sea of toast
» Wednesday, March 29, 2006

In the comments section of my last post, my Montreal friend and yours, Helvetica, she of the sharp descenders and pleasing x-height,* thought that Volcano's tagline - The Coast is Toast - referred to the impending invasion of Los Angeles by an army of R0Vaf48 ToastAmblers, marching machines recently quit of their suburban owners, coming to the City of Angels to offer so much toast that, ultimately, the coast is buried in browned bread.

In the streets, heaps of toast, drifting against doorways, spilling out onto the boulevards. Goodbye Wiltshire, so long Mulholland. All the airbuses at LAX grounded, unable to accelerate into the toast sea. Goddamn that's a lot of toast.

I only bring up the nightmarish scenario because it has come one step closer to its toasty realization. Here's the prototype of LA's ultimate undoing:



Note the classic robot legs.

*These are typographical terms and not meant to be smutty or nothing.

Labels: film, toast, useless

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fight the filming
» Tuesday, March 28, 2006

If there's an art to creating a movie tagline, it's a special sublevel of art, somewhere on the same level as picking a nice font size for the cover page of the report, or trying to colour inside the lines when you're an adult. Really, it must be that easy to come up with a snappy quip that captures a film. But for whatever reason the half of them are pure garbage, the hasty last-minute call from the graphics department to the PR office. Here are a few that rankle me most. And why.

Volcano - The Coast is Toast.

I don't think so. Everyone knows that the coast of southern California is not only a shipping hub of the Pacific, it is also to home to some of the most beautiful beaches and seaside homes in all of North America. The LA metropolitan area alone boasts a staggering population of 10 million people. Settlement could not have occurred in such concentration on toast.

X Files - Fight the Future.

You can try and fight the future, but as soon as you do, it becomes the present. I blew your mind, man. I blew your freakin' mind.

More realer reason for not liking the tagline: it's just stupid. It makes my head hurt, and then my head goes numb for a while, and I think, Hey, Maybe that line makes sense, and then the pain sets in again like a kick from an alien in the back of the neck, and I think No, that tagline's still stupid.

Panic Room - It Was Supposed To Be The Safest Room in the House.

From this tagline you'd expect a movie where people shut themselves away from danger in a panic room and then died or got exceedingly mutilated or something. Ahhh, they shout, We thought we were safe in the panic room etcetera as their heads fly off. Instead, Jodie Foster and an androgynous teen shut themselves in a panic room - and it really is the safest room in the house. Everyone outside the room gets shot, burned, deformed, maimed, betrayed, you name it. Inside the panic room? Safety. That tagline lied to us.

The Phantom Menace - Every Saga Has a Beginning.

Maybe, but that doesn't mean you have to show it to us. We were just fine without seeing Ewan MacGregor's weird Duran-Duran-Joins-The-Marines haircut.

The Green Mile - Miracles Do Happen.

Yes, such as uneducated black man being imprisoned and executed for a crime he didn't commit in 1950s America. And he had the magical ability to heal white people. What a feelgood tale that was.

Léolo - Sometimes Growing Up Can Be Painfully Funny/Parce que Moi Je Reve...

There must be some award for the most flat-out mendacious tagline ever. I want this award to be a five hundred pound iron crown, the better to break the necks of the film's English distributors. The French tagline is part of the narrator's repeated refrain "Parce que moi je reve, je suis," which sums up the film fairly well. The hero is a thirteen year old boy named Leo, a kind of gutter Cocteau who dreams up an illustrious Italian heritage and fantastical present in order to escape a degrading and horrific life. It's one of those films that leaves you wanting a very long and very hot shower, unless you're enlivened by the sight of a boy fucking a cat, or a naked woman trimming an old man's toenails with her teeth (to the music of Tom Waits). If you're trying to get a mental hold on this movie, think of it as a pornographic version of Radio Days where family members give each other enemas instead of hugs.

If there's one thing that Léolo is not, that would be a slightly sexy coming-of-age comedy. Which is what the English distributors are marketing it as. If they were honest, the tagline would read: Sometimes Growing Up Can Be a Catalogue of Psychosexual Horrors Until You Retreat Into Catatonia.

The Return of the King - This Christmas, The Journey Ends.

Seems awfully dated.

Labels: film, scorn

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iToast spam
» Thursday, March 23, 2006

Friends, I'd say if I were an idiot writing to spambots, I have news. I have pharmacy news. I have ph aErmacy news. I have chiw3tel ebiogl0r news. I have good news for all of you about laJij36 and its exciting benefits.

And maybe I am writing emails like that, because the spambots have been squishing my inbox with subject lines like Re: laJij36 news. Maybe they're hope that I'm scanning my messages so quickly that I'll be taken in by the Re: and just click away on the Snow Crash virus waiting to be unleashed. Or maybe they're hoping to get incredibly lucky by finding that one person out of a billion who really has been trying get the news out about pha Harmseay.

Today I received my favourite yet, from one Alex Matamoros: Re: roVaf48 news. That's right, Alex. I sent you an email with all the latest news on RoVaf48 - the robotic toaster oven that walks from room to room! With smart circuits and built-in sensors that can predict when your need for toast will strike, the roVaf48 ToastAmbler will arrive with crispy toast or bagels ready for your homestyle snack attack! You can set it to come with a clap or just have it walk around the house, with fresh toast ever on the ready. Model 48-AZ features a rechargeable battery, removable bagel slicer and iTunes pre-loaded.

Labels: scorn, toast

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for saint patrick
» Monday, March 20, 2006

Any bar on St. Patrick's Day is loud. Too loud for casual conversation, too loud for relaxed chat across a table. Instead, the talk consists of "Yeah!" and "I know!" and "I'm doing GREAT! I said GREAT!" while the Irish music blares and the green-shirted sea of drunks sloshes back and forth across the floor. In my case the noise was compounded by a troupe of pipers and drummers who, every 30 minutes until the schedule dissolved into a brown chaotic soup, would march through the bar. How the Scottish landed a chance to horn in on St. Patrick's Day I don't know, but this is Canada. We may be multicultural, but the bagpipes are mandatory.

My neighbourhood bar is run by an actual Irishman, so on St. Patrick's it becomes Celt Central in a city starved for a vernacular of wanton drink. I hit the lineup around six, but apparently the place had been packed since two. Already I could hear the sounds of breaking pint glasses with attendant whoops, and I could smell the interwoven tang of draught and puke. Boy, I thought, Hope there's a cover charge at the end of this line. Because that would be so worth it.

Inside the place was crowded with people who had an imperfect understanding of their capacity for drink. I found Schmutzie right away. We entered the crowd and eventually washed up in a safe spot. Girls in green tank tops with Kiss Me I'm Irish written on their chests wandered by, followed by packs of guys in green sparkly hats. What makes you think that wearing a green sparkly hat - even on St. Patrick's Day - is going to get you laid? This seems to me the deadliest of delusions. I'm sure that hordes of future business managers and engineers stumbled home alone that night, only realizing the next day: damn, it was the hat. I looked like an idiot.

Amazingly enough, the crowd started to dwindle around 11:30, leaving actual empty seats and a lull in the noise.** By then we were too invested in the standing and screaming dynamic, and most of us remained clustered on the floor, shouting at each other. I ended up talking with a friend who's 6'8", so the conversation turned into a funny sort of see-saw, with all my contributions delivered on tip-toes and him bending at the waist to hear. I'm sure he looked like a gangly drinking bird trying to catch my words. It turned out that he had free tickets to an Imax concert film of Motley Crue.

"Do you and Schmutzie want to come with us?" he shouted.
"To Motley Crue?"
"Yeah!"

He stared at me for a moment.

"I can't tell if you're being ironic," he said.
"I'm not," I said. "That honestly sounds like fun".

He kept staring.

"Okay," he said, "I really can't tell. Do you want to come to a Motley Crue film with us?" He said it slowly and clearly, as if I hadn't really understood what I was consenting to.
"Yes! I really do!"

He scanned my face a moment more, then turned to Schmutzie.

"Is your husband being serious?" he asked.

This went on for a while.

But the upshot is: next Friday, eight thirty, it's time for a five-story tall Nikki Sixx.

*Without fail I forget St. Patrick's Day. I forget pretty much everything else as well - Mother's Day I keep in mind by dint of having my father phone me up and suggest that remembering Mother's Day would be a good thing - but St. Patrick's Day falls under a special category of ignored celebrations. Every St. P's D. I show up at work to find everyone in green. Someone says "Where's your green, Aidan? Did you forget to wear your green?" And I snark back "My name's Aidan. Isn't that enough green already?" On St. Patrick's Day I prefer to come off as a self-satisfied descendant of Irish immigrants. Really I'm just forgetful and not organized enough to plan out a green shirt on a given day of the week.

**The crowds were going to a cabaret of Irish entertainment at the local stadium venue. The word cabaret exerts a magical pull on people in this city that will pull them away from their dying mother's bedside. Why this is I don't know, because every time I say to someone "So how was the cabaret?" they always say "It sucked, dude". This one was no exception, the organizers having booked a Cajun band for the big St. Patrick's event.

Labels: autobio

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belated thanks
» Wednesday, March 15, 2006

I've been too busy over the last few days to pay close attention to my site, but I thought I'd thank the many people who've commented kindly and given me hours of online reading material. Thanks also to Slodwick, who set up a Livejournal feed for my site. It's now up and running and quietly waiting to aggregate.

Labels: metablog

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my brush with poetry fame
» Tuesday, March 14, 2006

From sixteen to eighteen I wrote poems by the dozen, by the hundredweight, poems penny each, a dollar ninety-nine per pound. Every day, for nearly 900 days, I wrote and signed and faithfully dated at least one piece. Sometimes I'd write two or three in a day. And much like Spiderman's juvenilia, it all started over a girl. The first poem I wrote actually netted her, so why I continued long past the point of impression and into the realms of irritation, I can't say. All I knew was that I was in love and that the smoke of hormonal fire seemed to emerge as words.

At first I wrote free-form breath unit lines in the manner of Ginsberg, because I had a notion that I was good at it. All sixteen year old poets, it turns out, write free-form breath unit lines in the manner of Ginsberg. Who knew? After a while I found more formal masters to imitate, and I started to mimic - oh, everyone. I probably wrote poems in the styles of menus, the unique metrics of highway signs, the sly voice of the absence slip. Eventually I just ripped off the style of Wallace Stevens all the time, and those who'd never read Stevens really liked it.

In the summer of 1989, when I turned eighteen, the turbine of iambs stopped spinning, and my output dropped from one a day to one a month. This made my friends and family very happy, since no one had to deal with me thrusting a wrinkled rag of looseleaf into their hands with a few lines scribbled down from an inspirational burst at 4 AM. Every so often someone would say, Hey, Mr. Node, are you still writing poetry? And I would say Yes, but I would avoid going into detail like I used to, with its commentary, backstory, oral footnoting and soliciting of praise from the poor bastard dumb enough to ask in the first place.

In 2000, I was avoiding work by nosing around on the internet (has the internet been making our lives useless for that long? Man.). I went to thespark.com, which at the time had not been bought out by B@rnes & N0ble,* and was therefore interesting and anarchic in a college-y way, with a huge portion of its content devoted to cruel jokes and news parodies. During a day in which I could choose between interviewing a woman about her dead infant sister or poking around on the internet, the latter fell into the category of more fun.

The site featured the heavy metal poetry stylings of Ernie Morrison, which you can read here (go on and read a few. I'll wait here. Done now? Okay. Funny, hey?) At the end of the poem selection, the site invited people to send in their "heart-felt poems and Ernie will include them in his next anthology". I gave my knuckles a crack and then, because I'd had a sandwich for lunch, wrote the following:

the ham-fisted man

he was ham-fisted, true
and heavy-handed, yes, for sure,
with ham so dense it must have been
compressed.
Reconstituted?
Compressed; he was ham-fisted
by Carl Buddig meats. He wondered
if Carl Buddig was real, sent
letters, threw emails through
cyberwindows,
wondered once again:
was he ham-fisted, heavy-handed,
or was he kind of hungry?
You know what I'm saying?
Carl Buddig never answered.
He went south, was eaten by hogs.
They left the hands.
Alas.

I included my name and address for some reason and forgot about it.

A few months later I received an envelope from the International Library of Poetry, those parasites on the body of literature. Their letter was so cool that I couldn't throw it out:



Imagine... a hardcover coffeetable book with "the ham-fisted man"? A chance at ten grand for making up a few lines about a guy with meat for fists? Usually I'm as gullible as the next, but this seemed wrong somehow.

It didn't get less wrong when I saw the intended title of the book.



A man with meat hands obsesses over the identity of a packaged pork provider, then gets devoured by pigs. Ironic? Oh my but yes. An echo of nature? I doubted it somehow. I pictured a nation of homemakers and sad rejects from literary magazines cracking open their copy of Nature's Echoes to find their tender piece about the Wind Through the Grasses plunked down next to my two-minute joke. If they looked closely they'd realize that all the flattery piled on them by the International Libray was a grab at their Christmas money. I didn't feel like sending out my ham-fisted messenger to tell them the bad news.

Mind you, here was a chance to do what I would have jumped at a decade before: convert my utterly pointless poetry into a chance to harass people. On fine-milled paper, no less. I came close to accepting publication, but I knew that I would have to throw down ridiculous amounts of cash for what would amount to a bad joke. And for the next few years I'd be fending off letters from vanity presses looking for an amateur with a few hundred dollars to spend.

The International Library must have smelled my indifference, because they sent me an even better offer a few weeks later:



I don't know what I can add to that. I imagined some actor in some studio somewhere putting the right weight on "reconstituted," or holding a beat before breathing a final, wistful "Alas". Would they want me to provide the promised commentary? Or would they drag in some sessional prof for a game attempt at framing "the ham-fisted man" alongside the western canon?

Now that I'm older and better paid, I could definitely afford both the book and the CD, instant classics both. Maybe I should submit the poem again.

*This statement is probably a gross oversimplification of whatever it was that happened to The Spark to make it less interesting and sadly useful. But gone are the days when you could read about the Stinky Feet Project or find the recipe for Hot Damn.

HELPFUL SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

The acceptance letter.

The further adventures of acceptance letter.

The motherfucking Sounds of Poetry!

They sent me an "Artist's Proof," intended to "prove" that I was an "artist".


The reverse side of the artist's proof. If they didn't want me to write in that space, why'd they write all over it?.

Labels: autobio

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pants management
» Thursday, March 09, 2006

Evening as always. Schmutzie posed in the bathroom doorway, fetchingly backlit.

Palinode: Those are nice pants.

Schmutzie: Thank you.

Palinode: When did you get those pants? Those are great pants.

Schmutzie: I've had them for a while. (Demurely) They're slimming.

Palinode: (Resists urge to say, "They're sliming?", because he used to work for a guy who drank a Chinese herbal tea called, in a spectular example of Engrish packaging, 'Sliming Tea'.) They're effective.

Schmutzie: They do the job.

Palinode: They should be promoted.

Schmutzie: What do pants get promoted to?

Palinode: Oh... management.

Schmutzie: Administrative duties?

Palinode: Pants... management... yeah.

(Pause)

Palinode: That's the problem with the pants system. High-performing pants get promoted out of the field.

Schmutzie: Hence all the fuschia stirrup pants still in circulation.

Labels: conversations

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not a bad question
» 

Approaching bedtime. Palinode and Schmutzie loitering by the coats in the hallway (This is where the marriage happens, in moments by the coats and over next to the cupboards, fumbling for keys, fumbling at zippers, clapping down a pint, a morning peck on the lips in the darkness of the bedroom). Schmutzie picks the cat up and squeezes it.

Schmutzie: He lets me kiss him all I want now.

She kisses the cat on the forehead. The cat stares off into the middle distance, waiting for food.

Schmutzie: He hardly ever bites my face anymore when I kiss him.

She kisses the cat again.

Palinode: Tell me again. Why do we own a cat?

Labels: conversations

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year zero in palinode's palace and elsewhere on the property, as defined by the hedges
» Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Monday: 113 unique visitors, 167 page loads.

Dooceday: 4831 unique visitors, 7384 page loads.

Ye gods. I'm never going to get hits like that again, unless I host live streaming media of my upcoming cosmetic surgery to look more like Colin Farrell (step 1: staple caterpillars to eyebrows; step 2: all done!). And all it took it was a few minutes to make fun of one piece of mail.

Well, I can see which side my bread's buttered on. Time to make fun of everything else in my mailbox.

1) What's this? Ah-ha. Ah ha ha ha. It's my power bill! What a larf! These schnooks want money for electricity! Hey dudes - I'll just rub my cat against a blanket if I want to build up a charge, if you see where I'm going with that - and you do, don't you? Suck it, Power Company!

2) Oh! My aching sides! Phone and internet now! They want my money. Hey Phone Company, why don't you just phone me? Don't you know my number? I'll pick up if I'm not too busy ignoring you because holy crap, I owe you a lot of money.

3) Someone stop my swift tilt to the floor, please! It's misaddressed mail! Wait, that's not funny. That's just stuff that got lost.

4) A pizza flyer. New specials... choice of toppings... don't forget to ask for that tumor-looking crust that Jessica Simpson feeds to teenage boys... whatever happened to the P'zone Revolution? Did it go underground? Splinter into factions? Must ask when I order...

5) Hey, my grandmother sent me an Easter card early! That's nice of her. I treasure the cards and notes she sends, because one day they'll serve as a remembrance of her. My chest will be an ark bearing her memory over the dark cold ocean of the future.

Okay, all done. Man, making fun of mail, that's good stuff.

Labels: metablog

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dooced is the new farked?
» Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Yesterday I had a modest weblog. One hundred, two hundred hits a day, a few regulars faithfully commenting.

Today I have over 1700 hits. And it's not even 11:30 in the morning.

I've been linked by Dooce. This has driven my hits through the roof and excited my wife, who phoned me this morning to tell me that her weblog was being boarded* by surfers coming from my site. Then her voice dropped to a whisper: "You've been linked by Dooce," she breathed.

I had to pause a moment to process two things: 1) Heather Armstrong reads my site; 2) it seemed to be getting my wife kind of hot.

It turns out that she linked to my post about the care and feeding of elderly Jews. Faaantastic. I'm going to be that Guy Who Wrote About the Jews from now on. This is not something I can put on my CV.

Actually, I'm thrilled. What this is going to give me is a billion more weblogs to read, a billion more interesting and funny and thoughtful people to wave hello to across the cybergulf. And once the initial rush of visitors drops off, there'll be a few who stick around. As Just Linda said, I'm in for it.

*I say 'boarded' because I picture the web surfers as pirates on surfboards. I don't know why.

Labels: metablog

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today's outstanding word
» Monday, March 06, 2006

Okay, don't read this one. Skip to the next entry down.

Today's outstanding word comes from the 1971 OED: Immane, a rarely used word meaning "Monstrous in size or strength; huge, vast, enormous, tremendous" or "Monstrous in character; inhumanely cruel or savage". Sentences such as "The immane terrorists immanely displayed their immanity by running immane planes into immane buildings" successfully expoit the play of duality inherent in the term - how, for example, are the buildings and planes immane? Are they just big? Or savage somehow? Similarly, are the terrorists really cruel? Or are they an NBA team? Unrelated but adjacent to immane is immanacle: to handcuff; to fetter; to put manacles on. Sentences such as "Immanely the immane police immanacled the already immanacled immane main man Vern" successfully remind us that Rain Man possesses significant cultural force that even now, eighteen years after its release, we are still moved by the thought of main man Vern being doubly and immanely immanacled. We are also a little shocked by the prospect of Vern's immanity; is he huge or cruel? Surely Rain Man's Main Man can't be cruel or savage; maybe he's just a big guy. But you don't remember him being all that big - just his soothing presence, his kind smile and generosity with the high fives. Plus that double immanacalization - it seems a bit much to me.

Study section (5-10 points)

1. Why did I write this?

a) I am immane.
b) I am immane, but not in the same sense as a).
c) I am immane and immane, and I am ashamed of one sort of immanity but proud of the other, and I'm not telling you which.
d) I am wasting your time.
e) This is pretty edifying.

Labels: language, useless

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at least five of two things
» 

I know. I know whose blog wears the pants in this family. I know which of the two of us writes the more popular weblog, which commands a greater blip of the blogosphere. But instead of strategizing to grab more traffic or bitching about it, I've decided to make use of it. Most of you, then, have already read Schutzie's latest entry, a measured reply to a Christian samizdat that came in our mailbox. As angry, funny and cogent as Schmutzie's reaction may be, she neglected to comment on the reverse side of the tract.


It's a binary Christian choose-your-own-adventure! Choose from one of 2 exciting endings. Either that, or its binary logic tree is intended to convert the computerized postal scanners. Attention Equus 3110 CanOBD2 Code Reader! Jesus=1! Satan=0! Spread the logic!

Scanners aside, I doubt that the publishers of this tract are about to save anyone from anything. For example, it would have benefitted them immensely to let people know that the critical content of the paper lay on the reverse side. I will read this or lay it aside? Okay, already reading it. If I read it, I'll believe it or say it is false? Well, I'm not finished reading it yet, so I'll reserve judgement... what? If I believe this, I'll accept Christ and go to Heaven? Awesome! What am I being asked to believe? Is it something reasonable, like the existence of giraffes* or the metric system? This is going to rock! It's gonna totally... oh. The alternative is hell. And it hasn't even told me what I'm supposed to be believing or rejecting, beyond the propositions it offers about the benefits of belief. Talk about begging the question.

Actually, it's really wishy-washy about the infernal fires. It doesn't say you're headed for hell. It just says that you "may reject the only opportunity of being saved". Laying aside the strange flavour of permissiveness in may, this line really has the spongy feeling of the soft sell with the hard little core. It's curious and inviting until you squeeze it and feel the hidden something. Hold it up to the light you can just make out the dark smudge at the centre.

*Accordng to this website, giraffes do not exist (scroll down to the commandments).

Addendum: I googled like a champion, but I could not find the phrase "Ben Mulroney does not exist". It really should. Because whenever I see Ben Mulroney, the Canadian analogue of Ryan Seacrest, I have a sense that the world is a scrim of irreality through which we dimly see a rightly ordered reality, one in which the Ben Mulroneys of the world are completely ignored. Same goes for Seacrest. These people are the human equivalent of cheap air fresheners.

Labels: religion

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something for the regulars
» Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Remember that post I wrote a while back when I said that empty chip bags were robot vaginas? Remember that? And everybody who likes to comment commented until Blackbird bade us all stop? Sorry, Blackbird. Somebody reminded me of robot vaginas today (verbally, not by their presence or anything) and it's time for another installment on the subject.

Warning: The following lacks rigor. So did the preceeding.

The real problem with robot vaginas is that I can't think of the phrase without suddenly hearing Bitching Camaro in my head, and I'm forced to run through a verse or two before I can do anything else. Robotvagina robotvagina/ I ran over my neighbours/ Robotvagina robotvagina/ Now it's in all the papers.

Now I'll never get to hang out with J.G. Ballard. I'll come up to him and start talking and he'll give me a dry look, as if to say, "Your robot vagina motif is unsupported by an intellectual base, therefore it flakes easily". Then he'll say it, exactly as the dry look was as if to say. And I'll say, "Hey, way to force a metaphor, Ballard. For such a prolific writer, your prose doesn't exactly spring unbidden from your brain, does it?"

Then he'll put his cigarette out in my eye. And it'll serve me right.

Update #1: I don't know why, but somebody wants your empty chip bags. Sure, you'll get a free poster out of the deal, but how lightly will you sleep, knowing that you've contributed to the development of a vast robot army (all robot armies are vast, by the way)?

Update #2: A quick google search reveals that the robot army is no threat, since they seem to have succumbed to their version of internet porn:


So there's nothing to fear but fear itself. Fear itself and photo formatting.

Special late-breaking Saturday update: It turns out that robots are already making use of their special bits. It's like I was predicting the future. The very very near future.

I now predict that I'm going to go have a sandwich.

Labels: robotvagina

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