Artist's Statement

Best Call This Week

"Hi, this is Dave, from Sony."

Hi Dave! This is Robyn, from Earth!

On Horses

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

Happy trading floor picture!

Liberal, Secular, Not As Cold As You Think

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

In which Tom Cruise sues John McCain.

Chiming In

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

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

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

Weird Connection

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

The Tina Fey

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

Reasons to Love Bob

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

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

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

Really Do Not Like Hippies That Much

But they really like trees.

Limeys

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

Use your face.

Brand Awareness

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

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

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

At The Hollywood Bowl Tonight

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

What I Learned Today

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

Marrying For Healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

1, 2, 3, 4

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

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

Fun.

Discovery

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

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

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

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

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

Vancouver Chat Poem

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

Unicef

Red Cross

Oxfam

World Vision

From Heaven

I mean, am I wrong?

Futura Caps

Actually

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

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

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

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

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:

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."

Zip Me Goodnight

My duvet has given up on life, or at least on the part of its life that involved keeping me warm at night so for the last week, I've been sleeping in my sleeping bag. The first night I unfurled the sleeping bag, I got really excited and not just because I was anticipating staying warm all night--there's something about a sleeping bag that is inherently exciting. This is likely a Pavlovian response in which sleeping bags are connected to camping and sleepovers and the associated little kid excitement of sleeping somewhere weird and slightly uncomfortable and laughing about things in the dark until very late at night. Sleeping bags turn rocky beaches and the slick vinyl of summer camp mattresses into your own personal den of warm-cozy. Not only that, there's something about sleeping in a confined zippered sack that is actually super comfortable. Like how babies stop crying and conk out once they are swaddled.

Also, if the phone rings early in the morning, you can stand up, shove your feet into the corners of the bag and take your whole bed with you to answer it.

Google Street View

Google street view drove by my house in the morning when Eli was visiting. Weird.

Roach Patrol

My Spoon Is Still Too Big

The other day I was at the gas station again (the one on Fairfax and Beverly that's all dolled up to look like an oasis --turns out I go to a lot of theme gas stations) and they have these TV monitors on top of the pumps for people who can't stand to go without stimulus for 60 seconds at a time and I catch an ad for Poptarts with a very recognizable style.

Here it is:

I just caught the end of it. Just enough to wonder why someone would make this who earlier had made this:

Then I came home and did some research and found out Don Hertzfeldt didn't make the Pop Tarts ads; the Pop Tarts ads were ripping off Don Hertzfeldt. I guess one of the downsides of making a brilliant animated short about not selling out to the man is that it may get so successful that the man sees it, likes its countercultural morbid absurdity and uses it to sell refined flour and high fructose corn syrup to impressionable youths watching TV. Maybe he should have just taken the cash?

Walkscore

This is a good way to figure out whether you want to move to a neighborhood or not. One of the reasons I like my neighborhood so much is how much stuff is close by. My score is 92.

UnJunk

Remember that scene in LA STORY when Steve Martin's mail gets delivered and the letters come through the slot but then junk mail continues to be shoved through for another full minute until there is a puddle of it on the floor? Very true to life.

Here's how to opt out of receiving catalogues in the mail.

MAD Foldouts

When in elementary school, everything I learned about US politics in the sixties, seventies, and eighties was from MAD magazines. My Nana and Grandad passed on to me a bunch of Barbies from the sixties when I was around seven or eight that must have belonged to my dad's sister. A couple years later, my brother and I inherited a bunch of MAD magazines. It was a totally weird way to learn about sixties and seventies culture, but I think it worked. The foldouts were especially cool.

Art for Everyone

My new favorite website is 20x200.

Looking at drawings and paintings gets me excited to the point where I think I'm in the wrong business.

Things That Would Be Really Cool If People Actually Used Them

This, for one

Theatre Taste Test

Q: Wait, why is the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax the best place to see a movie?

A: Because the beer we smuggled in was the same kind as the beer the owner guy was wandering around handing out before the show started.

Q: Ah.

Green Gasoline and Other Miracles of Marketing

The other day I stopped for gas at the fancy BP gas station just south of Beverly Hills on Robertson. It's like fueling up at Pinkberry; the floor is really nice and kind of pebbly, everything is just so, aesthetically speaking. The lighting changes colors every couple seconds, there was peaceful music and the squeegee had an extra long handle so you don't have to lean on your car to reach the far edge of the windshield. The trash cans are futuristic like the pumps like the walls. There's a moist towelette dispenser in the wall. The cashier was a good-looking young blonde woman.

There was a woman at the next pump shrieking inanities into her cell phone while pumping gas, which is great only in that everyone within earshot was probably hoping that a spark in her phone would ignite the gas fumes and cause her to explode. I picked up some postcards that are biodegradable with flower seeds embedded in them.

The premise of this gas station is that it is eco-friendly. I read up on it, and apparently there are solar panels in the roof, the walls are made of recycled steel, the flooring is made of recycled glass, and fleets of seraphim form a protective angelic filter around the gasoline so it is non-polluting. Except that last part isn't true. Yeah, that's right, it's a gas station tarted up to make people feel super ecological and stylish about using gas.

Trendy environmentalism annoys the shit out of me. Environmentalism is not chic, folks. It's utilitarian and non-matching. It involves having less and using less. It involves washing it and using it again. Every ad I see touting a company's ecological consciousness has people wandering around in slomo through a rainforest, or an artfully composed shot of a sunflower, but they all involve the same aesthetic as this gas station: environmentalism equals clean. Are you kidding me? Chemicals equal clean. Environmentalism equals me not having AC and finding maggots in my trash can that I try to clean with vinegar but at a certain point say fuck it and clean with bleach. Environmentalism equals shoveling cow shit into your manure pile of hot rotting vegetables. Or hanging onto the same cell phone or computer when it is dinged up and ugly and parts of it don't work. Or flitering tap water instead of buying bottled. Or bringing your lunch to work in a jar. These things are not clean, they are not stylish and they don't make a much of a palpable difference to the environment, but that's what living ecologically actually is.

The danger of cool, clean, hip eco-friendly products is the same problem that Marie Antoinette had: you can run around and pretend to be a milkmaid all you want, but if the only savvy it brings you is to suggest cake-eating to cure the bread shortage, then you may find yourself out of game earlier than you had originally planned.

Hiking

The Beatles

The Rolling Stones

On The QT

On Friday, Andy and I caught the Charles Bronson movie THE FAMILY at the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax. The Silent Movie Theatre shows many other things besides silent movies, and in fact, has some really obscure and cool screenings. I didn't realize this until about three weeks ago. The seats, though uncomfortable, each come with their own throw cushion.

THE FAMILY is a piece of Eurotrash splendor and includes such wonderful things as: Charles Bronson, Charles Bronson with no shirt, Telly Savalas, Telly Savalas getting a facial, Telly Savalas making fancy drinks in coconut shells, Telly Savalas in enormous Sophia Loren eyeglasses, Ennio Morricone, lots of insane car chases accompanied by totally over the top and illogical tire-squealing sound, a weirdly pink tint to some of the reels, no-means-yes rape scenes, bad acting, bad dialogue, nudity, blood that looks like orange ketchup, zooms, and an iconic ending (featuring zooms).

The Silent Movie Theatre, like the New Beverly, attracts a lot of weird dudes. There were maybe five other women in the place.

So a good twenty minutes in, this guy comes in and is whispering to the guy sitting behind us:

Guy: hey, that's my seat.

Sitting Guy: huh?

Guy: that's my seat, all my stuff is there.

Sitting Guy: uhhh.

Guy (full volume): ALL MY SHIT IS THERE, THAT'S MY SEAT.

A good way to shame someone into doing something in a theatre when the show's on is to talk full volume. This works particularly well if you are Quentin Tarantino.

QT enjoyed the movie very much, I can report. He laughed a lot at some of the campiest stuff (there's a great part when Bronson is going to rape his old girlfriend down by the docks and then they pause and watch this other guy get the shit kicked out of him by three guys [and there's this strange subtext of maybe he's going to get raped too???] and then Bronson and the girlfriend talk about the fight a little like they are sitting on a couch watching it on TV and then CUT: to a totally different scene).

I have to admit that I didn't even realize that it was Tarantino until Andy pointed it out after we had left. Apparently he goes there a lot. The smoking patio between pictures must look like a crazy courtship ritual in which forty movie-obsessed dudes try simultaneously to sidle up to the man and tell him how much they liked KILL BILL: PART ONE.

Merit Badge for Red Tape

Since living in a country other than the one of which I am a citizen, bureaucratic struggles that would be medium-intense have become epic decathlons of perseverance. Registering my car in the United States took me approximately 30 to 40 hours of appointments, repairs, inspections and phone calls over a six month period. Getting my California drivers license also took multiple appointments and two tests.

Yesterday I finally got my new Canadian passport, which I've been working on since July. It's iridescent and pretty. In my old passport photo, I look like I'm pleased to meet you. In my new passport photo, I wear the expression of someone who knows that it will take eight months before I have the document in hand. I look Hungarian. You are not supposed to smile in Canadian passport photos anymore.

I do feel like I've perfected a combination of my Anglo-heritage (I know how to queue), my Canadian manners, and American aggression when it comes to dealing with this stuff. Everything I've put in for, I've eventually gotten, even though in the case of my passport, I had to call the Canadian consulate to get the certified mail tracking number and then go in person to the post office to find out that they had it, but no one had ever scanned it into their system so it seemed like they had no plans to deliver it until I showed up to ask about it.

Egg-based Horror Tales

I'm making a quiche from scratch for this Easter lunch I got invited to. It's baking right now. I think it's going to be a total disaster. The dough was a little dry, but worse, the crust is in a bottomless tart pan and I poured too much of the egg mixture in and the eggyness overflowed and went between the crust and the edge of the metal pan. Which wouldn't be that big a deal except that it's a bottomless tart pan, comprised of a ring that makes the outside edge and then a flat circle that sits inside to make the bottom. So when I poured the egg in, it started haloing out around the pan onto the counter like it was a gangster that had just been shot.

Okay, and just now, I looked in the oven and the eggyness is completely flowing out of the quiche and all over the baking sheet I put underneath it. This means the shell is leaking. I just poured in the leftover egg mixture to top it up.

Things I did different from the recipe:

1) Whole wheat flour instead of all purpose
2) Salted butter instead unsalted
3) I think slightly less butter than was called for
4) Frozen butter grated instead of "very cold" butter in a mixmaster because screw you Martha Stewart, not everyone has a mixmaster
5) Didn't chop the thyme all that finely
6) Skipped the "strain thorugh seive" step
7) Have a crazed variable temperature gas oven, that gets hot fast but can't keep a consistent temperature to save its life or the lives of the food it cooks.

Man, baking is a cruel mistress. In other kinds of cooking, you can usually get away with little changes and shortcuts.

Okay, holy shit, just looked in the oven. The situation is insane. There's super-fluffy egg craziness exploding from all over the baking sheet. In the center, sits the quiche, happy in its pan, all innocent like it had nothing to do with it.

It needs to cook for 45 more minutes. It will need to be eaten with pickaxes.

-------

6:43pm postscript: The quiche was magnificent. I was 1.5 hours late. This guy I once dated was at the lunch and we awkwardly avoided each other. I met my friend's fiancee and liked her very much.

Oasis Times

Last weekend I went up to Palm Desert to hang out with my parents. I recommend such an excursion for anyone who wants to feel really young and really pale. I got into town a couple of hours before they did and so after thoroughly inspecting the bathroom and jumping on the bed a little, I went down to the hotel bar.

The bar, like the hotel, like the town, is full of super-tanned people with wrinkles and coral-colored polo shirts talking about their triumphs on the links. I asked the bartender if she had the kind of whiskey I like and ordered a glass of it. She asked for my ID and when she took it and looked at it for a long time under the counter light and then turned around with her back to me and scrabbled at it for a minute before handing it back to me. I handed her my Visa, which due to bank screw-ups has a picture of a fluffy Golden Retriver snuggling with a kittycat. I'm sure that didn't go very much further than my ersatz fake ID towards convincing her that in fact I am on the home stretch of 29.

I started thinking about ways that I could prove my vintage: "I remember Expo 86!" "I saw Ghostbusters II in the theatre!" "CK One makes me think of algebra and purple jeans!" "I think of Will Smith as a radio star!" "I know who Christa McAuliffe was!" "I can moonwalk!" "I once had jams with Carebears on them!" "I can sing the Three's Company theme song!"

It's hard to say if any of these things would really work. Maybe the key is to not hang out in Palm Desert?

I talked to the pharmacologist next to me at the bar about Walmart and the lucrative trade of botox and fake boobs. Then my parents showed up and we drank large professional martinis and ate very small morsels of delicious food on beautiful white plates. Later when we were standing at reception, my mom double-dog dared me to take a bite out of one of their decorative green apples in their display. Which I did. So perhaps the bartender was right to scowl at me like I'm a teenager. Apparently I haven't made much headway past 15.

Attn: PIGS IN SPACE Scribes

Here's a handy guide.

Something Madonna Figured Out Ten Years Ago

I have a phone headset at work. I don't use it all the time, but I'll put it on to talk to the travel agent or to roll calls. Any situation that I think I'm likely to ask to talk to someone's supervisor, I'll wear it. It makes me a much gestural caller, I nod, I throw my hands up in the air. I love writing or typing while using it. I love getting up and wandering around while using it, but I don't do that too much because it's obnoxious.

Something about it makes me feel authoritative. I was calling the bookstore at the Grove to see if they had a book I wanted in stock. The woman said she they didn't have it but she could have it shipped to me. Normally, I'd say no and hang up and then buy it for the exact same price on Amazon because I'm a nervous shopper, but I was wearing the headset! And I was like, yes, yes, let's set that up, let's make that a go.

If I got a wrong number call from some scary stranger asking me for approval to detonate and I was using the regular handset, ten times out of ten, I would say, "What? No! Don't detonate anything! Wrong number!" but if I got that same call while wearing the headset, there is a fraction of a chance that I would say, "Detonate!".

Mystery Train (of Events)

A couple of weeks ago whilst waiting on the sidewalk for brunch, this car parked down the way and Jim Jarmusch got out. Except it wasn't Jim Jarmusch, it was a guy who looked exactly like him. How is this an accident? If you are the kind of dude who wears black, skinny cowboy jeans, somewhat imposing boots, an ancient black t-shirt and is pale as Scotsman with your white hair sticking up from your head in dramatic scoops and twists, how have you not heard of Jim Jarmusch? And having heard of him, how do you not realize that you look exactly like him? You probably go to the same parties, and whoops, that's awkward.

It's like having the same name as a famous person or character. For serious, at one point I had a plan of naming a character William Blake except he's never heard of William Blake.

And then I saw DEAD MAN.

Don't you love circles?

Head Cold

I'm home sick today. It's amazing how twelve hours of sleep makes me feel so much better. Or, rather, it's not amazing at all. If only that were a scheduling possibility.

Yesterday morning the old woman upstairs was dragging and bumping stuff around at about 5:30, as she is wont to do. At 5:50 there was a big bang noise and I lay there with my eyes open wondering if she had fallen over. Eventually I heard her moving around again and I went back to sleep.

Last night, she was listening to some cheesy drama and then to news reports about Barack Obama. When she does this, I put on my headphones and listen to music, because I'd rather be kept up by my own noise. Falling asleep wasn't really going to happen so instead I lay there and tried to decide whether or not I believed in god and what my ideas were on the afterlife, if any.

I guess it's only pretty recent that ruminating on these concepts has become something we can do in our spare time, as opposed to a necessary aspect of our cultural and social identity. That's kind of nice, I guess, individuals getting to decide by themselves what they do and do not believe in or want to get up early for on Sunday (or any other) morning. It does, however, lead to the situation where you don't really have to think about it if you don't want to and you have the option of sleeping in instead of spending time contemplating where you are headed, in terms of right and wrong.

I think that for the most part, the role that religion would have played in my life if I had been brought up to be religious was replaced by novels. I'm hard-pressed to think of a better way of gaining an understanding of the necessity of being a humanist in this world.

Needless to say, this line of thinking last night lead to some strange and wonderful dreams.

The Beach Boys

Neil Young

Context

You know what looks weird when you are not actually doing it? Standing on a ski hill. It just looks strange.



Much the way clumping around in ski boots seems normal when you are doing it but is otherwise crazy. I rode the Grouse ski gondola this summer to my friend's wedding wearing a dress and mules and it was the strangest feeling ever, especially when on the way down we went over the midstation and a bunch of water tipped out from somewhere in the ceiling and landed on me and the bride. Thank goodness for being drunk.

The Wonderful World of Shutting Up

I was at a "friends and family" screening for a movie last weekend. That means the people in the audience worked on the movie, or at least work for the company that made the movie, so they worked on the movie in the sense that they posted the job opening for the in-house lawyer in the international sales department who then advised other people who sold the movie to distributers in Uruguay. So granted, they may not be so terribly invested in the magic of filmmaking any more than your average ferry worker is into seafaring (which incidentally some are, not a lot but some).

But it still was a bizarre experience to sit in a theatre on the proverbial lot in which people still let their phone beep every five minutes for the second half of the movie, talked loudly to each other and crumpled popcorn bags in their fists apparently for the sheer fun of it.

At a screening of No Country, the old woman next to me was muttering away with her old husband in her loud, old-person, just-tell-me-if-I'm-yelling voice and when the title card came on the screen, she whispered, "TERRIBLE TITLE" and I got up and moved. The people sitting next to me during Atonement filled me with so much rage with their talking (they did not even have the good grace to think they were whispering) that my own emotional journey was becoming much more compelling than the one on screen. What the fuck people, watch it at home if you are going to say "do you want some popcorn?" to your canoodling mate in a normal speaking voice in a crowded theatre.

It makes me wonder: who are these crazy people? Who do they think they are? Where do they think they are? Obviously their own living rooms in Ultrasuede recliners. It turns out even people whose livelihood depends on people enjoying the movie experience are perfectly content to crap on the work of others. If I could punish these people, I would make them sit through a mix. Like, the whole thing. Of a feature. A Michael Bay feature. That would teach them.

Materialistic Ambition, part 1

I have dreams of making a bunch of money and using it to get everything on my Volvo all fixed and nice. So that, for example, I would never again cut my knee open on that broken hard plastic on the drivers' side door (happened again last week) and I could listen to the sound system normally without have to use an ipod as a pre-amp. Fix the rust spots and oh, and maybe get the radio working again. And certainly get both speakers working at the same volume so I could once again enjoying the LR panned stylings of the Beatles while I drive.

I'll know when I really make it huge, though, because that will be the day that I can afford to purchase and have bolted to the hood this magnificent creature:

Year of the Mouse

I read some interview with Gwyneth Paltrow a while back wherein she described her macrobiotic diet and how it involved "eating a piece of cheese once a year for Christmas".

In other words, "I'm rabidly insane".

If I had to choose between cheese and, you know, Vanity Fair covers, undeserved Oscars and populist pop singers writing songs about colors for me, I might just choose cheese.

Unhappiest Switchboard On Earth

The people who work at the Disney have to:

1) introduce themselves when they answer your call;

and

2) tell you to have a "magical day" once they are ready to connect you.

Maybe this would be fun if you got calls from little girls all day, but holy shit, what an unwieldy way to deal industry calls, which usually involve exchanges of four words or less by either party.

Also: the hold music is "It's A Small World."

If My Old Clothes Can Do It, So Can Tom Cruise

I cleaned out my closet a couple weeks ago with the following revelations:

1) I have enough brown shirts to start an army

2) I have enough plaid shirts to start a country. I shall call the country... Canada

3) The other sports sock was way in the back there

Jeremy and I have a running discussion, if you'll pardon the expression, about feng shui and colon health. I can't remember exactly how these two things are related, except that he had a book on feng shui and it in there was a chapter about keeping your colon healthy and it had black and white drawings of a happy digestive tract and then an angry digestive tract that was jagged like lightning or the frazzled bits of an angry cartoon character's hair.

Somehow all this got translated into the idea that getting rid of your unnecessary stuff in an enema-like fashion will make you more at peace with the world. I just gave my closet its very own Master Cleanse, and it is now happy. It is not the single pebble on an empty shelf that Jeremy strives for, but that seems like a fast track to pneumonia.

In case you were wondering about my progress to adulthood vis a vis wire vs wood hangers: wire. And I've been using the same cardboard box for a laundry basket for three and a half years. But you know, cardboard, fibre, roughage, good for the colon!

Tally

A not nice thing to happen is showing up to LAX extra early on December 22nd only to realize that the flight will be delayed three hours. A nice thing to happen is getting on the plane to find that for the first time in all your many shuttles between LA and Vancouver in the last three and a half years you get to watch a movie because they've installed little monitors in the seats. A nice thing because I had just about done as much as I could do with my magazine and music-listening routine for the day. A nice thing again is watching ELF and seeing that someone you went to high school with who had cancer as a teenager is now doing pretty well in their acting career and is pretty darn cute to boot. A nice thing is only watching the first thirty minutes of THE NANNY DIARIES.

A not nice thing is landing at 12:30am and there being a lot of lollygagging vis a vis unlocking the door to the gate so we can get the fuck away from anything related to air travel and home to whatever beds await us. A nice thing is the international arrivals area of the Vancouver airport.

A nice thing is family. Another nice thing is turkey. A nice thing is running into your grade six teacher at a play and him remembering your name.

A nice thing is an evening flight. A nice thing is a pleasant customs experience. A nice thing is running into someone you know and actually like at the gate. A not nice thing is Air Canada having another befuddled delayed departure. A not nice thing is irritating the person sitting on the other side of you and your friend with your conversation. A not nice, but also actually nice thing is not really caring. A nice thing is firing your cellphone up again when you land when everyone else is doing it too. A nice thing is your roommate picking you up from the airport. A nice thing is celebrity spotting at the luggage carousel.

A very nice thing is getting back home to LA.

January

Last night I went to see LARS AND THE REAL GIRL at the Regency Fairfax. When I passed it on the way home from work, the lights in the marquee were out but the strange and friendly man who sells tickets was outside the open doors smoking a cigarette so I figured it was still open and the lights were out because they had shorted out from all the rain. There were lights inside anyway.

I should add for you non-Southland readers that it has been raining here, raining to beat the band, raining enough to flood the streets and make you think about rounding up pairs of animals.

At home I suited up. I used to take a certain amount of pride walking around in the rain in LA, because I am a Vancouverite by birth and have a Vancouverite coat and a pair of Vancouverite (by way of Australia) boots. I spent half a decade at UBC, for god's sake. A little rain is nothing to wince at or drive like an idiot in. So I walked to the theatre, which is about six short blocks away, and the valet guys under awnings and podium umbrellas on my path looked at me like I was crazy. It rains harder and wetter here than it ever does in Vancouver. I did get water inside my boot at one point when I waded through a creekbed coming out of an alley, but for the most part I was dry.

Once the lights went down in the theatre and I snuck out my little flask of bourbon (if you are going to see a movie by yourself on a Friday night, you may as well get into the part), I began to hear it, though I thought at first it was part of the soundtrack. Dripping, plonking, and sometimes a bubble-bursting splash. The theatre was leaking in 5.1 surround.

It worked with the movie though, which is set as winter is trying to make its way into spring. A character says, as it begins to snow, "I though winter was over." And another character responds, "That was just the thaw, winter isn't over until Easter." These kind of sentences and the people who know enough to speak them make me miss people from the north.

It's a movie about patience, and it's a simple movie, and for that I liked it very much. Sometimes overly metaphoric films that deal with people's psychoses annoy me, but this one didn't. When the lights came up I could see the buckets all over the theatre, mostly along beside the walls but some amongst the seats, with taped off areas warning you not to sit there. It's a long drop from ceiling to floor there.

It was even wetter for the walk home and when I got there, my jeans were soaked from mid-thigh down. Next week I'll have more energy and be ready for sunshine again, but for now, a lot of rain and a good excuse to stay inside is all I could ask for.

Ladies and Gentlemen

Please allow the cats to demonstrate how cold it was in the house earlier in December:

The 10pm Goodnight

This morning I got halfway to work before realizing I had forgotten to brush my teeth. I chewed a lot of gum today. At the desks around me, the coughing and sneezing and hacking borders on criminal. Traffic's been light, I guess most of the inhabitants of the city are lying around digesting booze and turkey for another few days. My house is a mess. I've been taking a lot of liquids and eating fruit, hoping the diaphanous vapor of my brain will solidify into moving parts once more.