korean food dilemmas
» Wednesday, February 27, 2008

On the way home from work on Monday I stopped at the Korean grocery store on the corner of 13th and Broad. I rarely shop there, despite its proximity to my apartment and extremely friendly owner, who always stands up to greet you when you walk in.

The store makes me uncomfortable; although it is a small place, the shelves and freezers have been arranged in a fashion that make the place seem understocked, as if it has just opened for business, or is just about to close forever. The shelving, which refuses to meet my eye level, is overly simple, and the items are spread out instead of stacked up, and as a result it is hard to perceive the boundary between one kind of food and another. This confusion probably does not present itself so much to Korean customers, who likely understand perfectly well why the cans of mackerel boiled in broth are placed next to the seasoned perilla leaves in flat tins, but I am a stranger in the house of soy paste and giant bags of buckwheat noodles.

Cultural differences aside, I can never escape the feeling the owner has developed his own system of food groupings, and that the system is not imported from overseas, but via the dimensional gateways. Also, there is too much white in the place, and the monochrome brightness suggests that there are no discoveries to be made beyond a quick sweep of the goods.

The other problem is that I live in near-total ignorance of Korean food. I know bulgogi, which is so tasty that many vegetarians have been destroyed on its beefy shores. I know kimchi and its occasional assaults on my stomach. And I know kimbap, which looks and tastes exactly like sushi. I get the sense that kimbap is a distinctive snack in Seoul, but over here the Japanese version has probably muscled out the competition.

Anyway, I ended up bringing home a small jar of kimchi, canned spicy tuna and some instant noodles, which is what I get every single time I go there. The black rice looks interesting, but I can't commit myself to a ten-pound bag of the stuff. Does anyone here have a handle on what to pick up in a Korean grocery store?

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a cup of coffee
» Sunday, February 24, 2008

So this morning we invited a homeless person into our apartment.

That was how I woke up: I heard a voice in the hallway, and then my wife's voice, laughing and then: do you want a cup of coffee? I think my husband is awake.

Schmutzie swung into my view. I've invited someone in for coffee. He was drying his feet by the radiator in the hallway. I think he slept out there last night.

This is the start of any good Flannery O'Connor story. A non-religious but decent couple play the Good Samaritan and get destroyed for their pride (masquerading as kindness). That's the O'Connor path to Grace, I guess.

— What is... who? Do we know him?

— I don't think so. I get a good vibe from him though.

— I am not wearing pants.

And there he was, giving off good vibes: brown jeans, boots, a puffy hooded green jacket and a brown nylon touque pulled down over hair that could likely use a wash. His eyes were bright blue and slightly buggy. From his chin sprouted a thick goatee that jutted outward two inches from his face. He seemed completely unfazed that he was standing in a stranger's home.

He also seemed unfazed by our living room, which had a queen-sized bed in it and a half-asleep pantsless guy under the covers.

— Hi there. My name's Trevor.

— Hi. I'm just going to put on some pants.

Over the next hour and a half we sat around and drank coffee. Trevor had just been kicked out by his girlfriend, his car had broken down and work had run dry for him. It was pretty much the Hard Luck Trifecta, and I would have suspected that he was spinning a story for sympathy if it hadn't been for his unassuming manner. The strangest moment came when he told us that he was an avid ballroom dancer. When he left, he invited us to a dance session in a church basement.

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doin's are a' transpirin' over at Palinode's Sunny Time Ledger
» Friday, February 22, 2008

That's right - at Palinode's Sunny Time Ledger, my Wordpress site where I keep up the weblog memoir Travels With Greg, there's a new installment. Join me as I buy some books at a WH Smith's in Heathrow Terminal 4. Scintillating, I tells ya.

Labels: travels with greg

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a course in plumbing
» Tuesday, February 19, 2008

In a recent entry, I told you how to write a speech the Palinode way. I reread it and found that I had promised to follow it up with a guide to Plumbing the Palinode Way. I should not make promises that I have no clear plan for keeping.

All I really know about plumbing I learned from movies. So I may not have a how-to handy, but I have discerned the basic principles of movie plumbing for you. This will come in handy if you discover that your life is a work of fiction – just like Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction, or Will Ferrell in real life.

We Demean Plumbers Because They Are Masters of Our Fate

For some reason plumbers are the never-ending butt (hyuk, hyphen, hyuk) of jokes in movies or television. Think of a film with the plumber as the hero. Super Mario Brothers? Floor Flusher? It becomes pretty clear that movies cannot treat plumbers straight, and instead must make them zany, buffoonish or sinister.

This is because we fear plumbers. When we excrete waste, it is flushed away into another world, an abject universe of decay and shit that we’d rather not think about. Plumbing systems are an extension of our intestinal tract, and the space between our bodies and the toilet bowl is an unaccountable hole in the otherwise seamless tube that takes our waste out into that unthinkable alternate world.

Plumbers are the dark masters of that abject otherverse, that horrific extension of our intestines looping away into the primordial depths. So we make fun of them.

The Health Of Our Plumbing System Depends Upon A Single Twist of a Wrench

But we need plumbers. In movies, we know so little about plumbing that we generally make a greater mess of things when we try to fix them. In fact, we are so inept that we usually pick the single point in the system most likely to cause a catastrophic failure. So a twist of the wrench causes water to erupt from every available seam and joint. Usually this eruption is violent, which suggests that all water pumped into our houses is under extreme pressure.

When the plumber comes, though, he or she knows the exact point in the system that will restore order, which can be fixed with a single quarter-turn of a wrench.

Plumbers Will Break Your Will

The plumber will not restore your system until you have agreed to any one of a number of unappealing options. Most often this involves a complete replacement of your pipes. Often the plumber will inspect your plumbing gamely and, with a sigh, pronounce that a complete retrofit with copper pipes is necessary. "Yup, copper pipes," he'll say.

If I were writing a screenplay, I'd invent a more dramatic predicament. Like, you have to kill a guy to get your toilet working again. I'd call it Plumber of Blood. Tagline: Tastes Like Copper.

Plumbing Is Deliberate

No physical object in a movie exists by accident; it's there because someone made a conscious decision to put it there or include it in a shot. The use of plumbing in a movie is usually a good indicator of genre.

Science fiction - Most people who adventure in space or the future don't go to the bathroom. That's all there is to it. They hold it in for entire spaceflights, because the future has a dearth of toilets. There may be sinks or showers, but toilets are prized pieces of infrastructure. When they do appear, they're usually discreet aluminum pans that retreat into the wall after use. They're like Murphy beds.

The truth is that spaceships and plumbing make terrible bedfellows because so much science fiction is grounded in the notion of escape from the body, and plumbing reminds us of our corporeal ties like nothing else. What else is The Matrix, with all its images of sewer tunnels and slimy canals, but a really trippy gloss on getting out of the womb? So you can beat the crap out of Hugo Weaving? The Wachowski brothers believe that kicking Hugo Weaving in the head is a key ritual of masculinity that our modern industrial society has lost.

Horror - Plumbing in horror serves two functions. The first is to gross you out via the yuck factor of the abject coming back to visit you, whether it's a freaky sewer monster or a big old geyser of stuff coming out of every orifice in your home. The second function appears in relation to women taking off their clothes, so you can see them naked before somebody shows up to mutilate them. In the most efficient horror scenario, a woman would have her clothes soiled by an eruption of effluent from a sink, which would get her to the shower, where she would take her clothes off, and then the freaky sewer monster would come along to satisfy the sadistic violation portion of the entertainment. Then Jeff Fahey or Michael Biehn would blow up the monster with a small thermonuclear warhead, and all would be made right again.

Comedy - Whatever else may be true, the introduction of plumbing, plumbers, toilets, showers, showering means that you're going to see somebody's butt. At the very least, there is prime butt-display opportunity, and that's enough to get most people into the theatre on cheap night.

Mainstream - If a movie or television show involves plumbing in any way beyond a sight gag, then you're watching a domestic drama, or comedy, or dramedy, or maybe tragidramedy. Let's take a look at bathrooms in this year's Best Picture nominees:

Juno - 2007's pluckiest indie film features two bathrooms. The first one shows up in a convenience store where Juno is taking one of them pregnancy tests. Given the nature of home pregnancy tests, it could be said that the first bathroom performs an instrumental function. The second bathroom belongs to the yuppie couple looking to adopt a baby, and its sole purpose is to move Juno upstairs for an encounter with another character. I think it's fair to say that Juno is the rare movie in which the hero's bladder serves as a plot point.

Atonement - I haven't watched Atonement, but since it stars Keira Knightley, who does not eat human food, there would be no real need for a bathroom. It's possible that one day Ms. Knightley will accept a dried tuber or gruel for nourishment, but so little is understood of her physiognomy, or the strange cocoon she weaves about herself each evening. Does she even sleep in that silky bower? That chittering noise, is it the expression of her alien dreamlife? Scientists are uncertain.

Michael Clayton - The abject pours forth in a foul stream in this movie, where bathrooms are the private chambers of anxiety and murder. Big business and corporate law are the intestines of our culture, and our lives are their toilets. Welcome to the land of No Oscar For You.

No Country For Old Men - There's a lot of plumbing in this film. I counted at least six bathrooms, almost all of which are used for medical purposes. Wounds are patched up and blood swirls away down the drains, carried safely out of sight of polite society. The only instance in which bathrooms involve death - and not the cleansing away of death - comes when two nameless Mexicans get shot. The chief purpose of Mexican people in No Country is to run around with machine guns and dogs and die horribly.

There Will Be Blood - Yes, there will be blood. But there will be no plumbing. There will be holes. There will be men who dig those holes and draw out the oil. There will be wells and pipelines, but not for human beings. Instead, there will be infrastructure for the charged waste of the earth's body. There will be money, greed, power, religion, betrayal and two hypothetical milkshakes. There will even be bowling. But plumbing? There will be none.

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Page 123 meme
» Wednesday, February 13, 2008

It's true beyond the telling that I hate internet blog memes - not only has it degraded the meaning of the word 'meme', it usually comes off as a form of soft coercion. I may not want to reveal ten kooky things about myself, or talk about the last four songs I listened to, but once I've been 'tagged' I feel as if someone is constantly prodding me in the small of the back. You gonna do that meme? Huh? You gonna?

But - if the meme turns out to be something cool, fascinating, and not particularly onerous, then I say bring it on. Many thanks to Cecilieaux of Shavings Off My Mind for offering me a meme I can get behind.

Here are the rules.

The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Those were the rules. I don't quite understand why rules 3 & 4 aren't collapsed into one rule (ie. Post sentences six, seven and eight) but I'm not going to argue with rules. Especially meme rules, which are tinkered with at the user's peril. I understand that Jenny B. from Rapid City tinkered with the rules once, and the next day she developed hives, and the hives developed mouths, and the mouths wanted to watch the special edition of Ghost with the cast & crew commentary, and through the nights and days they screamed and lowed and ululated for Ghost, until eventually she broke down and bought a copy, and you know what? It sucked. That's twenty-five bucks she's never getting back.

And now the mouths rest quietly, waiting for the 3-disc box set of Pretty Woman.

Anyway, the book nearest, my God, to me, is Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, his crazy 1979 "metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll".

Tortoise: ....You don't have to think about it consciously. But in this piece, Bach was playing tricks, hoping to lead you astray. And in your case, Achilles, he succeeded.

Let's see, whom do I tag?

Nate from Okay City
Matt or Rebecca of Sporky
Amblus
rekabek
Tamara from Awkwardly Social

Labels: meme

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how to write a speech the palinode way
» Tuesday, February 05, 2008

When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I'm a speechwriter. This is partly true; what I am in full is a communications consultant, and speeches make up only a portion of my work. It's my favourite and heartiest portion, which is why I prefer to call myself a speechwriter. The rest of the shop (that's what they call it) is happy to have me, because no one really likes writing speeches, except for speechwriters. So event planning slides one way into the human resource pool, and speeches slide the other way. Into the shallow end, which is where I like to paddle.

Some of the speeches I write are long and complex pieces concerned with arts, cultural policy, social infrastructure, what have you. For those I break out the flowery-but-still-propulsive phrases that make serious people stand up and applaud. Other times, I'm writing a five-minute greeting for a Minister's appearance at a Chinese New Year celebration. Like last week. And here's how it works.

(Everybody who's anybody's somebody wants to know how to write a decent speech. Right? Because if I'm wrong, then what I'm writing doesn't matter a damn. So I'm going to assert my baseless claim and move on.)

I've worked for several different Ministers and written speeches for several more. Each has an individual style and process. Some read fluently, some stumble their way through, and some glance at the words and make it up their own damn selves. But no matter how it ends up, all speeches begin the same way, with a referral. The referral comes down from the Minister's office to my Ministry, then to the Communications branch, and invariably the trickle runs into my ~~bucket~~ inbox.

The referral can usually be divided into two separate tasks: speaking notes and briefing notes. Speaking notes are my business. Briefing notes are the business of the policy branch. A briefing note is an all-purpose supporting document that will give me the necessary background to write the speech, and it will give the speaker the necessary background to ignore the speech I've written. It's a win/win situation, unless you're the policy person who has to put together the briefing note.

There is a procedure for requesting a briefing note from a policy analyst, which I ignore, because remembering the procedure takes up vital space in my brain. I use that space for plotting revenge against the jerks who talked through There Will Be Blood last weekend (and believe me, they deserve an elaborate revenge). Instead, I phone the person to whom it will be assigned anyway and ask directly for a note on what to say to ring in the Chinese New Year. Because my store of knowledge about the Chinese New Year? Is understocked.

The note provides guidance to the Minister on proper etiquette (eg. don't kick over the fish maw soup, don't fire your gun at the ceiling, etc), historical context and why The Year of The Rat is a good thing. Details about the event itself are the province of the Communications shop. There is a general rule in event coordination that the degree of detail can only intensify; once a step in the plan is introduced, it can never be removed. Accumulated detail encrusts the proceedings until someone gets frustrated and brings in a new plan. From there the process repeats itself.

With a new Minister we have a new events template, and this one is detailed enough that even an electron scanning microscope couldn't capture all the questions. How is the Minister getting there? Who will greet her? Escort her? Introduce her? Who else is speaking and how should they be acknowledged? The only way to get the answers to the many questions posed by the template is to phone up the event organizer and get the entire agenda. So I phone her up, explain who I am and what I need. Then I send her a list fit to choke Nian, the monster from the mountain or possibly under the sea.

Once I have the agenda and the guest list (which is not always forthcoming), I identify the dignitaries and consult the protocol manual. Protocol tells you how to acknowledge dignitaries and the precise order in which to do so. Even at a relatively casual event, you don't want to give a shout out to all the Reeves in the house before you give props to the Councillors. Really now. This is the most tedious bit of the whole process, and the temptation is to leave it to the end. If you leave it to the end you will forget, and even though many eyes will see the text of the speech before it gets to its target, most aren't searching for protocol errors. It won't get noticed until later, and by then there will be nothing to do but bitch out the writer.

Still with me? I haven't written one word of the speech so far. Okay, I've written a few:

Thank you [emcee].

Good evening [guests].

[actual speech]

I wish you health, prosperity, happiness and good luck in the new year.

That's seventeen actual words, although the last thirteen are taken directly from the briefing note. Why does it look like that? Beside the part where I'm lazy? Because all the material I've gathered so far tells me bupkus about the core audience of the speech - the organization holding the event, the audience of Chinese-Canadians. Since there is no time to request another briefing note - we're closing in on 48 hours before the event, which means that the speech is already 24 hours overdue - I need to do my own research. I also need to find something interesting to throw in, a relevant factoid that will prick up the ears of the audience. Once that fact is in place, the rest of the speech will grow. If the fact is interesting enough, a thematic axis will develop around it and make it a speech worth listening to and worth delivering.

The first place I look is the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. The entry on the Chinese community tells me when they first came here (1885!), where they lived (Moose Jaw!), and how they did in the twentieth century. The answer is, um, discouraging. If laws are anything to go by, Saskatchewan held on to its Chinese population the way you or I hold on to a towel that the cat's peed on. Laws were passed to keep Chinese people from immigrating to Saskatchewan, holding jobs or hiring white women to work in their businesses (in a frank but classless turn, it was called the 1912 Anti-Asian act). In 1947 immigration laws relaxed enough to allow more Chinese people, and now - says the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan - Chinese people make up the largest visible minority in the province!

That sounds to me like a classic story of triumph over adversity that I can condense into four paragraphs. I'm twitchy about my facts, though, so I go to Statistics Canada and look up the numbers on visible minorities in the province. Chinese-Canadians, at 8,500 souls, outnumber the second largest visible minority by a factor of two. It turns out that the largest invisible minority is made up of invisible people. Or so it's believed.

Before I go back to my computer, I dig into some economic data. After going through a couple of articles I find a brief history of trade relations between big China and little Sask. From what I can tell, we export more goods to China than we do to the States. That's mind-boggling when you consider that we're a landlocked province sitting right on top of North Dakota. Nonetheless, it clinches the story of the speech: overcoming adversity, or 'meeting challenges,' and the confirmation of a solid relationship between the old and new home of an immigrant population. Now that I have that down, it only takes twenty minutes for me blow some new words into the form. And speech!

After that, it comes down to proofreading, proofreading and then proofreading. This is particularly important for me because I am unbelievably sloppy. My capacity to get things wrong, to bury the salient points, accidentally delete the concluding paragraph, astonishes me. On the credit side of the column, I have flawless spelling.

I suppose I can boil down my speechwriting techniques into a few points:

Research and consult.

Never write a single word that you don't have to.

Find The Thread/The Nugget/The Jewel/The Cool.

Find The Story.

But Make An Outline First.

It's Not Your Speech.

murderous anger

more murderous anger

Next up: Plumbing the Palinode way.

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korean food dilemmas » Wednesday, February 27, 2008

a cup of coffee » Sunday, February 24, 2008

doin's are a' transpirin' over at Palinode's Sunny Time Ledger » Friday, February 22, 2008

a course in plumbing » Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Page 123 meme » Wednesday, February 13, 2008

how to write a speech the palinode way » Tuesday, February 05, 2008