r-stop

Going Soft Inside

2011-02-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

Just in case anyone needed to dance it out today.

Kitchen Disaster

2009-12-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Totally and Completely Letting It Be

2009-09-30T23:57:00.001-07:00

The Heat

2009-09-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

It's finally hot in LA. It seemed to take forever this year. Overcast and lukewarm every day week after week.

But no, it's hot, in that slight-emergency way. Sleeping with an ice pack. All the windows down in the car. Maggots in the garbage.

On Friday night I drove all the way from my house to downtown on 3rd in Labor Day weekend Friday evening traffic. Everyone was out on the streets, walking up and down the sidewalks, sitting on front stairs, sitting on bikes, Grandmas holding ice cream cones for babies. Music. Why would anyone ever wear anything other than a tank top, ever? I went swimming in the ocean yesterday, diving under big waves, popping through the glassy ones just before they broke. Apart from finding sand in my ears the next day, I'm wondering: why don't I do this every Saturday?

Yesterday I rode my bike to the Larchmont Farmers market to buy tiny strawberries and baba ganoush. By the time I rode back, it was noon and so blindingly hot. I passed some side yards with trees and bushes and flowers and damp moss and the smell was of heaven and I thought about swimming in rivers the rest of the way until I got home and had a drink of water.

Raindrop Music

2009-09-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

For hot days.

Bug Life

2009-08-26T22:25:00.001-07:00

Maggots in the trash can again, it's like they follow me.

And the crickets that jump inside the apartment and then sing their loud evening cricket song, right next to the wall by the corner of the couch, loud. It's only when they pause for stretching that you realize: how loud!

It's a distinct time of year, these days when summer is ready to collapse into fall, wringing out the last of our energy with its heat, not sharp heat like July, more a dull boring heat like a mole in a hill and I'm thinking about being another year older again.

More Volvo Love

2009-08-04T22:15:00.000-07:00

I drove a rental car for the last two days because my car was in the shop having failed the smog test. It got to have a sleepover with the other Volvos.

The rental car I drove was a Nissan Sentra. It was red, at least. And not (sorry American car makers) American. But I felt like I was driving a kleenex box with power windows around. Who can stand to drive this car all the time? It's got no weight to it, is boxy as all get out and the bars (I'm sure there's a technical term for it, I don't know what it is) on either side of the windshield could not have been more huge or more totally in the way of seeing the road. It was zippy to drive and I enjoyed not having to be a total precious wimp about going over potholes, but how zippy do you really want an enormous kleenex box to be, really?

The radio does not work in my car, so I was listening to the radio in some horrible 405 morning commute traffic (who can do that every day? It must kill part of your soul) and here's what I've been missing:

1) shite RnB song about "ooo, ooh, in the hotel room, the hotel room, yeah girl, in the hotel room, mm, mm, here come the egg whites"
2) talk radio with Ashton Kutcher talking about doing a sex scene with an actress but finding her feet to be gross and talking at length about how gross they were and how he asked people to cover them up in the scene.
3) talk radio about how Brad Pitt was spotted getting McDonald's drive-through and it was the second time in as many weeks

Finally I found a station playing Fleetwood Mac. The next song isn't bad either. The station ID comes on: it's the oldies station.

Here's the thing that I realized bugged me the most though: I didn't like driving that car because it wasn't cool. The Volvo may not be a Porsche, but that car has character and style. It is distinctive in parking lots. I feel cool when I'm driving it. I even feel cool having a tape collection. As cars go, that's like have a record player in your automobile. I like the heaviness of the Volvo and the low slung seats and when I drive it, I have perfect zen with what it can do as a machine and the space it takes up because I've been driving it for eleven years.

Anyway, nice try Sentra, I'll be driving the Volvo into the ground.

Rules of Thumb

2009-07-31T18:52:00.000-07:00

Possibly everything you ever need to know.

A photograph plus a photograph plus a photograph is life.

2009-07-30T21:25:00.001-07:00

I think everyone with a digital camera has to come to terms with how many photos you end up taking because of how easy it is to keep snapping away.

It creates organizational problems, but it also makes for this woman's work. Also the idea for what kind of photograph you take of what kind of thing.

Also, there are crotch shots.

Goodwill, July 25th, 2009

2009-07-26T15:54:00.001-07:00

High-waisted houndstooth wool pencil skirt from Banana Republic, $4.99.

Still mourning the violently purple pencil skirt that was a mite too small. God, it was beautiful.

T Hanks

2009-07-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

Do you guys kind of miss when it was the 80s?

Nightdriving, California

2009-07-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

A Stroke

2009-07-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

Mural

2009-07-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Along the Galloping Goose bike path in Victoria.

We both agree that it's delicious and healthy

2009-07-22T21:07:00.003-07:00

Say what you will about Bruno, it did set me off on a hummus kick.

You Built A Time Machine Out of a Car

2009-07-20T23:04:00.001-07:00

When I was a teenager I went to a drama festival and the head adjudicator was this really wonderful stage actor Scott Bellis. I can't even remember what play we put up, or maybe I was just watching a friend's play. Anyway, when he got up at the end of the festival to talk about the plays, he stood there on the empty black box stage and walked around a bit and said, "You can do anything up here". And I had one of those profound moments when you are a teenager where that information suddenly seems like the newest piece of insight ever at the same time that it's something that you've know all along, and a whole world opens up.

I was already really into theatre, but thinking of the revelation of that moment made me return again and again to loving plays and how they create whole worlds in infinite succession on a tired old piece of black stage. Because it wasn't just that he said that, but also that he made it true the moment he said it.

And when I find things like this online, I feel that way all over again.

Because holy shit, this guy is amazing! Do people help him? His friends from high school? Does he work in a pay parking booth and write all the music at work (by the way, strongly recommend working in a pay parking booth if you need to get some desk work done)?

I love the internet for letting this guy make this stuff and letting us all see it. It's the best kind of nonsense, just like movies and plays and Van Gogh and Rolling Stone lyrics and the bible.

The Tragically Hip, June 10th at the Troubadour

2009-07-06T00:58:00.000-07:00

Sarah and I got there, having scored choice street parking (which was available because in typical LA fashion, we had to spend five minutes deciphering the logic problem of the six parking regulation signs to figure out if it was legal or not). To the wiliest go the parking spoils.

We got drinks, the place was pretty full, we looked around at all the other people in LA who would come out to a Hip show. At one point someone barely grazed my elbow from behind and immediately said, “Sorry” (Soh-ree, not saw-ree). A few minutes later, I stepped back to put my empty glass on the bar and someone leaning against the bar took it out of my hands and put it there for me. In that moment I knew: I was amongst more Canadians in one place than I had probably ever been outside of Canada.

The Troubadour is known for promptness and sure enough, they did not dilly-dally when it came to getting the show on stage. I and my day job appreciated that a lot. No one opened: no one needed to.

Now, I haven’t been following these guys lately. The last album I bought was Music At Work, which I didn’t really listen to much. I hadn’t listened to Phantom Power for ages; I didn’t even have it on my computer. Trouble At the Henhouse (apart from being one of my favorite album titles (Dongs of Sevotion being a close contender)) I’d listen to occasionally. In high school we all listened to Day For Night exhaustively, and Fully Completely got the most radio play. Once, on a road trip from Vancouver to Prince George in which everyone forgot to bring music, I purchased the cassette tape of Up To Here in 100 Mile House, which we then listened to from there to PG and all the way back to Vancouver on a loop until we couldn’t take it anymore.

All this to say that I haven’t heard their new stuff. And it’s a tour; they have to play a lot of the new stuff to keep the people happy/buying albums, I get that. The new stuff was a little too happy and mellow and dreamy for me. But they are dads now and stuff, so they, like Joni Mitchell, have looked at clouds from both sides now.

Mr. Gord Downie is still the most creative person on stage that I’ve ever seen. Bob Dylan takes the prize for most outrageous reinvention of his own songs on stage, but he can’t hold a candle to Gord’s physical imaginationings. It’s like when he’s making music something else takes over and it’s kind of dance and kind of performance art and it’s a little silly at times, but it always actually makes sense. His head is shaved bald and he had a white towel for wiping it. He’d go through a towel ever couple of minutes – the used ones would get tossed into the crowd (hm) and then a roadie offstage would toss him a fresh one. Are there eight million ways to catch a towel that’s being tossed to you? I now think that there are. Are there four hundred million ways to wipe your sweaty head? Indefinitely. Including singing whole songs with the towel covering your face.

Yes, they played: Grace, Too (with the “Well I’m tragically hip” lyric swapped in), Locked In The Trunk of a Car, Gift Shop, Ahead By A Century, Springtime In Vienna, Poets, Thompson Girl (so pretty). They played Bobcaygeon, which I never liked as much before, partly cause on the album there’s a bit of a easy-listening feel to it, flutes or something. They played it as straight up rock, a little harsh, and it was more beautiful than I’d ever noticed before. It was the musical equivalent of the plain girl in the movie who takes off her glasses and reveals herself as gorgeous. “Coulda been the Willie Nelson, coulda been the wine.”

And they played Nautical Disaster, which even if everything else was crap, would have made the night worthwhile. There is something about the years I was 17, 18, 19 contained in that song, some kind of worldview that it has. The fingernails on the hull. The kind of logic that will get you hated.

Yes, the Canadianness is a big part of it for me, especially now. And there’s a nostalgia element involved. But the Hip have this acuteness in their lyrics that you hardly ever find in music, especially popular music. I wonder how much of the magic of the line: “Maybe a prostitute/Could teach you/How to take a compliment” lands for their more meathead fanbase. Or “Sleepwalk/So fast asleep/In the motel/That has the lay of home”. Setting the scene with “Sled dogs after dinner/Close their eyes on the howling waste/Kurt Cobain reincarnated/Sighs and licks his face”. It’s possible Gord is right about “A generation so much dumber than its parents/Came crashing through the window”.

Have fallen in love with Fireworks:

If there’s a goal that everyone remembers
It was back in ol’ 72
We all squeezed the stick and we all pulled the trigger
And all I remember is sitting beside you.
You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey
Well I never saw someone say that before
You held my hand and we walked home the long way
You were loosening my grip on Bobby Orr.

Never read his book of poems, and it’s possible it may not be as good when it’s not sung out with guitars and drums and the ziiiing feeling of a solid pop hook, but when you add that stuff it’s pretty intoxicating.

And then they signed off and we filed out into the night, sweaty and with a tinnitus ring: souvenirs of a good night.

Tonight You Belong To Me

2009-07-05T00:58:00.001-07:00

When my old roommate Rebecca moved off to Jordan, she left a lot of stuff in the house for me to use, including one of her ukuleles. I played guitar a bit when I was a kid so it wasn't hard to pick it up and thanks to the internet, it's not hard to learn the basic adjustments of uke versus guitar. I played a song to my mom over the phone, which she complained about, because I played it really badly. But when I was up in Vancouver recently, she asked me why I don't play that song from The Jerk.

On looking for it, I found this girl, who is hopefully no longer posting stuff on YouTube because she's working on an album, because wowie geez is her voice pretty. Pretty song too. Now I just have to learn this tune and find a fellow who plays the trumpet to walk along the beach with me.

The Proposal, or: The Worst Possible Way to Stay In The Country

2009-06-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

How excited am I for this movie? A Canadian played by an American forces an American played by a Canadian to marry her so she can stay in America. And don't pretend the casting isn't part of the joke: for me the casting is the whole joke, expecially when RR starts making dumb American jokes about Canada. Directed by a choreograher.

Also, I would see any movie with Sandra Bullock.

Trustifarians Eating Ramen

2009-06-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

This is from a while ago, but I can’t not post it, because I think it’s too hilarious.

Did none of these people read into the moral lessons behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? I’m all for parents helping their struggling kids out and it being hard to be a young person struggling to get ahead, but give me a freaking break. If you’re twentysomething and you want to break into the [pretentious career] industry, be a scrapper and do it! Don’t take summers off, don’t spend all your money on ridiculous shoes and twenty dollar martinis (NYC can be an asshole about that) and then balk at working a shit job for 8 hours in a row. If you are the parent of such a person, cut them off.

The film industry, for one, is full of people who are trying to work in it or who do work in it who don’t care that much about movies and aren’t really interested in shutting up, working hard, and getting the job done. Of course, there are people who DO care about movies, who DO shut up and work hard and get the job done and those people are freaking DIAMONDS. And they do not spend very long working shitty jobs. Getting ahead in film is like a zen paradox: love washing the coffee cups and then you won’t have to do it for very long.

Routine

2009-06-17T15:27:00.000-07:00

Now that I've been working this job for over a year, I've gotten pretty good at my routines. I work about 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday, not including commute (30 minutes in the morning, 15 at night). I try to spend one weeknight a week socializing, two weeknights a week at the gym and Monday nights I usually give myself the night off (I'm usually a little jetlagged from the weekend hours).

This means one weekend day is (at least partly) taken up with chores: laundry, grocery shopping, cleaning up the kitchen, cleaning the house, because I don’t have time to do it during the week. I try to make myself a week’s worth of lunches for the week ahead too. This doesn’t always happen.

I have my behaviour pretty much set into a pattern that works really well. I’m missing writing time. So far, I still haven’t been able to figure out where to fit that in, apart from some 3 hour stints on the weekends. What’s hard is getting my head out of office mode and into writing mode. I’ve gotten really good at sensing what time it is, or how much time has passed. The other thing I’ve learned from work is a certain kind of split attention. I have real conversations at the same time that I’m listening to a phone conversation in my other ear at the same time I’m having an IM conversation. I monitor multiple email inboxes. I have a hard time reading a two page article all the way through without flipping through other windows, checking other information streams. It’s not a lack of concentration; it’s just broad concentration instead of deep concentration.

I’m looking forward to a future phase of my life in which I will be able to foster deep concentration once again.

Here are some famous people and their patterns. Often striking for their weirdness, which is great: to make great things, sometimes you have build your life around your own peculiarities, even if it’s not that healthy.

WH Auden:

He swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years, from 1938 onward, balancing its effect with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep. (He also kept a glass of vodka by the bed, to swig if he woke up during the night.) He took a pragmatic attitude toward amphetamines, regarding them as a "labor-saving device" in the "mental kitchen," with the important proviso that "these mechanisms are very crude, liable to injure the cook, and constantly breaking down."

Winston Churchill:

He awoke about 7:30 a.m. and remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers. For the next couple of hours, still in bed, he worked, dictating to his secretaries. At 11:00 a.m., he arose, bathed, and perhaps took a walk around the garden, and took a weak whisky and soda to his study.

Mr. Rogers:

Mister Rogers weighed 143 pounds because he has weighed 143 pounds as long as he has been Mister Rogers, because once upon a time, around thirty-one years ago, Mister Rogers stepped on a scale, and the scale told him that Mister Rogers weighs 143 pounds. No, not that he weighed 143 pounds, but that he weighs 143 pounds.... And so, every day, Mister Rogers refuses to do anything that would make his weight change--he neither drinks, nor smokes, nor eats flesh of any kind, nor goes to bed late at night, nor sleeps late in the morning, nor even watches television--and every morning, when he swims, he steps on a scale in his bathing suit and his bathing cap and his goggles, and the scale tells him he weighs 143 pounds. This has happened so many times that Mister Rogers has come to see that number as a gift, as a destiny fulfilled, because, as he says, "the number 143 means `I love you.' It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say `love' and three letters to say `you.' One hundred and forty-three. `I love you.' Isn't that wonderful?"

Pro-Ahmadinejad + Photoshop = Love

2009-06-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

Looks like the photoshopping skills of Iranian powers that be have not improved with practice and experience.

Homeless in the Sims

2009-06-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

I played the Sims a while back. It was boring. I couldn't deal with computer characters that took 45-minute-long showers in the mornings and then kept missing their carpools. As if the irritating details of real life aren't bad enough.

Maybe the key is giving your Sims some kind of actual, serious conflict, like making them homeless with an abusive parent. This makes the game seem actually interesting.

What Do You Call A Bad Tattoo Gone Bad?

2009-06-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

So this 18-year-old girl went to get a small ugly facial tattoo and ended up with a big ugly facial tattoo.

Couple of things:

Who falls asleep while getting a tattoo? Was she on morphine?

Facial tattoos at 18? You want to wear a badge of dumb for the rest of your life?

Who gives facial tattoos to a teenager? Oh, it's this guy:

So I guess if you ask this guy to start drawing on you with permanent ink, you get what you deserve. I hope my little cousin sees this.

So Get Off Your Ath, Let's Do Some Math, Math Math Math Math Math

2009-06-12T17:10:00.000-07:00

So I have a massive pile of receipts that I need to reconcile with my bank statements so that I can figure out how much I’ve been spending and on what. Not the most fun thing ever.

But look, here’s an excuse for continued laziness: you can use this checksum technique on your restaurant bills to mathematically “lock” your total so servers don’t give themselves tips off your credit card that you didn’t authorize, no receipt-checking required. Clever.

Is this paranoid? Yes, but so is tearing my name and address out of all junk mail I receive and taking it to work for shredding. A month ago I spotted a hobo going through my recycling bin looking not for bottles but for paper, specifically mail. Creepy.

Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling 2009

2009-06-05T14:13:00.001-07:00

Vlad

2009-06-04T17:40:00.000-07:00

Every photograph of Vladmir Putin cracks me up. And scares the shit out of me. He’s like a sad clown that is thinking very seriously about how your eyeballs will taste when he rips them out of your face and eats them.

Pictures

2009-06-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

I really like reading the news and I recently discovered this feature the Boston Globe has called The Big Picture, which is just that: news stories, told mostly by photograph, but really high-resolution, big photos that take up your whole browser screen. It's amazing how sometimes it feels much more informative than just reading an article.

Sometimes it is on big news stories that are already leading, but often the subject is stuff I've never heard of before, like... Gloucester Cheese Rolling!

The Verge

2009-06-01T22:32:00.000-07:00

I am still someone who has not thrown up from running too hard. I am also, but just barely, someone who has not thrown up from a traumatic emotional experience.

I am, however, someone who has thrown up in the car after eating half a bag of corn chips before driving down the Whistler highway. I am almost someone who has thrown up from eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Two-Fact Review of Angels and Demons

2009-05-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

1)When the usher announced the total run time of the movie, everyone groaned.

2)When Stellan Skarsgard was talking about why a mysterious sect was trying to murder the papal candidates, my thought was, “Hey we have the same kind of paper cups in our office.”

Clotheshorse

2009-05-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Why did I ever stop shopping at secondhand stores for clothes?

I survived on thrift stores for a long time. By the time I was 20, at least half of the items in my closet and most of my favorites were from secondhand stores. I may have depended on them too heavily: I think ideally one should have 20 - 30% secondhand stuff, only because inevitably the secondhand stuff I come home with tends to be a bit on the outlandish side and you have to mix the outlandish with more conventional basics to really set them off.

This is what I realized I missed about second hand shopping: it is to retail store shopping as hand-to-hand combat is to machine gun warfare. There is no other size or different color. You have to understand fabrics. 100% polyester will smell like someone's armpits and if not, it will smell like your own soon enough. 50-50 poly cotton blend t-shirts, on the other hand, will be thin and soft and hang great. Not everything has tags, so you have to be able to feel the difference between fabrics. Acetate lining or silk lining? It matters. Sometimes the store smells bad. But if you walk out with a Hill Street Blues shirt that strangers then ask to buy off you about once every year, it's worth it. You will never find good jeans (so don't waste time looking). You should be able to tell the difference between good cutting and shitty cutting, hopefully without trying it on. Sometimes the best finds are in the scarf section and the belt section. It can help your retail shopping too: one look at the state of the 100% cotton sweaters and you will never buy one new again.

Also, these clothes have history. Some people are creeped out by the idea of dead people's clothes, but I like to think of the people who wore the clothes before, what they did in them, if they loved that sweater or jacket as much as I do.

Permit me a brief philosophical sidebar to say: I love clothes so much. I love how they make people look different, how they make people move differently and feel differently about themselves. I love color and texture and putting things together that shouldn't go but do. It's possible this is a result of a couple of years of wearing uniforms for school and work, but I love waking up and deciding how I feel and dressing towards that. Because then I get to wear how I feel all day. I loved that speech in Devil Wears Prada where Nigel says:

Don't you know that you are working at the place that published some of the greatest artists of the century? Halston, Lagerfeld, de la Renta. And what they did, what they created was greater than art because you live your life in it.

When I started realizing how often I moved house, I began taking pictures of my bedroom before packing, to remember. I also take pictures of my closet, to remember the clothes I had at that point in my life. I love seeing the closet of a close friend for the first time: all those garments that you know from knowing that person hanging there.

To that end, a huge Goodwill opened down the street last weekend. The suede coat with the fur collar (recycled fur is okay, right?) was $10. The blazer was $6. The moment of trying both of these things on was the best possible moment of thrift store shopping: finding something interesting and gorgeous and well-made and trying it on, having it fit perfectly and know it's now become of part of you.

The Difficulties of Everyday Life

2009-05-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

In the last few weeks, I have fixed two things that weren't broken and broken them in the fixing.

One was the shower drain. I felt very pious, from a housekeeping point of view, cleaning the bottom of the shower and pulling the drain cover out and cleaning all the weird guck that was clotted around there. I'm sorry if this information disgusts you, unless you are a stranger that stumbled upon this randomly, you should know that I'm sorta into gross things. Anyway, turns out that guck was the thing that was preventing hair from getting washed down the drain, so now it's going down the drain and forming yet another big scary clot instead of piling up nicely on the drain cover for me to whisk away. When I was a little kid, my mom and I had some serious battles over hair-brushing. Once when we driving over the Lion's Gate bridge we were discussing the fact that it was a suspension bridge and my mom said that she bet if they got enough of my hair, it would be stronger than the metal cables that held the bridge up in the same way that spider webs, if you had enough of them, would be stronger than steel. Sorry, shower drain, here we go again.

The second thing was I washed my car and decided to be very thorough and clean all the dirty metal that you see when the doors are open. It was very dirty and really satisfying to clean. Then I got into my car to park it back in the driveway and the car started dinging like the driver's door was open, but it wasn't. That was two weeks ago. Despite a lot of research and experimenting, I haven't figured out how to fix it. If I could notch filter that shit, I would. Mechanic will be next week when my boss is out of town, but until now, here's what I've been doing:

New Pornographers, especially Mass Romantic. Great wall-to-wall sound
Spoon, GaGaGaGaGa
The Riff Randells have been pretty good
Stephen Malkmus has been okay, some songs not so much
David Bryne has been perfect
White Stripes, Icky Thump has worked pretty well
I'll bet more recent U2 would work well, but I haven't tried it yet
Cat Stevens: not at all.

Thanks Thom Holman for the lesson about masking a quieter sound with a louder sound.

Food

2009-05-09T16:00:00.000-07:00

So, lest life get too boring and staid, I have set up a grocery store rule for myself. Basically I always buy the same things at the grocery store and therefore I always eat the same things and it gets pretty dull. But there are lots of things out there to dine on and why should I always get the same kind of yogurt? Why? Because I really really like it? Stupid reason.

So the rule is: go to the grocery store and don't buy anything that I have ever bought before. Technicality is the key here. Sure, I've bought 2% milk before, but not the 2 litre (or whatever, I still think of everything in metric, by the way, vive le Canada) from Trader Joe's. This seems like kind of an easy rule, but then you get to the grocery store and stand in front of all the milk and it's a little challenging.

Findings: skim milk is gross, who would live their life like that? The olives with jalapenos are great, of course. It's hard to find vegetables that I don't usually get. Mini heirloom tomatoes! Genius! And snap peas. The second week of this rule is harder than the first. And I have a lot of food in my cupboards already. Before this phase, I was trying to buy as little food as possible so I'd eat the food I already have. Turns out it's pretty uninteresting. I'll save it for the apocalypse. (Yes, I am trying to reference the apocalypse as often as 30 Rock has been mentioning farts lately -- so about once an episode)

On Monday when I discovered a new kind of trail mix that is peanuts and almonds and golden raisins and wasabi peas (spectacular, I recommend) the cashier man and I had a chat. I told him about my rule-based buying. He told me that the first time he had wasabi, he thought it was guacamole and took an enormous scoop and suffered much.

All We Need Is Here On Earth (About Every Other Day)

2009-04-07T22:42:00.000-07:00

This weekend I went away to the mountains for a ski trip. It's a five-hour drive to get up there, which is good, because then you don't go unless you really mean to, and once you are up there, you are far away from many things.

The problem with a totally unplugged weekend is also the point: my mind downshifts into this really pleasurable grade of slow and there is time to look at the way the ice has melted itself off a rock or stand in bare feet on the porch (sunny spots only) and try to spot the jay in the pines.

The thing with skiing that I figured out somewhere around age 22 is that to do it well, you have to concentrate on it and use your whole body. There's a lot of observing: figuring out what's around you, gauging the surface of the snow, timing. But all that information is funneled into an effort that is purely physical, instinctual and rhythmic. It's the complete opposite of a computer screen. And then on the chair you float above the world on a little shelf with your friends, ahhhhh.

On the way back down in the car in the sunshine between changing CDs, the radio came on for five seconds and told us that North Korea had fired their first test missile and someone in New York had shot a whole bunch of people.

O to live in the country,
With some chickens and those other things.
Take a wife and no paper,
Never again to wonder,
Did that rapper rape her?

Christmas in Vancouver

2009-03-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

The Red River Valley

2009-03-29T11:27:00.001-07:00

As a result of constantly seeing news updates on the flooding in Fargo, this song has been in my head for the past few days. It is in the same category for me as "Stewball", an old and pretty song which made me feel so very very sad when I was a little kid. Partly because of the words, but maybe because the simplicity and prettiness of the tune made the words so much sadder. I remember singing it in grade four or five and getting all snuffly at my desk. It still makes me sad. "They say you are taking the sunshine".

Depression Breakfast

2009-03-12T22:44:00.001-07:00

Ever since I read How To Cook A Wolf earlier this year, I've been more and more interested in this cooking to survive idea.

I guess I also made a movie about this too.

But cooking is kind of magical -- you take these elements that on their own are pretty inert or at least uninteresting (handful of flour: not delicious) and the way you combine them in what ratios and what temperatures brings this new thing into the world that is nourishing and pleasurable. No wonder there's this child chef thing going on right now.

I think Depression-era cooking is particularly magical because you can take the most cast-off and dull tidbits of edibles and work this same magic.

Tent City in Sacramento

2009-03-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

Most significant (and alarming) are the regular folk and how much this looks like the dust bowl.

Apocalypse Skills

2009-03-05T23:09:00.000-08:00

I'm very interested in this idea of acquiring more and more skills with the intent of preparing for doomsday scenarios.

Here's an excellent example. (Please respond with your observations as to how the Ikea setting is appropriate when thinking about doomsday scenarios)

Postal Service, Data Entry or Special Ed

2009-03-03T14:00:00.000-08:00

Hi Women!

Take your pick!

West LA Baby

2009-03-01T15:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I went to MILK to make friends with a strawberry milkshake. The couple at the table next to me said to their infant son: "You can be gay as long as you are not a Republican".

The Table

2009-02-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

Those of you who have been over to my house in the last year or so know that it's a pretty adult place, and those of you who know me well know it's the most adult place I've had thus far in my adult life.

But the card table in the dining room with the plastic tablecloth didn't really work for this.

So after many Fridays of scouring Craigslist for something wooden, not tacky and relatively cheap, I found this:

And there was much rejoicing.

But the top was a little roughed up and needed work. Blistered. A little unloved.

So I got my dad to send me instructions, which he did. At the beginning of the instructions was that because the panels were placed in such a way that the grain runs in different directions meant that I needed to tape off the sections and sand with the grain ONLY.

Wet sanding is the key here. Water and some very fine grit sandpaper bring up a weird paste that is the finish that was on the table before.

Sanded in one direction. The leaf was particularly blistered and I had to sand right down to the wood.

>

Sanding the other direction. This direction-switching thing took a while.

But I sanded. I sanded my little heart out.

To match the stain to the current color, I hauled the leaf into the hardware store and the clerk (cute) helped me hold it up to the samples to figure out which stain to pick.

We picked the right color.

Then comes 6 layers of polyurethane with light sanding between each layer. It's like a cake except how the smell of it kills your brain cells.

After that came furniture wax, which was difficult to apply and didn't really work the way I wanted it to.

But then, then I had a beautiful table, a table people could leave a wet glass on for a week and nothing would happen to it. $150 secondhand, $80 of refinishing gear, one weekend of work and one minor flare-up of tendonitis. Come on over for dinner.

Eating Bugs

2009-02-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

From the NYT:

"In case you’re curious: you’re probably ingesting one to two pounds of flies, maggots and mites each year without knowing it, a quantity of insects that clearly does not cut the mustard, even as insects may well be in the mustard."

I like the idea that you'll, as they say, eat a peck of dirt before you're dead. But when I think of that, I think of, like, soil or sand or something. Clean dirt. Not so much fly eggs and rodent hair that the FDA is like, well, yeah, what are you gonna do?

Gross. Though, rich in protein!

Trough of No Value

2009-02-10T15:44:00.000-08:00

Hello Everyone

Do you ever think about acid-washed jeans? Or your Kriss Kross tapes?

I do. And wood paneling, and dulcimers, and weird crochet vests, and curly shoelaces, and those couches with the weird pouchy pillowy blobs for the backrest part, and chunky Mary Janes, VCRs, frosted lipstick,

They live in the Trough of No Value.

The Trough is getting smaller and smaller, however. I look forward to the future day when something can go out of fashion at the same moment that it is in fashion once again.

In Praise of Usefulness

2009-01-19T23:25:00.001-08:00

I spent the weekend refinishing a table that I bought on Craigslist.

My dad gave me a one-and-half-page list of instructions for the job, including half a page of things to buy. Buying the stuff seemed like the least exciting part of the exercise as all the stuff was really specific and I kind of didn't know what I was doing. But I found a really good local hardware store. If you've been in a really good hardware store, you know what this means: incredibly narrow aisles with stuff stacked to the rafters, people there to help you who have bifocals and the creased, hardened fingers of workers, and a lot of built-in grime (at my BC Ferries job, our old terminal building before they knocked it down had an amazing amount of built-in grime -- counters with the laminate worn down to the wood and everything so smooth and dirt worked into all the crevices -- I liked that building a lot better than the new one they built).

There is no substitute for a good hardware store: it has no aesthetic other than sheer utility, which becomes its own aesthetic. This hardware store was in the middle of West Hollywood too, so that's saying something. I walked past a very old man who could hardly stand up wearing a store apron who shouted out hello. His store?

I had to go way in the back to see the guy about screws for the arms of one of the chairs. The screw expert guy was so satisfyingly expert that he spent 25 minutes focused on figuring out how the hell the screws would work for the arms (and was not distracted by his coworkers' repeated requests to "explain Groundhog Day") and then sold me two pieces of hardware at the total cost of a dollar and ten cents. And said, "Bring in one of the other chairs and I'll have a look at it and we'll figure it out."

I had a closer look at the chairs when I got home: the puzzle is that they are designed for a long screw to go in one direction that has two holes through it for other screws to screw into perpendicularly. Seems weird. But I'll bet they have that piece of hardware somewhere in a creased cardboard drawer with a masking tape label ten feet up the wall.

Rooms

2009-01-19T22:57:00.001-08:00

So the other day I met the woman who used to live in my apartment.

I've been checking in on my upstairs neighbor, who was AWOL for a while and I thought maybe deceased? until she was back again after I got back to LA. My upstairs neighbor is old enough to talk about the plans she and her husband made when they got out of the concentration camps and these days is back from hospital but still poorly, so I fetch her mail and visit. My angelic good neighborliness has kind of backfired on me as I have been entirely unsuccessful in diverting our conversations away from the sole discussion topic of how crappy she feels and the unsaid implication of "and soon I will die". I feel like a shit for even complaining about this, but man it's a downer, plus there are very few ways to resuscitate (so to speak) the conversation at that point.

Anyway, last week, she had visitors and one of them was the woman who used to live in my place. As much as this neighborhood is full of orthodox jewish people, I haven't really talked to any of them besides my neighbor, so talking to her was an exercise in mediating my curiosity about her (she's got to be my age and has three kids-- is that a wig? does she have to wear that skirt?) while trying to have a normal conversation. She was very bubbly and sarcastic and friendly and translated the occasional yiddish phrases for me.

In a reciprocal curiosity exchange, I invite her in to look around my apartment and see how different it was. Our shower still has a glitter sticker of birds that I left up because I like to look at it in the mornings. She was on the phone to her oldest daughter describing the place as she walked through and the daughter said she got the sticker from her ballet recital. It's interesting to think of what a place that means so much to me means to someone else, not to mention all the other someone elses who have lived here for the past 80-odd years.

When I was sixteen, I got a baby-sitting job from people who had moved into the house I grew up in. I put the kids to bed and then wandered around in the house. I probably spent about ten minutes in each room.

Now, sometimes when I can't fall asleep at night, I imagine walking through my old house, what the rooms looked like, what kind of carpet, where the lightswitches were, the sound the cabinet doors made when you closed them. They tore that house down last summer.

Snow Day

2009-01-12T22:41:00.000-08:00

Twenty-Ten

2009-01-12T22:28:00.000-08:00

While in Vancouver, next year's Olympics were a frequent topic of discussion. With only a few variations, here's how the conversations went:

Discussion topic #1: Did you get tickets? We put in for tickets in the draw and got only biathlon.

Discussion topic #2: The IOC is so stupid that they threw down with Cirque de Soleil about creative control of the opening ceremonies and now Cirque is outie.

Discussion topic #3: Are you renting your house out?

Applause to Stacie's husband Darryl for the most illuminating suggestion re: topic #2 -- "Okay, so the lights are down in the stadium and you hear a rhythmic "crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch" and then the lights slowly come up and the stadium is full of two thousand and ten guys in perfect formation crushing beer cans against their heads" After this suggestion, we laughed very hard and then talked about Neil Young for half an hour. I know, eh?

Street Opera (In Three Acts)

2009-01-12T22:23:00.000-08:00

This weekend, I was walking out of my house and I noticed this big black BMW SUV parked blocking the building's driveway. Not a little; a lot -- half the car was hanging out into the driveway. Someone had written "asshole" in the dust of the back window.

When I got home, a tow truck was backing up, angling its bar under the rear wheels of the BMW.

Later, as I was washing my car in the back courtyard, I heard an anguished scream and yelling and swearing from the street.

[curtain].

Joining the Milk Line

2009-01-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

I went to the grocery store last Monday night because I, like everyone else in the entire city, just got back from holiday and needed milk. It was around 8:40 at night. The company line from the staff was that they were doing inventory, but I went to the milk fridge and there wasn't any milk there.

Well, to be totally accurate, there were four cartons of organic unseparated milk, but who's going to gag that down? No milk. Also, no bread. People were wandering the aisles in a daze. It felt like communist Russia.

Was this a shipping problem? Did the huge demand for post-holiday perishable essentials take the city by storm? Does this have to do with the economy? Is there more of this to come?

Artist's Statement

2008-10-27T22:18:00.000-07:00

Best Call This Week

2008-10-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

"Hi, this is Dave, from Sony."

Hi Dave! This is Robyn, from Earth!

On Horses

2008-10-20T16:50:00.001-07:00

I saw the first half of Ben-Hur the other week. I’m supposed to see the rest of it this week as long as I succeed in not nodding off (accountable in equal parts to the slow-moving contemplative scenes of epics from the olden days and the perils of watching DVDs on weeknights). On slow-moving epics from the olden days, two things: 1) I don’t think I will ever again watch a Technicolor movie without feeling a pull towards the intense sleepiness of being in movie school and watching movies in Norris for Crit Studies and kind of finding it kind of super impossible not to lay down on the carpet between the seats in that large dark theatre, just for 15 or 60 minutes or so. 2) Is there any better type of movie to play peanut gallery in? My mom and I are pretty good at this, but Greg threw in some winners during B-H pt. 1, mostly about Charlton wandering into the slave-master guy’s private quarters in the back of the ship and wondering where the crapper is.

Okay, but point is: there’s a great scene in Ben-Hur where this horse trainer guy says goodnight to his four beautiful white horses and (maybe after the I-ma-gonna-row-you-to-death scene) this is the best scene in the first half of the movie. Just because it is so completely and overwhelmingly charming and not at all about dudes standing around in leather skirts and weird spackle darkie makeup, but real horses being beautiful. It’s a single shot as well, not a bunch of cut together shots so that it looks like the horses are reacting. It’s like a cool sliver of ice after an hour and a half of tepid buttermilk. Plus there is no plot to it: even better.

I also saw Appaloosa the other weekend. Which none of you need to see, by the way, unless you have a hankering to see Renee Zellweger smoosh her face up in a way that I guess is supposed to be cute. Anyway, it’s a pretty strangely shaped script and not very remarkable filmmaking except for one scene that, yes, involves horses. Basically: Viggo and Ed and Renee are down in the valley and being followed by some (pardon the Western parlance) Indians. Viggo takes one of the horses and rides it up the hill and gives it to them. There is no dialogue. They take the horse, drive a spear into the ground and leave. Not really a major plot point, more like an interlude on How Things Are. Really well shot and staged, great acting, and the horses are beautiful.

This is possibly Hollywood fatigue but more and more my favorite moments in movies are the pure-film moments where something happens with picture and sound that could not be captured the same way by any other medium. See: the shot of the woman’s hair in the convertible in Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the shirt inside the shirt in Brokeback Mountain, the last shot of Blair Witch Project, “that” scene in Cache, kind of all of Eternal Sunshine.

They are pure film the same way that “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” is pure song, “The Colussus” is pure painting and “The Windhover” is pure poem.

Finally

2008-10-13T15:17:00.000-07:00

Happy trading floor picture!

Liberal, Secular, Not As Cold As You Think

2008-10-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

Funny cause it's true. Almost. It IS about as cold as you think and you will have to deal with the existence of a Federal political party that has the dissolution of the country as part of its platform, but just find it kind of hilarious like the rest of us do.

Name; Wearing It Out

2008-10-07T23:05:00.001-07:00

In which Tom Cruise sues John McCain.

Chiming In

2008-10-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, have you noticed that Margaret Atwood has written now two articles and participated in a forum on the Globe and Mail site decrying the policies of Harper and the Conservative party? And she also wrote a book on debt.

So far, all fairly lucid discussions. Can't wait to read the book on debt. From the author of Surfacing. Nice.

Darning

2008-10-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up and it was all rainy outside. I opened some windows to smell it and was looking at what wooly sweater to wear to go walk around in it when I found that moths have been into my sweaters. Horror of horrors.

That's the smaller of the two holes they made. The larger of the two went in a zigzag shape right next to it. Fucking moths, they always go for the very middle of the front of the sweater.

But it's recession time, people, no time for idly tossing a perfectly good sweater that is wooly and soft and light and warm just because it has holes. Also, this is the one sweater I took with me when backpacking and on more that one occasion allowed people I had become separated from to spot me in a crowd-- which was very useful because I had the only key to the room we were staying it at the time.

So I darned, dammit, I darned.

My mom was right about putting sweaters in plastic bags.

Northern Highlights

2008-09-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

I'm currently obsessed with Northern Exposure, it's true. I really like this show for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that every single character is likable, even the cantankerous ones. Also, there doesn't seem to be any sort of urgency to have any particular plot, instead the stories sort of meander in and out, sometimes culminating in a character musing on the phrase, "Alone like a stone in the new world", which he heard his grandfather say when his grandmother died, sometimes culminating in tossing a piano with a giant catapult. In any case, solutions and answers are not easily arrived at, and more likely are just new and different questions. People don't really get angry with each other, no one gets murdered, cheap shots are not made and sex, when it appears or is discussed, is sweet and a little goofy. You get to spend a lot of time with the characters, and are not asked to feel sorry for them, or envy them or judge them-- just to consider them. The pleasures of independence, good bars and intellectual musings are given heavy weight. Also, Marilyn reminds me of my grandma and Shelly has the same earrings as me. Also: how sexy is John Corbett in the election episode when he cuts his hair and shows up in a sixties suit with a skinny tie?

Also, because this show was shot in the early nineties, some of the young female characters have really shiny hair. When exactly did that stop being an indicator of beauty? Hair products, dye, perms, and unkempt rat's nest hair have not been good to shiny hair, but shiny hair is really pretty. I have a couple of friends who have not dyed the life out of their hair and have left it as the middle-brown, almost blonde (I believe Beverly Cleary referred to it as mouse brown) colour that is seemingly abhorred by would-be starlets. As a result, their hair is very shiny, and the colour, if you look closely, is complex and pretty.

I am starting to feel the weight of the time spent in LA.

On Voting

2008-09-19T12:57:00.001-07:00

Weird Connection

2008-09-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sons' adoptive father was Abel Meeropol who wrote the lyrics to "Strange Fruit".

The Tina Fey

2008-09-15T22:35:00.001-07:00

In script analysis class, the term we used for this moment was "Obligatory Scene".

Reasons to Love Bob

2008-09-14T20:24:00.000-07:00

Jeremy got me a ticket to see Bob Dylan for my birthday. Jeb: I'm too lazy to re-write what I wrote you about the show. With apologies, I reprint it here.

BOB:

Wearing his Spaniard hat and a black suit. Stood and played the keyboards the whole time. Did little toodly walks around the stage just as the lights went down at the end of each song-- his weird, sort of mincing, tripping gait was fun to watch.

It's got to be hard getting old. One thing I've learned from both Bob and Etta James earlier this summer is that you lose your range or perhaps your energy to force your voice into carrying the tune and instead you kind of float along with the tune in a one-octave (or less) zone. But while Etta has somewhat descended into clown versions of what used to be beautiful, touching songs, Bob rages, rages against the dying of the light.

The band was large-ish and competent and wearing boxy suits and skinny ties. Lap steel and rhythm guitar played in every song, along with I think the largest drum set I've ever seen (excepting the Freaks and Geeks one in the garage with the 10 or whatever snares). The sound was large and the venue gymnasium-like, which resulted in an unfortunately muddy sound and an indelicate mix.

I wasn't close enough to see his little moustache, as my illness made the idea of fighting through the sweaty throngs of old hippies and middle managers unappealing. But it was enough to be in the presence of a true legend, an artist-king. And even though his arrangements-- even of 'It Ain't Me, Babe" and "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and "Highway 61" and "Ballad of a Thin Man"-- tended towards a blast of big band-ish sound with Bob skeddaddling the lyrics in at the end of the bar, the air was filled with awe at being in the presence of The Man Himself.

There was lots of unfortunate dancing, but which I mean nerdy white people with no game dancing. It frankly made me a little relieved to have missed the sixties, especially when you factor in all the polyester of that era.

The number one thing that made me go instead of being lame and going home to sleep was the prospect of him playing "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" and me missing it. He didn't play that, but for the encore he unboxed his voice and played, fairly faithfully to the known version "Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along The Watchtower", which I knew was a brillant song because Bono told me but it never seemed so insightful and important before.

And then he introduced the band, raised his hands to the crowd, waved, and rode on into the friscillating dusklight.

More Reflections on the News

2008-09-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

1) Sometimes I think about how totally anal I am at work and I wonder if I irritate the hell out of the people that work with me. Then I consider the only people who seem annoyed by it are terminally disorganized and also, I will hopefully use this trait to avoid accidentally allowing two trains to smash into each other.

2) When I was in Youth Parliament I went to the annual dinner of former BC MLAs and heard an American journalist make an impassioned argument in favour of the Canadian system of federal elections -- that is, that they can be called by the governing party or if there is a vote of nonconfidence and are not on a pre-ordained schedule every fourth November. He said that this system of election made the campaigning period mercifully short and avoided the kind of mud-slinging that American elections quickly became. Now that I've been in each country for electoral mayhem, I think he might have been wrong. The mudslinging is ungracious and exhausting, yes, but you do get to know who you are dealing with as they complete their ultra-marathon of applying for the job. Anyway, Stephen Harper seems perfectly happy to sling mud, or guano or whatever is around on his happy way towards undoing Canada's progress towards becoming a more socially progressive, environmentally tolerant and brave country. It's hard to know who to dislike more: Harper or the Liberal party for messing up their streak.

3) David Foster Wallace. I read most of Brief Interviews at a pretty low point in my early twenties, to the point where I had to stop reading it and I actually stopped reading fiction for a long time soon after. That had more to do with me than him, but still, the man gave himself a pretty unforgiving errand. I saw Burn After Reading the other night and it's silly and doesn't mean anything and doesn't leave you with anything except a slight aspartame aftertaste, but maybe that's what the Coen boys had to do after making something as important and completely damning as No Country. In defense of the healing power of dumb art, or something.

(Bringing It) On In Years

2008-09-14T19:27:00.000-07:00

Yet another item in the long list of reasons why you should try and avoid having a baby when you are a teenager (it makes you do crazy things later). The good news is that if this woman is smart about selling her story to the production companies that will be hitting her up, maybe she could quit her job and get her GED.

Things I Did So Far This Year

2008-09-11T21:30:00.001-07:00

Really Do Not Like Hippies That Much

2008-09-09T15:52:00.000-07:00

But they really like trees.

Limeys

2008-08-25T18:52:00.000-07:00

Is it wrong to think this is pretty funny? I hope the people at home hoping to abolish the monarchy clip this one.

The Secret to Weightlifting

2008-08-19T17:56:00.000-07:00

Use your face.

Brand Awareness

2008-08-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

If you felt stupid on your student film set turning the milk carton sideways so you couldn't read the label in the shot, check it out. Though it probably makes a lot of things feel curiously no-name. Maybe it's not so hard to do in a communist country.

The Steam Room

2008-08-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

So there's this little gym at work. It's small enough to be empty or almost empty a lot of the time, and there are enough windows that I don't have to think of terrifying Joyce Carol Oates stories.

They renovated it the other week and now the floors are a different color and the running machines have weird screens with the TV right on them next to your stats. Haven't figured out how to successfully change the channel yet, which leads to watching House and Olympic men's volleyball and not the Simpsons, but that's okay.

The most important change is not a change of structure or object. There's only one steam room and it connects to both the men's and the women's change rooms. It's locked one each side every other day, because I guess people sit in there naked, though the thought of kicking it the buff in the humid dark with people you have to walk past in the hallways or even email the next day is super creep, even if they are the same gender as you. It used to be locked on the women's side on Tuesdays and Thursdays, now it's open on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

This has revolutionized my evening gym-going routine. Sitting in there makes me feel like I've left my body somewhere else for a while. I think it has to do with how hard it is to see through all that diffusing mist. And that breathing feels like drinking. It also gets me much closer to my goal of maximum sweatiness on my shirt, which makes me feel like I've achieved more. Maybe the key is that it's the antithesis of my overly air-conditioned desk area and thus neutralizes the typing and shivering which has occupied the many proceeding hours.

Scarier Then Divorcing For Healthcare: Murder by Bureaucracy

2008-08-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

Oh, look! I knew there had to be something!

"Soon, according to court papers, he had to rely on other detainees to help him reach the toilet, bring him food and call his family; he no longer received painkillers, because he could not stand in line to collect them. On July 26, Andy Wong, a lawyer associated with Mr. Cox, came to see the detainee, but had to leave without talking to him, he said, because Mr. Ng was too weak to walk to the visiting area, and a wheelchair was denied."

Even Mascots Get the Trips

2008-08-14T13:37:00.001-07:00

At The Hollywood Bowl Tonight

2008-08-14T00:03:00.001-07:00

According to Etta James, she has a niece named "Hamhock".

What I Learned Today

2008-08-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

Ann Landers and Dear Abby are the same double-headed person. Actually they are identical twins. For serious.

Marrying For Healthcare

2008-08-13T11:41:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to think of what is scarier than this. Selling your hair and front teeth for cash? Selling your kids to a factory? Reunification of church and state? I guess that's scarier. All part of the same continuum, though.

Neighbors

2008-08-10T23:31:00.000-07:00

The annoyingness of our neighbors across the driveway becomes more significant in the summer when everyone's windows are open all the time and despite the curtains and blinds that never get open, it is still possible to hear conversations re: I want to take a shower/but I'm taking a crap/well hurry up/why don't you just go away. This argument was much friendlier (ending with the crapper yelling, "I'm done!") then previous arguments, which have involved shrieking, "Don't touch me!!! Don't touch meeeee!"

I have never seen the sister (aka the toucher, aka the crapper) but I have frequent conversations with the brother (aka the touchee, aka the showerer), who is actually really friendly, built like a Care Bear and says "Oh my god" once a sentence.

So here's where it gets interesting. They somehow got some huge dog in there. I don't know if they are taking care of it for someone or if it's for keeps, but this thing casts a long shadow on their lives. I didn't hear the dog for weeks, but could hear them shouting, "Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado!" to it. Much like I have seen men without experience with babies will say a baby's name to it fourteen times in a row, loudly into its face, as if they are actually communicating a concept.

So this is my Saturday afternoon of late: I'm eating crackers or reading or having a nap and I hear from across the driveway, "Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Sit! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado!"

The dog is maybe as sick of this as I am because this weekend I heard:

"Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado! Mado!"

[a surprisingly loud and deep growl]

"Mado! Why are you growling? Why are you growling? Why are you growling? Why are you growling? Why are you growling?"

[more growling]

"Mado! No--Mado! No biting! No biting!"

And then I shut the window.

Vancouver Specials

2008-08-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

My new favorite website is about stucco and McDonald's brick.

I Am Totally Obsessed With My Three-Year-Old Cousin

2008-08-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

One, he looks like a sumo wrestler. A little one. Two, he calls his dad by his first name. Three, he really digs Placido Domingo. I could go on from there. Some where in the long list of awesomeness: the kid is preternaturally dapper sometimes. When you have a chunk of hair missing from your bangs and a dinner party guest is rude enough to ask you who cut it? Make direct eye contact, say, "myself" and change the subject.

And hey, if all eyes are upon you at the dinner table when someone is encouraging you to squeeze their thumb as hard as you can in and in your herculean efforts, you accidentally let one fly, chuckle along with everyone else like the good natured little champ you are.

Thrilling New Experiences

2008-07-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

Things I did yesterday that I usually never do:

1) Got all the way to the airport and realized I left my passport in my desk drawer at home.

2) Walked into a men's public bathroom, thinking it was the women's room.

It is good to do these things once in a while, to remind you to not do them more often.

Raft of Love

2008-07-17T13:35:00.001-07:00

1, 2, 3, 4

2008-07-17T13:32:00.001-07:00

My favorite part of humans and muppets together is when the human puts their arm around the muppet where the muppet's shoulders would be but aren't. Muppets have no shoulders! Maybe that is what makes them so kidlike and vulnerable and huggy.

Manhattan Project

2008-07-09T08:37:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I discovered there is a production company called "The Manhattan Project". It seems a dubious choice to name your movie company after a science project famous for making bombs, but they did produce CANADIAN BACON. Also JAWS, COCCOON, A FEW GOOD MEN, and other minor works.

Art

2008-07-03T15:24:00.001-07:00

Fun.

Discovery

2008-07-02T23:21:00.000-07:00

Even if my alarm does not go off, I still will wake up at 6:22am on the dot-- the time when I usually get up.

This discovery brought to you by the clerical errors of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Can I Borrow Your Bobcat Teeth

2008-06-06T23:38:00.000-07:00

Turns out you can borrow stuff from the Natural History Museum in LA as long as you're a member of the museum. This is kind of awesome. I'll take a stuffed lynx or raccoon (only if it's in the process of climbing up a branch), a bunch of mounted bugs and some very old piece of gold panning equipment, please.

For Seminar Today

2008-06-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

In discussion with various people and in no particular order, the top 5 American contributions to the world:

1) Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

2) Hamburgers

3) Disney

4) Jazz

5) Westerns

Discuss.

Guest Photographer

2008-06-03T22:37:00.000-07:00

Remember being three? Me neither. Here's what it looks like, though:

Cousin Steve

Auntie Valerie

Some people you are related to, hopefully getting you some hotdogs.

Cousin Robyn and the back end of Uncle Kim

Dad

The Writers

2008-05-27T23:23:00.001-07:00

A month ago I went to the Festival of Books at UCLA.

Discovery one: taking the bus from Santa Monica on an idyllic Saturday morning is delightful.

Discovery two: UCLA's campus is pretty- prettier than USC's. The brick-obsessed architecture is more ornate, for one, and for two, there are grassy hills to sit on with shade trees. Maybe it's because I grew up on a hillside so hilly my middle school was named Hillside, but a place never seems properly landscaped without a few steep inclines. The entire area we were walking around was filled with glorious sunshine and the smell of hamburgers.

I'm always curious to see writers, partly out of what Margaret Atwood labels perversity. I want to know what these people look like who make a living out of getting their thoughts down on paper in such a way that people want to read them. Really, there are very few people who manage to do that.

The panels were mostly kind of weird, because the writers themselves are kind of weird, and not weird in the same way. Also because they are up against a roomful of people, some of whom are hoping to catch certain writers after the panel and have a 45 minute conversation with them. So really there were only particular moments of panel discussion in which the writers really got down to it on certain issues and some interesting ideas got thrown around. Not as much of a torrent of interesting ideas that I was hoping for, but a handful nonetheless.

There seemed also to be a number of writers who were pretty interested in their cultural errand or some kind of responsibility to talk from a place of being disenfranchised or poor or (in a particularly LA turn) non-drivers. Every panel I went to brought up Hollywood movies and talked about them with mostly disdain. There were a couple of writers who were good enough to have more expansive thoughts on the politics of demographics and that was pretty enjoyable. Maybe it's because a lot of them got English degrees like I did, but most of them seemed pretty intent on fixing something about the world, or at least embodying a voice that, quote, needs to be heard, unquote. It's not so much that I think those voices don't need to be heard, it's more that people self-identifying as fringe has started to feel like such a popular thing to do that it's become necessary to a certain kind of authorial identity. "I'm worth listening to not because I speak from inside the center, but because of my socially underprivileged but artistically privileged viewpoint outside of it". I'd argue (and Shakespeare would back me up) that the center doesn't actually exist anyway, except in our minds when we think about how we are outside of it. I wish people would just shut up and tell whatever story they have it in them to tell without mapping their own cultural value. If it's a "story that needs to be heard" then it will have its own value. All this positioning feels like listening to someone talk who is at the same time pointing at themselves with both hands.

Cringer

2008-05-15T13:53:00.000-07:00

Vancouver Chat Poem

2008-05-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

by artists formerly residing in Vancouver

me: o burnaby, you are lost to me
the train tracks
i wander
have no robin's donut stores

Sarah: !!!!!

me: a poem by robyn marshall

Sarah: a great poem
epic

me: so epic
i miss poems. and crosswords

Sarah: we could write a huge missive
poems are for high school summers
and lit class
doodlin
What would a vancouver epic be called
Dunbar

me: Dun-BARRRRRRRRRR!!
the heroic call to poets the lower mainland wide!
bring me your bic, your papermates,
bring me your sharpies and your dr. grips
we ride tonight!

Sarah: your donald's market shopping bags

me: your triple-o mugs

Sarah: and soggy bus transfers

me: glance not at the wheeling crows

Sarah: the palette of MEC passes 'fore me
the motley of lulu thunders by on rollerblades

me: do not be troubled by the torn tilleys that dot your path

Sarah: ha
(my favorite word uttered in beowulf was "lovelimb")

me: you have a higher calling, vancouver poets, a sharper purpose

Sarah: for penis

me: stretch your lovelimbs wide across the whaleroad

Sarah: WHALEROAD IS MY FAVORITE

Myanmar and Sichuan

2008-05-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

Unicef

Red Cross

Oxfam

World Vision

From Heaven

2008-05-13T16:37:00.000-07:00

I mean, am I wrong?

Futura Caps

2008-05-13T11:36:00.001-07:00

Actually

2008-05-13T11:17:00.001-07:00

There are a couple other people I would yell marriage proposals to at a show: young James Taylor and Bill Callahan.

Music is the New Pornography

2008-05-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

Several month ago Sarah copied me a bunch of albums. I've been getting to them every time I have to spend serious quality time with Excel at work. Listening to music helps it be less boring and also drowns out neighbouring conversations about episodes of Friends, so it's a double-fisted concentration booster.

So I finally heard the new New Pornographers album all the way through. "Challengers".

[Yes, I am terribly behind the times. Don't even worry about it: I'm killing it in Fantasy Moguls in both leagues that I am in. I've traded my book and music on-top-of-it-ness for movie on-top-of-it-ness. I love me some tracking reports.]

This music is good. Good enough to distract me from =SUM(A:14*1000), good enough to play some songs over again right after hearing them for the first time. "Myriad Harbour", wow. "Go Places", wow. How great would it be to write songs for Neko Case's pretty pretty voice? If I were a guy, I'd be one of those guys at New Pornographers shows shouting marriage proposals to Neko (which happened both times I saw them back in Vancity, although at the Commodore, she also got, "show us your tits!" which is a good reason not to play at the Commodore, horsehair floor or no). As it is, the only person I'd yell a marriage proposal to at a show would be Roy Orbison. Too bad for me he's dead. Also: old.

"Go Places", though. I've been listening to that all day. Thank you, you magical side-projecteers for the semi-all-knowing, semi-nonsensical lyrics. Good thing this is in the era of the convenient portable device with headphones, otherwise my roommate might kill me the same way roommates of the past have probably wanted to during winters of "The Only Living Boy In New York" eighty-seven million times in a row.

Tearing It Up with Robyn and Sarah

2008-05-11T17:19:00.001-07:00

On Friday night I went over to Sarah's house and borrowed some pants so I wouldn't have to sit around on the couch in the skirt I'd been wearing all day at work. I've been pulling this precise move since 1995, the first pair of pants I borrowed from Sarah being dark green and wooly with cool pockets and a great belt. I remember succeeding in hanging on to those for two weeks at least before I felt bad and gave them back. The pants she lent me this week were hospital scrubs. The moral of the story being that twelve years after high school ended, her job involves much more comfortable clothing than mine.

We watched several episodes of Flight of the Conchords, and discussed Figwit, watched Figwit's line in ROTK and laughed ourselves silly at the badness. Dude seriously looks like a lady in that movie. Probably because of the absence of pants.

Marie Antoinette

2008-05-05T22:36:00.001-07:00

I caught the last 40 minutes of Marie Antoinette on TV the other night. I remember watching this and being very bored by it and by the end feeling very exasperated with both Marie and Sophia and kinda sorta being on the side of the peasants with pitchforks. I definitely remember being annoyed at the way it ended, partly because, to my peasant, pitchfork-wielding attitude, she got away scot free. The whole thing seemed like a boring dress-up movie.

But the end gets pretty good.

Sophia Coppolla is actually pretty adept at getting a certain kind of quality out of her actors, especially young women, and it's really satisfying to watch a movie that's well shot. And she's very good a getting a kind of lovely complicated sadness up on screen.

The camera is wistful, like a Mallick movie (actually this feels a little shot-for-shot New World). Kirsten Dunst's Marie is much more complicated and tired at this end of things, and there's a whole section near the end when things start to get really scary with scene after scene of no dialogue that is quite moving.

Also, that movie has really amazing dresses in it, which would cancel out all other concerns if it had to.

Music Appreciation

2008-05-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

I have the dubious fortune of constantly living next to singers. In high school, our next door neighbor's son started studying opera, and would practice in the basement. I'd be sitting watching Cheers and then I'd hear this cascading baritone from next door. Later at UBC, I lived in Gage Towers and the apartment across the hall (being dormitories apartments, the space above the door was open) had another student of opera. People would be hanging out with me in my apartment and we'd hear this rich voice rocking some Mozart. Once the person I was hanging out with bellowed, "shut the fuck up" across the hall before I managed to let them know that it was a real person making the noise.

On a tangent, I kind of miss Gage Towers. They were three, communist-style, seventeen-story apartment blocks grouped together around a 1-story commons building. High rise living and the associated voyeurism is an important part of the Vancouver lifestyle and depending on what room you got, you could find yourself either with a multi-million dollar view straight up the Georgia Strait and sunsets all year or staring at another one of the blocks across the no-man's land of the roof of commons, which was invariably littered with beach balls, frisbees, various alcohol-related accessories, someone's pants, definitely a bra and a number of other items that seemed to have no place there, but were likely tossed out of windows.

(Tossed out of window story one: Once when leaving the building I almost stepped on a raw, skinless, boneless chicken breast, all pink and weird on the sidewalk. Hard to say how far it fell and why before making its touchdown on the walkway.

Tossed out of window story two: late December, deep into the exam period, I'm sitting at my desk at 4am taking a break from my Caribbean Lit paper by writing my Milton paper. I'm staring out into the darkness and a pumpkin falls past my window. I think I'm going insane, then reconsider and look out onto the pavement. Smashed pumpkin. In the morning, no trace remains.)

When signing up for housing, you could either request a good view or to room with your buddies. My buddies and I got the sixth floor, looking out at the other two buildings. Despite the bad view, the one and only time I've seen the Northern Lights has been from that balcony.

Anyway, at the end of the year, people got a little more exhausted and raucous and the individual parties that you could watch happening in apartments sort of turned into a yell-back-and-forth party amid the towers. I may have been involved in borrowing my cheese-hating roommate Yen's New Kids On The Block Greatest Hits album to blast it with maximum volume across the gulf.

All this is to say: my next door neighbor is this squirmy little dude who is very nice to us but sings, with much gusto, Disney-esque tunes and soul sometimes in the afternoon. Guy better watch out or I will start hitting him back with Yma Sumac.

Found:

2008-05-04T18:12:00.000-07:00

On cement steps of the back stairway between the 2nd and 3rd floors in my building: the crushed wings of a monarch butterfly. There was a time that I would have found this sad and poetic (if cheesy). Now, after silverfish, ants, maggots and cockroaches, my thoughts are more along the lines of, "Ha ha, bug."