in that blissful state of pre-awareness
» Monday, July 31, 2006

Of all the limp, meaning-free words that marketing has given us, 'pre-awareness' may be the lamest of all. It means so close to nothing in particular that it's barely there, like a flattened figure that vanishes when viewed sidelong.

Actually, 'pre-awareness does have a meaning, but I'm selfish and I dont want the word to exist. The term shows up in planning documents and is purported to mean 'background knowledge' in some contexts and 'a state preceding awareness of a given issue or phenomenon' in others, which would seem to be closer to the sense of the word. In Hollywood, it appears to mean the public's awareness of the characters or scenario of a film project. The easiest way for a project to have this valuable 'pre-awareness' is to make it a sequel. A remake. A bold reimagining. A crappy ripoff. Whatever. Anyone who goes to movies these days knows how prevalent this is. Of the ten movies playing at my nearest CosmiPlex Cinexperience right now, one is a TV remake, three are sequels, and the rest are stupid (actually, of the remaining movies, most are so generic that they're meant to remind people only of movies they've already paid good money to see - two are animated children's rip-offs, one a highschool comedy, and two others are mediocre comedies starring the Owen and Luke Wilson, respectively. The one original piece is by M. Night Shyamalan, which is what passes for auteur these days).

You know, that's a crap sample. Usually there are more remakes and sequels on the marquee. Anyway, it appears that we've lived so long now under these pre-aware circumstances that a new standard has been set. In today's Globe & Mail, an article on the lid-bangin' good box office returns on the Miami Vice movie featured the following snippet:

"It's what our expectations were," [Nikki Rocco, president of distribution at Universal Pictures] said. "We tried to do something different. There has been a lot of criticism regarding unoriginal product. We took a TV series and made it very different."

Okay then. Putting a different wardrobe on Crockett and Tubbs constitutes originality. Take away the Ferrari and the loafers, let a hyper-masculine Colin Farrell moustache his way through the script instead of pink-shirted Don Johnson, and wham! New product somehow! I think it's time we updated Gilligan's Island, with all the characters ridiculously hot, and a monster in the jungle and a hatch and - never mind. Some days I wish I were pre-aware.

*Note: Like everyone who keeps a weblog, I am a comment whore. But please don't write to point out that works of art always rip off earlier works, or that Shakespeare did it, or that Hollywood is simply giving people what they want. Because that? Argh and bored.

Labels: film, language, scorn

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tuna aforethought
» Monday, July 24, 2006

Palinode: Hey, you know that cafeteria where the sandwiches exist in strict hierarchy?

Schmutzie: Of course.

Palinode: Today I abjured the salmon.

Schmutzie: You ‘abjured’ it, did you?

Palinode: Hot diggety dang I did. I bought the tuna instead.

Schmutzie: I won’t eat tuna. I find methods of tuna fishing ethically unacceptable.

Palinode: I can’t believe there’s such an industry for a fish that exists only as compressed flakes.

Schmutzie: Oh that’s gross.

Palinode: But this sandwich one came with a sticky note.

Schmutzie: What did it say?

Palinode: It said ‘tuna’.

Schmutzie: Did it say it once or did it repeat the word ‘tuna’ in a tinny little voice?

Palinode: Plaintively it cried ‘Tuna!’ before subsiding into a susurrant tuna-related monologue.

Schmutzie: What are you going to do with a sticky note that says ‘tuna’?

Palinode: Take it back to the office, affix it to documents, write reminders on it, that sort of thing.

Schmutzie: And let it lull you into an afternoon nap at your desk with its whispering?

Palinode: Heck no. I’m not letting my guard down for some dolorous post-it note and its fishload of troubles.

This post generated on 07/24/06 by the Palischmutz TalkBot. This conversation would have definitely taken place had Schmutzie not been on her coffee break when I called about the sandwich.

Labels: autobio, conversations, lies, work

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voximation
» Tuesday, July 18, 2006

I have a couple of posts on Vox for your perusin' pleasure. Whether you like ruminations on adult behaviour or misty watercoloured memories of girlfriends past, there's a little something for you there.

I have also, by the by, two invitations to Vox to give out. No tortuous requirements, no hoops to jump through. Just say you want one, and it's yours.

Besides, if'n you don't speak up and say you want one? Gord will totally take both of them and just waste everyone's time with his total bullshit.

Update: Only one vox invite left as of Tuesday afternoon! Act now or it goes to the horrible Gord.

Labels: metablog, vox

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watching Superman
» Friday, July 14, 2006

So the other night I was home - chilling - and my friend Gord calls me and he's like, Let's go see the new Superman movie! And I'm obviously like, Awesome! I worship the original Superman movie. It's even my ringtone. Because Superman is so much cooler than Batman? And even Spiderman, except for when he's Venom? And then Gord goes, The new Galaxy Cinema is open, so let's go there!

So Gord comes and picks me up in his new Camry. I tell you: sweet ride. We're driving up the Lewvan when I say to Gord, where's the Galaxy again? And he thinks it's on the corner of Rochdale and Mackenzie, but I'm like nu-uh, dude, it's Rochdale and McCarthy, but Gord is sure it's Mackenzie, and I'm not going to say anything because Gord gets angry when you argue with him, and one time I saw him get so mad he kicked a dumpster and then when that hurt, he set it on fire and the cops came and we had to pretend that we had just seen someone set the dumpster on fire, but they didn't believe us because the fire had burnt the brim on Gord's baseball cap and it was all black and smoking and smelling like burnt hair when he was talking to the cops. True story. So we drive to Rochdale and Mackenzie.

From the outside: total disappointment. Thumbs way down on the Galaxy. No parking. No Burger King or East Side Mario's anywhere. No hot chicks standing outside. And it was totally small. I looked at Gord and he thought maybe the movie screens were set underground, because this place was tiny. I didn't say it, but I was all like, Bad idea jeans. But Gord - he gets angry.

We walk in and it's still totally small, and now I want to header down to the Southgate to see the movie there, or maybe just hang out in the parking lot. Whatever. But then this woman comes up to us. She's a total MILF, and she's all like "Can I help you?" And Gord gets this look on his face, like Yeah, you can help us. Gord's boned all of his friends' mothers, except for mine. We call him The Milfinator. I say, "We're here to see Superman," but I guess she didn't hear us, because she said "Are you here to see Ryan?" You start going deaf when you get old or something. So I repeat myself and she tells us to take a seat. Gord says "Where's the concession?" and she gets this really weird look, like we've insulted her, but then she tells us to follow her.

She takes us right behind where the concession stand is into this kitchen. I'm thinking maybe she wants us? I look over at Gord because he knows when a woman totally wants it, but he's looking kind of confused too. She says "Chocolate or vanilla, boys?" and suddenly I'm like holy shit she's going to cover her body with ice cream, and I say "Vanilla," trying to be all like I don't care, but it comes out all squeaky and she gives me another funny look. But then she gets down a couple of bowls and actually gives us some ice cream. I was let down, but it was Haagen Dazs, so whatever, it's cool.

Then she says to go into the "living room" and she'll go get this Ryan guy - wtf, lady? - and when we go into the theatre, I can see why she calls it a living room. It's all set up like one, with chairs and couches and a big plasma screen on one end. A couple of people are sitting there waiting for the movie to start. Gord is kind of skeeved because the movie screen is so small, but the old guy on the couch says it was the biggest one at Costco. I kind of let that slide, because old guys who jump in on your conversation are usually perverts or just weird, so we ignore him and sit down. Then Ryan comes in and he's just standing there with the milfy woman and she says "Your friends came by to watch Superman". Ryan looks at us for a sec - what's he, the guy who runs the camera booth - then he snaps his fingers like he's remembering something and he leaves the room.

We keep eating our ice cream and the old guy starts trying to talk to us again, asking us how we know Ryan. Gord kind of rolls his eyes and starts humouring the dude. He says we met Ryan at the roller derby, and the old guy looks a bit confused but he nods his head and says he didn't know there was a roller derby in town. What a geezer. Finally Ryan comes in and messes with the machinery. He turns the lights down and Superman starts up.

I tell you - the screen was small but the new Superman is just as awesome as the old one. The new guy looks so much like Christopher Reeve it's scary. I bet some psycho is going to try to put him in a wheelchair, just 'cause. And Kevin Spacey rocks! He plays Lex Luthor so well that he even looks like Gene Hackman. Effin-A!

If I had any complaints, it would be that the new Superman movie is a little too much like the old one. They do the whole thing with Lex trying to get new land, and then Lois dies in the earthquake and Superman spins around the globe and reverses time and saves Lois and all that shit. I know that they wanted to be true to the old movie, but come on guys! Get a few new ideas! But still - that was so awesome it brought down the house.

After the movie ended, me and Gord jumped up in our seats and started hooting. Ryan turned the lights on and said, Okay dudes, come with me, and we were like Why not? and we followed him out to the driveway. Except once we got out there he was kind of twitchy and looking at the front door every few seconds. He says Yeah, I'll take a quarter, and we were like, Shit, that's the cheapest movie ever! I give him two quarters and Ryan looks at them for a second. Then he throws one at my forehead and says Real fuckin' funny buddy, I've got three hundred on me for a quarter ounce, so don't jerk me around. Gord says, What are you talking about man? The guy stops and looks at us again with this I-can't-believe-it-look on his face. Then he walks back up the driveway. Just before he goes in, he looks at me and says Nice fuckin' T-shirt buddy. Stain'd sucks ass. Then he slams the door.

We're never going to that place again.

Labels: film, lies

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surprise
» 

Sometimes I surprise myself. Sometimes I start writing one thing, and a phrase or a sentence, seemingly out of place, will push what I'm writing in a different direction. It's one of those times when you have no idea what you really think until you write it down. You find yourself reading it as your fingers type it out, thinking is this really how I feel? And apparently, it is. Or maybe you don't, but the sentence has its own direction and logic, or it's too well-formed, and you can't withdraw it. Sometimes a phrase will have an unexpected felicity. Not my aunt Felicity. The noun felicity. You're not expecting anything worthwhile, rhythmic, graceful or thoughtful to appear, but suddenly it's there and you're typing away, moving the cursor past the unexpectedly beautiful words. Another line. You bracket the beautiful moment with more words and hope that someone takes note and gets a spark of enjoyment.

Other times, of course, I do not surprise myself at all, and I write tortuous, overthought, overprocessed shit. It's like the frozen yoghurt I had today, which had two kinds of tasty fruit, one block of tasty frozen yoghurt, but came out as a brown paste. It looked like fancy dogshit. If you mated a dog and a pastry squeezer, it would crap out this stuff. Which, if you're following along, resembles the bad stuff I write. Today I wrote several paragraphs on sudoku, and how I discovered sudoko just last night, and how it kept me up late and helped me flatter myself about my intelligence and my ability to figure out the placement of a number on a grid. I was going to post it but then I took a quick glance, just a look for the purposes of review. The mannered crapiness of it hit me like a bucket of that yoghurt I ate this evening at Superman Returns. How did that piece get past my junk filter?

Mind you, I found some poetry that I'd written after a lousy affair that I'd had in 1998 or 1999, and holy holy hell, that was bad stuff. I was an emotional wreck and I'd been reading a ton of John Ashbery at his labyrinthine best (or maybe worst), and the stuff I wrote out of that was nearly unredeemable. It wasn't even a matter of salvaging the best lines. There were just words left - a few decent words left stranded on the slopes of Mount Crapverse, waiting for the helicopters and the drooling dogs to come and rescue them. By comparison, the sudoku piece was a bit better. But not fit for my friends and neighbours on this site. So I tried to write up a Snakes on a Plane shtick, and that - ugh. Today was not a day to plan my writing. Today was a day to stay up late, stare at the screen and finally just blab a bit. Y'all have been my audience for the bit of blab. Thanks for that.

I don't generally blab on the blog (whatever you may think). Personal information, the kind that it hurts a little to part with, the kind that may actually help to share but you never know until you risk it, doesn't make it on here. Some people have praised my confessional moments, but they're wrong. You've never been privy to my confessions. This is not because I have juicy secrets - I just find it really difficult to do. Sometimes I wonder whether there's a point to it anyway; what's left to expiate or reveal? Confession is like pruning. You cut some parts away and let other parts grow. Maybe I haven't done sufficient pruning, and now I'm covered in dead and dying pieces. Wait a second. What happened to my yoghurt metaphor? And why did I write about dogs and shit in two different contexts? Good night, folks. Gooood night.

Labels: metablog, useless

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on the way to the chiropractor
» Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Today, for the first time ever, I went to the chiropractor. And it was pretty much what I expected: a healthy, fit guy in casual clothes made me take off my shirt and then sat on me. Or something like that. I had my head turned to the side so I wasn't quite sure what he was doing, but if felt like he sat on me, punched my kidney repeatedly and then tried to pull my limbs off like I was a tasty pretzel. The whole thing felt a little Greco-Roman, if you know what I'm saying. But my God, I never knew how much I needed someone to sit on my back and punch me, until I stood up from that weird vinyl table and felt... normal.

I hadn't felt normal in weeks. Moving from one apartment to the next had twisted my body and set my entire torso at a strange angle to my hips. One leg felt shorter than the other, which gave me the orthopedics heebie-jeebies. In my experience, people fitted with orthopedics are condemned to walk up and down the concourse of the crappiest shopping mall in the city. They don't stop, unless it's to buy their sullen pimpled children fries from the A&W. They just walk the dead spaces, the clomp of their heel hard on the tile, living out some ghastly twilight existence in the shelter of retail outlets. So you can see why I wouldn't want an orthopedic shoe. I like to limp around horribly walk in the world, people! Here's what happened on the way.

In the Sears: I stopped to buy underwear at Sears. Why? I needed new ones.The ones I had on were not the freshest. The apartment move kind of interrupted the natural cycle of laundry, and there was no way I was going to the chiropractor without decent underwear. Plus they were old and looked they'd been in a gang fight. I felt like the grandmother from Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" who wore her nicest underwear for a car trip, just in case she died in an accident. Is this more than you need to know about my habits? I figured there was little chance that the chiropractor would want me to take my pants off, but in that unlikely event, I wanted some fine fresh underwear.

I also discovered, or rediscovered, that old people are bullies. I don't care if you've accomplished the remarkable feat of not dying for eighty years - stop butting in front of me in line. Yeah, I'm talking to you, lady. Oh, I see you're buying underwear as well. Visiting the chiropractor?

Passing by the windows of HMV: The posters for Johnny Cash's latest and likely not last album read: This Is The Music Johnny Wanted Us To Hear. That's a new tack - guilting the public into buying a dead guy's album and invoking a kind of mournful solidarity. There's always something a little ghoulish about the recording industry propping up the dead to sell product to the living, but this feels almost bullying. Hey Paulie, should we throw down money for the latest Rick Rubin album featuring the voice of Johnny Cash? You bet, Cindy - it's what Johnny would have wanted. But Paulie, we already spent that money we made selling methadone to those kids in the Durango. Damn, Cindy, time to go turn tricks again. One handjob should do it, hey? Plus there's that 'us'. Are we supposed to join in on the mourning with the people who are selling Johnny Cash to us? I don't think so.

In The Park: I'm not going to google this at work, but I'm pretty sure that the guy who passed me with a cell phone stuck against his ear was talking about a musician named MC Fecal Matter. Yeah, he's the guy who raps about shitting, he said, which didn't surprise me. He just raps about taking a shit. People on benches looked up from their private heat highs and swung their necks around, trying to locate the source of the shit talk. I couldn't imagine whom I'd phone, just to talk about some guy who talks about shit. That sounds kind of Carveresque: What We Talk About When We Shout About The Shit-Rapper On Our Cell Phones or something.

Labels: autobio, chiropractor, music, shit, underwear

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up with vox
» Monday, July 10, 2006

I've started up another weblog on Vox, a state-a-thuh-art service with all the most rocking features from Typepad and something else and another thing. I am not their spokesperson, as you can tell. Go ask Team Vox, and they'll say "He's not the spokesperson of us!" and they'll throw the ice cream on the floor and run around the table screaming for a while.

I josh. They are better than that, and here is their blog. Membership is apparently by invite only, but it turned out that I was married to a vox member, so the invite proved relatively easy to procure. I just had to do, you know, that thing with her. And look what it got me - I call it palinode's intrusion into civilized space. The Palace, as you may know, occupies a high-energy plane that is a hypostasis of my mind, a sphere of all things palinode, generally contained in a bubble of its own. The Vox blog is an irruption of The Palace into The World. It's a blog hernia.

Yes, I know the readers have all left now. There's only Deron and Mnuez. Hello you two! I'm framing the new weblog in extra fancy talk because I'm apparently part of a wave of new users. Most of their entries run like "This is my first entry on Vox. I am going to use this weblog to talk about work. I work very hard for my success which I enjoy". Or "This first entry is crap, haha". Yes, it is. Deliberate crap? Is still crap. And people who spell out their intentions in the first entry of their weblog, under the delusion that anyone is going to read them after such a dull introduction, should be placed into a big canister and floated out into the Pacific. Telephone sanitizers all. Away with them.

I blather some. Visit yourself some alternate weblog some time. I'm there, Schmutzie's there, and all those crazy blogging superstars are kicking around as well.

Labels: metablog, vox

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coulda been shorter maybe but here ya go
» 

Tourism

For those of you about to rock - sure, I salute you, but first, I want you to ease down on the pre-rock exercises and consider touring all the museums and sites dedicated to the atomic bomb in the United States. Invariably these places sit in the sun-scorched centre of Nowhere At All (so many places are described as being in the middle of nowhere that the middle of nowhere must be pretty damn crowded. In fact, it's probably a bustling metropolis of podunk towns and coworkers' acreages, entire suburbs of nothing but your in-law's retarded cousins and their stupid canola farm), so it's probably best to buy a gigantic old station wagon circa 1974 and load up the back seat with water, Scotch, mushrooms, guns and anti-evolution pamphlets of some kind. The pamphlets will come in handy when the state troopers pull you over; either they'll judge you to be harmlessly crazy or an upstanding example of the values that make America great, never mind your bloodshot eyes, booze-soured sweat and that clenched tooth grin that signals the first prickle of psilocybin along the nerves. Just don't titter at the trooper and you'll do fine.

Filmgoing

Derrida, back in his productive non-dead phase, said in The Other Heading of nations that "it is proper that a society not be identical to itself". This is one of those spongy Derridean statements that keeps on leaking meaning with each squeeze. I'm paraphrasing from seminar courses of the late 1990s, so perhaps I've bent the phrase until it suits my own imaginings, but I've taken it to mean that the State should never assume a unified face, a single monolithic identity that permits itself one interpretation of the world. I would guess that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union were a bit too identical to themselves for comfort. Perhaps Derrida worried about the prospect of an overidentifying European Union? Gee whillikers, Jacques. You're dead.

Anyway, I think that A Scanner Darkly sheds further light on that spongy tissue statement of Derrida's. As most of you probably know by now, Linklater's film, based on a Philip K. Dick novel, is a near-future sci-fi tale of a narc whose addiction to a drug called Substance D splits his personality to the point that he no longer understands that he's narcing on himself. In my favourite scene in the book, the cop is watching footage of himself and his friends as they tell a particularly pointless, stoned joke. He begins to fast forward through the joke, thirty minutes, forty-five minutes, an hour and a half, but every time he plays the recording, they've only progressed to the next line. The cop is disgusted, at the stoners he's watching, at himself for watching them, at the pointlessness of the whole enterprise.

He's not in the real joke - that he is watching himself but no longer understands who he is, that once he removes his uniform he becomes a criminal. In Dick's novel, the State has looped in on itself, closed the circle of governance on its citizens. The State is both victim and victimized, criminal and enforcer, pusher and junkie, like a person who doesn't recognize his own subconscious and is therefore truly unconscious. Anyway, it hasn't come to any theatres in my city yet, so until then I've got all the Superman Returns and Click I can handle.

Working

I work on the ninth floor of an office/hotel tower. A dirty grey Walmart bag just sailed up past my window, flew over the casino and flopped down in the Canada Post parking lot a few blocks away. It wasn't begging me to come and play with it. It more looked like it was getting punched around brutally, like it had lost an argument with the wind. Man, I love my job.

Later: a huge ugly black cloud, riding in the underside of some high white cirrus clouds, has pushed its way over the city. Tails and tentacles of rain sweep down. The cloud has blocked the sun so completely that streetlights have lit up, the great band of green that covers the suburbs has turned ash-grey, no colours left but a few bright yellow signs and the dark red Hyundai shipping crates in the rail yards.

A little later: Big-ass forky lightning.

Sing it to the tune of "Big Rock Candy Mountain".

Thermos

On the weekend I stopped at a Starbucks to pick up lattes for the family. Only the frothiest of lattes would do, I reasoned, and so Starbuck's it was, for the exceptional froth. In keeping with my abjuration of froth, though, I bought a plain coffee for myself. I don't know what I'm talking about.

While the baristas - three girls who were presumably not related, but who shared some quality of skin and hair that made them very difficult to tell apart - made the froth-related drinks, I poked around the merchandise. Most of it was mildly stylish and extravagantly overpriced, unless you think it's fine to pay twenty five bucks for an ugly ceramic mug with a rubber lid and a stainless steel bottom. That was an "urban stripe coffee mug," and the word urban in a marketing context makes me think of Billy Dee Williams, which then makes me think of Billy Dee Williams working in some office somewhere drinking Colt 45 from his urban stripe mug and frantically chewing breath mints before he stumbles into a board meeting, and then I picture him trying to hook up the digital projector to his powerful new notebook computer for the Powerpoint presentation that he and his assistant have worked on all night, but his nerves are sheathed in a mitten of liquor and he just can't do it. He drops the laptop, kicks it across the room, trips over a chair and upsets the flip chart. He hits the carpet and crawls under the boardroom table, all the while saying "It's alright folks. I'm alright!" And that's how I picture Billy Dee Williams losing his high-powered office job.

On the clearance table sat the few last sad novelty items that people buy for holiday occasions. One of them was a little fake golf bag with a stainless steel dildo-bullet of a thermos inside. The item, once priced an appalling thirty six dollars, had been reduced to thirteen ninety nine, since the item was such a transparent grab at the Father's Day market. Once the spell of the Official Buying Event had worn off, the nifty golf bag-shaped carrying case revealed a tackiness rare for the usual reserve of Starbuck's. Therefore it had been exiled to the clearance table, tainted by deep discount. Operating on the same impulse that compels me to adopt the sickest and ugliest cat at the pound, I took it home with me and the frothy drinks.

I can't understand why the staff hadn't tossed the novelty case and simply sold the thermos, which retailed on its own for about thirty dollars. Price it at twenty-five and it would have moved off the shelf in no time flat. Was the manager so slavishly attached to procedure that she refused to alter the product? Or was she simply invested in the notion of the item as a single object, existing independently of its component parts? If that was the case, then I had actually bought three items instead of just two: the little fake golf bag, the thermos, and the novelty gift item of a thermos in a little fake golf bag. What a deal. And it also gave rise to the following brief conversation:

Palinode: So, did you like my thermos?
Schmutzie: Sure. I guess. Is there anything special about your thermos to like?
Palinode: No, it's just a nice thermos. What's the matter, you don't like a thermos?
Schmutzie: I don't like a thermos?
Palinode: That's the message I'm getting here.
Schmutzie: You don't say a thermos. You say 'I like thermoses' or 'I like that thermos'.
Palinode: Well, you don't seem to like any thermoses, so I don't think you'd be using either of those phrases. In fact, I'm starting to think that you hate a thermos.
Schmutzie: I don't 'hate a thermos'.
Palinode: Oh you do. You hate a thermos. This talk of a thermos, it gets you all het up.
Schmutzie: What does that even mean?
Palinode: I'm employing the vernacular.
Schmutzie: [silence]
Palinode: It lends authenticity to a conversation.

The best part of that conversation was that we were sitting next to each other on a bus and she couldn't get up and leave.

Labels: autobio, conversations, film, star wars, work

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rooibos
» Thursday, July 06, 2006

Down in the lobby of my Workenbuildung I found a coffee kiosk squirreled away behind the elevators and the fountain. They have a sign up advertising something called 'New Tea Wave'. This phrase irritates me. They're packing words of uncomplementary shapes into a semantic box entirely too small for whatever it is they're trying to mean. 'New Tea Wave' - no. My brain wants me to read it as 'New Wave Tea,' which gives me these images of little cups of tea in poofy shirts and heavy eyeliner mooning around a cheap set mocked up to look like an alien landscape - although that would be more like New Romantic Tea. Real New Wave Tea would have skinny black suits and sharp corners. And it would carry an astringent aftertaste, no matter how much sugar you dumped into it.

I asked the barista what 'New Tea Wave' meant. It turned out to be a slogan for rooibos, that undrinkable muck long prized for its medicinal benefits and hideous taste. Its flavour has been described as slightly sweet and nutty, which makes me think of Cyndi Lauper and the time in grade eight when we had a contest to draw a visual pun, and the prizes were a Def Leppard album (the one with Rock of Ages) and Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual on good old bulky vinyl. I tied for first place with a girl named Jill and ended up with the Cyndi Lauper record. The only chance I had to look like a cool guy in junior high evaporated as I held out my hand and the teacher slapped Cyndi Lauper into my palm. I tucked it under my arm and shuffled back to my desk, feeling the hot sweat of shame prickle out from my forehead and armpits as a wave of snickering washed over the class. The teacher looked confused and gave the Def Leppard album to Jill, which brought on another round of snickering.

For the rest of the class I sat with the album on my lap, in fear of the moment when the bell would ring I would have to walk down the hallway in front all the other students, the denim-wearing guys at the east doors inclined to violence (whom I feared), the imperious rich kids by my locker who dressed as punks (and whose approbation I craved) and the hoards and hoards of girls who would not be impressed at the sight of a sweaty short kid in corduroy pants with a Cyndi Lauper album under his arm. When the bell rang, I opted for a kind of dazzle camouflage: just hold onto a corner with one hand and let it dangle casually, as if it were a gym bag or something. As if it were no big deal that I was openly flashing the least macho album ever.

If you can picture holding an album that way, you can see that it's the most unnatural way possible to hold something of that shape and size. It doesn't look casual. It just looks weird. In order to keep the album from hitting my leg every time I took a step, I had to hold it out and forward slightly, the way you hold a stinky bag of garbage. So I marched out of the classroom, holding my Cindy Lauper album out before me, trying to convey how casual it all was by crooking my arm and wrist at this demented angle that looked like I'd been hit with a bat. People stared. People who had never noticed me, even teachers, stared at me, first in pity, and then with the confused disgust usually held for the remedial students. A group of girls in bedazzlered jean jackets and slabbed-on makeup watched me pass by. One of them muttered "You don't carry albums around, you play them, buddy". I agreed with a little high-pitched "Yup!" that was supposed to sound assured and manly, but came out more like a poodle bark. They all started laughing. I kept going, somehow unable to tuck the damn album under my arm.

Jill gave her Def Leppard album to some guy in grade 11 and got knocked up or something.

Labels: autobio, rooibos, scorn

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mental blog space
» Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Lynn o' Sprigs commented to me the other day, in one of our all-night wine-guzzlin' poetry-debatin' french-phrase-employin' sessions, that my new job seemed to be affording me ample time (un abondance de temps) for my weblog. I told her that it was not a matter of time but of mental blog space, or l'espace mental pour blog, as I actually said. In French and all, because it was a high-minded intellectual type talk.

She liked the phrase. I liked the fact of mental blog space. Which is exactly what this job affords me. I had plenty of face time with a computer in my last job, but I found myself so crushingly bored and irritated that I had nothing to offer people but crabbed cryptic lines of despair. Who wants to read that? I don't want to read something like that. I certainly didn't want to write it. Consequently I wrote less and less, increasingly convinced that what I had to say was of no interest to anyone.

In retrospect, I probably should have complained online. I should have screamed out loud and rolled around in some fine stinky self-pity. Then you all, in your wisdom and kindness, would have told me what my smart and spanky spouse had been telling me: your job sucks, you have no support mechanisms there, and you're typically left to dangle and then made to feel as if it's your fault. I did not see this at the time. My job previous to that, which was really my first full-time work, had been such a chaotic mess that anything looked good after that. It was a small independent production company created and run by people who, for all their fine qualities, did not know how to run a production company. It was like a top that constantly had to be kept spinning or it would just hit the ground and carome off under the couch (stupid top). They promoted an atmosphere in which everyone had a say, which seemed egalitarian at the time, but which I now suspect was a ploy to get a whole lot of input for very little investment. Or an attempt at a ploy.

Plus one of the producers was a drunk who would show up red-faced, stuttering with drunkenness as he eased himself into his office after lunch, eyes swimming in a bath of pure vodka. Eventually he quit drinking. This was even worse, because the alcohol turned out to be sedating a detail-oriented bully. He still didn't know the first thing about his job, but now we had to deal with him stomping into our offices and shouting at us, fists on hips, all dressed up in a lifetime's worth of humiliation and looking for some pride. His behaviour became so predictable that it took on a ritual quality. The call of "Where's that goddamn deal memo?" demanded the response "I put it on your desk last week," which in turn prompted a "Well, I don't have it". Then you'd fish out the deal memo from underneath a pile of field tapes in the edit suite and put it back in his inbox. Twenty minutes later he'd walk by your office with the deal memo in his hand, on his way to the edit suite to yell at the latest editor (our editors would quit regularly, or walk off with the hard drives) and leave the deal memo on a shelf or something. The memo would go unsigned, the funding deadline would pass, the broadcasters would get more and more pissed off. The blame would slide off him and splash over us. We hated him.

So it's pretty obvious that my next job looked like the manna that comes down from the heaven. Where Company 1 was all Dionysian chaos (right down to the drink), company 2 was pure Apollonian order. Comp 2 had figured out a method for refining the creativity of young people and extracting pure profit. The production process was Taylorist in its zeal for monitoring employee time. The CEO gathered us all together at one point and announced that every minute of our work day that wasn't spent working was a minute stolen from the company. That's right: talking to coworkers constituted theft. They also had a policy manual, which was constantly being expanded as new situations arose. One day an employee showed up with a shirt that showed her poky nipples. Within a few days the policy manual was revised to include the stipulation that "employees must wear appropriate undergarments". The girl was fired for some other infraction, but the truth of the matter there was: if you do something that requires a revision of policy, you're on your way out. Especially if the policy changed involves nipples.

Atop the policy sat a shifting layer of agreements and documents that we would occasionally be compelled to sign, reprimands, discipline, reviews, little documents of understanding that we had broken some rule or other, that we understood the nature of our offense and would not be so foolish as to commit it again. From the point of view of management, the documentation looked perfectly reasonable; it was a record, a means of protection, a way of backing up management’s position in case of dispute. Because disputes were common enough there to warrant that kind of bureaucratic ass-covering.

What I didn’t really get at the time, even when I ended up in middle management, was that the low-level ambient paranoia, in which employees are seen as a liability more than a resource, was built into the company’s strategy. Hire young people, work them hard for next to nothing with lousy training until they burn out or get fired, and then hire the next crop. Don’t spend more than a week training, because that costs. You’ll end up with low morale and a bunch of productions that are okay but not great. And you’ll be extremely successful. There are always young people with energy and naïveté to parasitize. The model ran more like a fast food outlet than a film production company.

So that was the role of a producer at Company 2: something like a shift manager at the Burger King. Your job was to make sure that the employees were keeping up with the demand for delicious flame-grilled burgers, plunging those crisp fries into the hot fat and releasing just the right amount of refreshing soda into each company-mandated drink container. If you could keep those slackers in line and keep the customers from getting pissed off, you were one heck of a shift manager. And shift managers do not get mental blog space.

Labels: autobio, scorn, work

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the neighbourhood
» Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Our new street is noisy.

This is not a complaint. The noise is friendly and human-scaled: cats crying from windows, children calling back and forth, bits of conversation from smokers on balconies. Couple of cars now and then. Elm leaves rubbing against each other in their masses.

At our old place, the noise had a distinctly different quality. Cars were parking and departing constantly on our street, so that the sounds we heard were stacatto and abrupt. A door slam, an engine cough, a drunken yell at night. The empty insect-ridden prairie that lurks behind the image of our city was particularly close to the surface there, always rising up and stealing the calm and lightness of the day. Not so here, though, where the trees are older and the peak-roofed houses crowd together. Most of the people on our block are members of young families who get tax breaks for settling down in the neighbourhood. It's part of the city's plan to rid the area of its prostitutes, skinheads and meth labs.

So it turns out the house directly across from us is a meth lab. Apparently no one opens up crack houses any more. The place is a striking sky-blue with an unpainted wooden door that makes it look condemned. People come and go at all hours, announcing their presence with sharp whistles or strangled yells. The whistling is so commonplace that I thought a strange bird had settled in the area. A displaced kookabura. When you whistle a skinny girl in cutoffs pulls open the door and lets you in.

According to the former tenant of the apartment, she once saw somebody fall out a window on the second story into the alley. Fortunately the gang of skinheads next door came out and took care of the guy.

I absolutely fucking love our new place. With a meth lab and skinheads across the street, I'm going to forget the theatre and haul a tub of popcorn onto the balconey.

Labels: autobio, neighbourhood

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matter and meeting
» 

Invective against matter

Mass is a scam. For that matter, matter is a scam, a put-on by a demented demiurge, a trick bending of the substrate sent by the devil to piss us all off mightily. I should know, because myself and Die Schmutzige spent the long weekend stuffing and shoving matter into boxes also made of matter, and then shuttling all that lame matter over to a new apartment. It was all matter, it was all heavy, and every last gram of it had to be moved through space. And it took time. Three days of lifting, shifting, hauling, sweating, cramping, cleaning and finally going to the storage place at the edge of town to store the last of your ex-girlfriend's crap that you've had for three years and you're sick of looking at it time. I threw my back out. Rod threw up. Deron turned red. Schmutzie's blood ran with hot black bitterness. Aaron was too hungover from a pirate-themed party to show.

Why didn't we hire people to come and move all that matter for us? Schmutzie believes it was because we don't have mountains of cash. This is only true if you consider a mountain to be particularly big. We did have enough cash for movers to pack up our junk in three hours. The truth is that we are assholes who decided to starve the local moving and cleaning industries of revenue. Our local economy is poorer because of us, and we have no one to blame but, um, neoconservatives or something. No wait! Let me refer you to the original theme and blame matter. It's no wonder that so many people harbour those fond hopes of dropping the body off at death and leaping into another dimension as pure energy. It's soulerific! No more matter. Goodbye gravity! Time, off with you. You can have my old matter. It sucked anyway.

Now our new apartment is full of matter - the same stupid matter that threw out my back and stole the long weekend from us. Why are we inviting this matter into our new place? Because it has our coffee maker.

on the meeting

In my last job I was spared an excess of meetings. Usually they were small ad hoc affairs of two or three people, convened to address a particular issue and dissolved like spit in the wind. Every Wednesday we were forced to sit through a production meeting, but those usually functioned as a relief from the unending irritation of convincing my staff to go the extra mile for no money and less credit. Now I have come to the World of Meetings. Civil service is a theme park for office life, which is a metaphor I am not going to pursue. Flippy charts and Powerpoint shows, stuffy rooms all over the city, and grumpy folk who regard you with suspicion (after all, you are now The Gub'mint).

Beyond the scale of two-four people, meetings, I feel, accomplish nothing beyond the obligatory agreement to have a follow-up meeting. They have the feel of a high school pop quiz, in which you wonder if your expertise is suddenly going to be called on in ways for which you're not prepared and had never imagined. Nonetheless, the meeting is so central to office life that there are training sessions available on running effective meetings.

Running an effective meeting turns on one thing only: preventing boredom. Because meetings are boring. You sit and sit and listen and daydream and occasionally eat a donut. The lights are too bright, and then the projector starts up and you're offered darkness in which to doze. One of the topics in meeting effectiveness involves Powerpoint presentations. The only effective Powerpoint presentation is the one that gets dumped out the window, along with the illegible handouts and uninformative notes. I'd give my left toe for a meeting that put aside the Powerpoint and substituted an eloquent speaker at ease with the subject matter and confident enough to merit the attention of a roomful of semi-glazed crullers attendees.

That's right, I'd give my left toe. I've only got two.

Labels: autobio, scorn, work

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