ask palinode: cutlery edition
» Thursday, November 30, 2006
First things first: go vote for my Schmutzie-wife at the Canadian Blog Awards. She's up for Best Blog, under the title "Milkmoney or Not, Here I Come".
Some day some people gonna ask a Palinode, when you gonna put away the foolish things of life and grow up proper? And I'm gonna say, don't bother me, I'm eating a pie. But until that day arrives, I'm putting down that pie to answer your highly legit questions. Today my friend Amblus, who is also Keen Designs, asks me:If one has a titanium spork and is emptying the dishwasher and putting things away, does the spork go in the spoon slot of the silverware drawer or would the fork slot be better? I am fairly tortured by this.
Love,
Amblus
Whoah! A titanium spork? I've been given to understand that those titanium sporks are only used by government agents in black ops missions. They won't be released to the public until 2016, by which time the military hopes to have an effective counterspork in place. I own a nickel/zinc spork, which still makes an nice weapon, but you can't go around delivering killing blows like you can with the titanium model.
Some experts - or should I call them "experts" - maintain that the spork-drawer issue goes back to a medieval-era dispute between the Spork Guild and the Dutch Brotherhood of Receptacles. This is taken as a blanket explanation that also covers the evolution of the weaponised spork, from oddball implement to military mess tool to a weapon for cutting on people. However, there's strong evidence to suggest that the Dutch Brotherhood of Receptacles was first convened in 1987 by a group of D&D players, and sporks have been used as weapons for much of our history. Playwright and adventurer Ben Jonson kept a "killing-sporke" concealed in his cloak at all times, as does disgraced Canadian athlete Ben Johnson.
A spork has no easy slot in the drawer because it's a piece of zombie silverware. Zombies are the quintessential in-between creatures - not living, not dead, not allowed into bars until after one in the morning. To ask where to put a spork is the same as asking Where to put a zombie? You can't put it at the dining room table, because too often the guests end up becoming the meal. You can't put it in the ground, because there are so few brains there. More often than not, the zombie claws its way out to the surface and presents itself as an eyesore as well as a menace.
The truth is you can't put a zombie anywhere - it is not an object so much as it is an indeterminate state. And it's not one of those scientific thought experiments where the zombie's in a box and you resolve its state by observing it. Zombies don't care about quantum physics. You go and observe a zombie, it's still a zombie, just kind of standing there and moaning and lurching a bit. Then it observes you and tries to resolve your state. The only real resolution is to crush its head or blow it up.
And that's what you do with a spork, except that the spork's power is in its little tines. Cut the tines off with tin snips or fill in the spaces with old gum and bits of newspaper, whatever. Do that and you've resolved your spork into a spoon, and you can store it with security and confidence. Just don't let it loose in your kitchen.
Curious about the all the things that ever were? Don't have an artificial bird set upon a bough to keep a drowsy emperor awake and sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, or passing, or to come? Want to know where those lines come from? Ask Palinode and he will tell you. Email askpalinode @ gmail . com.
Labels: ask palinode, lies
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high seas?
» Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Yargh. An entry. Pirates.
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the origin story
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Lotsa people wanna know, out on the street, where they's kickin it palinode-style: Why do call your site In Palinode's Palace? Where's the palace? Why's the reference up all about classical poetry when you got or gots no rhymes or metrical feet (besides the feet-shoes) on the site?Holy hot piranha, that's the worst street slang I've ever heard. That's like street talk if you lived in a can of stewed tomatoes for twenty years and then, when they let you out, you um, oh never mind. Let's just get on with the outrageous lies section.
Okay, so back in the days when money was made out of paper and cats weren't sold in open-air markets for meat,* I thought blogging was for squares only. In fact, when I saw
Then one day I experienced a terrible streetracing accident that put me on fire and in the hospital. When the bandages came off, I still looked beautiful, but my hairline had receded from all the stress, and I found that I was around thirty years old, which surprised me, as I had just been seventeen and the big name on the street.
Despondent and downcast, I went to see my friends, but they no longer recognized me and thought I was some old square. They did the square-in-the-air thing, which did not arouse me but certainly made me realize that my streetracing days were over, and that I had better get a series of jobs in the film industry for seven years and then end up working for the government.
I left my old friends and started walking home when I saw a poster on a wall.
Hey, I thought, that's funny, I'm going to go blog about it, and that's how I started blogging. But I didn't have a title for my blog yet. Then I met some guys who asked if I had a backup band for my blog, and I said No, and they said, We're a great band and we just need a break to make it big. So I said, What do you call yourselves? And they said Earth, Wind and Fire.
And that's how the top funk band of the '70s got their start in the business.
*I know these conditions don't apply in 2006-07, but I have to take future readers into consideration.
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fine dudes
» Monday, November 27, 2006
In a daring move, 1970 has sent four of its finest dudes to the twenty-first century (Two of them are twins. Or clones. Dunno which.). No one knows why these hunkonauts have landed here on the far shore of 2006. Maybe the sexy scientists of the past predicted that nuclear warfare would render males infertile or impotent, and these fine dudes are meant to repopulate the scorched wasteland of Earth. Or maybe these are weapons of the homosexual agenda, sent by elite radicals to conquer straightdom in the future. Or maybe these guys are swingers whose mesh shirts and dashikis proved so sexually powerful that they tore the very fabric of space-time.
And these fine dudes may not be the only emissaries of manliness. Perhaps the future holds dudes even finer, with furious sideburns and shirts so sheer that their very nipples shimmer.
Labels: fine dudes, lies, photos
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the worst party of my life, part 2
» Sunday, November 26, 2006
Appearing by popular (and unpopular) demand, here's part two of the Worst Party of my Life. Part one took me up to the invitation, which was offered over a plate of horrendously hot hot wings.Even though I'd agreed to come to Lindsay's party, I was a bit skeptical. As far as I knew, Lindsay had one friend other than me, and this guy was not exactly the most entertaining company. His name was Doug. He had a sculpted shell of dark hair and aviator glasses perched permanently on his nose. He was jowly and stocky, with a ridiculously fine nose and tiny mouth that indented the centre of his face. He had the look of someone with a garage full of army rations and rifles under a tarp. Lindsay had been particularly enthusiastic about setting up coffee between the three of us. He had described Doug as a "brilliant schizophrenic" with tremendous insights into the treatment of mental health. He had wowed a group of doctor in California, Lindsay told me, shaking his head to emphasize the degree of wowing Doug had worked.
At coffee I tried to elicit some of the insights that Lindsay had promised, but Doug preferred to talk about highways. Doug spent his summers hitchhiking around the States, and he could describe each stretch of road he'd traveled, its junctions and signs, the condition of each road and every stretch of repair work he'd encountered.
Worse, he would describe every road in the same fashion, starting with route number, major service points, road conditions and friendliness to hitchhikers. I made the mistake of trying to keep the roads straight in my head, but Doug's autistic recall overwhelmed my short-term memory. I figured that the trick was to block out the highway bits and catch the bits of story sandwiched in between, but after half an hour I understood that there was nothing between the roads. One road merged with another, branched off to a side route, came round to the trunk artery again. I pictured the world in Doug's mind, an endless tangle of bridges and underpasses, service roads and rights-of-way, with all the cities no more than a few fast food huts and outlet malls clustered around the exits. My god, Lindsay said after Doug had left, that man is brilliant. A bit fixed on highways, but brilliant.
(Doug's brain)Who else is coming to the party? I asked Lindsay.
Well, he said, there's Doug. He liked you.
I showed up anyway.
That's all for today, folks. I'm still under the weather, and this one needs a degree of concentration that my spacy brain won't permit. The rest forthcoming, as soon as the Feather Duster of Health clears away the Cobwebs of Sick. Lucky for me, I live in Canada, so my Feather Duster is free. But I have to wait six months for it.
Labels: autobio
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freeze-dried fred, or worse
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Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. And then I realize that some people have it way, way worse.
You can't hear them, but Barney's saying either 'Kill us now' or 'Suck your big dick for a glass of water'. Hard to tell, really. I honestly don't think I've ever seen anything as sad as that wasted, dessicated Barney, his tunic draped over his 90 pound frame, the whole terminating in those crazy feet-shoes. If you can have feet-shoes, why can't you have leg-pants to complete the illusion? Was there nothing in the budget for leg-pants? Or maybe some kind of labour problem had closed the leg-pant factory down. You'll note that Fred gets arm-sleeves, even if they're wrinkly as one of those horrible hairless dogs. Clearly he's the alpha male.
God, they look like they've been wandering in the desert for weeks. I bet they took a wrong turn on the way home from the theme park and somehow ended up in the Mojave. Unless, after the Flintstones was canceled in 1966, Fred and Barney ended up as homeless guys wandering the bright empty streets of Burbank, offering to degrade themselves for bit parts in low-rent cartoons. Only the New Fred & Barney show from 1979 (the one with the teenage Pebbles and Bam Bam) revived their careers, and that took a lot of casting couch action, if you know what I mean.
Why am I suddenly so fixated on the notion of Fred and Barney whoring themselves out? Does this say something about me or the ugly underside of the cartoon industry?Am I onto something here - something explosive and true? Given my track record for ferreting out the truth, I'd have to say yes.
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God Friday is love
» Saturday, November 25, 2006
Oh hey! Is it, like, the late hours already? Ha ha, I knew that. Once again I curse NaBloPoMo for keeping me cursedly, nastily awake. And I suppose, since you're here, that you'd like some words. Sometimes I open a book or open up a web page and I can't believe that it's words I came for. It's just shapes and squiggles with a trace of aesthetic interest. I worry that you will come here and your eyes will scan over the shapes, then flick away. So keep your eyes trained. Otherwise you'll never know how many chicken wings from 7-Eleven I can eat before I notice that I'm eating a pile of grease and pale meat. The answer is eleven.Following on Schmutzie's example, I'm going to give you three things that made me happy today, or at least three positive things. Let them be random and stuffed full of the caprice and shit.
1) Last week I called a meeting with my executive director. My term is coming to an end, and although I've had a casual promise that my term would be extended into 2007, I hadn't received official word. Today I found out that I would still be bringing home my allotment of bacon for another while.
2) Here's a video of Joanna Newsom playing her harp and singing through her nose. She looks like a Gelfing and sings like a chain-smoking twelve-year old, but I love her so. Her new album, Ys, archaic and hypermodern all at once, shows that you can play a harp and still kick the crap out of Loreena McKennitt. Not that you need a harp for that. Just a nice heavy halberd and a thirst for justice.
3) Sometimes an entry will generate paragraph on paragraph of junk, but every so often I'll find myself with passages that have their own worth but don't really fit anywhere, like a well-formed but superfluous limb (although I could always use another arm, for spooning of extra pudding and such). Here's a stump from my review of The Departed.
"We never lived in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when television was unknown and the shared dream was dreamed in dark places with crowds of strangers, and studios pushed out picture after picture, grand, good and indifferent alike. Between the wars, moviegoing was the quintessential shared media experience. By the 1950s, televisions were tunnelling their diodes in more and more households, the studio system that kept stars on screens was beginning to collapse, and that brief cultural bonding moment that was the movies had ended. Ever since we have lived in the receding echo of that moment. Sure, there are theatres, and yes, in those theatres they show shows, and we crowd into darkened rooms to watch the shows they show us, but the experience is different. I'm not calling out to a lost golden age of films - most of my favourite films come from long after the mid-'50s - but much of what we're watching is a half-hearted attempt to reproduce that experience, when movies seemed like a projection from the eye of an arc-lamp god. Now movies are billed as events, in the manner of grand Biblical stories, but studios miss the essential element, the continuum of movies, with epic films cresting the surface of a silver ocean like the blunt heads of whales".
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the great game!
» Thursday, November 23, 2006
Yesterday I promised a part two of the worst party I'd ever attended. But I've got a flu coming on, so here's something I started this morning before my sinuses started filling up. Yummm.James Conway, the latest US General in charge of the Irag-Afghanistan schlemozzle, repeated one of the standard rationales for the conflict: We fight them terrible terrorists there instead of here. Gen. Conway stated (from Salon.com): "Somehow I don’t think our people have made that connection and feel the same way that I do, and our troops do --that because there has not been an attack in this country is directly related to the fact that they are killing these … fanatics who would otherwise be trying to work their way in to Baltimore harbor or Los Angeles airport".
Aside from the logical confusion in that statement between causation and correlation: if the people back home don't get the connection, it's because it's never been explained properly. As far as I can tell, it doesn't matter how many troops you pour into Iraq - it's not like you're maintaining a physical barrier against a fortified position. If terrorists wants to hit LAX, they don't have to fight their way through a wall of American troops on the way to the travel agent. They'll book a ticket to LAX. Terrorist with sufficient resources and a well-defined program are not going to spend their time burying explosives on the road to Sadr City. They'll get on a plane and land at LAX. Visit Disneyland, have a drink at the Viper Room, take a photo of Drew Carey. Then their plan begins to unreel. As one distracts Drew Carey with an autograph, the other sneaks up and straps an IED to Carey's back and sneaks away on tiptoes. Carey spots IED in a classic double-take, looks up, sound of slide whistle and BOOM. Charred star, muted trumpet plays, and then it's on to a series of 30-second vignettes involving Drew Carey's hapless attempts at revenge. The terrorists make him run off a cliff, hit him with giant mallets, drop a piano on his head, cleverly disguise a brick wall as an alleyway - into which Carey runs smack. Eventually Carey gives up and the terrorists destroy vital infrastructure. They tip California into the ocean with a giant crowbar, and once everyone from Bakersfield to Sacramento is treading water, they do their terrorist dance to some tinny Turkish pop music. On cue, French people run up and start dancing in approval. And that's all, folks.
I can't say for certain that this will be the shape of the next assault on America, but really, if you've read the pundits of thunder and Islamo-fear, then my scenario is as good as any other.
Labels: lies, politics, useless
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the worst party of my life, part 1
» Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Before you read this, I recommend you go and read Schmutzie's tale of family and fish and victory. Okay, done? Pretty nice, wasn't it? That Schmutzie, she sure is married to me.In the summer of 1993, having decided at twenty-two that my adulthood was at hand, I dropped out of university and moved to another city. I had never held a real job, never paid rent or bills, never bought groceries. My parents certainly didn't spoil me, but they were so tolerant of my habits that ultimately I had run out of patience with myself. I announced my plan to move out the day before my birthday, when, in a burst of irritation, I answered a casual question with the answer: "I'm moving out. Chocolate". The question had been: What kind of cake do you want for your birthday?
My mother, who had been gently pushing me out the door ever since I had turned eighteen, asked me what I planned to do if I couldn't find a job. I thought for less than a second, actually shrugged. "Go on welfare," I offered.
"Oh, don't say that, Aidan," she pleaded. Having never had to pay for my own food, I thought my mother's anxiety was funny. I had yet to be broke and jobless, credit card maxed and bank account drained, sitting around in a tilting building and living on cigarettes. That came a few years later. In the meantime, I hated the city I lived in and the university I was attending, and I wanted nothing more than to run, as fast as I could, no plans or contacts of worth, in order to hit escape velocity.
For some reason I chose Calgary. It was big and anonymous enough for my purposes, six hundred kilometres away, with a few friends to stave off loneliness. It was also just close enough to home that I could afford the bus ticket back if things got really bad. Without a plan in mind, I decided to guide myself by the Principle of Yes. Whatever came along, I decided, I would not refuse it. I would at least give it a fair chance. The universe would reveal its intentions to me if I said Yes to everything.
I discovered very quickly that the universe's intentions are not equal. For a comfortable divorcee looking into Caribbean vacation packages, the universe may intend a renewal of love and life. If you're a young man who takes a minimum-wage job and moves into a slummy building in a dodgy neighbourhood, the universe will take your measure and try and degrade you further. The Principle of Yes landed me in a Bible study group with a bunch of fundamentalist wackos for a while. It had me sitting in a roomful of pale-faced losers, all hanging on the words of network marketers in expensive but poorly tailored suits. It had me listening patiently to the entreaties of middle-aged men who had spotted me leaving the hostel and wanted to help me out with "rent, school, anything you need". Had I done the universe's bidding, I would have ended up a Bible-thumping rent boy who could sell you cleaning products on the side. Oh, and I'd be paying two hundred dollars a month for a crappy video dating service, but that's another story.
In truth, my guiding star was more the Principle of Let's Not Say No Just Yet. Until I met Lindsay, who invited me to the most terrifying and bizarre party of my life. Then it became the Principle of Get Me the Fuck Out of Here.
I met Lindsay at the Kathmandu Uptown Café, a coffee shop that was no doubt meant to cater to an affluent crowd, but had been doomed by location to become a hangout for alcoholics, the mentally ill and the terminally unemployed. Lindsay was all three of these things. Years of drinking and poverty had reduced his hair and face seemed to the same ash grey and limp texture. He had been a newspaper journalist and photographer of no small talent, but alcoholism and an inability to tolerate the increasingly cold and corporatist world of print media had driven him onto the streets, hard drinking and bi-polar. During lucid periods, which would last a few weeks at a time, he drank coffee and told stories of working in newsrooms across the country. He had no more than three or four teeth left in his mouth, which fact he would cover by raising his coffee cup to his mouth everytime he laughed or smiled, which was often, so by the end of any given evening he'd be wired on coffee, talking at high speed and excavating the memory of his newspaper days and his marriage to a poet who'd had some minor fame in the 1970s.
After a few months I could always spot Lindsay's manic phases, which would build slowly and usually culminate in his disappearance, then subsequent reappearance a week or so later, stinking drunk and covered in bruises. He would start wearing buttons on his jacket, talking elliptically about politicians and the Hell's Angels, interrupting his monologue every so often with a dark portentous laugh. When he was manic he didn't bother to cover his lips, which would draw back to reveal the stumps of canines. It gave his face wolf-like appearance. Once he showed up at my apartment, knocking on the window and scuttling in when I opened the back door. He wore an oversized tweed sports jacket covered in pins and buttons. He announced to me that "Operation Mindfuck" had begun, laughing darkly. Then he bummed a cigarette and disappeared for two weeks.
After I'd known him a few months Lindsay told me that he had a girlfriend. I had a hard time imagining this, since Lindsay always seemed like such a wreck. It was a testament to his charisma that anyone would talk to him at all, alcohol having ravaged his face and coarsened his skin. Nonetheless, Lindsay told me all about her. She was gorgeous, he said, the daughter of a wealthy businessman. From what I could gather, Lindsay had worked for this businessman or known him in a professional capacity at some point. He had hooked up with her during his last stay in the hospital. She too, apparently, had her problems, which exhibited themselves in the form of repeated spontaneous suicide attempts.
I had run into Lindsay one afternoon in a sports bar at the end of Seventh Avenue, right at the downtown terminus of the LRT line. It was the in-between hour of the restaurant day, when the place is empty, the music is off and the only light comes in through the windows. I can't remember now what either of us were doing there, but he sat down with me, talked me into ordering a plate of the hottest hot wings I think I've ever eaten (with the exception of a Jungle Jim's restaurant in rural Newfoundland, where I had to sign a waiver), and told me more about his girlfriend Sheila.
Lindsay seemed calm and personable, but every so often the portentous laugh would slip out, with that baring of fangs. He had decided that it was time for me to meet her. She was a spitfire or a firecracker, I forget which. All I can remember is the sweat beading and running down my forehead, the room practically vibrating with all the capsicum I was eating, so by the time he invited to his place for a party that Friday, I nodded helplessly, my face the colour of boiled ham.
OMG! Where's part two? It's here.
Labels: autobio
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if you meet this barista on the road, kill him
» Tuesday, November 21, 2006
After the indignity to my coffee, I sat down and sketched while he took his diseased hands and scooped coffee beans into a bag for some soon-to-be-ill customer. This was the point where I "whipped out my notepad," just like all the exciting artists and intrepid journalists do.
I've been wanting to sketch this guy for a while because of his extraordinary face. He has a forehead that borders on the hydrocephalic, set off by eyebrows that belong to a fashion model twice his size, all narrowing down to a ridiculously pointed little chin. I haven't done justice to the eyes, which are large, clouded grey-green affairs that bulge out over the most hollow cheeks I've ever seen. The black ink has made him look a bit more affable and attractive than he really is, with a fuller goatee and thicker hair. In truth his hair is a light mousy brown, almost feathery.
And you see where the text in the picture trails past the margin? That's the flaw that sets off the perfection of the whole. That's what makes it art, sucka.
Sucka.
Here's something I drew one night at the bar. A table of RCMP cadets shaking off their aggression with Guinness. Yeah, that'll work. And don't draw drunk.
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monday
» Monday, November 20, 2006
Last night I barely slept. I never do on Sunday nights. Friday and Saturday I push my waking hours to three or four in the morning, and by Sunday I've tilted my circadian rhythms over. Monday to Thursday is repair time. I reset my clock back to something approximating normal business hours, and then Friday I bugger it all up. I knew I'd be too tired tonight to write a proper post for NaBloPoMo, so I put down two entries late Sunday, one on either side of midnight. I thought that would give me a reprieve and let me sleep early tonight.Unfortunately, daily posting has started to become habitual. More to the point, it's finally prodded my long-dormant compulsion to write. Maybe I've said it on this weblog or maybe elsewhere, but I find writing of any kind extremely tortuous and painful. I lead with jokes to get through the painful part, and then I'm off, but still picking through each sentence and pushing words around (to quote Philip Roth, who pushed them around for a living). Today was a slow day at work so I took out a tablet of paper and started filling it with blue ink, line by line. Only when I'd flipped the paper over twice did I realize how much I'd written in a fairly short period of time. I used to write like that in highschool, but what I wrote back then was all Ginsbergian nonsense and fever dream. Usually it was just words for the sake of sounding impressive, grand cosmic themes and pantheistic pronouncements. Today I wrote five pages on video games and O.J. Simpson, and I hate both of those things. Better yet, what I wrote in haste was clear and uncluttered when I read it back, which, let me tell you, is exceedingly rare. Usually my sentences are multiclausal disasters, phrase propped up on phrase until paragraphs look like pick-up sticks. What you get here is often the result of periods and commas dropped judiciously into the mess.
I don't know if it's NaBloPoMo and its demand for content that have spurred this on, but in the absence of other factors, I give full credit to Fussy for offering up this idea. Many thanks. And good night.
Labels: metablog
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responses to google queries
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"nan golden"Hey, nan golden searcher! I get you all the time. Whoever you are. Looking for something, the fabled "nan golden," whatever that is. I wonder if Nan Goldin the photographer ever looked for the elusive "nan golden"? You should google her and find out.
"barnyard movie tits"
I don't have too much to say about this search, but the 16th result is for a DVD called "Goo Gobblers," which I surmise is about gelatinous turkeys.
"fuck cancer shirt"
Whoah now! I don't go for that shirtosexual business. You want to have sex with a shirt - even a cancer shirt - that's fine with me. Live and let live, I say. But don't go rubbing it in my face with your internet search strings and your shirt marriage rights.
"how to make a reptile fog mister"
What? Are you looking for some mister to tell you how to make a "reptile fog"? Okay, I'll be your mister. Just take all the reptiles you can find, big or little, it don't matter - just get a big sumbitch pile of the scaly critters - and blow them up with all the dynamites you can find. Just wham! A fine mist of alligators, garter snakes, skinks, whatever.
Reptile fog could also be a drink. Something green and nasty.
"nan golden"
A-ha, you didn't take me seriously last time, did you? Maybe you're looking for "The Golden Naan," that Eddie Murphy movie where he goes to India and wipes his ass with a piece of bread? Is that it? Stop coming here.
"michael jackson singer powerpoint presentation"
Judging from stories about his most recent performance, I think he'll be reduced to doing powerpoint presentations soon enough. I can imagine the first slide: Main Heading - "We Are The World"; Points - 1. Children; 2. Relative Brightness of Day; 3. Let's Start Giving; 4. Nose Falling Off Again, Fuckfuckfuck
"soon the gypsy queen in a maze of vaseline lyrics"
A maze of vaseline?
"sigmund freud secret documents 2016"
Awesome. I never knew I wanted something so much until I saw that search. This sounds like the next Bond movie plot to me. If it were an Ian Fleming novel, it would probably reveal Freud's membership in any one of a number of terrorist organizations seeking to bring down civilization (See: anti-semitism, batshit rabid, in works of Ian Fleming, The). If I were writing the script, the documents would read: "Dear Diary, How are you today? I am fine but dead, as it is 2016. The doctors have not brought me back to life to continue my evil work of dismantling the way of life we all cherish. Okay, bye! Signed, Sigmund."
"her first anal sex"
I'm sorry, I don't know her.
"nan golden"
Get off my goddamn website, you punk kids.
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scott thompson signed my stomach - here's how
» Sunday, November 19, 2006
The older I get, the harder it is to pry me out of the apartment. I don't have aching joints or any evening responsibilities to speak of - except my sworn duty to Battlestar Galactica or The Wire, maybe - I just have things things to do. I have food to make and stuff to write and nooky to commit, which often takes me into the small hours. And everything costs money these days. Is that a function of age or is it simply the case? In other words, are my tastes changing, or is consumer capitalism reaching far back into the youth demographic and plundering their pockets as well? Whichever it may be, I find that my best defense against poverty is to stay indoors and nail my wallet to the wall.
As an aside, Schmutzie and I were wandering through the aisles of the Dollar Stretcher Store today and we found fake plastic bulbs of garlic to hang on your wall, presumably to deter the plastic vampires from showing up and feeding on all our hard-earned aromatic polymers and thermoplastics. Like sucking the grooves from my Nina Simone LP, or gnawing on our countertop. Consider this a sidebar. More actual entry below.A few weeks ago, I pried the nail from my wallet and went to see Scott Thompson's one-man show Scottastrophe. People have called Scottastrophe a 'multimedia presentation,' but 'monologue with slideshow' is closer to the truth. Bob Wiseman provided musical accompaniment (most memorably when Thompson suddenly bursts out into a brief but show-stopping number called "It's time to laugh about September 11") on accordion and guitar.
I showed up early and it turned out that I was late. Bob Wiseman was already halfway through his set, so I scooted off to the bar at the end of the hall and hid myself in a dark area where the chairs were still piled up on the tables. A few other people, driven by the same urge for anonymity, had nested amongst the chairs and tables and cases of empty bottles, shadows that looked like more furniture until they shifted in their seats. A man sat down a few feet from me and watched Wiseman play. He gave off an air of impatience, which rankled me a bit; his restlessness was impinging on my ability to enjoy Wiseman's music. Then I realized it was Scott Thompson.
When Wiseman's set ended I found my friends. One of them had a midnight radio show and wanted a guest appearance from Thompson. Another had decided that, whatever the night may bring, he was going to get Scott Thompson to sign his ass. I wished him luck, and hoped quietly that I would not have to watch it happen.
The show itself was about as funny as I'd expected and plenty obscene, although the shocks and gasps that I'd heard about didn't really materialize. Maybe my personal disgust bar has been risen. Even the notion of playing September 11th for laughs didn't shock, but he doesn't really play the event for comedy; instead, he uses it to exploit the gruesome ironies of chance and the intersection of huge events and tiny personal tragedies (a kind of funny gay "Man proposes, God disposes" homily dispensed in obscenities). Thompson's monologue starts with the story of his last one-man show, "The Lowest Show on Earth," a Buddy Cole story that culminates in a three-way with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Thompson had the bad luck to schedule the opening of his Middle Eastern gay terror-sex fantasy for September 12, 2001, in New York City. It's funny because it's true.
In truth, I found Thompson's use of his schizophrenic brother (not literal use) to be far closer to exploitation than the September 11th material. Like many family stories of schizophrenia, the brother seems exceptional as a child, somehow blessed with an excess of potential. As the evidence begins to mount, it becomes clear that this potential will never be realized. The sufferer begins to display strange behaviour, sometimes violent, sometimes developing an inappropriate sexual fixation. And then begins the life spent in and out of institutions, cycling from parents' house to apartment to hospital. Thompson's brother kills himself at a relatively young age, an act for which Thompson implies that he is partly responsible. It's always a bit uncomfortable when you realize that real individuals are fodder for someone's art, and to his credit, I think Thompson was well aware of it; the passages involving his family and his childhood were delivered with much less assurance than the rest of the material, and he would often consult his notes during these sections.
The monologue is comedy in form as well as content, in that Thompson resolves the personal and professional issues that have dogged him ever since the dissolution of Kids in the Hall. Professionally, he resolves never to play "another neutered fag on American network television" ever again. On the personal front, he acts out an imagined conversation between himself and his dead brother in the midst of a crisis on a plane bound for Mauritius, in which the spirit of the brother grants him some degree of absolution from his corpse.
Wait a moment - I got carried away with describing the monologue in the midst of trying to describe my evening. I should have left that part alone, I suppose. In fact, I should have been more on the ball generally, because when the lights went up and the lineup for autographs/merchandise/possible sex formed, the friend who had sworn that his ass would bear Scott Thompson's signature had already queued up. I got into line just as he swivelled around and pulled his black jeans and Y-fronts down to his calves. Scott obliged.
When my turn came, I knew I couldn't top the ass signing, so I complimented him on his juba and talked about the Philippines for a minute (he had mentioned going there at some point in his past). Then, in a stroke of ale-fueled inspiration, I had him sign my stomach. Scott was very complimentary about my stomach, for which I thank him. But to be honest, I was fishing for compliments.
When I got home, Schmutzie was fast asleep - at least she was too asleep to appreciate my signed belly - so I hauled my drunken ass into the computer room and took photos.
Guess what, folks? I can't find my photos. I was saving those damned things for a nothing-to-post, nothing-to-lose day. Considering that the photos amount to me lying drunkenly on a hardwood floor, flashing my torso and looking pretty darn bearded, it's probably for the best. The whole thing ended up looking like a rejected American Apparel ad anyway. If I find them lurking somewhere on this laptop, I'll put them up. And then you'll all be sorry.
In the meantime, here's some more fake-ass garlic.
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clay
» Saturday, November 18, 2006
Found by my friend and yours, Aaron: a Jan Svankmajer short (warning: clay penis).What I want to know is, how do they all knock?
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friday movie list bidness
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Argh! Cruel whips of NaBloPoMo, scoring my conscience! Content running freely from the wounds! So who are those people laughing at my pain? They seem to be wearing buckled pilgrim hats. Stupid imagination.Inspired by the twin film demons of Mother Bumper and Reel Fanatic, here's my list of movies that I dig, dig furiously, dig like the Lord's own entrenching tool in the loam of Eden. What? Never mind, It's Friday night and I'm drunk. Here are five of my favourite films. Because I'm snooty, these ones are all black and white.
The Third Man. This movie gave me the most annoying conversation-filling gambit of all time: the 'doo-da-da doo-doo/ doo-doo' zither line from the opening credits. Whenever a silence falls across the table, that zither music rushes up in my head and I have to push it back down again before I start doing the scat version. I doubt that I've ever seen another movie so sure of itself, so gleeful in its manipulation of the terminally confused main character, a pulp fiction writer from American landing in occupied
Touch of Evil. Maybe you don't want to believe that Charlton Heston makes a plausible Mexican. Maybe that's the point of the character, with his starched shirts, stilted diction and lily-white wife. You're not in it for Heston's stuck-up prig of a prosecutor, anyway. You're there for the crazy angles, the knife-like slashes of light against shadow, and the shambling hulk of Orson Welles as the corrupt police captain, whose very weight and will are weapons. That and the six-minute opening shot where you're waiting and waiting for the bomb in the trunk of the car to finally explode.
L'Atalante. As far as I can tell, film profs hate their jobs. They lecture with an air of weariness and faint embarrassment, cover their mouths whenever they have to say mise-en-scène or diegesis. And when it comes time to show the films they've been talking about, they're only too happy to disappear and let the movie carry the burden of explanation.
I'm not sure that I learned much of value from my film courses in university, but I do have to thank the instructor who took us through the work of Jean Vigo. A tubercular Frenchman who died at age 29, Vigo made only three films in his short life - a silent documentary called A Propos de Nice, a short film about a boys school called Zero de Conduit, and a feature-length film about a marriage between a rural girl and a a barge captain called L'Atalante.
It's difficult to explain what makes L'Atalante so compelling, but compelling it is, and charming too. My favourite character is the crew member Pere Jules, the grizzled crew member with the striped shirt, a singing tattoo on his stomach and a menagerie of kittens that spill over every surface in the frame. There's a sense that Vigo is truly experimenting with the possibilities of film and ways of storytelling that by now have become familiar.
Orpheus. As it turns out, every mirror is a passage to the underworld ("Look at yourself in a mirror and you will see death doing its work," says one character). And there are poets so talented and beautiful that even Death falls for their charms, which is a fine incentive for taking up dithyrambs. Orpheus is a retelling of the classic myth, updated for an off-kilter post-war France, where groups of poets and bands of angry women seem to call the shots.
Jean Cocteau made only a few films, but like Jean Vigo he seemed to have an instinct for filmmaking. Orpheus moves between the realistic and the fantastic with only a few cues for the viewer, deploying startling but simple visual effects that somehow look convincing even fifty years later. If anything, the effects may even be more powerful now, the technology of film and its manipulations having been thoroughly absorbed into our collective psyche.
Night of the Hunter. Charles Laughton wanted desperately to make a film, and after the studio saw this one, they never let him behind a camera again. Possibly the strangest tale of warped rural America ever committed to film, Night of the Hunter resembles a Flannery O' Connor story produced by Walt Disney with Yahweh as the script doctor.
Greil Marcus described early American folk music as an art that dug beneath the modern world of anxiety and success to evoke the primeval America of horror and redemption. If that's so, then Night of the Hunter is folk film, an art that bypasses standard narrative for a succession of images and moments that register as pure nightmare. If you don't believe me, watch the film and wait for the gospel duet a shotgun-toting Lillian Gish and Robert Mitchum's twisted preacher. She sits and rocks on a lit porch, guarding the house and singing a hymn, as Mitchum's deranged preacher sings just beyond the reach of the porchlight, calling to her from the outer dark.
Update: It was pointed out to me that I mistakenly set The Third Man in Berlin instead of Vienna. I've corrected my error. To avoid similar mistakes in future, I declare that all films ever made anywhere are actually set in Berlin and tell the story of a young man and his telepathic dog.
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cartooning the news
» Thursday, November 16, 2006
Here's a little something I thought up this morning where I take some cartoon characters I've drawn in my notebook and have them say things that apply to today's most up-to-the-minute breakingest headlines. I'm hoping that the illustration will point out, in a humorous way, some of the foibles of the men and women in power. I can't figure out what to call it yet, so if you hear of anything similar, just let me know.Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports that people in the US are no longer hungry. Instead, they are experiencing "very low food security". I don't quite get that phrase - are people allowing liquids and gels into their stomachs? At any rate, it appears that the number of people experiencing low food security has been rising for the last five years, now totalling around 35 million, or 12% of the population. Is there a Department of Food Security in the offing? Maybe that's going to be the new name for the USDA.
That fish is a real hater.
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ask palinode goes me straight to movie's house
» Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Sometimes people ask me, "Hey Palinode, how's your old English?" And I say, "Hwaet!" and then they run away. And sometimes they ask me things like this:
Ok, so here's my question.
Its been 26 years since Raging Bull and 16 years since Goodfellas. Why in the hell do I keep getting my hopes up with Scorsese? Has he completely overstayed his welcome, veering much to close to Brian de Palma territory? Or is it me? "The Departed" got 92% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. I fail to see why. I didn't get "A History of Violence" either. Are films actually getting more brilliant, but I'm getting soft-headed? Okay, that's sorta two questions.
losing my patience with movies
Grand Tuma
Mr. G. Tuma, I hear you. Like the fabled beavers of yore, Martin Scorsese and all his ilk are beginning to gnaw away at my faith in films. Gangs of New York was a whole lot of so-so. The Aviator was a triumph of some cool shots and a little cupful of entertaining scenes poured into a big bowl of blah. Like you, I'm pretty much in agreement that the last unbroken pleasure from Martin Scorsese was Goodfellas. Not that this is unique to Scorsese; what has Brian de Palma done in the last fifteen years that's worth watching? The answer to that question isn't Snake Eyes, which pretty much made my eyes bug out with its awfulness, and it isn't Femme Fatale either.As for those other young turks of filmdom: Francis Coppola went from Apocalypse Now to Jack; George Lucas retreated behind a bank of computers and started looking more and more like Jabba the Hutt, or maybe a Guild Navigator; Hal Ashby, who directed Harold and Maude, ended up with stuff like "Beverly Hills Buntz" before he died of cancer in the late eighties. And there was a time when Stephen Spielberg had some kind of handle on his sentimentality.
Clearly, something bad has happened to these people in the late arc of their careers. The only one who seems to inspire perpetual hope, the one who's able to shrug off the string of second-raters and say "This time for sure!" is Martin Scorsese. Somewhere in all the hype leading up to The Departed, with all the reviews and blurbs claiming that the movie marked a "return to form," I became half-convinced that this was the movie we movie nudniks had been waiting for - a redemptive last-minute turn against the boring, the mediocre and the unconvincing. Once again, brutal men with foul mouths and a taste for the pleasures of life, the boot in the rib and the plate of osso bucco, would rescue filmgoing for male audiences in the coveted 18-34 deomographic. I felt not just excited - hell, I got excited over Slither- but hopeful.
Okay, let me interject here to confess something - I'm finding The Departed really difficult to write about. I want to reach into the movie and grab something solid, find a handhold to swing into a discussion on the damn thing - but it's so squishy. It's like putting my hand in a bowl of tapioca. After a couple of experimental swirls, you realize that you're looking for something solid in tapioca, and that's one thing you definitely don't want. So I'm going to pull my hand out of The Departed and grab onto Scorsese himself. A hank or hair, or maybe that nose. Or I'll just ram my index fingers right into his eyes and then crook them in a coy c'mere Martin gesture.
Don't worry. I'm not threatening to kill Scorsese with my bare hands. As far as I can tell, he's already dead. If Martin Scorsese made Goodfellas and Raging Bull and the truly awesome After Hours, then his autistic double is the force behind The Departed. This film is like a memory of Scorsese, a babble of fragments from the mouth of a man rocking back and forth in the corner, tossing up a snatch of patter from Mean Streets, a plume of manhole steam from Taxi Driver, a sudden Goodfellas spray of blood. Someone wrote it all down, slapped on a plot from a Hong Kong flick, set it in Boston - et voila. A Scorsese flick.
There's a good rule of thumb in major studio films that says: the more producers, the lousier the film. Actually, I don't know if that's a rule of thumb, but I know enough about making films to know that there's an ideal number of people to have on a film - just enough to get it made, but not enough to fuck it all up. Too many producers bring too many ideas, pull a film in all sorts of directions, introduce pet obsessions or set unworkable conditions. The Departed has a whopping thirteen producers: four full, five executive, three co- and one associate. That's not a credits list, that's a trail of blood (although to be fair, it looks as if there were extra hands involved because it was an adaptation from the film Infernal Affairs).
Thanks in no small part to Scorsese's longtime editing companion Thelma Schoonmaker, the first fifteen minutes of the film is a kinetic delight (yup - a kinetic delight) as the characters are introduced and the premise is laid out: two young men, one a criminal who infiltrates the police (Matt Damon), the other a cop who infiltrates the Irish mob (Leo DiCaprio). Both are sent undercover so deeply that none but a few people on either side know their true identities. Nothing's entirely believable yet, but the 'I fucked your mother' jokes fly fast and furious and the plot points land with admirable precision. By the time the title card comes up, we're set for two and a half hours of epic gangland action, with cops bleeding into criminals, and criminals finding themselves unwittingly on the side of the law. The premise is cartoony and schematic, but moral grey areas and identity vertigo abound, right?
No! Not at all! Not even a bit. For a film that attempts to ground itself in gritty front-stoop and back-room realism, with criminal behaviour tied into cultural identity and sense of place, The Departed fails completely to understand what makes human beings commit crime, what makes them take a stand against it, and ultimately, the nature of corruption in a country so sold on hucksterism that violence becomes another legitimate way of getting ahead. Goodfellas knew it intimately; the movie spelled out exactly what the Italian mob was, and what it became as ever-greater amounts of money and drugs flowed through it. Cops bent the rules because they rubbed up every day against the attractions of criminal life; criminals ratted out their colleagues to save their own lives. The Departed chucks all that and gives us a metaphysic of good and evil, with principled warriors in place of ordinary folk.
For all his violent behaviour, Leo DiCaprio's character never displays any real liking for it, nor does he ever lose sight of his crime-fighting mission. The easy power and entitlement of being a gangster never affect his resolve, and his only real conflict stems from what amounts to job stress. In a suspiciously parallel development, Matt Damon disappears entirely into his role as a crackerjack detective rising in the ranks, with even less convincing results. Damon's character is unswervingly dedicated to Crime, even though he doesn't derive much benefit from it. He spends his time being impotent with his girlfriend, arguing with Jack Nicholson on the phone, and earning the hatred of his peers when he's assigned to track down a suspected mole within the ranks (oh dah irony).
You can practically see the script notes piling up as the movie pushes on, keeping these two characters on course, making sure they never do anything interesting or start exhibiting a hint of complexity. By contrast, the characters in Goodfellas were not people to root for: greedy, venal, violent and selfish, crudely judgmental but blind to their own faults, and above all, abidingly ordinary. The story of Henry Hill, if you take out the drugs and violence and jail time, resembles the tales of nouveau riche Americans in the post-war age, the wasteful children of hardworking immigrant families. That hidden normality, the sense that these gangsters were no different from the rest of us, was the heart of Goodfellas.
Damon and DiCaprio's characters are given a dash of backstory and a Manichean psychology to start with, but after that they are left alone to wag