Check out the minivan! It’s right next to Danceland.

UPDATE: Ever since I posted my minivan photo, my inbox has been going crazy (with emails). Everyone wants to know about the minivan. What’s its name? When did I get it? Is it male or female? So here we go.

Minivan FAQ

1. Hey, sweet minivan!

Thanks, but it’s not mine.

2. What? But you implied -

No.

3. Then I don’t care about that minivan.

That makes sense. I don’t even know what it’s doing in the photo.

4. It kind of ruins the image.

Tell me about it. I thought that it would serve as the punctum to Danceland’s studium, but it just looks like a minivan photobomb.

5. Where were you, even?

I was at Danceland in the resort village of Manitou Beach. February. Off-season.

6. And there’s a dance hall there?

Yup. It’s one of the few left in the world with a floating floor on a bed of horsetail hair. Really.

7. Huh.

But I think the van’s female.

Wilma’s topic of choice: Hoarding vs. Collecting. Since all my collecting looks like hoarding, I felt that I was uniquely unqualified to contribute. And then I did it anyway.

Sometimes I wonder – particularly when I’m standing around in my spare room, mentally organizing the profound mess piled up in there – what difference exists between hoarding and collecting. Then I watch late night television, and as usual, it gives me the answers.

The ad for the $50 Gold Buffalo Tribute Proof will tell you everything you need to know about what separates hoarders from collectors. It’s all in the language. Listen to the ad and you will hear the words:  first; pure; famous; popular; American; iconic; stunning relief; masterpiece; through the roof; reserve;  strict limit; hurry.

That’s four nines!

Just so we’re clear: the $50 Gold Buffalo Tribute Proof is not fifty dollars (it’s nine ninety five). It’s also not the original gold coin; it’s a tribute to a coin that collectors love. It’s not even legal tender. And the gold of the tribute is an electroplate. You’d be buying less than a dollar’s worth of gold, even with gold prices “skyrocketing,” as they say here. It’s a pretty cheap substitute for an actual gold American Buffalo nickel. But there are bound to be a few souls out there with a hunger that can only be named and appeased by one of these cheapo mail-order coins.

It’s the words that give it the aura, that sense of value (but note that the word ‘value’ never appears in the ad). That’s part of what makes it a collectible (even though no serious collector would pay attention to this piece).

Once acquired, a collectible object behaves differently in the household than an ordinary object. The collectible is often given pride of place and is put on display. Unavoidably, the collectible organizes the space around it, so that nearby objects seem to orient themselves around it. Or it goes in a special case, which is then locked away. Whether it’s on display or hidden from sight, the collectible is all about order.

Hoarding is a different situation altogether. The impulse to hoard is like the ideal behind the collectible uncoupled from its socket and spraying all over the place; suddenly, every object becomes vitally important, a thing that holds a memory or an idea or some possibility. Or maybe there’s something shameful attached to the endless acquisition of things, so that closets are packed with boxes of unworn shoes, or albums of clipped coupons merge with piles of flyers, which in turn merge with papers and magazines.

When everything has value, nothing has value. The hoarded items gather dust, become invisible to the hoarder. The filth piles up, and one day you’re a bleary-eyed weirdo pushing your way through narrow paths between ceiling-high hedges of old newspapers and grocery bags. If there was anything of value or real use in there, you’ve hidden it away in a wordless midden heap of stuff. Don’t go doing that, please. It’s weird.

Palinode: Something just occurred to me.

Schmutzie: What’s that?

Palinode: I’ve figured out how to predict the future.

Schmutzie: You do not know how to predict the future.

Palinode: Totally. I’ve got it cased.

Schmutzie: Prove it.

Palinode: On July 23, 2012, I will receive a present.

Schmutzie: Of course you will. That’s your birthday.

Palinode: And when will that birthday happen?

Schmutzie: …

Palinode: That’s right. In the future. Quod erat BOOYAH.

Schmutzie: I thought of the best present for you the other day.

Palinode: Really? What was it?

Schmutzie: Well you’re not getting it now.

Hubris

By Aidan Morgan
Delivered to Mrs. Collicutt’s class, 1980

Hello everyone. I am so glad to see you all here today. For my presentation Mrs. Collicutt asked me to pick a word to talk about so I am here to tell you about hubris. What is hubris? The dictionary defines hubris as the act of bringing shame to someone. To use the word in a sentence, I could say “Dwayne showed hubris when he threw dog poop at me last week during recess,” but that sounds weird. My dad says that hubris is when people show too much arrow gins. Gin is a kind of liquor, so I guess that hubris is for people who drink a lot or show off their collection of gin to everyone. But I wasn’t sure what arrow gins was exactly, so I asked dad for an example but he told me to talk to my Aunt Jane. But I’ve never seen any gin at Aunt Jane’s place. She doesn’t have any liquor at all, or even a television. And all the furniture in her living room is covered in plastic, and no one is allowed to go in there. Why did she buy a house with a living room if she didn’t want to go in there ever? Maybe she keeps all her gin in there.

What is an example of hubris in my own life? Here is one. This story has my Aunt Jane in it too. Over Christmas time she took me to the Science Centre to look at the animals and see the guy do the dry ice demonstration and they had a whole exhibit on evil lution. Aunt Jane said they had too much hubris and that mankind should remember where it came from. She also said she didn’t pay twenty dollars to have her intelligence insulted with evil lution. She took me home right after and dad was asleep on the couch and not doing anything but he got mad anyway because aunt Jane was supposed to take me out for supper as well and couldn’t he get just one day to himself and then I asked him why evil lution was hubris and he started shouting at Aunt Jane to keep her opinions to herself and then mom came from upstairs and she didn’t have her makeup on and she started shouting at dad to stop picking on her sister and dad told her she looked ugly with no makeup on and then mom threw a vase at dad and Aunt Jane left with me and now I’m staying at her house for a few days. Tonight I’m going to sneak into the living room and see if I can find her gin. Well that was my presentation and thank you very much for listening. I hope you don’t think I had any hubris in my talk.

photo credit: Darrol Hofmeister for prairie dog magazine

Time never stops. And neither does the small stream of random bits and pieces that come slipping downstream and end up in the little eddy that is this site. Here’s a little bit of stuff I’ve written on the internet that’s appeared recently.

From InsertEyeroll.com:

Bruce Springsteen Shocks Audience By Revealing He’s Alive

“I guess I’m a little surprised,” said long time fan Ellie Carou after the concert. “Springsteen is my favorite musician of all time. And I went through a real grieving period back when I thought he was dead.”

Carou is only one of thousands of fans who were convinced that Springsteen had been dead for at least a decade.

“I seriously thought The Rising was a compilation album,” Carou said. “I mean, it sort of sounded like a bunch of B-sides from the ’80s.”

From prairiedogmag.com:

What I Ate: My Year of Food

THE SADDEST GOODBYE OF THE YEAR In the winter of 1989, when I was new to Saskatchewan winters and even dumber than I am now, I slipped on my desert boots and went for a walk. Thirty minutes later, I teetered into the Novia Café on frozen, screaming feet and thawed out with a cup of dishwater coffee. I watched old women with voluminous hair and deadly fingernails suck on cigarettes and leave lipstick-stained filters upright in glass ashtrays. The walls were stained with years of smoke and the bathrooms were tiny and terrifying. I decided that this was the greatest place in Regina, with the possible exception of the courtyard at the Quality Tea Room.

Over the years the Novia changed owners, underwent some major renovations to look more like a classic post-war diner, and for a brief, glorious period it served the best fish and chips in town. And then it closed after 93 years. In a city that’s barely passed the century mark, that’s a pretty amazing run.

You Have To See This: Fusion Hero Review

Whatever your taste in food, you should visit Fusion Hero at least once, just to look at the place. The exterior is unassuming strip mall frontage next to a Subway Restaurant, but once inside, you’re plunged into a vast black warehouse of design ideas, a hypnagogic dream of a restaurant that jumbles a lifetime’s worth of Asian dining experiences into one laquer-and-glass whole.

Online surveys have become ubiquitous at franchises and chain restaurants these days. It’s hard to take a sip of water without being offered a QR code or a special numeric key to feed into your smart phone so you can rate the service or the thirst quenchingness of your beverage. In return for a few minutes of your time and a surprising quantity of personal information, you’ll get a free cookie. Or a coupon, mailed to you in six to eight weeks’ time, for $10 dollars off your next entrée with purchase of other entrée. Goodie.

Nonetheless, I had a sizeable amount of work this afternoon that I didn’t want to do, and telling my computer about my sandwich seemed like a great way to put it off for a few more minutes.* Fritter your days away with surveys and focus groups, people. At least it’s not Facebook.

I hadn’t anticipated the seriousness of the online survey. When I typed the URL into my address bar, a page came up with the stern reminder that I would not qualify for the survey unless I had, in fact, purchased and eaten the BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich in question. Good thing, too. Imagine all the cheese sandwich and profiterole people who would otherwise throng the site with their irrelevant experience.

Once I logged in, though, the site still wasn’t satisfied that I had the BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich authority I claimed. “Did you, yourself, eat the BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich?” it asked me, with a kind of doggedness not seen since the demise of the Stasi. I clicked my assent. It asked me whether the sandwich was toasted - unfortunately, there were no options marked “Duh” or “No, because I hate it when my sandwich tastes good,” so I clicked Yes once more. Then it asked me to quantify what exactly I’d eaten on my BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich. Had there been pulled pork? How about BBQ sauce?

I was about to walk back to the restaurant and tell them to stop giving me survey cards, when I realized that the questions were surprisingly relevant. I’d refused the offer of BBQ sauce, since that stuff is mostly sugar suspended in a matrix of other sugar. I realized that the survey was right to question the basic substance of what I’d eaten, right down to the elements that gave the sandwich its ontological grounding. I expected the next question to demand proof that I existed apart from the sandwich. And since I’d just finished eating the thing, I wasn’t sure that I could furnish said proof.

After a few more questions about my sandwich, the survey switched to the ‘classification’ section. Those are the questions that drill down into your income and education, and generally make you feel like you’re underqualified to answer questions about a sandwich. The clincher came on the last page, when it turned out that I needed to give my name, phone number and address in order to claim my $5 certificate and complete the survey. Which would be mailed to me, instead of, say, printed out right then and there. And since the survey didn’t furnish its interface with a ‘back’ button, I couldn’t opt out of any of the income/education info that I’d provided. No thank you.

And that’s how I ended up not waiting around for six to eight weeks for my $5 gift certificate to a fast food restaurant. If you can explain to me why I wrote all this down in the middle of the night on my blog, feel free to explain it to me.

*The views expressed on my blog do not reflect those of my employers. It’s their position that I should do the work they give me.

One recess we went exploring at the edges of the playground, and I found a particularly large wedge of slate that needed pulling up. When I pulled the rock aside, a huge centipede and other shiny, squirming creatures scattered, running for dark places. A friend told me not to touch the centipede; it was, he said, deadly poisonous.

The centipede was probably not deadly poisonous, but it was in no great hurry to leave. Even as the other insects burrowed or skittered away, the centipede undulated out from the lip of the depression and continued on its unhurried way. It was my first encounter with insect life, with a form of existence that was completely alien. In a pre-articulate way, I understood that humans were not privileged by life or placed in a special state of harmony with it; life, in fact, existed in opposition to us. It defied us with its endless legs and undulating form, with its promise of poison. No communion was possible with a centipede; we could only watch it ripple across the ground in revulsion and fascination, or step on it.

I did not step on the centipede. It was too potent, too charged with menace and otherness for me to kill. What if its body contaminated my shoe, and that contamination somehow made it to my skin?

I suppose that’s why we can’t kill monsters; we risk becoming the object of disgust in the very act of destroying it.

Anyway, I sure enjoyed James Cameron’s Aliens. I’ll watch that film at the drop of a hat.

This is the premise behind Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998). It’s the kind of high-concept device that Hollywood slavers after and chews up in its boardroom jaws, generally digesting it in a corrosive bath of sentimentality. If you watch the English language trailer below, this is pretty much what the distributor is trying to do.

There’s definitely a precious streak that runs through the movie, but the charm of the film lies in Kore-eda’s attention to physical detail. The office building is semi-abandoned and in need of a good coat of paint, the staff make tea on hot plates and wear heavy sweaters to compensate for the malfunctioning boilers. This is a low-rent afterlife.

In fact, the lack of special effects extends to the films that the staff make of people’s memories; given a short timeline and a prop supply limited to scraps and junk, the ‘filmed memories’ look like the whimsical creations of children. One woman has a memory of falling cherry blossoms, so it ends up being someone’s job to stand on a ladder and gently shake (fake) blossoms onto the scene below.

And that’s where the real story lies: in the afterlives of the staff, the ones who shake the blossoms and bury themselves in the strange routine of interviews, facilitation, and re-creation. Hirokazu is probably commenting on the work of the artist - someone who partipates in the miraculous and mundane in the same breath: whose fake productions are ultimately more memorable and valuable than the reality it rearranges.

Much of my taste in film can probably be attributed to the technology of my youth. If I were a movie-loving teenager today, I’d have the full arsenal of digital quality and semi-legal access to nearly any movie I wanted. It’s hard to say, in that welter of pristine copies of Leningrad Cowboys Go America and Le Samourai, what I would have found to love and claim as my own.

Growing up in a small Nova Scotia town in the ’80s, though, meant that scarcity defined many of my movie loves. Scarcity and crappy quality: between flimsy copies of maximumrocknroll mags and scratchy Husker Du records, being a fan was sometimes an act of will. Back then, we did the work of listening around the scratches and scrutinizing the photocopied concert photos until the thing we loved snapped into view.

So it was with movies. Every so often I went to the theatre in the city, but these were usually mainstream films; at home, my appetite was fed by videodisc and VHS rentals. Videodiscs, an older sibling to the laserdisc, generally developed skips and scratches, particularly in spots to which people had rewound repeatedly (the scene where Uma Thurman takes off her top in Dangerous Liasions was a complete mess); and VHS, that undeserving Prince John to Betamax’s Richard, made a hash of movies. At the time I didn’t really know how terrible VHS was as a format, but I think its inherent awfulness - the smeary, jumpy image, the usual pan-and-scan format - made me a more devoted watcher.

All this is to say that I probably would have loved After Hours even if I’d seen a restored print transferred to Blu-ray and sold with a Glad bag of cocaine. Of all the Scorsese films, it’s the most wilfully strange, the one where his playfulness with the camera hadn’t devolved into flashy nostalgia. Griffin Dunne plays Paul Hackett, a bored Manhattan office worker who bumps into a lonely-looking and pretty woman named Kiki in a diner (Rosanna Arquette). Acting on impulse, he accepts Kiki’s invitation to visit her at her uptown loft. And that’s when the trouble begins.

Did I say trouble? Maybe I meant nightmare of sexual persecution. That’s troublesome, right? Once Hackett hails a cab, he abruptly enters a night world in which events become random, God seems to have forsaken him, motivations are mysterious but hostile, and sexual fulfilment hovers tantalizingly close but never quite lands. It’s a perfect dramatization of the overlong fever dream of adolescence, played out by an adult in the ubercool cityscape of pre-Giuliani Manhattan. I probably wanted to be Paul Hackett.

The comedy works like any good farce - by layering bizarre elements on top of each other until you’re immersed in a complete clusterfuck of the inexplicable. If you walk into After Hours three-quarters of the way through, it won’t make any sense; all you’ll see is a panicked yuppie in a filthy suit running from an ice cream truck. That’s how these films get you. They feed you one implausibility after another until your defenses are stripped away. Then, when all Hell breaks loose, you accept it. This is Hell, and you’ve been in it for the last hour.

Hello. In my inimitable style (unless you can imit it, in which case, go forth and imit) I’m starting one day late for NaBloPoMo. In other words, I’ve lost the race right out of the gate, but that won’t stop me from running it. That’s the Palinode Way. Check the self-help section of your local bookseller.

Anyway, I thought I’d lend some focus to the enterprise by writing each day about my favourite films. I’m not making claims about the quality of these films - that is to say, my list is derived by taste instead of judgment - but these are the movies that I will watch without hesitation, no matter what the circumstances. Seriously: If my apartment were burning down and I still had twenty minutes to go until the end of Aliens, I’d probably just lay on the floor and hope for the best.

This is the list of films I’ll be discussing over the course of November. In order to avoid any semblance of coherent argument, I’ve arranged them in alphabetical order. It’s my hope that by following an alphabetical sequence, I’ll avoid falling into the standard patterns of thought that come with, for example, going in chronological order. Besides, that would probably show a grossly lopsided preference for the late ’70s or mid ’50s. I also seem to prefer films directed by men. Well, isn’t that special of me.

You can also see that the films in this list outnumber the days of November. And that’s okay. I can do whatever I want. This is the Internet, where there are no rules. I don’t even have to capitalize Internet, even though the Canadian Press Style Guide advises me that I should. Screw you, CP guide. I’m not a journalist on this blog. I’m just a guy with a set of half-formed opinions and a weblog. Tremble.

First up: Martin Scorsese’s screwball nightmare After Hours.