hp sauce and ketchup
» Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Sometimes you want to say something smart. You amble out of a movie theatre, drop from a book, pass by a snip of conversation, and you want to deliver something witty about the experience to the next friend you encounter. So when Schmutzie asked me what I thought of Hoary Putter and the Giblet of Fur, I wanted to knock it out of the park. Instead I said, Oh, it was okay, I guess.

PaliDude, you say. What's wrong with you? Where'd your mojo go, Schlomo? (Would you really say that to me? My name's not Schlomo.) Can't raise a phrase to swat down a franchise flick for kids? Not this time, I say. Then tell me what's going on, you say. How did it beat you?

Simple. Harry Potter was stronger than I, and I submitted. Not just brute strength, either: a imperturbable Zen strength, a reed-in-the-wind strength. And a craftiness that made up for its lack of intelligence.

Its first weapon was the smell of stale ketchup. As I picked out a seat I noticed it: sugary, ripe, slightly sweaty. The whole theatre reeked of it. I realized that the day's matinees, packed with Potter kids, had been filled with people eating movie theatre wieners (the theatre I went to was not of the grade to sell fries). Imagine a movie whose primary audience was a bunch of wiener-eating kids. I knew that I was no match for such a mass, since there were certain to be wiener-eaters all around me, waiting for the signal to start munching away and going back for nachos.

Its second weapon was its crazy heft and density. I know who Harry Potter is, and I know what Muggles are, but I've never read the books and I'm not familiar with the whole backstory (like the mark of Tiny Zorro on his forehead). I've seen the second movie, but it was so bad I just emptied it from my mind as soon as I saw it, like an airplane toilet emptying itself at 40 000 feet. I watched the third one somewhere around the tenth hour of a fourteen hour night flight across the Pacific, and I think I was delerious at that point. All I came away with was the impression that David Thewlis played a gay teacher who cruised the moors at night in a butch getup. Therefore I had no idea what the Goblet of Fire was going to be about. But I think this is what I watched:

First there's a tower with a little scaly guy who's friends with a giant snake who lives in a skull, or at least the skull is the door to the snake's house. The snake and the little scaly man and his friends look at someone, and it's a Bad Look. But it was a dream and the dreamer was Harry Potter. Harry Potter is fourteen years old, and he looks fourteen the way Wilford Brimley looks twenty-two. Harry's friends make him get out of bed and touch a boot in a field. Somehow touching a boot in a field is related to painful teleportation and adolescent sexual tension. Why not? Then they're at a gigantic sports match that the entire world knows nothing about but appears to equal the GDP of Ireland. Then a bunch of guys with pointy hats show up and that means all the tents are going to burn and some guy in a leather coat is going to light up the sky with the Sign of the Snake and Skull, which probably means that Iron Maiden is signalling its lordship over the magicians. Then there's a scene with people talking in the ruins of the tent field and every so often they look up and yes, the Sign of Dickinson is still there. Then there are exchange students, dancing, tears, dragons and eggs, squabbles, ugly mermaids, hedge mazes, and a cup that everyone wants. And then there's the little scaly guy, who turns out to be Ralph Fiennes looking pretty much like he does on any given day at home, except for the lack of a nose (I tell you, Ralph Fiennes has overinvested in consonants). He touches Harry's Tiny Mark of Zorro and it seems to be a Bad Touch. He and Harry Potter point their wands at each other and spray magical fire for a few minutes until Harry's parents show up and tell him to stop that right now. And a beloved character dies, but it's not Harry or Hermione or the bitter red-haired guy so it carries the emotional impact of shaving cream, but everybody's upset anyway. And that turns out to be a typical year at Hogwart's. Given all that - and I'm leaving the whole Brendan Gleeson bit out - what possible response could you muster?

But its third and mightiest weapon was its obviousness, its happy indifference to subtlety and irony. The movie goes to some lengths to show that the pains of insecure adolescent wizards are just like the pains of insecure adolescent muggles, and it is to this keel that critics have attached themselves. Look at Hermione hang off the arm of some jock while sensitive red-haired guy moons on and rakes in the bitterness. Look at Harry struggle with asking girls out to a dance. Aren't these weak and distant pulses of recognizable human behaviour a sign of intelligent life? Isn't this proof that the whole Potter enterprise is worth our obsession with it? Sure, you want to believe. You've thrown down ten bucks and spent two a half hours surrounded by wiener-eating tweens in a fug of old ketchup smell. You'll take any old stool to lift yourself above that experience. But it seems to me that the Goblet of Fire gets childhood and early adolescence exactly wrong: the world of magic is not overt, and conducted under the guidance of authority; it is covert, performed with a tiny band of friends, out of sight of the difficult and unresponsive world. But the difficult world is left far behind in this movie - not a single normal human being shows up - and it makes the magical seem muggleish, which causes the muggleish to lose its magic.

Labels: scorn

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a snatchingly bad evening
» Thursday, November 24, 2005

To my immense disappointment, violin and violate are not etymologically related. I wanted to link them together somehow, make an opaque funny, shake up a little snowglobe of oblique attack on the main topic. But it's not to be. So let me approach this differently. You know those scenes in movies in which the intrepid hero runs down a bicyclist who's just snatched his wife/best gal's purse? I found two nights ago that the movies lie. They lie like apes. It turns out that a guy on a bike who sails by, rips a purse from Schmutzie's shoulder and keeps on going, cannot be caught by me, running flat-out, all 145 out o' shape pounds of me flapping around, screaming after him as he pedals casually around a corner and out of our lives.

From the scattered paragraph above you can deduce that the Schmutz got robbed on Monday night. We were on our way to somewhere decent for supper, just outside our building. I heard the whizzing of a bicycle chain behind us and then he passed on our left, a subtle bump and then a startled "Hey!" from Schmutzie. And then I started running and shouting, my legs kicking up behind me. I ran even when I knew that he was long gone but only a block away. We didn't even see his face.

I have never been robbed like that ( I say 'I' even though it was Schmutzie's purse - call me solipsistic). I've had a jacket stolen after I left it in a Tim Horton's at 3am. I've had people take my wallet when I left it exposed. I even had my identity stolen once, out of the barest scraps of ID. Some kid passed a bunch of bad cheques in my name (the RCMP spent months looking for me and fortunately they found the kid first). But all those things have happened out of my view, and they felt about as relevant as news items about tragedies in foreign countries. I had a laugh with an RCMP officer about the crimiPalinode embezzling in my name and the fact that a warrant briefly existed for my arrest. Schmutzie has a longer and more intimate relationship with violation than I do, having had apartments broken into, backpacks stolen, men pursuing her, but I believe that having her purse suddenly grabbed and gone in an instant, before she had a chance to even understand what she had lost, was new to her as well.

Being mugged suddenly and radically revises your view of things. The mugger breaks into the protective space that you project around yourself, the bit of air that you claim as your own, and demonstrates that the space is not yours at all, that it is part of the outside world, the public world, for better or for worse. You see that you exist in closer relation with the rest of the world than you had thought. Suddenly every stranger and every doorway you see becomes a potential threat, a possible vector of harm. You see your own helplessness, the swarm of possibilities set to divebomb your sense of security. And you suddenly want to ditch almost every sociological argument for crime you've ever heard or repeated, and go stalking the streets with a gun or a bat. Endemic poverty and poor circumstances be damned - you just got victimized and you want to commit some violence. You want to revisit that violation on someone else, break into their space and show them what you just saw. I suddenly understood the kneejerk anger and bigotry of certain people - after being made a victim, especially with such ease, you are diminished, and you rage for the lost mass.

After that initial reaction, though, things got a little better. I know that Schmutzie was and still is pretty shaken up, not least because her purse was new and vintage, her wallet new, and her uber-cool Moleskine notebook full of her writing (Enjoy her poetry, you stupid-ass crystal-meth-smoking soft-toothed motherfucker!). It was that sudden view into helplessness that angered me so much.

***

My browser spat up a popup window this morning that said: "We're sorry, this service is not available in Canada". That's a bit like someone driving across town to tell me I can't have the sandwich they just made at home.

Labels: autobio

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anarcho-labellism
» Friday, November 18, 2005

11 AM. The office of Palinode Productions. Phone rings.

Palinode: Good morning, Palinode Productions.

Schmutzie: Hi there. I've got your dumb question for the day.

P: Is it eleven already?

S: Labelist.

P: That's more of a word than a question.

S: Is that a word, labelist? I just came up with it.

P: You've made up the word.

S: Yes.

P: But that's not really your question.

S: No.

P: You want to know if it's spelled with one or two l's.

S: Exactly.

P: Definitely one l.

S: Otherwise you'd be a labellist.

P: You'd be all for Patti LaBelle, marching in the streets.

S: Holding placards. Shouting out LaBelle-friendly slogans.

P: You're no LaBellist.

S: No way!

P: What do you think is worse: you calling me up at work to ask about a made-up word, or the fact that I knew immediately that your question was really about the spelling of a made-up word?

S: Worst of all is the spread of vioent LaBellist demonstrations.

P: Pah! Ti! Pah! Ti!

Labels: conversations

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mockie talky
» Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Over the last year and a half I've written down enough of my conversations with Schmutzie that I've got a respectable mini-anthology going on. For those of you who like this sort of thing, here's a guide to the VERY BEST of the marital chitchat. And by very best I mean whatever I had.

The apple core incident
Topics include: fruit waste, starving children, unhealthy fixations

The creepy bargain
Topics include: parsimony, fish with bugs for tongues, disgust

Falcon powder
Topics include: bird discomfort, bird pulverization

Time is a number if you read it right
Topics include: darkness, imprisoning me, all that I see, absolute horror

The invention of Chanklemas
Topics inlcude: deceiving children, sock abundance

Debeakotheque
Topics include: bird mutilation, bisons, kitchen tools

On the way to the Easter bash
Topics include: driving, talking, driving, talking, where's the goddamn party?

Passing through
Topics include: I can't believe we had this conversation, I can't believe I wrote it down

Swift diddle
Topics include: doughnuts, porn, fornication, speed, outbursts

Peas afire
Topics include: fire, mushy peas, rebreathers, Hull

The pie that satisfies
Topics include: fungus-bungus pizza, 'phone fingers', Basque food

Finishing the search
Topics include: novels, sudden comprehension, nudity

A peasant in the head
Topics include: hair, thatched roof cottage heads, peasants

Chickens are birds
Topics include: chickens are birds

Less talk, more action
Topics include: kissing, more kissing

Questions for study:

1. Why do you think the topic of mutilating or imitating birds comes up so often? Which do you imagine would be more fun?

2. What exactly is a fungus-bungus pizza? Discuss.

3. Please compare and contrast any two conversations. Please mention: theme, setting, mood, style, and tone. Due by end of period.

4. It's clear that the characters in these dialogues share a fascination with disgusting and inedible food. Just saying.

5. Would you say that the most significant conflict in these dialogues is Man vs. Puffin? Why or why not? And where's a clip art picture of a man punching a puffin when you want one?

Labels: conversations

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a few things
» Sunday, November 13, 2005

First, I'd like to thank Finslippy for linking to me and my talented wife Schmutzie, but I'm a little concerned with the excerpt that shows, to a giant chunk of the blogobunch, that I am the kind of guy that throws his garbage into his wife's bath. As you can readily guess, no such thing happened. What loving husband would toss out the trash into the tub? Here's what really went on:

Lazy lazy afternoon. Schmutzie in the bath. Palinode passes by, holding an apple core. He wants nothing more than to dispose of his core in a socially responsible manner.

Schmutzie: Hey you...

Palinode: Yes?

Schmutz: Can you come in here for a second?

Pal: I have to throw out this apple core. It's very important.

S: Come in here first.

P: I was about to phone the community garden and see if they needed this apple core for composting. They're closing in ten minutes and if I don't get this core into their compost in time, the food bank may not have enough fresh corn and tomatoes to feed the starving children of the city. Whatever you need from me, weigh it first against the needs of the starving children.

S: Let's not disappoint the social Darwinists. Come in here.

P: But -

S: And bring that apple core in here.

P: Okay, here I am.

S: Good, now throw the apple core in my bath.

P: What? That's crazy.

S: Don't ask questions, just throw it in.

P: I don't know why you want this, but I can't be a part of it.

S: Whatever.

Schmutzie sits up in the bath and bats the apple core out of Palinode's hand. The old brown remnant of fruit lands in the water with a sodden splash.

S: Now that's what I'm talking about.

P: Oh my god. runs out of room.

S: Whatever.

P: (from next room) 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.

S: Well, I got my bit of trash. That's what counts.

She runs a bit more hot water. The core bobs and swirls under the stream, eliciting a high-pitched titter from Schmutzie. A howl of socially responsible activist despair arises from the next room.

Okay, so I set the record straight. Next up, people have been reporting troubles with their gander (see last entry, in which I do not suggest but simply advise people on the use of ganders in analysis and argument). As this confusing image may or may not demonstrate, ganders are highly prized creatures:



The lesson to be drawn from this is that ganders are so rare, so valuable, that even artificial ones can inspire incomprehensible sports contests. So don't complain if your gander is giving you trouble. Just be thankful.

Labels: conversations

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more
» Monday, November 07, 2005

It's been long enough since my last post that someone named Anonymous - who the hell gives their kid a name like that? - demanded more from me. Actually, they demanded two different things from me. Let's take a gander at their comment (to take a gander at, v. to apply a male goose to an object or situation as a means of focusing attention (colloq). Still illegal in the southern US and Dubai):

okay, where's your next post. I want more.

It looks simple, but if you bring your gander in a bit closer (so that the beak is pointing right at the words) you'll see that Anonymous doesn't necessarily want the next post, he or she is just... curious. Just wants to know where the post has gotten to. Say, Palinode, where's the post at these days? Anonymous could best be described as post-curious. Which is illegal in Florida.

So far I've got a casual inquiry about a specific but hypothetical object, the post. Then Anonymous says flat-out:

I want more.

You want more... post? That doesn't really scan. I don't know what you want more of, Anonymous. I don't know why your parents gave you that name and I don't know what you want from me. More what? More heads of cabbage? Because I've got 'em. More estuary property watershed rights? Valuable stuff. More sitcoms revolving around a dysfunctional family with an impotent patriarch, a long-suffering mother who functions as the conscience of the family, a sexpot daughter and an effeminate/sensitive/intellectual but not actually gay son? And the gay thing is a running gag? That's a hoot. But I can't give you more of that kind of thing. I can only give you more bootleg CDs.

I realize that I'm being a little disingenuous here. I can also give you more cheese, more Veruca Salt fanfic, more clutter, more angels in the LDS firmament, more of what you know you want but are just too damned shy to ask for. I'm here for you, Anonymous. You just have to let me know what you want.

In other news, I've joined Nanowrimo this month and am trying like ol' crippled Yahweh to keep up the 1667-words-per-day count. Most of the novel makes as much sense as this entry. In fact, I'm going to count this entry as part of my Nanowrimo bid. It'll be an inexplicable daydream experienced by a secondary character selling oranges from a cart on a boulevard.

In other news: Ol' Crippled Yahweh.

Labels: metablog

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