a cure for youthful longings
» Saturday, May 29, 2004

I'm listening to a copy of The Cure's old BBC sessions from 1979-1982. It contains all their moodiest, gloomiest, most introspective music. At the same time they kind of sound like a bunch of highschool kids banging away at guitars and keyboards in an auditorium somewhere, getting ready for a heavily chaperoned 'Talent Night'. Man, talk about glorious. Ever tried to imagine The Zit Remedy doing Seventeen Seconds?

Labels: music

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synchronicity, prescience, or incontinence?
» 

Today at work, The Lotus received the new Random House catalogue and found that the entry for the Emmanuelle Carrère reproduced the quotation that I used below, which, since I cribbed it from John Leonard, hardly comes as a surprise (it does lower my estimation of John Leonard a tad, but any guy who's willing to criticize Bob Dylan for being cruel to Joan Baez deserves a break now and then).

What I found creepy was that the catalogue copy promptly followed that up by talking about Dick's potassium tablet and Scotch diet.

Labels: literature

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that's not funny
» Friday, May 28, 2004

In the latest issue of Harper's John Leonard quotes from Emmanuel Carrère's new book I Am Alive And You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick: "What [Dick] asked of culture, psychoanalysis, and even religion, was not that they educate him but that they hand over the password that would permit him to escape from the cave wherein we are shown not the real world but only its shadows". That pretty much sums up Dick's attitude toward the cosmos.

Bear in mind, though, that Dick was admitted to a hospital after completing his novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer because, he claimed in an interview, the pain of leaving his characters behind incurred physical illness. Then he mentioned that he lived on nothing but potassium tablets and Scotch while he was writing. Then he died.

Labels: literature

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my lands are where my latter day saints lie buried
» Wednesday, May 26, 2004

It looks like I'll be heading to the Crazy Horse monument in June to do a segment for our "Big and Small" show. The show, unsurprisingly, is about big things and small things. I am preceded by an illustrious line of frivolous show hosts, chief among them Donny Osmond for the Travel Channel. I was supposed to travel to South Dakota last year, which would have put me within days of meeting that old Clean Pop LDS icon. Who knows, I might have gotten to hang out with D. Osmond! I believe he was a little bit rock and roll, no? I am deeply conflicted about my job sometimes.

Speaking of LDS, do you remember the scene in Star Trek IV in which Kirk tries to pass off Spock's Swami-esque behaviour and terrycloth outfit with the explanation that "in the sixties he did a little too much LDS"?

I wonder how many Mormons found that line funny? (Ha ha, he baptized too many previous generations &c.) Which makes me wonder: what constitutes Mormon humour? Hey, Jake, don't tip over that urn! C'mon, Zeke, you're such a moron...i! AH HAH HAH HAH. Snarf snarf.

Labels: useless

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appelation days
» 

On the way home from work today two guys in an orange-and-black Corvette sped past me down 11th Avenue. The passenger leaned out the window and yelled "Faggot!" as they went by.

Oh yeah, I still got it.

Labels: autobio

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If I were The Swan
» Monday, May 24, 2004

If I were The Swan, I would use my new superpowers to eliminate evil from the world. I would drive around in my new Jaguar sportscar and my hundred thousand American dollars minus taxes and instruct ugly people on the miracle of inner and outer transformation. I'd give them a small amount of money for toothpaste and suntan lotion. Criminals would catch sight of my flashing smile and confess tearfully to their crimes, moved beyond words by the radiance of my true self. I would consume lemon meringue pies, cream puffs, eclairs and pralines, but human beings would be my true repast. In the park I would erect a fringed purple tent, scented with the perfumes of the Orient, and lead men and women inside to satisfy my newfound voracious sexuality. Some would emerge dazed and drained. Others would be wrapped in plastic and carted off to the harbour under cover of darkness. If I were The Swan, I would resurrect the lost art of haberdashery, only to grind it under my heel when the adoration of haberdashers grew tiresome. If I were The Swan, I would also have to be a woman, which seems to take up more hours of the day than being a man. Nonetheless, I would be The Swan.

Labels: useless

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The Pubs
» Monday, May 17, 2004

On the back porch of a rowhouse unit in Halifax's public housing projects I sit and talk to the couple who live there, prepping them for a television interview. The husband sits and drinks a beer. The wife dons a pair of sunglasses and opens up an appointment book, which baffles me a little since the interview is not happening sometime in the next few weeks but in about ten minutes. A little girl with diry hair, dimpled knees and a stained orange T-shirt runs into the yard, carrying a hopeful expression on her face and a plastic bowl in her hands. The wife glances up from her appointment book and screams, "No, Savannah! We don't want any mud!"

Labels: travel

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have a nice d good please just pay
» Saturday, May 15, 2004

You know your waiter's neurotic when the bill has three carefully whited-out attempts to make a satisfactory smiley face above his name.

I picture him in the back applying white-out to bills with silent tears streaming down his face.

Labels: food

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antarctic ice shelves and the free market
» Wednesday, May 12, 2004

I ran my plan to flash-freeze New Jersey and mount it on the Antarctic ice shelf by my wife last night. She told me that scientists of great renown and stern demeanour fear that sections of the ice will eventually slide into the sea (climate change &c.).

This sounds great to me. New Jersey will become a floating monument to the free movement of capital, riding the currents as we ride the deep undertows and riptides of the free market. Better yet, we could freeze several different locations from around the world, set them adrift and offer people a choice of distinct floating monuments. Choice bits of Minneapolis. Asbestos, Quebec. The International Free Zone perched on the shores of Jamaica. Guantanamo Bay. The travel plaza off highway 403 as you approach London, Ontario. That place has got a Mr. Sub and a Tim Horton's and a Wendy's and everything.

Labels: useless

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the free market
» Tuesday, May 11, 2004

A few weeks ago in a Toronto cab I listened to the cabdriver extol the virtues of the free market.

He waxed enthusiastic about a mall in New Jersey where you could choose between twenty-six brands of ice cream, each brand distinctive and competitively priced. Same went for a shoe store in a mall in New Jersey. "You see?" he said. "That's the market for you! Twenty six brands of ice cream! Lots of competition means lots of choice!" He told me more about the malls of New Jersey.

Well, let's step off the stage of history right now, because clearly we've reached the pinnacle, and now there's nothing to do but scan the vistas and lick ice cream. Or we could flash-freeze New Jersey and mount it for display on the Antarctic ice shelf as a monument to the free market.

Labels: autobio, scorn, travel

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askance
» 

Lookit. It's pretty. My goal this evening is complete unreadability and unfathomable context. Try the veal. I hear they pound and pound it and rub it with salt.

Labels: useless

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aboot me
» Monday, May 10, 2004

You have arrived at the front door of Palinode's palace. Some of you have an overnight bag slung over your shoulder. A few of you have brought nothing but a toothbrush sticking out the back pocket of your jeans. That's sweet, but I'm a happily married man. Please make your way through the atrium to the gallery, where a tour is currently in progress.

My name is Aidan. My surname is also a nice trochee, which makes people enjoy saying my full name. For some reason I tend to mumble when I introduce myself, so whenever possible I prompt others to introduce me. I was born in Halifax in 1971. The day was warm and humid, but in the room where I was born, fluorescents gave off a cool and arid light. My father was in the cafeteria at the time, having been told by a nurse that my birth was still several hours off. It turned out that she had lied to him, that she anticipated my arrival but disapproved of the father's presence in the room. Those were distinctly old-fashioned times: the Vietnam War was still on, Halifax was a small and slightly skeevy port city with slum neighbourhoods clustered around the harbour, and I was very very small. We lived on the top floor of a house on Vernon Street near the university campus. A rose bush climbed up to the second story. My biggest fear at the time was the moon, which gazed down through the window with a mournful look that to me somehow signigified ill-will. I also found frightening a small framed picture of a sparrow on a branch that shared my bedroom with me. I'm not sure that I could form the words at the time to tell my parents about the picture and the fear its innocousness raised in me, because it stayed up night after night with me. I had trouble falling asleep in my crib.

My parents had a print of Guernica, but this picture, which should by rights have scared the living shit out of me, I found fascinating. I particulary liked the agonized punch-drunk bull's head that seemed to be struggling out of a press of contorted bodies. Why a picture of a sparrow freaked me out but a print of Guernica aroused my sympathy (I think I felt a bit sorry for the bull), I can't say. Kitsch just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

My first word was 'button'. My second word was 'ball'. Me and the spherical have a long cozy history.

Here you would see a picture of my toddler self if it weren't stuffed in a blue naugahyde photo album in a hutch in my parents' house. I'm in a red bathing suit, sitting in a plastic wading pool. My normal haystack of hair has been dragged into a queer downward wedge by a stream of water tilting down the side of my head. I could also show a black and white photo of myself in mid-air, an infant being tossed to the ceiling by my father. I must have liked it, because I'm grinning like an idiot and holding my hand up to my mouth. Thirty plus years later I look at the photo and I recognize the shape of the grin and the hand-to-mouth gesture. I do it now and it seems that I was doing it then. Unrefined, sure, but I was just getting started.

Between the ages of three and thirty I poked around, moving here, moving there, smoking a lot of cigarettes and basically being very lazy. I exhibited promise for years. I still exhibit promise. At some point in my teens I may have tried to believe in God, but if I did, the attempt didn't take. I had a bad experience with the Columbia Record and Tape Club when I was fourteen, but in my dealings with them I learned that if you ignore a debt long enough, they will eventually wipe the slate clean and send you a letter praising you for your excellent standing with the company. I understood this to be an earthly manifestation of Grace. Based purely on a hunch, I ordered The Smith's Meat Is Murder on cassette, which my parents found pretty excrutiating but I adored. A couple of years later I managed to snag my first serious relationship with a girl by lending her my copy of The Queen is Dead. A couple of months after she returned the tape I slept with her, which I understood was another and purer manifestation of Grace, even though the forgiveness of debts is probably a better thing overall.

At eighteen I moved out to the prairie provinces, which unsettled me. I had never seen a 7-11, never eaten nachos, never walked into a convenience store and seen drinks measured out in ounces. I didn't grow up with cable television, so regular access to American channels was also a new thing for me. The commercials and shows were filled with primary colours and loud happy voices, which brought me to the conclusion that 99% of televsion shows were targeted at children. I made a lot of friends who thought I was eccentric. Every one of my new friends seem to have gone to Bible camp when they were kids, and they all knew a bunch of cheesy campfire songs that praised the lord. In my new city there were no hills, no oceans, and almost no pedestrians - everyone drove from their house to the convenience store and down to the Blockbuster. At my new school there were hazing rituals for frosh, which I had thought was a cliche from American movies. Nope. I was given a frosh but didn't have the slightest idea what to do with him, so I allowed two particularly cruel fifteen year old girls to abuse the guy for a week. People here cruised, hung around in parking lots, smoked pot behind the Burger King, got in fights with guys from the north end of the city, and lived from party to party in various people's basements. I couldn't figure out whether I'd entered the cultural mainstream or been diverted into some cul de sac universe in which all participants were forced to live out American Graffiti every weekend.

In 1993 I met Schmutzie in a coffee shop. She had long red hair with bangs, wore round glasses and heavy long-sleeved shirts that covered her wrists and left her fingers poking out. Chiefly I remember her eyes, which seemed somehow to be open wider than other people's and coloured a curious grey-green. Whenever she had a point to bring up she would crank her eyes even wider, which gave her a perpetual look of urgency, as if she had just returned from abroad with vital information. For some reason she reminded me of Bailey from WKRP in Cincinatti. We held off dating for seven years - a complicated tale of moving away, chance meetings, shaved heads and nights listening to Dar Williams - but once we started dating we decided we may as well go whole hog and get married.

From 1999-2006 I was involved in the dynamic world of independent television production. I ended up producing a television show that somehow shows in sixty different countries around the world. How this has happened, I cannot say. People will watch anything.

I left television in mid-2006 and went to work for the provincial government. I work in Communications, because producing a television show proved insufficiently weaselly.

***

In Palinode's Palace is a continuation of my first weblog, The Palinode, which was hosted by the good folks at Diaryland. I started The Palinode at the height of my fascination with Richard Nixon, although you probably wouldn't know it from reading my entries. After a year I began to feel that I had run out of things to say on that site, so I went and built In Palinode's Palace, which for whatever reason seemed to suit my temperament better. At the time I envisioned the site as a repository for brief observations, epigrams, quotes, links - basically one of those weblogs that looks a bit like a lumber room or a trash heap, fun to pick through briefly but not something to return to. After a while I found that I couldn't jot down a sentence or two and leave it at that, having been cursed with a need to clarify everything, and after a month or so my entries began to resemble the pieces I put up on my first site.

The word palinode refers to a specific mode of classical poetry in which statements or themes from an earlier poem are retracted or clarified. It has come to mean, loosely, any formal retraction or recantation. I first ran across the word in Matei Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity, in which Calinescu characterizes the palinode as a dominant strategy of postmodernism. Correction and retraction have moved from the margins to the foreground, as we assume authority and question it all at once. Or maybe it's a means of slyly asserting power? You heard it here first: You have come to the front door of Palinode's Palace and it turns out you've been living here all along. And that is the third and final manifestation of earthly Grace.

Labels: autobio

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best of palinode 2004-2005
» Monday, May 03, 2004

Here is what I call the Best of Palinode. You may call it that if you like. You can also call it the Most Self-Indulgent and Impenetrable of Palinode. You may call it Too Many Entries About Movies. You may call it Where's My Favourite Entry? Whatever you want to call it, these are the pieces that have held up best over the past few years. A few surprised me; one or two rang palpably false, but I've kept them in as curiosities for my Museum of Disingenuous Pleading (I've picked Frank Gehry as the architect).

2006-07 coming soon. Soon, I tells ya!

Note for the newbies: My nickname for Schmutzie throughout 04-05 was The Lotus.

Aboot Me - May 10 2004

Those were distinctly old-fashioned times: the Vietnam War was still on, Halifax was a small and slightly skeevy port city with slum neighbourhoods clustered around the harbour, and I was very very small. We lived on the top floor of a house on Vernon Street near the university campus. A rose bush climbed up to the second story. My biggest fear at the time was the moon, which gazed down through the window with a mournful look that to me somehow signigified ill-will.

The Pubs - May 17 2004

A little girl with dirty hair, dimpled knees and a stained orange T-shirt runs into the yard, carrying a hopeful expression on her face and a plastic bowl in her hands. The wife glances up from her appointment book and screams, "No, Savannah! We don't want any mud!"

Lost Cooking Methods of 1958 - June 1 2004

Braising, according to Craig, is a monstrously involved task requiring the GDP of a medium-sized industrialized country. It is easier to get tritium-3 from the moon than to braise pork and potatoes. You are better off, he continued, trying to gather all the sand from the ocean floor with tweezers. Go to hell, he said.

Anti-darwinians in Darwin - June 10 2004

Darwin is pure tropics, a wet-and-dry season odyssey of heat and humidity, spear grass and mudwasps, ibises, crocodiles that jump from the water (when prompted with buffalo meat), and cockatoos whose call sounds like a high-speed car accident.

Rapid City VI: Cornickles of Riddick - July 1 2004

No matter how crappy a town you've landed yourself in, no matter how much it resembles the developing world, you stand a good chance of being close to a movie theatre. If you're short on luck, the theatre is a whitewashed shack with plastic chairs and a scratchy print of 8 Mile projected on a stained or ripped screen. That kind of bad luck is called "rural Newfoundland".

Countdown - July 12 2004

But, as in the uncanny opening passage of a cascading nightmare, the Chapters is a Barnes & Noble, the surrounding conversations are in Spanish, and outside runs a frantic route 183, pouring vehicle after vehicle into Dallas.

What I've Wasted - July 22 2004

I swear, Olive Gardens must have gigantic underground warehouses that pump soup and pasta up to the surface in fearsome pipes.

Found: Arrival - August 3 2004

This afternoon I found someone's manuscript scattered along the alley behind my apartment building.

A Good Day For Neologism - August 9 2004

Without disclosing full details of its genesis, I will inform you that I've created a new word from handy preexisting ones, the better for semantic range and flexibility: sockbison.

Overseas Still - August 20 2004

The unsmiling man buckles you in and shuts the door, and after a moment of adjustment the helicopter is rocking unsteadily, just a few inches off the ground. A sudden tilt and you're over the city, heading south to circle an active volcano.

There's Another Georgie Deep Inside - September 2 2004

To tell you the truth, I'm growing my very own doppelganger out of handy household materials.

Q and A - September 2 2004

I've been working out some answers to questions that people pepper me with on the job.

Palinode plus Lotus Equals Good - September 3 2004

Yes it does.

Downhome Badness: Revelation - September 18 2004

My favourite moment in the first Resident Evil movie occurs when Milla Jovovich kicks a dog in the head.

Dutch Dictionary - September 25 2004

If in the morning your cheese man is host to murders of cawing crows, you and your friends may steal a car and get stoned in an Amsterdam coffee shop.

Hit The New Post Link And Now I'm Staring - September 27 2004

I can see at the bottom of the stairs a lone guy chopping at a block of wood with a curious-looking hatchet. The shoe 'factory' is actually an abandoned part of the subway once intended to shelter people from nuclear assault.

Things To See In Europe If You're Me - October 7 2004

Naked (topless) ladies on the beaches of southern France. I didn't stop to investigate, but you know, I saw naked ladies.

Wenn Ich 'Kultur' Höre - October 14 2004

In Holland we were treated with courtesy, in France with apathy, but in Germany we were watched.

Fruit, Mobility, Science - December 1 2004

Bear in mind that I am not a prize-winning scientist with a grant from the Department of Defense. I am just a man working furiously to bridge the gap in his knowledge of fruit.

The Last Cigarette - January 4 2005

Whatever anyone may tell you, it is not easy to smoke forty cigarettes in a day.

No Image Is Currently Available For This Headpeasant - January 9 2005

"Your hair is an outmoded roofing technology. There are peasants living in your head".

Because My Friends Are Voyeurs - January 12 2005

"Ah ha ha ha ha! Oh my - (quiets down for a split second, then bursts out into fresh round of laughter) I was just LOOKING at you! And you were talking! Ah ha ha ha!"

Spamalit - January 22 2005

Let me tell you, TIGERS ARE NOT CHEAP. Where'd you get that thing? It smells and it bites.

Rad Lobster - January 30 2005

In Brampton I penetrated the armoured flanks of a Jack Astor's and a TGI Friday's to get to that Red Lobster in distress. A Red Lobster high up in a tower let down a meaty Alaskan king crab leg for me to climb up.

New Brunswick - February 17 2005

The Super Decker has some good fried clams.

On Having The Courage To Open Up and Share Thoughts - February 22 2005

I think it’s the nouns that confound me.

The Chairs of Constantine - February 24 2005

Chairs point to the dual nature of hospitality, the grimace beneath the grin, the skull beneath the skin, what have you. Chairs are the tool of the hostile host, simultaneously offering ease and threatening to bind and harm.

No Image Is Currently Available For This Firepea - March 3 2005

"There was a fire at my work today". "Are you burned beyond recognition yet?"

They Think It's People - March 14 2005

But it’s also about the permeable boundaries of human compassion and the mysteries of death and eternal life. Not to mention the importance of getting your pet neutered. You'll even find out where circus animals go when they die.

Give Us Your Slick, Your Broken Shouldered - March 14 2005

"I didn’t want to shit you in the first place anyway."

My Living Will - March 22 2005

In the event of brainsucker attack, carefully remove whatever is left of my brain and leave me with only a stem and a spinal cord, the better to respond to stimuli with random smiles and occasional eye tracking.

The Dumbest Picture In The World - April 8 2005

As you prepare for your weekend, I'd like you to take a few minutes to sit down and contemplate The Dumbest Picture in the World.

Debeakotheque - April 11 2005

"Why? Why would you want to debeak a puffin?" "You want to eat puffin with the beak on?"

On The Jetty - April 15 2005

As a bonus, La Jetée also features people from the future with buttons glued to their foreheads to indicate how advanced they are. I love this film, and I understand that it was made in 1962, but did we ever think that far-future humans go around wearing black turtlenecks and glueing buttons to their foreheads?

Salad - April 19 2005

Somewhere in the past thirty years, during the orgy of brand diversity and the wild outflinging of supply chain tentacles to the last arable lands on earth, salads got fancier along with everything else.

Absinthe Trash - May 11 2005

3 AM house party? Sure! Long-abandoned drug? Hell, just this once. So it was that I ended up Friday night drinking absinthe with a bunch of lawyers and up ‘n’ coming neoconservative power politicians.

Socks, Rocks and Chanklemas - May 13 2005

"And there are those argyles I bought from that angry woman in Chicago."

Jedinomics! - May 22 2005

Certainly the harsh and greedy economic policies of the Empire must have funnelled a good deal of wealth away from many planets, but I think a more fundamental explanation is at hand: The pre-Imperial galactic economy was supported by a heavily subsidized trade in Jedi cloaks.

Just A Good Example Of Why I Shouldn't Keep A Weblog - June 30 2005

"Oh yeah? Here's some Mexican habanero sauce from the FUTURE, you condescending barbarian! C'est l'avenir pour vous!" "Mes yeux! Ils ont chaud!" "Yeah, that's the supply chain in action. Be glad I didn't bring a Kalashnikov".

The Summer Blockbusters - July 5 2005

A sudden profound blackness makes you stumble into the person ahead of you, but as your eyes adjust you make out the terraced rows of hunched figures crunching away on great tubs of food. The strange submarine light makes you think of a submerged pyramid in Atlantis, the popcorn eaters in the seats the ghosts of a doomed and slovenly race.

The First Family Plot - July 11 2005

I thought I was a worldly guy, but I'd never had the experience of struggling in a bed and being held down by several strange women

Bird Facts - August 2 2005

The truth is that there is only one species of bird, and since birds were never real in the first place, there is only one bird. But it is everywhere.

Basement - August 4 2005

...the finished basement, where the polyvinyl armature of civilization suffers the expeditious sowbug.

Shed - August 12 2005

There were no purple jackets with gold emblazoning on the back (where had I gotten that idea?), no great vistas of coolness. There were only a few old Playboys and Mayfairs, which in a fit of guilt I handed over to my parents. My dad spent the afternoon leafing through them at the dining room table.

Bag-el - August 25 2005

What laws will this baker's dozen flout as they build their own alien society, unrecognizable to humans but a shelter for the inscrutable bagel mind?

Falcon Powder - August 25 2005

"Is it powder made of falcons, or is it a powder for falcons?" "It isn't - it wouldn't be made of falcons. Foot powder isn't made of feet, you weirdo".

How I Go From Trash To Robot Vaginas In One Entry - September 27 2005

An open chip bag, all shiny with grease. It's like a robot vagina. Chip bags are the future skins of cyborgs.

All My Terrible Aching Needs - October 9 2005

Palinode needs more tummy time

The Creepy Bargain - October 15 2005

This post - a conversation between me and Schmutzie - is notable for having been plagiarised by some blogger. Go read it and ask yourself: would you want to take responsibility for this conversation?

A Few Things - November 13 2005

"Hello? Community Gardens? I can't bring the apple core in. Will the children be alright? Will they - Oh good lord. I'm so sorry."

A Reason To Live From The Conservative Party - December 14 2005

But we're not really talking about Canada here; we're wandering through Stephen Harper's funhouse, where the politicians kick back in the faculty lounge and ignore the hordes of plumbers and drywallers and electricians out in the street. Either that, or he's exploiting a non-existent class conflict for political gain by making it all up.

Labels: best

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