrastructure designed to pander to the basest common-denominator in consumer gullibility, and in no way accurately reflects the inherent, and fundamentally subjective worth of a film"
Drew the Intrepid Movie Reviewer: I WILL NOT BE CULLED BY YOUR LIES!
Film, the First! (Please note, since films are by their nature full of excitement, this blog entry shall contain an abnormally high! quantity of exclamation marks)
Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno)
by
Guillermo del Toro
This film truly requires no introduction. Or review, for that matter. Go see it if you like Spanish people, civil wars, gobs of fertility symbolism, subdued Christian allegory, and imaginative creatures with hand-eyes.
I was going to rate this film something like "SHALO-", you know, as kind of like an almost-complete "shalom", because I swear to g-d that word is easily six times funnier when I say it. Unfortunately, it sounded like "SHALLOW", which is utterly inaccurate for this film, so instead I'm gonna give it:
4/5 Giant Leaping Tortoises with Flaming Wings that Double as Portals to a Secret Dimension Full of Cake
Film, the Second!
The Departed
by
Martin Scorcese
Premise: Take the very very first time you ever played Cops and Robbers, as you fired your clickety plastic orange gun and shouted hysterical taunts you believed were totally representive of the way both cops and robbers spoke, especially to each other, like:
"I'M GONNA GET YOU!"
"DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!!"
"Bzoo! Bzoo! Bzoo!"
"Pow! Pow! Pow!"
"I GOT YOU! I GOT YOU!"
"NO YOU DIDN'T! I HIT YOU FIRST!"
and then hone in on the nagging thought, steadily dawning on you, that, Gosh, if you really wanted you could pretend to be EITHER a cop OR a robber, expand that notion into an extremely long script without significantly altering the above dialogue, hire every bloody well-known actor on the planet, give it to Martin Scorcese, and BOOM! You'll have Departed (ohhhhhhh that one was bad).
I give this film a hefty 3.5/5 Ingenious Plot Twists (though in fact the movie possessed something more on the order of 15).
Film, the Third!
Children of Men
by
Alfonso Cuarón
Honestly, I am a bit speechless about this film. It is amazing. It is so good in fact that my typically childish and irreverent tone fails me, almost completely. The movie is brilliant, gripping, gorgeous, visceral, detailed, and best of all - post-apocalyptic sci-fi!
I am, and have been for some time now, a /huge/ lover of this genre. I will not lie, the origins of this crush are nestled somewhere in the dark recesses of my video-gaming past, in the creepy Mutant-filled depths of a certain FALLOUT 2. But really not even there. No, rather, in the mother fuckin' brilliant Louis Armstrong "Kiss to Build a Dream On" opening video with backdrop of horrific nuclear annihilation, the destruction of all earthly hope and order, and the savage reality of the deadly driven winds of atomic winter... the chills! the nerdy but awe-inspiring chills!
Woaahh Nellie. I think a went a little code-red on the geek scale for a minute there. Sorry about that.
If the genre, top-notch cinematography, acting, set design, suspense, and overall majesty of the whole film are not enough to get you to see this movie, then let it be known that two of the most intense, continuous, cut-free scenes I have ever seen in any film (even (marginally) surpassing the like 8-minute one-take fight scene in Hard Boiled with Chow Yun Fat that spans several floors of a building, via elevator, and contains lots of really flexible kicking), are here, in all their mind-blowing glory.
I can't describe... I just can't find the words... the words..... THEY SHOULD HAVE SENT A POET! Fuck it, I'll just draw the awesomeness of one of the scenes for you:
Children of Men: 5/5 Geniuses in Total, Eerily Almost-Telepathic, Agreement
Now stop reading and go see it, before the world really /does/ end and you miss your chance!
What's happened? Well, a lot, really. I suppose I shouldn't be too unhappy, since where else but in Ottawa can you see someone biking in -20 degree temperature, at about midnight, with an accordion strapped across his chest? I wonder where he could possibly have been going?
MOST PLAUSIBLE SCENARIO POSSIBLE:
Tall, mustachioed gentleman, wearing a crushed purple velvet suit, hair all pomade-slick: "ORDER! ORDER! ACCORDIONS AT REST! Welcome all to Ottawa's first official Underground Marxist-Leninist Winter Accordion-Biker Festival!"
"HERE HERE!!"
"We are gathered here today, in this large abandoned government warehouse - with wheelchair access for Stevie -"
"HI STEVIE!!"
"to HERALD THE DESTRUCTION OF CAPITALISM! PLAY ON COMRADES! PLAY ON!"
But in all seriousness, there's a lot of stuff. It has ocurred to me that it is simply no longer viable to ramble on and on interminably, you know, factoring in as I have done (with complex mathematical and statistical measuring devices) the precise duration of a typical person's attention span. So, for a change, I will attempt henceforth to keep my rambling short, sweet, but considerably more frequent.
Wonder how that'll work out.
To begin (and end) today's ramble, for it is my intention to linger on the subject of New York until I've exhausted my supply of delicious memories (no, honestly, the food! the FOOD! if you could only eat these thoughts!), today's topic will be:
DREW'S MOVIE REVIEWS!
Well, I considered using the ever-more cutesy "REVIEWIES", but then felt the last shred of my masculinity disappearing, and so I didn't.
In New York it was my ambition, since it is truly the CITY OF LIGHT
(being all flashy and blinky and stuff, and did I mention I am particularly awed by all things shiny and flickering in nature? especially when they loom above you like tall, glimmering tombstones)
to attend as many excellent films of no fewer than 5 stars in quality.
Internal Philo-Art Snob: "You know, Andrew, that whole 'star' rating thing is entirely arbitrary, and stems from a bloated economic infrastructure designed to pander to the basest common-denominator in consumer gullibility, and in no way accurately reflects the inherent, and fundamentally subjective worth of a film"
Drew the Intrepid Movie Reviewer: I WILL NOT BE CULLED BY YOUR LIES!
Film, the First! (Please note, since films are by their nature full of excitement, this blog entry shall contain an abnormally high! quantity of exclamation marks)
Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno)
by
Guillermo del Toro
This film truly requires no introduction. Or review, for that matter. Go see it if you like Spanish people, civil wars, gobs of fertility symbolism, subdued Christian allegory, and imaginative creatures with hand-eyes.
I was going to rate this film something like "SHALO-", you know, as kind of like an almost-complete "shalom", because I swear to g-d that word is easily six times funnier when I say it. Unfortunately, it sounded like "SHALLOW", which is utterly inaccurate for this film, so instead I'm gonna give it:
4/5 Giant Leaping Tortoises with Flaming Wings that Double as Portals to a Secret Dimension Full of Cake
Film, the Second!
The Departed
by
Martin Scorcese
Premise: Take the very very first time you ever played Cops and Robbers, as you fired your clickety plastic orange gun and shouted hysterical taunts you believed were totally representive of the way both cops and robbers spoke, especially to each other, like:
"I'M GONNA GET YOU!"
"DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!!!"
"Bzoo! Bzoo! Bzoo!"
"Pow! Pow! Pow!"
"I GOT YOU! I GOT YOU!"
"NO YOU DIDN'T! I HIT YOU FIRST!"
and then hone in on the nagging thought, steadily dawning on you, that, Gosh, if you really wanted you could pretend to be EITHER a cop OR a robber, expand that notion into an extremely long script without significantly altering the above dialogue, hire every bloody well-known actor on the planet, give it to Martin Scorcese, and BOOM! You'll have Departed (ohhhhhhh that one was bad).
I give this film a hefty 3.5/5 Ingenious Plot Twists (though in fact the movie possessed something more on the order of 15).
Film, the Third!
Children of Men
by
Alfonso Cuarón
Honestly, I am a bit speechless about this film. It is amazing. It is so good in fact that my typically childish and irreverent tone fails me, almost completely. The movie is brilliant, gripping, gorgeous, visceral, detailed, and best of all - post-apocalyptic sci-fi!
I am, and have been for some time now, a /huge/ lover of this genre. I will not lie, the origins of this crush are nestled somewhere in the dark recesses of my video-gaming past, in the creepy Mutant-filled depths of a certain FALLOUT 2. But really not even there. No, rather, in the mother fuckin' brilliant Louis Armstrong "Kiss to Build a Dream On" opening video with backdrop of horrific nuclear annihilation, the destruction of all earthly hope and order, and the savage reality of the deadly driven winds of atomic winter... the chills! the nerdy but awe-inspiring chills!
Woaahh Nellie. I think a went a little code-red on the geek scale for a minute there. Sorry about that.
If the genre, top-notch cinematography, acting, set design, suspense, and overall majesty of the whole film are not enough to get you to see this movie, then let it be known that two of the most intense, continuous, cut-free scenes I have ever seen in any film (even (marginally) surpassing the like 8-minute one-take fight scene in Hard Boiled with Chow Yun Fat that spans several floors of a building, via elevator, and contains lots of really flexible kicking), are here, in all their mind-blowing glory.
I can't describe... I just can't find the words... the words..... THEY SHOULD HAVE SENT A POET! Fuck it, I'll just draw the awesomeness of one of the scenes for you:
Children of Men: 5/5 Geniuses in Total, Eerily Almost-Telepathic, Agreement
Now stop reading and go see it, before the world really /does/ end and you miss your chance!
Thursday, February 1, 2007
The Journey Home (and what the little Jew found there)
Holy shit. There is so much to report, and so little time to do it, so I've come to a sort of compromise with myself. I'm going to type REALLY REALLY quickly in an attempt to compress the totality of this past week into the smallest time space imaginable! In this way I will emerge victorious over fate, destiny, and fatalist destinies.
In other news, I am no longer in New York. I have arrived, safe and soundly, with snow crunching beneath my feet, in the Nation's Capital. Comic interlude:
AMERICAN BORDER SECURITY *DUM DUM DA DUM DUM DUUUUUMMMMM*
Malicious sergeant/small-penis-man/border patrol terrorist insurrection put-downing specialist/aka urban warfare against the mofucking evil of canadian tourists and their flap-eared hats, god damn freedom hating flap-ear wearing commie sludge-sucking pro-health-care pansy lily-sniffing wimps! (-hater): ALRIGHT YOU BITCHES, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SIT DOWN! (As previously reported... though I never realized how true it is that some people literally talk in capitals, before that night)
VERSUS
Canadian Civilized Cross-Country Communication and Civility Courtesy Consortium (aka CANADIAN BORDER SECURITY *dum da dee twiddly da doo twiddly twiddly doo dop baaaaa*): Hi there! Did you pack your luggage? Oh that's wonderful. Are you carrying any firearms or other weapons that might pose a potentially hazardous threat to the health of your lovely neighbours? No? That's really great. Please carry on and have a splendid early morning!
This has not been an exaggeration.
So on a darker, more sombre, more contemplative, isolated, Jew-alone-in-the-world melancholic kind of reverie thing, as I gazed upon the rolling pre-dawn hills in upstate New York, crested with what was surely a little bit of incipient fog, just waiting to roll down into the slumbering cozy forest-nestled family cottages spotting the land, I decided then and there that the world was beautiful, and you know, anguish-ridden and sad and lonely, but fundamentally in some perservering way beautiful, and would always persist in being so, would always find ways of showing me these fleeting glimpses of beauty, no matter where I went, what I did, or how lonely I by myself became.
And then the hills went their little hilly way, and before I knew which side was Upstate (badum with a muffled ching), I was in Ottawa, and, well, you know how that old wives' tale ends.
And if today's blog appears even marginally more schizophrenic or hysterical and unrestrained than usual it is because of the explosive collusion of different emotions that are currently, probably, wreaking total irresponsible carnage on my spleen and hypothalamus. Not least of my worries is the quite realistically probable possibility that I will not in fact graduate this year, not at all, not even remotely, and be stuck lingering on in perpetual Ottawa-clinging Carleton-snuggling limbo without the stupid piece of processed tree flesh with ink particles that everyone worships and hugs and cherishes and calls by the strange and cryptic title "Deg-Ree." And if they had feet would we call them pedigrees, and feed them, and polish their coats?
But even more troubling is that nagging sentiment in the back of my gut that tells me, in not-so-subtle ways, that maybe what I in fact want is, in the end, NOT to go to grad school, but instead to fuck off, to wander blithely in some foreign country, getting myself into tremendously awkward but retrospectively hilarious situations, and above all to live and live wandering, alone and sometimes not. I'm an idealist, a romantic, a fool, a putz, a yokel, and worst of all a shmuck with a penchant for the melodramatic. But am I a scholar?
So much has happened, and so much continues to happen. There is literally too much to say. I've learned that the eye of a writer, the nack, or the foolhardiness (call it what you will) that enables one to overcome the horrible places of silence, is seeing in the minutae of existence these little fascinating details, and I think part of it is also the ability to shake them loose, shed some light on their brief, fractured, shifting facets, and make of the mundane something new... something transfigured and... and... well... I've used that other word too much today, so best perhaps to shelve it lest it become old and worn like so much tired cloth.
Which is really another long-winded way of saying I'm way too goddamn wired, sleep-deprived (thank jesus for making me immune to the curse of sleep in interminable bus trips, for lord I know not what I would do, being all warm and well-rested like that), and way way too confused to make any kind of coherent statement about anything except my own almost utter incoherence.
But rest assured, there is much still to report from the goings-on that most assuredly went..on.. in New York... not least of which shall include: EXCITING AND SPECIAL MOVIE REVIEWS! Stay tuned!
In other news, I am no longer in New York. I have arrived, safe and soundly, with snow crunching beneath my feet, in the Nation's Capital. Comic interlude:
AMERICAN BORDER SECURITY *DUM DUM DA DUM DUM DUUUUUMMMMM*
Malicious sergeant/small-penis-man/border patrol terrorist insurrection put-downing specialist/aka urban warfare against the mofucking evil of canadian tourists and their flap-eared hats, god damn freedom hating flap-ear wearing commie sludge-sucking pro-health-care pansy lily-sniffing wimps! (-hater): ALRIGHT YOU BITCHES, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND SIT DOWN! (As previously reported... though I never realized how true it is that some people literally talk in capitals, before that night)
VERSUS
Canadian Civilized Cross-Country Communication and Civility Courtesy Consortium (aka CANADIAN BORDER SECURITY *dum da dee twiddly da doo twiddly twiddly doo dop baaaaa*): Hi there! Did you pack your luggage? Oh that's wonderful. Are you carrying any firearms or other weapons that might pose a potentially hazardous threat to the health of your lovely neighbours? No? That's really great. Please carry on and have a splendid early morning!
This has not been an exaggeration.
So on a darker, more sombre, more contemplative, isolated, Jew-alone-in-the-world melancholic kind of reverie thing, as I gazed upon the rolling pre-dawn hills in upstate New York, crested with what was surely a little bit of incipient fog, just waiting to roll down into the slumbering cozy forest-nestled family cottages spotting the land, I decided then and there that the world was beautiful, and you know, anguish-ridden and sad and lonely, but fundamentally in some perservering way beautiful, and would always persist in being so, would always find ways of showing me these fleeting glimpses of beauty, no matter where I went, what I did, or how lonely I by myself became.
And then the hills went their little hilly way, and before I knew which side was Upstate (badum with a muffled ching), I was in Ottawa, and, well, you know how that old wives' tale ends.
And if today's blog appears even marginally more schizophrenic or hysterical and unrestrained than usual it is because of the explosive collusion of different emotions that are currently, probably, wreaking total irresponsible carnage on my spleen and hypothalamus. Not least of my worries is the quite realistically probable possibility that I will not in fact graduate this year, not at all, not even remotely, and be stuck lingering on in perpetual Ottawa-clinging Carleton-snuggling limbo without the stupid piece of processed tree flesh with ink particles that everyone worships and hugs and cherishes and calls by the strange and cryptic title "Deg-Ree." And if they had feet would we call them pedigrees, and feed them, and polish their coats?
But even more troubling is that nagging sentiment in the back of my gut that tells me, in not-so-subtle ways, that maybe what I in fact want is, in the end, NOT to go to grad school, but instead to fuck off, to wander blithely in some foreign country, getting myself into tremendously awkward but retrospectively hilarious situations, and above all to live and live wandering, alone and sometimes not. I'm an idealist, a romantic, a fool, a putz, a yokel, and worst of all a shmuck with a penchant for the melodramatic. But am I a scholar?
So much has happened, and so much continues to happen. There is literally too much to say. I've learned that the eye of a writer, the nack, or the foolhardiness (call it what you will) that enables one to overcome the horrible places of silence, is seeing in the minutae of existence these little fascinating details, and I think part of it is also the ability to shake them loose, shed some light on their brief, fractured, shifting facets, and make of the mundane something new... something transfigured and... and... well... I've used that other word too much today, so best perhaps to shelve it lest it become old and worn like so much tired cloth.
Which is really another long-winded way of saying I'm way too goddamn wired, sleep-deprived (thank jesus for making me immune to the curse of sleep in interminable bus trips, for lord I know not what I would do, being all warm and well-rested like that), and way way too confused to make any kind of coherent statement about anything except my own almost utter incoherence.
But rest assured, there is much still to report from the goings-on that most assuredly went..on.. in New York... not least of which shall include: EXCITING AND SPECIAL MOVIE REVIEWS! Stay tuned!
Sunday, January 28, 2007
The Great Conch of Civilization
Since I've been so sparse with posts lately, I've decided to condense the more interesting aspects of my time in New York into powerful thematic segments.
This segment shall be entitled: ANDREW'S ARTSY ARTNESS!
Well, shortly after the events recorded in my previous blog entry, Madeline, Trish and I decided to visit the Guggenheim.
Madeline and Trish: "We're going to the Guggenheim!"
Andrew: "Okay!"
We agreed to meet there at 6:00pm. They left early and I took my time getting ready. This included eating, showering, plotting out a subway route to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), dressing, double checking the address of the MOMA, cleaning some dishes, pocketing the MOMA information securely, and heading out. I made all my connections brilliantly and arrived at 11 West 53st, the location of the MOMA, with about 15 minutes to spare! I bought myself the juiciest fallafel I have ever eaten - from a street vendor no less! - and waited outside the entrance for the arrival of Trish and Madeline, delicious fallafel juice dripping slowly down my chin...
And...
Did you know you can cab from the MOMA to the Guggenheim in about 15 minutes! It even cuts through central park! Very scenic and fun!
The Guggenheim, for the uninitiated (though you be few), is a large spirally conch-like building with lots of paintings stored inside it. Outsiders, or Non-Guggenheimers as they are called in technical ARTSY language, are permitted for a nominal fee to stare at these paintings, smell them, and pretend to understand their profound significance.
Once you have crossed the invisible and eldritch threshold of "The Guggenheiming", denoted by the Sacred Doors of Revolving, you become temporarily endowed with magical Guggenheim abilities. These abilities enable you to grow steadily tired and cranky and bored over the span of only two hours, culminating in almost total banality.
Using awesome pneumonic techniques of mental cognition, I created a secret chamber in my mind wherein I stored three of the most exquisite paintings from the Guggenheim collection. These paintings, perfectly preserved in my memory, shall now be projected by the miracle of ARTSY technology onto your computer screen.
Painting, the First:
Two Seated Children (Claude and Paloma)
by
Pablo Picasso
Now, before I begin critiquing this painting, let me just say that if I were to write a manifesto for Art Criticism, it would read something like this:
STOP! The unfertile nebulous meandering commentary of bygone years must now cease, under the spectacular moon of new nightly nocturnality! STOP! Pilgrims of the mind! And sow your seeds in fecund loam! The Tyranny of Grist and Grind here-now ENDS!
Of course, if I were ever to write a manifesto for Art Criticism it would probably never get read. Either that, or people would read it with that look of pained forebearance that I so often get.
So, instead, I'll just state my ARTSY prejudices: Art is fun and loose and bendy and stuff. Art Criticism, since it's about art, should be those things too.
Now to begin: ANDREW'S ARTSY ARTNESS!
So basically this Picasso painting really caught my eye. It was sandwiched between a bunch of other austere Spanish paintings of children, both the seated and non-seated varieties, doing such exciting and insightful things as: 1. Staring Directly Ahead; or, 2. Trying to Look Like Adults. Oh yeah, the painters were like El Greco, that other dude who painted royalty, what was his name... and like Velasquez, and probably someone called Sanchez, and Dali too, but you might want to double check the Sanchez.
But this painting.. oh wait, it kind of scrolled off didn't it? Hold on, let me put it up again...
There we go, perfect. See now, THIS painting was like a cross between Tim Burton and Edward Gorey, though of course Picasso preceded both of them, so it's not an apt comparison at all, really. But I think we can tease out their influences here, a sort of seminal piece for future macabre art - a visual manifesto for depicting pale-skinned children backgrounded by a stark, sombre, and yes - pallid - moon. Pallidity being an essential quality in all things macabre.
And anyway it's ghostly and twisted and imaginative and frankly I didn't get that impression from any of the other paintings, mired as they were in the 16th and 17th centuries, poor things. Of course I guess I could talk about the obvious maternal sublimation in the seated posture of the male child in relation to the domineering female presence of his (presumed) sister, whose two-facedness belies a disunity projected in opposition to the comparitive unity and wholeness of the male. I mean, I COULD do that, but it'd be a bloody lot of wank, wouldn't it?
Painting, The Second:
Dead Birds
by
Pablo Picasso
Yes, this painting was also by Picasso (who, though there were paintings by Goya and Dali and other good artists, was by far the most interesting and innovative and, frankly, modern - Dali, my old love, now strikes me as a bit too transparently egoistic). It was nice, cubist, and.. well, I think it would really look good on my wall next to the giant oriental fan.
Painting, the Third:
The Table (Still Life with Rabbit)
by
Joan Miró
This painting appeared in a section dedicated, amazingly, to food. Apparently, Spanish people eat a lot of dead animals. The reason this painting is included here is because of the tripartite symbolic content of the three animals it figures: the fowl is the father, who observes all of the vast, resplendent -- wait for it -- tableau of creation, with his one watchful, unblinking eye. The fish is the holy spirit, because it points always towards the heavens and suffuses everything with a vague, unidentifiable odour. And, finally, the rabbit is the Son, because he kind of looks angry and I think if Christ were around right now he'd be pretty pissed off too.
And that basically concludes the more or less first installation of ANDREW'S ARTSY ARTNESS! Since I also went to the MOMA, and because this post is getting pretty long, my next post will be about that. Tata for now! (This is the official trendy ARTSY farewell.)
This segment shall be entitled: ANDREW'S ARTSY ARTNESS!
Well, shortly after the events recorded in my previous blog entry, Madeline, Trish and I decided to visit the Guggenheim.
Madeline and Trish: "We're going to the Guggenheim!"
Andrew: "Okay!"
We agreed to meet there at 6:00pm. They left early and I took my time getting ready. This included eating, showering, plotting out a subway route to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), dressing, double checking the address of the MOMA, cleaning some dishes, pocketing the MOMA information securely, and heading out. I made all my connections brilliantly and arrived at 11 West 53st, the location of the MOMA, with about 15 minutes to spare! I bought myself the juiciest fallafel I have ever eaten - from a street vendor no less! - and waited outside the entrance for the arrival of Trish and Madeline, delicious fallafel juice dripping slowly down my chin...
And...
Did you know you can cab from the MOMA to the Guggenheim in about 15 minutes! It even cuts through central park! Very scenic and fun!
The Guggenheim, for the uninitiated (though you be few), is a large spirally conch-like building with lots of paintings stored inside it. Outsiders, or Non-Guggenheimers as they are called in technical ARTSY language, are permitted for a nominal fee to stare at these paintings, smell them, and pretend to understand their profound significance.
Once you have crossed the invisible and eldritch threshold of "The Guggenheiming", denoted by the Sacred Doors of Revolving, you become temporarily endowed with magical Guggenheim abilities. These abilities enable you to grow steadily tired and cranky and bored over the span of only two hours, culminating in almost total banality.
Using awesome pneumonic techniques of mental cognition, I created a secret chamber in my mind wherein I stored three of the most exquisite paintings from the Guggenheim collection. These paintings, perfectly preserved in my memory, shall now be projected by the miracle of ARTSY technology onto your computer screen.
Painting, the First:
Two Seated Children (Claude and Paloma)
by
Pablo Picasso
Now, before I begin critiquing this painting, let me just say that if I were to write a manifesto for Art Criticism, it would read something like this:
STOP! The unfertile nebulous meandering commentary of bygone years must now cease, under the spectacular moon of new nightly nocturnality! STOP! Pilgrims of the mind! And sow your seeds in fecund loam! The Tyranny of Grist and Grind here-now ENDS!
Of course, if I were ever to write a manifesto for Art Criticism it would probably never get read. Either that, or people would read it with that look of pained forebearance that I so often get.
So, instead, I'll just state my ARTSY prejudices: Art is fun and loose and bendy and stuff. Art Criticism, since it's about art, should be those things too.
Now to begin: ANDREW'S ARTSY ARTNESS!
So basically this Picasso painting really caught my eye. It was sandwiched between a bunch of other austere Spanish paintings of children, both the seated and non-seated varieties, doing such exciting and insightful things as: 1. Staring Directly Ahead; or, 2. Trying to Look Like Adults. Oh yeah, the painters were like El Greco, that other dude who painted royalty, what was his name... and like Velasquez, and probably someone called Sanchez, and Dali too, but you might want to double check the Sanchez.
But this painting.. oh wait, it kind of scrolled off didn't it? Hold on, let me put it up again...
There we go, perfect. See now, THIS painting was like a cross between Tim Burton and Edward Gorey, though of course Picasso preceded both of them, so it's not an apt comparison at all, really. But I think we can tease out their influences here, a sort of seminal piece for future macabre art - a visual manifesto for depicting pale-skinned children backgrounded by a stark, sombre, and yes - pallid - moon. Pallidity being an essential quality in all things macabre.
And anyway it's ghostly and twisted and imaginative and frankly I didn't get that impression from any of the other paintings, mired as they were in the 16th and 17th centuries, poor things. Of course I guess I could talk about the obvious maternal sublimation in the seated posture of the male child in relation to the domineering female presence of his (presumed) sister, whose two-facedness belies a disunity projected in opposition to the comparitive unity and wholeness of the male. I mean, I COULD do that, but it'd be a bloody lot of wank, wouldn't it?
Painting, The Second:
Dead Birds
by
Pablo Picasso
Yes, this painting was also by Picasso (who, though there were paintings by Goya and Dali and other good artists, was by far the most interesting and innovative and, frankly, modern - Dali, my old love, now strikes me as a bit too transparently egoistic). It was nice, cubist, and.. well, I think it would really look good on my wall next to the giant oriental fan.
Painting, the Third:
The Table (Still Life with Rabbit)
by
Joan Miró
This painting appeared in a section dedicated, amazingly, to food. Apparently, Spanish people eat a lot of dead animals. The reason this painting is included here is because of the tripartite symbolic content of the three animals it figures: the fowl is the father, who observes all of the vast, resplendent -- wait for it -- tableau of creation, with his one watchful, unblinking eye. The fish is the holy spirit, because it points always towards the heavens and suffuses everything with a vague, unidentifiable odour. And, finally, the rabbit is the Son, because he kind of looks angry and I think if Christ were around right now he'd be pretty pissed off too.
And that basically concludes the more or less first installation of ANDREW'S ARTSY ARTNESS! Since I also went to the MOMA, and because this post is getting pretty long, my next post will be about that. Tata for now! (This is the official trendy ARTSY farewell.)
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Let there be... BLOOD!
Well, it's been an inexcusably long time since my last post, and for that I apologize. Mostly to myself, really, for sort of falling off the writing wagon, albeit briefly.
I've had a lot on my mind these past few days. Indeed.
Since quite a lot has happened, I think a brief recap is in order, rather than a lengthy and detailed retrospective. A sum, if you will, of the choicest bits.
I think the day after the Gay Philosophy thing I worked up the courage (or rather, whittled down my apathy) and called up this girl Tania, who was supposedly Miles' friend, and who was holding on to his suit for him. Which he had forgotten... at her apartment. And which he was so insistent that I retrieve for him, because that's what friends do for friends... you know, collect their discarded and forgotten clothing from gigantic cities around the world.
Being the kind of silly and wonderfully brilliant people that we are, Madeline and I decided to make the whole thing a PHOTO ADVENTURE. But before you get your knickers in a bunch with excitement, the photos will have to wait to be uploaded, since they're on Madeline's camera and Madeline seems to have some kind of phobia about hooking it up to my laptop. As if my laptop had cooties, or something.
DESTINATION: ASTORIA
From the above title, you should be able to deduce that our destination was Astoria. Astoria, for those who are not intimately familiar with it, is sort of like a suburb of New York. Unlike most suburbs in... say... OTTAWA... Astoria sounds like a cool and distant fantasy land full of dragons. It is in FACT a cool, distant, fantasy land full of marvelous Indian restaurants. It's also in Queens.
Well, to cut a long story short, it was really really far. When we finally got to the place, we were greeted by Rahul. Rahul is Tania's husband, has a fancy British accent, and does post-conflict work. I have no idea what post-conflict work entails, but apparently it is very dangerous and exciting and probably involves digging wells while bullets fly overhead. Rahul was very nice, and to his infinite credit was a food and restaurant connoisseur.
He also had never met Miles. Tania, his wife, arrived shortly after we did, and she too had never met him. And apparently, Tania's sister, who I originally thought was Miles' friend, only knew him peripherally through her friend. This fourth person, whose name I never got, was also apparently only the most fleeting of acquaintances with Miles. What a web of confused relations!
So, the story I pieced together from all this was that Miles, apparently wearing a suit, met some people, drove to New York, crashed at some person's house, forgot his suit, and wandered off into the streets of New York naked, probably with a bottle of Vermouth in a plastic bag.
Anyhow, we got the suit, vowed to wear the oversized thing in various comic poses and photograph ourselves doing it (since Miles is like 6'5", it really is comical), and then wandered back home. We also spotted a disgusting lump of bulbous rooty material that MAY be ginger but is more likely an alien pod waiting to birth little parasitic mind-controlling spores in order to take over and then terraform the world into a scorched carbonaceous wasteland. We have photographic evidence to prove this.
Well, that's pretty much it for that day. A day or two after the Gay Philosophy thing, I met up with Dan for some food at a Korean restaurant that Rahul had recommended. The place was called Cho Ding Sol, or something like that, 55 W 35th St., and wasn't bad but wasn't fantastic.
(For anyone wondering, Dan is not a romantic interest of mine. I met him on an online Go Server, and consider him only a friend.)
After dinner we went down to the East Village, in Manhattan, to check out a gay bar called the Phoenix. I believe I mentioned it in a previous post. No one was there yet, so we wandered around the area, which is really very nice and trendy with many cool cafes and tea houses. We found this one place that was like my quintessential nerd-hippie dream bookstore/cafe type establishment. Only, upon closer inspection, the books were really primarily gay porn, which in retrospect is not altogether a bad modification of my dream.
Dan and I perused, but did not purchase, gay porn. I swear. We bought a drink, chatted, then went back to the Phoenix to grab another drink, shoot some pool (I had originally written "people" by accident! yikes), and then call it a night. Pretty unexciting, really.
Well, a day or two after that, Trish, another friend from the Humanities, came into town on her way to Greece. She is there now, working on an organic farm somewhere. Crazy girl. Lots of fun, though!
The three of us - me, Madeline, and Trish - went out to the local bar in the area called "The Gate", which is Madeline's top pick because of its proximity to the apartment, and more importantly because an attractive sweater-wearing fuzzy British bartender called Noel works there, for whom Madeline has a bit of a crush. I drank with the two of them until about 2:00 AM, got too drunk, and came home. Madeline gave me her building key so I could get in, which naturally meant that I had to stay up and wait for them.
I lay in bed until 6:00 AM, feeling nauseated, thinking they'd been kidnapped or worse, until finally the two wenches staggered in, laughing hysterically, and collapsed into a heap of splayed, writhing, drunken limbs. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but probably not.
Their night was an hysterical, licentious romp of drunken abandon. By the end, they were pouring their own drinks. As an indication... Madeline came home with a spigot from one of the taps! Don't ask me why.
Well, the afternoon rolled around, then dusk, then evening, and still the two ladies were asleep. There was a neat Japanese bookstore I wanted to check out, so by 5:00pm I'd resolved to step out the door. (I was a little bit hung over myself. Just a bit.) Trish woke up and I persuaded her to come see a musical with me.
Trish: "Should we invite Madeline?"
Andrew: "I don't know... is she up?"
Trish: "Why don't you check?"
Andrew: "I would, you know. But... she... scares me when she's hungover."
In the end, just Trish and I went to see:
THE EVIL DEAD MUSICAL!
Oh yeah. We bought the cheapest tickets we could ($29), and when we got into the theatre and found our seats, we noticed there were plastic bags over the first three rows.
"Uhh... this doesn't look good."
Apparently, The Evil Dead Musical features a "Splatter Section", where theatre-goers are inundated with much splurting and gushing blood! Thankfully, they handed out little plastic raincoats during the intermission. Glad I wore mine, because in the big final act I got a huge stream of blood right into my lap!
Funny moments:
Andrew: "So what really IS the difference between a musical and an opera?"
Trish: *looks at Andrew like he must be joking*
Andrew: "No, come on, I mean really. They both have music!"
Trish: *starts laughing hysterically*
Andrew: "What?!"
Trish: *dull, drawling, faux-congratulatory tone* "You got a DEGREEEEEEE!"
Leaving the theatre, after the performance...
Guy in big white hoody, DRENCHED in blood: "I swear, they were AIMING for me!"
Friends: *laughter*
Guy in big white hoody, DRENCHED in blood: "God damnit."
The musical itself was alright. But damn, there was BLOOD!!!
And with that... I bring you all only partially up to date. Madeline and I are heading out now to check out the MOMA. I'll post again later! Cheers.
I've had a lot on my mind these past few days. Indeed.
Since quite a lot has happened, I think a brief recap is in order, rather than a lengthy and detailed retrospective. A sum, if you will, of the choicest bits.
I think the day after the Gay Philosophy thing I worked up the courage (or rather, whittled down my apathy) and called up this girl Tania, who was supposedly Miles' friend, and who was holding on to his suit for him. Which he had forgotten... at her apartment. And which he was so insistent that I retrieve for him, because that's what friends do for friends... you know, collect their discarded and forgotten clothing from gigantic cities around the world.
Being the kind of silly and wonderfully brilliant people that we are, Madeline and I decided to make the whole thing a PHOTO ADVENTURE. But before you get your knickers in a bunch with excitement, the photos will have to wait to be uploaded, since they're on Madeline's camera and Madeline seems to have some kind of phobia about hooking it up to my laptop. As if my laptop had cooties, or something.
DESTINATION: ASTORIA
From the above title, you should be able to deduce that our destination was Astoria. Astoria, for those who are not intimately familiar with it, is sort of like a suburb of New York. Unlike most suburbs in... say... OTTAWA... Astoria sounds like a cool and distant fantasy land full of dragons. It is in FACT a cool, distant, fantasy land full of marvelous Indian restaurants. It's also in Queens.
Well, to cut a long story short, it was really really far. When we finally got to the place, we were greeted by Rahul. Rahul is Tania's husband, has a fancy British accent, and does post-conflict work. I have no idea what post-conflict work entails, but apparently it is very dangerous and exciting and probably involves digging wells while bullets fly overhead. Rahul was very nice, and to his infinite credit was a food and restaurant connoisseur.
He also had never met Miles. Tania, his wife, arrived shortly after we did, and she too had never met him. And apparently, Tania's sister, who I originally thought was Miles' friend, only knew him peripherally through her friend. This fourth person, whose name I never got, was also apparently only the most fleeting of acquaintances with Miles. What a web of confused relations!
So, the story I pieced together from all this was that Miles, apparently wearing a suit, met some people, drove to New York, crashed at some person's house, forgot his suit, and wandered off into the streets of New York naked, probably with a bottle of Vermouth in a plastic bag.
Anyhow, we got the suit, vowed to wear the oversized thing in various comic poses and photograph ourselves doing it (since Miles is like 6'5", it really is comical), and then wandered back home. We also spotted a disgusting lump of bulbous rooty material that MAY be ginger but is more likely an alien pod waiting to birth little parasitic mind-controlling spores in order to take over and then terraform the world into a scorched carbonaceous wasteland. We have photographic evidence to prove this.
Well, that's pretty much it for that day. A day or two after the Gay Philosophy thing, I met up with Dan for some food at a Korean restaurant that Rahul had recommended. The place was called Cho Ding Sol, or something like that, 55 W 35th St., and wasn't bad but wasn't fantastic.
(For anyone wondering, Dan is not a romantic interest of mine. I met him on an online Go Server, and consider him only a friend.)
After dinner we went down to the East Village, in Manhattan, to check out a gay bar called the Phoenix. I believe I mentioned it in a previous post. No one was there yet, so we wandered around the area, which is really very nice and trendy with many cool cafes and tea houses. We found this one place that was like my quintessential nerd-hippie dream bookstore/cafe type establishment. Only, upon closer inspection, the books were really primarily gay porn, which in retrospect is not altogether a bad modification of my dream.
Dan and I perused, but did not purchase, gay porn. I swear. We bought a drink, chatted, then went back to the Phoenix to grab another drink, shoot some pool (I had originally written "people" by accident! yikes), and then call it a night. Pretty unexciting, really.
Well, a day or two after that, Trish, another friend from the Humanities, came into town on her way to Greece. She is there now, working on an organic farm somewhere. Crazy girl. Lots of fun, though!
The three of us - me, Madeline, and Trish - went out to the local bar in the area called "The Gate", which is Madeline's top pick because of its proximity to the apartment, and more importantly because an attractive sweater-wearing fuzzy British bartender called Noel works there, for whom Madeline has a bit of a crush. I drank with the two of them until about 2:00 AM, got too drunk, and came home. Madeline gave me her building key so I could get in, which naturally meant that I had to stay up and wait for them.
I lay in bed until 6:00 AM, feeling nauseated, thinking they'd been kidnapped or worse, until finally the two wenches staggered in, laughing hysterically, and collapsed into a heap of splayed, writhing, drunken limbs. Maybe I'm exaggerating, but probably not.
Their night was an hysterical, licentious romp of drunken abandon. By the end, they were pouring their own drinks. As an indication... Madeline came home with a spigot from one of the taps! Don't ask me why.
Well, the afternoon rolled around, then dusk, then evening, and still the two ladies were asleep. There was a neat Japanese bookstore I wanted to check out, so by 5:00pm I'd resolved to step out the door. (I was a little bit hung over myself. Just a bit.) Trish woke up and I persuaded her to come see a musical with me.
Trish: "Should we invite Madeline?"
Andrew: "I don't know... is she up?"
Trish: "Why don't you check?"
Andrew: "I would, you know. But... she... scares me when she's hungover."
In the end, just Trish and I went to see:
THE EVIL DEAD MUSICAL!
Oh yeah. We bought the cheapest tickets we could ($29), and when we got into the theatre and found our seats, we noticed there were plastic bags over the first three rows.
"Uhh... this doesn't look good."
Apparently, The Evil Dead Musical features a "Splatter Section", where theatre-goers are inundated with much splurting and gushing blood! Thankfully, they handed out little plastic raincoats during the intermission. Glad I wore mine, because in the big final act I got a huge stream of blood right into my lap!
Funny moments:
Andrew: "So what really IS the difference between a musical and an opera?"
Trish: *looks at Andrew like he must be joking*
Andrew: "No, come on, I mean really. They both have music!"
Trish: *starts laughing hysterically*
Andrew: "What?!"
Trish: *dull, drawling, faux-congratulatory tone* "You got a DEGREEEEEEE!"
Leaving the theatre, after the performance...
Guy in big white hoody, DRENCHED in blood: "I swear, they were AIMING for me!"
Friends: *laughter*
Guy in big white hoody, DRENCHED in blood: "God damnit."
The musical itself was alright. But damn, there was BLOOD!!!
And with that... I bring you all only partially up to date. Madeline and I are heading out now to check out the MOMA. I'll post again later! Cheers.
Monday, January 15, 2007
The Gay Philosophy of... Jesus?
Well, it's been an interesting two days.
Madeline and I tried to leave the apartment early on Saturday, in order to check out Central Park. Not only was I slow to rise, but I also realized there was a Gay Philosophy thing going on at the GLBT Centre in Manhattan at the same time. So, perhaps understandably, Madeline wasn't impressed.
We went to Central Park together, but I got restless so I split. Madeline didn't really object - I think she was pretty content ogling the ducks by herself. I trained down to the Center and dashed into the Philosophy room, breathless, just barely making it.
First words I hear:
"Oh no, darling, don't you get me started. Jesus was no philosopher!"
I'm thinking, "Oh shit. What have I gotten myself into now?"
As it turns out, I got myself into two enthralling hours about how and why Jesus was (not) a philosopher, why the question had no bearing on profound religious emotional experience, a discussion on the Q-source and its deep implications on the Gospels-as-word-of-Xst, and the many reasons why the Unitarians were/were not the brood of Satan.
However, the room WAS full of gay men (and one extremely intelligent and articulate Asian transvestite... also a staunch Unitarian), which did enable the discussion to break down into moments of emotive hysteria and brief, wonderful bits of flamboyant hilarity.
I especially loved it when one of the guys, prompted by the oft-repeated phrase, "Jesus was just a man", began to sing that song by Faith No More:
"A star is out
I reach for one to sparkle in my hand
A star is out
I will not touch you, I am just a man" - whereupon, with "touch you", he began fondling the leg of the man next to him (who really didn't seem to mind!).
Man do I love gay people! Unfortunately, none were under 40! :(
Anyhow, afterwards I got the coordinates of an apparently nice gay bar, not too loud/dancy, but an actual place to sit and have a drink and talk. Called the "Phoenix", down in the East Village. I walked around Manhattan directionless for a while, until I found a comfortable and discreet enough place to take out my gigantic, screaming, fairy-coloured gay "Funmap" of the downtown area, and get myself "oriented".
Eventually I made it to the bar, which had a nice exterior neon sign and some old iron ring like fixtures on the outside brick wall. Kind of weird and cool. I only peeked inside, since by this time it was only 6:30, and there really wasn't anyone there yet. Looked nice, so I definitely WILL come back, hopefully soon.
I got lost on the way home, again, of course. Took the "L" train, the wrong way, and went like a bullet east, straight into the heart of north Brooklyn. Figured no problem, I'd just hop on a connecting train south to where I needed to be. Caught the "G" train, which promptly stopped halfway to the station I needed, emptied itself of all its passengers, and trundled into the enigmatic depths of the NY subway.
Had to catch a shuttle, which wound itself through what seemed to be the streets of all of Brooklyn, before finally letting me catch another train ALL the way back into Manhattan, just to find a connecting train ALL the way back to the bloody Brooklyn stop I wanted in the first place.
Confused? Just take a look at the following map:
If you think that looks like trying to navigate yourself through a mound of multi-coloured spaghetti... you're not far off. Most confusing subway in the world!
Madeline and I tried to leave the apartment early on Saturday, in order to check out Central Park. Not only was I slow to rise, but I also realized there was a Gay Philosophy thing going on at the GLBT Centre in Manhattan at the same time. So, perhaps understandably, Madeline wasn't impressed.
We went to Central Park together, but I got restless so I split. Madeline didn't really object - I think she was pretty content ogling the ducks by herself. I trained down to the Center and dashed into the Philosophy room, breathless, just barely making it.
First words I hear:
"Oh no, darling, don't you get me started. Jesus was no philosopher!"
I'm thinking, "Oh shit. What have I gotten myself into now?"
As it turns out, I got myself into two enthralling hours about how and why Jesus was (not) a philosopher, why the question had no bearing on profound religious emotional experience, a discussion on the Q-source and its deep implications on the Gospels-as-word-of-Xst, and the many reasons why the Unitarians were/were not the brood of Satan.
However, the room WAS full of gay men (and one extremely intelligent and articulate Asian transvestite... also a staunch Unitarian), which did enable the discussion to break down into moments of emotive hysteria and brief, wonderful bits of flamboyant hilarity.
I especially loved it when one of the guys, prompted by the oft-repeated phrase, "Jesus was just a man", began to sing that song by Faith No More:
"A star is out
I reach for one to sparkle in my hand
A star is out
I will not touch you, I am just a man" - whereupon, with "touch you", he began fondling the leg of the man next to him (who really didn't seem to mind!).
Man do I love gay people! Unfortunately, none were under 40! :(
Anyhow, afterwards I got the coordinates of an apparently nice gay bar, not too loud/dancy, but an actual place to sit and have a drink and talk. Called the "Phoenix", down in the East Village. I walked around Manhattan directionless for a while, until I found a comfortable and discreet enough place to take out my gigantic, screaming, fairy-coloured gay "Funmap" of the downtown area, and get myself "oriented".
Eventually I made it to the bar, which had a nice exterior neon sign and some old iron ring like fixtures on the outside brick wall. Kind of weird and cool. I only peeked inside, since by this time it was only 6:30, and there really wasn't anyone there yet. Looked nice, so I definitely WILL come back, hopefully soon.
I got lost on the way home, again, of course. Took the "L" train, the wrong way, and went like a bullet east, straight into the heart of north Brooklyn. Figured no problem, I'd just hop on a connecting train south to where I needed to be. Caught the "G" train, which promptly stopped halfway to the station I needed, emptied itself of all its passengers, and trundled into the enigmatic depths of the NY subway.
Had to catch a shuttle, which wound itself through what seemed to be the streets of all of Brooklyn, before finally letting me catch another train ALL the way back into Manhattan, just to find a connecting train ALL the way back to the bloody Brooklyn stop I wanted in the first place.
Confused? Just take a look at the following map:
If you think that looks like trying to navigate yourself through a mound of multi-coloured spaghetti... you're not far off. Most confusing subway in the world!
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Of Ghosts and People
So I wrote my last post on the floor, arched awkwardly over my computer in the one spot in the whole apartment where I could access one of the three unsecure wireless networks that appear and disappear infuriatingly and without any apparent logic or purpose. My post was, as such, a bit awkward and stilted and uncomfortable in its own right. For this I will make no apology, but rather point accusingly at the stupidity of the various multinational corporations involved in the collective production of the "Wireless" God, who for whatever reason could not find a reliable way to beam the entirety of the world's electronic knowledge directly into my laptop.
So! Dan and I met up at 5:00 outside his office and grabbed burritos or fajitas or enchiladas or god knows what they're called - basically imagine a mound of rice, corn, sour cream, beans, guacamole, cheese and salsa poured into an insta-toasted slice of soft tortilla wrap, encased in tin foil, slammed into a plastic bowl and hurled at you on a tray, and you've got New York Mexican Fast Food.
DRAMATIZED DRINK-PURCHASING EXPERIENCE:
"Anything to drink, cabron?"
"Uhh, I'll take an orange juice."
"We've got MANGO orange juice, puta."
"No plain orange juice?"
"MANG-"
"Okay, okay, I'll take one of those."
We ate fast. I'm talking FAST. They're still telling stories there about how fast we were.
"Those two, eh hombre, they were pretty fast, no?"
"Si, si. Muy loco - crazy tontos! Ate like no tomorrow, mang."
*Error: Insensitive ethnic stereotyping detected! Error! Initiating security protocol PC-ENFORCER10001101*
**BZZT**
Ow! Shit. Blogger's got some mean political correctness software installed! I'll have to be more careful.
Anyway, so Dan and I played go, down at the New York Go Center. Same shtick. Same more or less awkward and vaguely annoying people. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love go. I've had great times playing the game in the past. I've met some fantastic people who also happen to play go. Truly marvelous, splendid, generous, and enjoyable folk. It's just... when you get a room full of go players, a strange, eery, disconcerting transformation takes place. They become... infused with the hysterical power of GO KNOWLEDGE, and wield their awesome wisdom with untramelled determination and, well... frequently an un-funny and relentless sarcasm.
Well, here, let me give you some examples. We, Dan and I, are playing a game by ourselves, off to one side of the room. This old guy, maybe in his 50s, looks like Baron von Munchausen without the hat, is giving some kind of teaching game to a freakish 17-something-year-old, couldn't be older, really doubt it, but anyway who somehow WORKS at this Center, and whose duties involve wandering up to you while in mid-game and showering you with questions and unsolicited information about deals and offers and membership fees. Let's call him Scruffy.
Let me try to recall some of the more choice snippets:
Baron: Hahaha, what do you think you're doing?
Scruffy: I just want to live.
Baron: You can't live there! Can't do it! No way!
Scruffy: Why can't you be nicer?
Baron: Teehee, I'm going to squash all your groups.
Scruffy: ...
Baron: Hey what do you think you're doing? How dare you try to invade!
Scruffy: Oh yeah? I can live in the smallest spaces!
Baron: You have no hope! I'm not going to let you off that easily! Hahaha.
Scruffy: Whose move is it?
Baron: Oh oh oh! You're ALL MINE NOW!!!
Which really doesn't capture the very annoying, quite condescending, and at times vaguely creepy tone the Baron possessed, nor Scruffy's general state of confusion and childishness. Nor the fact that both were having a wildly good time despite all of it.
I guess I'm only belaboring all this go stuff because I feel guilty for ragging on them in an earlier post, and that I should somehow be like this Patron Saint of Go since I play it so much, and have attained some kind of Respectable Status or something, at least among go players, and further because they really do often seem to be the sort of people who could use all the help they can get.
But that said, I do really love the game, and find it incredibly beautiful, and I guess in some ways I think it's a shame that in our culture you can't really love something so headsy and abstract without being all funny and detached and incapable of relating to other humans, basically. Which I don't get.
So anyway, we played, and then left when we were both starting to get a bit tired and cranky. We grabbed a couple drinks at a nearby bar and started talking about our lives and our dreams and our pasts. Of course our differences outnumber our similarities, but there is still a lot of common ground between us. I have a hard time articulating my emotions... but I felt sad for him. Not sorry, not sympathetic, or pitying, or anything like that. Just... sad. I can't explain it. Maybe in time I'll understand why. Maybe it has something to do with being dogged by who we were, who we could have been... and who we could still, maybe... one day be.
I had to walk underground to Bleecker St. station on the way home, to make a connecting train. The station was dark, and the platform was long and narrow, like a decrepit collonade with crumbling tiles and mortar. Innumerable lines of tracks, laid side by side, disappeared gradually into the darkness across the way. Then, as if out of the air itself, burst a number 4 train with a green eye-like circle suspended in the dark, and it tore through the open space with a shriek and a rumble, for all the world like a hounded wraith. Then it was gone. That place felt, for a surreal and lonely moment, quite like a catacomb for the dead.
So! Dan and I met up at 5:00 outside his office and grabbed burritos or fajitas or enchiladas or god knows what they're called - basically imagine a mound of rice, corn, sour cream, beans, guacamole, cheese and salsa poured into an insta-toasted slice of soft tortilla wrap, encased in tin foil, slammed into a plastic bowl and hurled at you on a tray, and you've got New York Mexican Fast Food.
DRAMATIZED DRINK-PURCHASING EXPERIENCE:
"Anything to drink, cabron?"
"Uhh, I'll take an orange juice."
"We've got MANGO orange juice, puta."
"No plain orange juice?"
"MANG-"
"Okay, okay, I'll take one of those."
We ate fast. I'm talking FAST. They're still telling stories there about how fast we were.
"Those two, eh hombre, they were pretty fast, no?"
"Si, si. Muy loco - crazy tontos! Ate like no tomorrow, mang."
*Error: Insensitive ethnic stereotyping detected! Error! Initiating security protocol PC-ENFORCER10001101*
**BZZT**
Ow! Shit. Blogger's got some mean political correctness software installed! I'll have to be more careful.
Anyway, so Dan and I played go, down at the New York Go Center. Same shtick. Same more or less awkward and vaguely annoying people. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love go. I've had great times playing the game in the past. I've met some fantastic people who also happen to play go. Truly marvelous, splendid, generous, and enjoyable folk. It's just... when you get a room full of go players, a strange, eery, disconcerting transformation takes place. They become... infused with the hysterical power of GO KNOWLEDGE, and wield their awesome wisdom with untramelled determination and, well... frequently an un-funny and relentless sarcasm.
Well, here, let me give you some examples. We, Dan and I, are playing a game by ourselves, off to one side of the room. This old guy, maybe in his 50s, looks like Baron von Munchausen without the hat, is giving some kind of teaching game to a freakish 17-something-year-old, couldn't be older, really doubt it, but anyway who somehow WORKS at this Center, and whose duties involve wandering up to you while in mid-game and showering you with questions and unsolicited information about deals and offers and membership fees. Let's call him Scruffy.
Let me try to recall some of the more choice snippets:
Baron: Hahaha, what do you think you're doing?
Scruffy: I just want to live.
Baron: You can't live there! Can't do it! No way!
Scruffy: Why can't you be nicer?
Baron: Teehee, I'm going to squash all your groups.
Scruffy: ...
Baron: Hey what do you think you're doing? How dare you try to invade!
Scruffy: Oh yeah? I can live in the smallest spaces!
Baron: You have no hope! I'm not going to let you off that easily! Hahaha.
Scruffy: Whose move is it?
Baron: Oh oh oh! You're ALL MINE NOW!!!
Which really doesn't capture the very annoying, quite condescending, and at times vaguely creepy tone the Baron possessed, nor Scruffy's general state of confusion and childishness. Nor the fact that both were having a wildly good time despite all of it.
I guess I'm only belaboring all this go stuff because I feel guilty for ragging on them in an earlier post, and that I should somehow be like this Patron Saint of Go since I play it so much, and have attained some kind of Respectable Status or something, at least among go players, and further because they really do often seem to be the sort of people who could use all the help they can get.
But that said, I do really love the game, and find it incredibly beautiful, and I guess in some ways I think it's a shame that in our culture you can't really love something so headsy and abstract without being all funny and detached and incapable of relating to other humans, basically. Which I don't get.
So anyway, we played, and then left when we were both starting to get a bit tired and cranky. We grabbed a couple drinks at a nearby bar and started talking about our lives and our dreams and our pasts. Of course our differences outnumber our similarities, but there is still a lot of common ground between us. I have a hard time articulating my emotions... but I felt sad for him. Not sorry, not sympathetic, or pitying, or anything like that. Just... sad. I can't explain it. Maybe in time I'll understand why. Maybe it has something to do with being dogged by who we were, who we could have been... and who we could still, maybe... one day be.
I had to walk underground to Bleecker St. station on the way home, to make a connecting train. The station was dark, and the platform was long and narrow, like a decrepit collonade with crumbling tiles and mortar. Innumerable lines of tracks, laid side by side, disappeared gradually into the darkness across the way. Then, as if out of the air itself, burst a number 4 train with a green eye-like circle suspended in the dark, and it tore through the open space with a shriek and a rumble, for all the world like a hounded wraith. Then it was gone. That place felt, for a surreal and lonely moment, quite like a catacomb for the dead.
Friday, January 12, 2007
The Inchoate Murmurs of the Meta Blog
So I didn't really get up to much yesterday. Went for a walk with Madeline down past the exciting 7th and thrilling 5th avenues, in Brooklyn, to what we believed would be the proportionally even MORE exciting/thrilling, if the decreasing numbers were supposed to represent some kind of night-life hierarchy, 3rd and 1st avenues. What we found was in fact a decrepit industrial neighborhood with lots of broken glass and corrugated rusty steel doors and concrete walls topped with barbed wire. Fun fun.
Now I am willing to accept that maybe 3rd ave. is an aberration, a bizarre anomalous impoverished backwater separating the glorious 5th avenue from the resplendent land of beauty and free mocha lattes that could, potentially, be 1st avenue. Maybe 3rd ave. is the New York equivalent of a moat or a wall of fire, across and through which only the most brave, courageous, and worthy can pass. I have, in fact, no good empirical evidence to refute this hypothesis.
Nevertheless, being the pathetic, weak, and easily-muggable coward that I am, and considering that I don't even really like mocha lattes, I think I'll just keep my distance and permit 1st avenue to remain the mythological New York Eldorado that it most assuredly is.
In other news, I've changed the blog settings so anyone can post comments without having to become a blogger member. Because I know I wouldn't post any comments for precisely that reason. So I look forward to hearing from y'all!
By the way, I hope you like the title today! I think it's pretty good (in being verbose and pretentious as all hell), and would make for a sufficiently ridiculous bombastic short story - which I may in fact write, one day!
In all truth, though, I have really been thinking a fair bit about what I can do with this blog, and especially since at the moment I don't really have anything exciting/interesting to talk about in the way of wanderings-about, at least for the past couple days. But, in some ways sadly, and other ways not at all, it really is no stretch that this blog is probably one of the more exciting things I have involved myself with in the immediate past.
On the other hand, a kind of self-referential "meta-blog" blog entry does sort of strike me as the intellectual equivalent of a 6th grade English assignment entitled "Why I had Nothing to Write About". But damnit, it's such an interesting topic!
And since that is my espoused topic for today, I hereby announce!... that I'm thinking of creating a couple of parallel blog sites: one for political/theoretical ramblings, and another, probably infinitely more interesting one for stories/fiction and general extemporization on more esoteric albeit artistic subjects (like Dragons!). I think probably all these blogs will be cross-/inter-referenced. Because that's trendy and cool.
In general, however, I'm still learning about this format, and about myself as a writer. I don't really know what "The Blog" is capable of... and forget about any kind of reasonable self-awareness about what I can do, artistically. I really don't have the slightest clue. Really, the entire substance of my plan is just to ramble on and hope it remains interesting and readable.
In any case, for now I'm heading downtown to meet Dan for a game of go. How quaint!
Now I am willing to accept that maybe 3rd ave. is an aberration, a bizarre anomalous impoverished backwater separating the glorious 5th avenue from the resplendent land of beauty and free mocha lattes that could, potentially, be 1st avenue. Maybe 3rd ave. is the New York equivalent of a moat or a wall of fire, across and through which only the most brave, courageous, and worthy can pass. I have, in fact, no good empirical evidence to refute this hypothesis.
Nevertheless, being the pathetic, weak, and easily-muggable coward that I am, and considering that I don't even really like mocha lattes, I think I'll just keep my distance and permit 1st avenue to remain the mythological New York Eldorado that it most assuredly is.
In other news, I've changed the blog settings so anyone can post comments without having to become a blogger member. Because I know I wouldn't post any comments for precisely that reason. So I look forward to hearing from y'all!
By the way, I hope you like the title today! I think it's pretty good (in being verbose and pretentious as all hell), and would make for a sufficiently ridiculous bombastic short story - which I may in fact write, one day!
In all truth, though, I have really been thinking a fair bit about what I can do with this blog, and especially since at the moment I don't really have anything exciting/interesting to talk about in the way of wanderings-about, at least for the past couple days. But, in some ways sadly, and other ways not at all, it really is no stretch that this blog is probably one of the more exciting things I have involved myself with in the immediate past.
On the other hand, a kind of self-referential "meta-blog" blog entry does sort of strike me as the intellectual equivalent of a 6th grade English assignment entitled "Why I had Nothing to Write About". But damnit, it's such an interesting topic!
And since that is my espoused topic for today, I hereby announce!... that I'm thinking of creating a couple of parallel blog sites: one for political/theoretical ramblings, and another, probably infinitely more interesting one for stories/fiction and general extemporization on more esoteric albeit artistic subjects (like Dragons!). I think probably all these blogs will be cross-/inter-referenced. Because that's trendy and cool.
In general, however, I'm still learning about this format, and about myself as a writer. I don't really know what "The Blog" is capable of... and forget about any kind of reasonable self-awareness about what I can do, artistically. I really don't have the slightest clue. Really, the entire substance of my plan is just to ramble on and hope it remains interesting and readable.
In any case, for now I'm heading downtown to meet Dan for a game of go. How quaint!
Thursday, January 11, 2007
What Cannot Change Dies
Not much happened today. Madeline and I went shopping in Soho, which for the uninitiated is south of Houston St. (pronounced "House-ton", for arcane reasons, under punishment of tarring and funny looks). I was looking for slick duds and preppy styles. I have decided that I am a fan and proponent of the "Mama's boy" look, with the even more extreme sub-culture of "GrandMama's boys", typified by dog-eared hats and knit sweaters with cutesy alternating colour patterns, and if you're daring/awkward/pathetic enough the little helpless mittens with security strings to prevent loss. Okay I lied, I don't actually like the look of security-string mittens, but damn they're useful!
But in all seriousness. My days of embarassing whale-mating T-shirts and undersized alpaca wool sweaters are over. I have discovered the exciting world of dignified attire! There's something really satisfying about having your own style. Something almost emancipatory about it, even though in another inescapable sense it is always bound to the economics of BUYING nice clothes.
And those economics are a bitch! I've never stared so cravenly into the abyssal depths of my wallet as I have here. And in another sense this town, as much as I relish every precious and fortunate minute I spend here, is a constant reminder of how utterly privileged I am in a global sense.
*WARNING: The experienced staff here at Blogspot have detected elements of PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE in the following Blog material. For your protection proceed at your own risk. Any injuries that result are your own god damn fault.*
But another part of me doesn't care. I remember some time ago reading Siddartha, by Herman Hesse, and getting to the point where the protagonist suddenly goes ape-shit, disavows all his priestly ascetic ways, and delves without restraint and only a hint of remorse into the hedonistic and consumptive life. At the time I didn't get it. I believed totally in denying the trappings of this world - the whole modus operandi of getting while the getting's good (that is, INTO the "this-life" of void tree-hugging oblivion - a sort of earthly druidic platonism). I worshipped this.. idyllic return to a freedom devoid of any materialism or mundane attachment. Aghast! After all, what kind of spiritual hero forsakes the golden path for pleasure and abandon?
At this point, of course, I could do the whole internalized Christian shtick and basically identify with Hesse's project, only from the perspective of an enlightened and wise person who has come to understand the necessity of passing THROUGH the period of hedonism into a more enlightened, more righteous and lucent "freedom" from earth.
Fuck that!
I would much rather say, at this point, that I passed THROUGH an idealist period of indulgent and romantic world-renunciation, a dandyism that spurned every fragile, brief, and painfully beautiful bit of human existence along with all the disgusting, vulgar, narcissistic and violent bits too. The latter can't just be discarded! It's all part of the same package. Who wants the vacuity of pure non-attachment? How can we ever be unattached? What the hell does that even mean?
And look, lest I come across here as some kind of bizarre reformed-socialist, pro-capitalist reactionary let me just say that, for the first time in my life I feel GOOD about myself. I feel like the external me that wanders around, crashes into things, commits horrific social blunders, and somehow manages in unexpected ways to endear himself to a select group of beautiful, understanding, and far too charitable people (you know who you are), is becoming consistent with the internal self that broods, questions, doubts, criticizes, agonizes, and craves salad for breakfast.
I've got to totally re-examine what I understood, what I THOUGHT I understood, to be happiness. I never had it, and yet I felt I could speak so authoritatively on the subject, for so many years. What presumptiousness!
I went out shopping today with Madeline, and all I bought was a scarf. But it was a very nice scarf, and it really went well with the new coat my mom got me for Christmas. And damnit it looked GOOD, in the window of that store, with my hands in my coat pockets and that stupid sheepish grin on my face. Seeing myself for the first fucking time, meeting myself for the first fucking time. It felt good. For the first fucking time.
But in all seriousness. My days of embarassing whale-mating T-shirts and undersized alpaca wool sweaters are over. I have discovered the exciting world of dignified attire! There's something really satisfying about having your own style. Something almost emancipatory about it, even though in another inescapable sense it is always bound to the economics of BUYING nice clothes.
And those economics are a bitch! I've never stared so cravenly into the abyssal depths of my wallet as I have here. And in another sense this town, as much as I relish every precious and fortunate minute I spend here, is a constant reminder of how utterly privileged I am in a global sense.
*WARNING: The experienced staff here at Blogspot have detected elements of PHILOSOPHICAL DISCOURSE in the following Blog material. For your protection proceed at your own risk. Any injuries that result are your own god damn fault.*
But another part of me doesn't care. I remember some time ago reading Siddartha, by Herman Hesse, and getting to the point where the protagonist suddenly goes ape-shit, disavows all his priestly ascetic ways, and delves without restraint and only a hint of remorse into the hedonistic and consumptive life. At the time I didn't get it. I believed totally in denying the trappings of this world - the whole modus operandi of getting while the getting's good (that is, INTO the "this-life" of void tree-hugging oblivion - a sort of earthly druidic platonism). I worshipped this.. idyllic return to a freedom devoid of any materialism or mundane attachment. Aghast! After all, what kind of spiritual hero forsakes the golden path for pleasure and abandon?
At this point, of course, I could do the whole internalized Christian shtick and basically identify with Hesse's project, only from the perspective of an enlightened and wise person who has come to understand the necessity of passing THROUGH the period of hedonism into a more enlightened, more righteous and lucent "freedom" from earth.
Fuck that!
I would much rather say, at this point, that I passed THROUGH an idealist period of indulgent and romantic world-renunciation, a dandyism that spurned every fragile, brief, and painfully beautiful bit of human existence along with all the disgusting, vulgar, narcissistic and violent bits too. The latter can't just be discarded! It's all part of the same package. Who wants the vacuity of pure non-attachment? How can we ever be unattached? What the hell does that even mean?
And look, lest I come across here as some kind of bizarre reformed-socialist, pro-capitalist reactionary let me just say that, for the first time in my life I feel GOOD about myself. I feel like the external me that wanders around, crashes into things, commits horrific social blunders, and somehow manages in unexpected ways to endear himself to a select group of beautiful, understanding, and far too charitable people (you know who you are), is becoming consistent with the internal self that broods, questions, doubts, criticizes, agonizes, and craves salad for breakfast.
I've got to totally re-examine what I understood, what I THOUGHT I understood, to be happiness. I never had it, and yet I felt I could speak so authoritatively on the subject, for so many years. What presumptiousness!
I went out shopping today with Madeline, and all I bought was a scarf. But it was a very nice scarf, and it really went well with the new coat my mom got me for Christmas. And damnit it looked GOOD, in the window of that store, with my hands in my coat pockets and that stupid sheepish grin on my face. Seeing myself for the first fucking time, meeting myself for the first fucking time. It felt good. For the first fucking time.
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
A Comic Lust
One thing that never changes, no matter where I go: waking up is hell! I rolled out of bed at 11:30 AM... or rather "was lowered out" since the inflatable bed I'm sleeping on was in fact half deflated this morning.
Madeline and I went and got some groceries, after (though not because) I discovered that the two books I still had out from the library are in fact going to be overdue on the 12th. Naturally, I said to myself, I'll just EXTEND them. This had been my pseudo-plan from the very beginning! Haha, Andrew out-thinks the system yet again!
"Error: This book could not be renewed."
"FUCK!!!"
So I'm looking for the post-office that Google Maps pointed me to, on 7th Ave. and Garfield street, so I can mail this goddamn book back to Ottawa by express post before I get slammed with another late fine...
Madeline: "Your book is overdue?"
Andrew: "Yeah."
Madeline: "Why not renew it?"
Andrew: "Tried. Won't let me for some reason."
Madeline: "Why didn't you renew it before you left?"
Andrew: "Well, you know, about that, I was going to, and..."
Madeline: "..."
Andrew: "Uhm... yeah, uhh, well... Hey, wait, what the fuck? This 'post office' is just a mail box!"
We ate some lunch and I, determined to find a proper post office - one with stamps and all the other 'CIVILIZED' accountrements of contemporary postal services, for reference you bloody savage Yanks - set out downtown. Actually, we set out to see the Met (shorthand for Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I say not to be pedantic but because I didn't actually know until today, or wasn't sure I knew, and was using 'Met' to be safe, but could easily have been persuaded that the Met was really inside the Statue of Liberty, which was obviously in the heart of Queens, and specialized in miniature postcards - thank god no one tried).
The Met was nice but, well, full of the 'usual' pretty paintings and expensive old things (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Rubens, Pollock, El Greco, god do I NEED to go on?!?). However, the first room we walked into was the Egyptian exhibit, but seeing as I am currently staying at the temporarily vacated residence of an Egyptologist and his wife, whose apartment is in fact filled to the brim with thousands of bizarre, gaudy, and ocassionally rare and probably expensive pieces of Egyptian memorabilia and miscellany, we felt we'd already had enough.
Amusing exchanges:
How Andrew selects an exhibit!
"Hey Madeline, let's decide on an exhibit!"
"Okay."
"Let's choose European paintings!"
How Andrew comments on Christian sacred art involving Mary and Baby Jesus!
"G'DAMN. Is that a giant tumour sticking out of Baby Jesus' hea.... oh wait, that's Mary's bre... ohhhhhhhh."
So rather than boring you with tedious and most likely wildly and embarassingly ignorant critiques of famous art, I'll just post my favourite painting for this evening:
The artist is Viktor Brauner (1903-1966). The painting is entitled "Prelude to a Civilization" (1954). For legal reasons I am apparently required to say this image comes from http://www.metmuseum.org. For anyone interested, the full link is: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/euwco/hob_1999.363.13.htm
Okay, there you go. Pretty painting of some kind of cow. No, wait, horse. Done in a primitive cave painting style. What you can't really get from the web representation is the sheer crisp beauty of his drawings, his sharp and stunning colour contrast, all set against this incredible black scratchy/fuzzy rough texture. It was really gorgeous. If I were a proper art critic I'd probably call this primitivism or something like that, but since I'm not I'll just call it AWESOMISM.
After the Met we got hungry and went down to 14th street to grab dinner and check out this Graphic Novel exhibition/talk/presentation thing at the giant Used/Rare/New bookstore called Strand Books - by this point totally forgetting that I was supposed to find a post office. Oh well.
We went to some Japanese restaurant called "Moshi Moshi Japanese Food" which isn't actually its name but sounds fucking plausible, and maybe one of these days I'll remember what establishments I go to.
INTERMISSION!
Woah I just remembered that while walking around Brooklyn looking for what turned out to be a large metal can with a one-way hinge-slot, we came across this incredible Super Hero Supply Store (I do not kid!), sporting such wonderful slogans as, "Many Items are Splendid!" "If items do not suit you, you are not a Superhero!"
BZZT!
So Madeline ordered the vegetable tempura with edamame and I got the same but with rice and this awesome ice-chilled sake - the smoothest I'd ever had - called "Beautiful Boy", which I did NOT in fact select because of its name, but rather was the affordable option presented enthusiastically by my waiter. Honestly!
After this we went to the Strand for the 7:00PM event. Two graphic novelists from Seattle were presenting their latest works and discussing them. The first was Megan Kelso with "Squirrel Mothers", which involved porches, stoops, and "Important Places" - to her, anyway. Apparently I get twitchy and fidgety when I'm bored, because I was definitely bored for this one.
The second novelist was more interesting. Ellen Forney, novel "I Love Led Zeppelin", gave a multi-media presentation on music, Camille Paglia, almost dating Camille Paglia, and dramatic car-crash deaths.
However the fine nuances of all this were lost on me since the person who introduced and later interviewed them was gorgeous, and had this adorable flappy-wing hat with actual mouse-ear type things sticking out the top. And he was beautiful, almost certainly gay, artsy, and in New York! And he got heckled by some stupid jerk, about his hat.
I got this really crazy idea that maybe I should ask him on a date, offer to buy him a drink, or... SOMETHING... like some wild, insane, romantic thing out of a Richard Linklater or a Godard film, but I chickened out at the last moment, which now in retrospect I kind of regret, even though I probably would've been summarily rejected as some kind of weirdo, because I mean who really does that?
"Hey there. I, uhm, really like your mouse ear hat."
"Thanks."
"Uhm. Want to go get a coffee? You're dreamy."
"Security!"
But damn, what if there had been a chance he'd say yes?
Madeline and I went and got some groceries, after (though not because) I discovered that the two books I still had out from the library are in fact going to be overdue on the 12th. Naturally, I said to myself, I'll just EXTEND them. This had been my pseudo-plan from the very beginning! Haha, Andrew out-thinks the system yet again!
"Error: This book could not be renewed."
"FUCK!!!"
So I'm looking for the post-office that Google Maps pointed me to, on 7th Ave. and Garfield street, so I can mail this goddamn book back to Ottawa by express post before I get slammed with another late fine...
Madeline: "Your book is overdue?"
Andrew: "Yeah."
Madeline: "Why not renew it?"
Andrew: "Tried. Won't let me for some reason."
Madeline: "Why didn't you renew it before you left?"
Andrew: "Well, you know, about that, I was going to, and..."
Madeline: "..."
Andrew: "Uhm... yeah, uhh, well... Hey, wait, what the fuck? This 'post office' is just a mail box!"
We ate some lunch and I, determined to find a proper post office - one with stamps and all the other 'CIVILIZED' accountrements of contemporary postal services, for reference you bloody savage Yanks - set out downtown. Actually, we set out to see the Met (shorthand for Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I say not to be pedantic but because I didn't actually know until today, or wasn't sure I knew, and was using 'Met' to be safe, but could easily have been persuaded that the Met was really inside the Statue of Liberty, which was obviously in the heart of Queens, and specialized in miniature postcards - thank god no one tried).
The Met was nice but, well, full of the 'usual' pretty paintings and expensive old things (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Rubens, Pollock, El Greco, god do I NEED to go on?!?). However, the first room we walked into was the Egyptian exhibit, but seeing as I am currently staying at the temporarily vacated residence of an Egyptologist and his wife, whose apartment is in fact filled to the brim with thousands of bizarre, gaudy, and ocassionally rare and probably expensive pieces of Egyptian memorabilia and miscellany, we felt we'd already had enough.
Amusing exchanges:
How Andrew selects an exhibit!
"Hey Madeline, let's decide on an exhibit!"
"Okay."
"Let's choose European paintings!"
How Andrew comments on Christian sacred art involving Mary and Baby Jesus!
"G'DAMN. Is that a giant tumour sticking out of Baby Jesus' hea.... oh wait, that's Mary's bre... ohhhhhhhh."
So rather than boring you with tedious and most likely wildly and embarassingly ignorant critiques of famous art, I'll just post my favourite painting for this evening:
The artist is Viktor Brauner (1903-1966). The painting is entitled "Prelude to a Civilization" (1954). For legal reasons I am apparently required to say this image comes from http://www.metmuseum.org. For anyone interested, the full link is: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/11/euwco/hob_1999.363.13.htm
Okay, there you go. Pretty painting of some kind of cow. No, wait, horse. Done in a primitive cave painting style. What you can't really get from the web representation is the sheer crisp beauty of his drawings, his sharp and stunning colour contrast, all set against this incredible black scratchy/fuzzy rough texture. It was really gorgeous. If I were a proper art critic I'd probably call this primitivism or something like that, but since I'm not I'll just call it AWESOMISM.
After the Met we got hungry and went down to 14th street to grab dinner and check out this Graphic Novel exhibition/talk/presentation thing at the giant Used/Rare/New bookstore called Strand Books - by this point totally forgetting that I was supposed to find a post office. Oh well.
We went to some Japanese restaurant called "Moshi Moshi Japanese Food" which isn't actually its name but sounds fucking plausible, and maybe one of these days I'll remember what establishments I go to.
INTERMISSION!
Woah I just remembered that while walking around Brooklyn looking for what turned out to be a large metal can with a one-way hinge-slot, we came across this incredible Super Hero Supply Store (I do not kid!), sporting such wonderful slogans as, "Many Items are Splendid!" "If items do not suit you, you are not a Superhero!"
BZZT!
So Madeline ordered the vegetable tempura with edamame and I got the same but with rice and this awesome ice-chilled sake - the smoothest I'd ever had - called "Beautiful Boy", which I did NOT in fact select because of its name, but rather was the affordable option presented enthusiastically by my waiter. Honestly!
After this we went to the Strand for the 7:00PM event. Two graphic novelists from Seattle were presenting their latest works and discussing them. The first was Megan Kelso with "Squirrel Mothers", which involved porches, stoops, and "Important Places" - to her, anyway. Apparently I get twitchy and fidgety when I'm bored, because I was definitely bored for this one.
The second novelist was more interesting. Ellen Forney, novel "I Love Led Zeppelin", gave a multi-media presentation on music, Camille Paglia, almost dating Camille Paglia, and dramatic car-crash deaths.
However the fine nuances of all this were lost on me since the person who introduced and later interviewed them was gorgeous, and had this adorable flappy-wing hat with actual mouse-ear type things sticking out the top. And he was beautiful, almost certainly gay, artsy, and in New York! And he got heckled by some stupid jerk, about his hat.
I got this really crazy idea that maybe I should ask him on a date, offer to buy him a drink, or... SOMETHING... like some wild, insane, romantic thing out of a Richard Linklater or a Godard film, but I chickened out at the last moment, which now in retrospect I kind of regret, even though I probably would've been summarily rejected as some kind of weirdo, because I mean who really does that?
"Hey there. I, uhm, really like your mouse ear hat."
"Thanks."
"Uhm. Want to go get a coffee? You're dreamy."
"Security!"
But damn, what if there had been a chance he'd say yes?
Sorry, it's... Scrabble
Woke up today at 2:00 PM, slightly hung-over. Last night was a riot.
I wasn't even sure I'd do anything today, but I saw a friend of mine online, Dan, who lives here in New York. We agreed to meet up for dinner at this nice vegetarian restaurant called Zen Palate, down near 42nd street.
The vegetable dumplings and miso soup were fantastic, but the weird gaucamole bean wrap with minced spicy carrots and miniature taro spring rolls was a bit unusual. Dan didn't care much for his rose-petal slab of soy bean product with raspberry sauce and a sprinkle of ginger. I couldn't imagine why.
On the way downtown I caught a glimpse of a sign saying "Gay and Lesbian Community Center" at the 14th street station, which I thought was more than a little bizarre, and certainly unexpected. I made a note and after dinner Dan (who is also gay, but no, not an interest in that way) and I set off on a gayscapade to find this mysterious cent(re)(er).
Dan promptly got us lost.
"Is this Chelsea?"
"What?"
"That sign there, it says 'Chelsea'."
"Okay sure, it's Chelsea."
"Really?"
"How the hell should I know?"
And later,
"Where is Hell's Kitchen?"
"I have NO idea."
Now Dan's lived here for at least 2 years, but has a terrible sense of direction. After walking the wrong way, about-facing, continuing in an also-wrong-but-slightly-less-so direction, discovering we were right the first time, and repeating, Dan stops and raises his finger in the air, "Ahha, I've got a brilliant idea!"
So we're inside this magazine shop which has four thousand vacuous seeming fashion magazines if it has one, and Dan keeps muttering something like, "So many magazines, there's GOT to be one for New York!"
We find what we're looking for, not surprisingly, in a little nook at the back in the "Gay and Lesbian" section. I picked up some bed-time reading for myself. You know, gay literature, excellent articles, engaging perspectives. That sort of stuff. Totally intellectual. 100%.
Dan picks up this mag "Metro", which looks promising, has bunches of gay bars and restaurants listed. We head out to a little Parisian styled dessert cafe called "La Cafe Parisienne"... which is not actually its name but that's all I got. Dan gets an awesome crepe with chocolate sauce and bananas, I make a fool of myself speaking French to the waitress, and together we scan the mag.
20 minutes later...
We find the damn thing in a tiny advertisement near the back. 208 Something Or Other Street. Boom! Off we go.
We get about two blocks before getting lost again.
"I thought this city was supposed to be a grid!"
"Yeah, uhh, well..."
So the centre(er) turns out to be this four storey building with a big front desk and tons of conference rooms and shit. I liked the free condom bin, which unfortunately was empty. I mean, I liked it in principle, as an idea. A public service. You know. I didn't ACTUALLY like... LIKE it.
Upstairs we found a whole wall full of pamphlets and newsletters and events listings. They even had rainbow coloured "Fun Maps" for Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and.. of course.. Manhattan.
Success! *triumphant fanfare with a little prissy trill towards the end*
New York Gay Listings
20Something
Social group for LGBT New Yorkers in and around their 20s (ages 18-33).
Dan, 30, was thrilled about being reinvited into the 20s age group.
VEG-OUT
Vegetarian potluck (no meat/eggs/dairy) for LGBT and queer-friendly vegetarians and wannabees.
Dan: "No way I'm going to that one. I wouldn't eat anything New Yorkers make - there are some crazies in this town."
SCRABBLERS
All levels. Bring boards.
Turns out the scrabble was happening RIGHT THEN. So off we rushed into the bowels of the building. Four floors down, one elevator ride up, two floors down, one windy corridor, two floors down, one creepy pipe-exposed concrete cobwebbed basement, one non-functional fire exit leading to neatly tended veranda with ferns and benches, four flights of stairs up, and a door into a cramped, paint-peeling room later, and we found the scrabblers!
Hooray!!...
I open the door and one of the six people in the room turns to me, his face crestfallen and embarassed, and just says, all meek and apologetic: "Sorry, it's... Scrabble."
Oh New York.
I wasn't even sure I'd do anything today, but I saw a friend of mine online, Dan, who lives here in New York. We agreed to meet up for dinner at this nice vegetarian restaurant called Zen Palate, down near 42nd street.
The vegetable dumplings and miso soup were fantastic, but the weird gaucamole bean wrap with minced spicy carrots and miniature taro spring rolls was a bit unusual. Dan didn't care much for his rose-petal slab of soy bean product with raspberry sauce and a sprinkle of ginger. I couldn't imagine why.
On the way downtown I caught a glimpse of a sign saying "Gay and Lesbian Community Center" at the 14th street station, which I thought was more than a little bizarre, and certainly unexpected. I made a note and after dinner Dan (who is also gay, but no, not an interest in that way) and I set off on a gayscapade to find this mysterious cent(re)(er).
Dan promptly got us lost.
"Is this Chelsea?"
"What?"
"That sign there, it says 'Chelsea'."
"Okay sure, it's Chelsea."
"Really?"
"How the hell should I know?"
And later,
"Where is Hell's Kitchen?"
"I have NO idea."
Now Dan's lived here for at least 2 years, but has a terrible sense of direction. After walking the wrong way, about-facing, continuing in an also-wrong-but-slightly-less-so direction, discovering we were right the first time, and repeating, Dan stops and raises his finger in the air, "Ahha, I've got a brilliant idea!"
So we're inside this magazine shop which has four thousand vacuous seeming fashion magazines if it has one, and Dan keeps muttering something like, "So many magazines, there's GOT to be one for New York!"
We find what we're looking for, not surprisingly, in a little nook at the back in the "Gay and Lesbian" section. I picked up some bed-time reading for myself. You know, gay literature, excellent articles, engaging perspectives. That sort of stuff. Totally intellectual. 100%.
Dan picks up this mag "Metro", which looks promising, has bunches of gay bars and restaurants listed. We head out to a little Parisian styled dessert cafe called "La Cafe Parisienne"... which is not actually its name but that's all I got. Dan gets an awesome crepe with chocolate sauce and bananas, I make a fool of myself speaking French to the waitress, and together we scan the mag.
20 minutes later...
We find the damn thing in a tiny advertisement near the back. 208 Something Or Other Street. Boom! Off we go.
We get about two blocks before getting lost again.
"I thought this city was supposed to be a grid!"
"Yeah, uhh, well..."
So the centre(er) turns out to be this four storey building with a big front desk and tons of conference rooms and shit. I liked the free condom bin, which unfortunately was empty. I mean, I liked it in principle, as an idea. A public service. You know. I didn't ACTUALLY like... LIKE it.
Upstairs we found a whole wall full of pamphlets and newsletters and events listings. They even had rainbow coloured "Fun Maps" for Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, and.. of course.. Manhattan.
Success! *triumphant fanfare with a little prissy trill towards the end*
New York Gay Listings
20Something
Social group for LGBT New Yorkers in and around their 20s (ages 18-33).
Dan, 30, was thrilled about being reinvited into the 20s age group.
VEG-OUT
Vegetarian potluck (no meat/eggs/dairy) for LGBT and queer-friendly vegetarians and wannabees.
Dan: "No way I'm going to that one. I wouldn't eat anything New Yorkers make - there are some crazies in this town."
SCRABBLERS
All levels. Bring boards.
Turns out the scrabble was happening RIGHT THEN. So off we rushed into the bowels of the building. Four floors down, one elevator ride up, two floors down, one windy corridor, two floors down, one creepy pipe-exposed concrete cobwebbed basement, one non-functional fire exit leading to neatly tended veranda with ferns and benches, four flights of stairs up, and a door into a cramped, paint-peeling room later, and we found the scrabblers!
Hooray!!...
I open the door and one of the six people in the room turns to me, his face crestfallen and embarassed, and just says, all meek and apologetic: "Sorry, it's... Scrabble."
Oh New York.
Monday, January 8, 2007
A Stone too Far
So I got up at 6:30 AM yesterday to haul my sorry ass downtown (which is like a misnomer here, since EVERYWHERE is downtown) to play in a Go tournament. For those who don't know, Go is an ancient board game played by people with aspirations of being ancient bores. In my more deluded moments I like to think I'm one of the few Go enthusiasts with social skills and a sense of humour that doesn't involve pointing out people's grammatical errors when they talk.
I won two and lost two games. I learned some things about the game, but I learned a lot more about the kind of PEOPLE who play it. Imagine a room full of overweight disfigured geeks with food-stained clothes and an unhealthy fascination with binary programming - said atmosphere humming with a kind of weird nasal neighing laughter - and you've got a go tournament hall.
Someone a lot weaker than me started huffing and hawing and being a total dick as I tried to explain a concept to another player. Being insecure and awkward is one thing, and lord knows that described me for the vast majority of my own life thus far, but there's something really foul smelling about people who have no sense of humour or charm to compensate for their lack of social graces - and I'm not just talking about body odour!
I went home after the "award" ceremony ("Can I get everyone's attention please? The winner of the tournament is _____!" *insert modest clapping* "Here's your free Go book. Thanks everyone for coming!" *insert weird neighing laughter as crowd mills awkwardly around the exit*). Madeline and I then went out to this nice little bar called Buttermilk. We'd been there before, and a country band had been playing. I don't like country music, but they were tight.
No band this time, but we started drinking and before long we found ourselves talking to this guy "Henry" at the bar. A fourty-year-old dude with great taste in music and a wicked sense of humour. Bought us some drinks and chatted us up for an hour. Fantastically nice guy. Madeline got his e-mail and then lost it.
We also met some other Americans. One was a DJ who doubled as a high school counsellor or something like that. Another one had a duel with me to see who had the stranger name. Knoerschild or something like that. I think he won, but I won the dance off later in the night. I vaguely recall someone describing my moves as "fluid like water", which I felt was pretty flattering.
The last one was a philosophy and political science grad who'd been all over London and Paris and Spain and seemed like a genuinely cool guy. Good looking too!
The rest of the night is shrouded in blackness and drunken staggering, which admittedly had been our plan from the very beginning. I recall observing that New York was like the coolest two blocks of Ottawa stretched out for miles and miles and miles. On the way home we crossed a roundabout that honestly looked like it had been airlifted from Belgium for the express purpose of Europifying Brooklyn. It sent a chill down my spine how similar it looked - even the corrugated metal gates covering store entrances looked the same.
All in all I have to say this town is fucking incredible.
I won two and lost two games. I learned some things about the game, but I learned a lot more about the kind of PEOPLE who play it. Imagine a room full of overweight disfigured geeks with food-stained clothes and an unhealthy fascination with binary programming - said atmosphere humming with a kind of weird nasal neighing laughter - and you've got a go tournament hall.
Someone a lot weaker than me started huffing and hawing and being a total dick as I tried to explain a concept to another player. Being insecure and awkward is one thing, and lord knows that described me for the vast majority of my own life thus far, but there's something really foul smelling about people who have no sense of humour or charm to compensate for their lack of social graces - and I'm not just talking about body odour!
I went home after the "award" ceremony ("Can I get everyone's attention please? The winner of the tournament is _____!" *insert modest clapping* "Here's your free Go book. Thanks everyone for coming!" *insert weird neighing laughter as crowd mills awkwardly around the exit*). Madeline and I then went out to this nice little bar called Buttermilk. We'd been there before, and a country band had been playing. I don't like country music, but they were tight.
No band this time, but we started drinking and before long we found ourselves talking to this guy "Henry" at the bar. A fourty-year-old dude with great taste in music and a wicked sense of humour. Bought us some drinks and chatted us up for an hour. Fantastically nice guy. Madeline got his e-mail and then lost it.
We also met some other Americans. One was a DJ who doubled as a high school counsellor or something like that. Another one had a duel with me to see who had the stranger name. Knoerschild or something like that. I think he won, but I won the dance off later in the night. I vaguely recall someone describing my moves as "fluid like water", which I felt was pretty flattering.
The last one was a philosophy and political science grad who'd been all over London and Paris and Spain and seemed like a genuinely cool guy. Good looking too!
The rest of the night is shrouded in blackness and drunken staggering, which admittedly had been our plan from the very beginning. I recall observing that New York was like the coolest two blocks of Ottawa stretched out for miles and miles and miles. On the way home we crossed a roundabout that honestly looked like it had been airlifted from Belgium for the express purpose of Europifying Brooklyn. It sent a chill down my spine how similar it looked - even the corrugated metal gates covering store entrances looked the same.
All in all I have to say this town is fucking incredible.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
A Special Kind of Fry
Here I am in New York. The town is marvelous; wonderful stores, great atmosphere, and dazzling buildings. I am almost literally blown away by the tallness of things.
I am at a loss for what to do, though. So far I've wandered more or less aimlessly, indulging periodically in bouts of consumerism - mostly involving books!, of which there is no shortage in this town - and ogling not only the striking modern capitalist architecture, but the modern capitalists themselves. God damn but there are some hot guys here!
But beyond this, I feel a little apprehensive. I don't have much time here - returning to Ottawa on February 1st - and I feel almost... compelled to make the most of it. For some reason it has entered into my mind that this will involve sex, but how paltry a goal is that?
I want more. I want New York to somehow change me into that sort of person who can soak up all the potentially inspiring ground that undergirds the island Manhattan. This city, mythologized to no end, represents for me a kind of panacae for world-wandering. A cure-all for the sick and unaccomplished spirit....
Oh, what the fuck am I saying? I just want to get laid.
Tomorrow I wake up at 7:00 AM to reach 53rd St. for a Go tournament. I feel more than a little insane to be doing this - a whole day of slamming little ceramic objects onto a wooden surface in a room full of people who think tireless pedantry is endearing - but there you have it.
Funny Moments:
Okay no one ever told me "steak fries" are in fact "BIG FRIES" and not some bizarre beef-soaked potato product. Hence the following exchange, upon sending back a chicken and celery soup when I ordered a potato and leek one:
"Is there anything else you'd like to order?"
"Do you have fries?"
"We have steak fries."
"No, look, I'm a vegetarian. Do you have normal fries?"
"Uhhmmm..."
Fortunately the person I was with elected to laugh at me AFTER we left the restaurant.
I am at a loss for what to do, though. So far I've wandered more or less aimlessly, indulging periodically in bouts of consumerism - mostly involving books!, of which there is no shortage in this town - and ogling not only the striking modern capitalist architecture, but the modern capitalists themselves. God damn but there are some hot guys here!
But beyond this, I feel a little apprehensive. I don't have much time here - returning to Ottawa on February 1st - and I feel almost... compelled to make the most of it. For some reason it has entered into my mind that this will involve sex, but how paltry a goal is that?
I want more. I want New York to somehow change me into that sort of person who can soak up all the potentially inspiring ground that undergirds the island Manhattan. This city, mythologized to no end, represents for me a kind of panacae for world-wandering. A cure-all for the sick and unaccomplished spirit....
Oh, what the fuck am I saying? I just want to get laid.
Tomorrow I wake up at 7:00 AM to reach 53rd St. for a Go tournament. I feel more than a little insane to be doing this - a whole day of slamming little ceramic objects onto a wooden surface in a room full of people who think tireless pedantry is endearing - but there you have it.
Funny Moments:
Okay no one ever told me "steak fries" are in fact "BIG FRIES" and not some bizarre beef-soaked potato product. Hence the following exchange, upon sending back a chicken and celery soup when I ordered a potato and leek one:
"Is there anything else you'd like to order?"
"Do you have fries?"
"We have steak fries."
"No, look, I'm a vegetarian. Do you have normal fries?"
"Uhhmmm..."
Fortunately the person I was with elected to laugh at me AFTER we left the restaurant.
Friday, January 5, 2007
First day in New York
I arrived in New York yesterday, at 7:00 am. The bus ride was overnight and hellish. When we got in at the border an insane patrol officer told us all to shut the fuck up and sit down and if we just did as he said we could all get the hell out of there faster and lady sit the hell down are you deaf? Etc.
This was repeated in a more mild fashion when in the town of Plat-themiddleofnowhere-mouth , a concrete wasteland community, we took on some new passengers and a new border patrol officer. He started grilling the new people. One poor sap didn't have any papers. This led to 30 minutes of the border patrol guy radioing dispatch to have different records and databases scanned for this guy's history, in front of everyone.
"Have you ever been arrested, sir?"
"No."
15 minutes later, after the NCSX2D1R scan is completed by dispatch,
"Hoho, Looks like you've got multiple arrests in Baltimore!"
"But I thought you were asking if I was arrested in Platmouth!"
Eventually we got into Manhattan, cabbed into Brooklyn, slept, then wandered the streets looking for cool bars and stores. Nice neighbourhood Madeline's aunt and uncle live in! Got all these storybook Cosby show stone steps leading up to old two-storey apartment buildings. Very quaint.
Next day saw an interesting crazy guy outside a bookstore. Kept shouting for some, as far as I could tell, fictional black person to step outside. He litterally GROWLED. Never seen any person I could accurately describe as "feral" before!
Funny event:
Met a hardcore Jew in the metr... I mean SUBWAY (gotta stop doing that), of which there are uncountable numbers here. He asked Madeline and me what sounded like, "Are you rich?"
Madeline shook her head and pointed at me. But wait, I'm not rich! What's this guy on about?! goes Andrew's highly intelligent thought process. I say "No!" The Jewish guy walks off, looking sad, whilst I feel more or less proud of myself for narrowly escaping some kind of strange Jewish timeshare scam.
Madeline spent the next five minutes looking at me strangely. Oy Vey!
This was repeated in a more mild fashion when in the town of Plat-themiddleofnowhere-mouth , a concrete wasteland community, we took on some new passengers and a new border patrol officer. He started grilling the new people. One poor sap didn't have any papers. This led to 30 minutes of the border patrol guy radioing dispatch to have different records and databases scanned for this guy's history, in front of everyone.
"Have you ever been arrested, sir?"
"No."
15 minutes later, after the NCSX2D1R scan is completed by dispatch,
"Hoho, Looks like you've got multiple arrests in Baltimore!"
"But I thought you were asking if I was arrested in Platmouth!"
Eventually we got into Manhattan, cabbed into Brooklyn, slept, then wandered the streets looking for cool bars and stores. Nice neighbourhood Madeline's aunt and uncle live in! Got all these storybook Cosby show stone steps leading up to old two-storey apartment buildings. Very quaint.
Next day saw an interesting crazy guy outside a bookstore. Kept shouting for some, as far as I could tell, fictional black person to step outside. He litterally GROWLED. Never seen any person I could accurately describe as "feral" before!
Funny event:
Met a hardcore Jew in the metr... I mean SUBWAY (gotta stop doing that), of which there are uncountable numbers here. He asked Madeline and me what sounded like, "Are you rich?"
Madeline shook her head and pointed at me. But wait, I'm not rich! What's this guy on about?! goes Andrew's highly intelligent thought process. I say "No!" The Jewish guy walks off, looking sad, whilst I feel more or less proud of myself for narrowly escaping some kind of strange Jewish timeshare scam.
Madeline spent the next five minutes looking at me strangely. Oy Vey!
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