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!

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:

                                          #@
 - - - - - 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?

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!

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!