Things I saw between 3-5 pm while sorta doing Xmas/misc errands:
(1) A woman in stretch pants picking up a book from Amazon at the post office.
(2) A dude with an Exploited hoodie, a KMFDM toque and a cheap mountain bike helping his buddy onto the 13S bus going uptown. The buddy held up the bus' departure while rummaging in his parka pockets for his Tim Horton's cup of change. Mainly it was the two half-full bottles of Life Brand mouthwash obscuring his search.
(3) A cashier at the Dollar Store with too much chat for a line that long.
(4) Down the scoop neck of woman's blouse at the Zeller's check out... and her to buy list that included "Socks, Smokes."
(5) Two Dairy Queen cheeseburgers.
(6) Firetrucks outside the 'mature (foreign) students' residence on Montgomery.
When I get a little punchy and bored I like to type random words into Google to see what turns up. There is no rhyme or reason, just free association and a training in absurdist structuralism guides my tender typing digits.
The lack of light is getting to me a little I think.
Or it could be my winter-driven vitamin-free diet. Or both.
I took today off from the store, mainly to get laundry done... something I neglected to do over the weekend when I had time. It felt a little decadent to take a sunny Wednesday afternoon off and wander around the hood a little.
In the morning I started the process of weeding through the storage stacks where I've relegated my Surgery Radio promos. Trying to figure out which ones should get databased and which ones should be repurposed in some manner. They date from late 2005 to now... not sure of the count... but it was fun sitting the "computer room" and listening, drinking too strong coffee.
The Xmas phone calls have been coming in with predictable frequency and disorientation for the last little while. People looking for country CDs or Xmas CDs or country Xmas CDs. Everyone loves "music" at Xmas.
I've been enjoying a blog I came across that makes available all sorts of crazy indie and foreign films. So far I've snatched an Arthur Russell documentary, a super-bad, super-fun Italian horror movie called Nude for Satan, a Claire Denis film Trouble Every Day and a Polish film (or collection of short films) called Blood of a Poet. Takes the sting out of Roger's Jumbo Buster of Blocks.
Ok, I have a twelve year old named after leafy greens tapping his toes to a GarageBand masterpiece who needs tossing out. Zip-bam!
As the cold weather hits I've been entering my standard hibernation strategems: eat more salt and fat... rent/watch more movies and television.
My friendly little iPod Touch has taught me that downloading and watching the first 10 episodes of Season 4 Battlestar Galactica is a snap. If you hold it up close to your face it's still like big screen tv.
Other catch-ups have included renting and watching season 2 of Dexter, then charging the iPod with the first few episoded of season 3.
Borrowed and watched the entire run of the British comedy Spaced. It stars and is made by many of the folks behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Essentially it's a slacker comedy/drama that's obsessed with comics, sci-fi and whip-pans.
Finally, when I was bringing back Dexter to Jumbo I thought I'd give a few of the horror titles a spin. There are so many little umbrella imprints like Dimension Extreme and Ghost House that have been pushing stuff out... and though I'm in front of a computer most nights I never think to research any of these titles. So each rental is a semi-informed crap shoot.
The first one, which I watched last night, is called End of the Line, made by Montrealer Maurice Devereaux. It concerns the subway, the apocalypse and a religious cult that comes on like Jehovah Witnesses gone all Warriors after a pager blow-up.
The acting and effects were pretty decent for a low budget effort, though the run and hide plotline wasn't particularly suspenseful.
The opening of the movie had an effective little boo scene that nonetheless made me realize that I'm a little too versed in filmic language. The main female character is "attacked" in the subway but it's revealed to be a dream sequence as she quickly finds herself submerged in bubbly red liquid; but then we're jumped over to a scene of her in the shower. What's missing is the (apparently) obligatory moment of her sitting up in her bed, clutching her blanket to her bosom. I was surprised how much the exclusion actually impacted on the flow of the narrative.
Next up I have a new Dario Argento to watch. I'll let you know.
Sometimes we are all speaking the same language... but we aren't really communicating.
Sometimes I wonder if we know how peculiar we truly are when our lives are accidentally observed by others.
For instance... I cannot imagine ever getting into a line at Sobeys with approximately two dozen large cans of apple juice, a dozen cans of tomato juice, another dozen cans of assorted fruit juices... then produce a bunch of rain checks for a "2 for 1" promotion, only after the cashier has rung everything through... necessitating a supervisor to come and reverse the purchases then re-enter everything under the promotion rate. Then realize that the total is still more than I'm willing to spend and so... yep, supervisor again, reverse the purchases, new total... etc., then demand everything be double bagged.
It would be more understandable and less sad if not for the fact that almost exactly the same thing happened the very next time I was in line at Sobeys. This time with about two dozen boxes of some granola type cereal... this time the yuppie lady only questioned the final total and the goth cashier said, "Check the receipt for yourself then." It's all too easy to love a glum blunt girl under these conditions.
All was rescued when the stew I made without a recipe looked like real stew.
Stewing Pork 4 potatoes 1 sweet potato 1 turnip 1/2 bag of shredded carrot 1/2 container of beef broth water savory white pepper salt basil.
A mouse. He's not told me his name. I call him either "hey!" or "little motherfucker!"
We play games like "run between my feet and into the closet" first thing in the morning, and "whack the garbage bag with a broom until he pops out and runs behind the stove" when I get home.
The Gagetown area's premier agricultural fair opens its doors today at 10 a.m. at the Queens County Fairgrounds.
Lots to see at the fair: Gemstone cutter and silversmith Tony Campbell from Prince Edward Island arranges a mookite pendant in his booth at the Queens County Fair. Campbell has been coming to the fair for seven years.
creative showcase: Queens County Fair volunteer Nancy Blanchard-MacDonald examines some of the latest entries in the fair's photography competition. Each year, the fair receives hundreds of entries in a number of artistic categories.
As usual, the fair will be offering a cornucopia of livestock, horse shows, farm animals, live music, a bustling midway, horticulture, arts and crafts competitions, and downhome grub.
"There's something for everybody," said fair vice-president Bob McNally. "We're not straying from our format. The Queens County Fair is still an old-fashioned, country-style fair."
But that doesn't mean the fair's small army of volunteers is staying with the tried and true.
"We're sticking to our country roots, but blending the old with the new," said entertainment chairwoman Connie Denby. "We're branching out and trying to mix things up a little bit."
Part of that new blood is Moncton's Neon Highway, which will be bringing its brand of "untamed country" to the fair's outdoor stage Saturday afternoon.
Four days of entertainment offer something for everyone D1 By Yvon Gauvin Times-Transcript
RIVERSIDE-ALBERT - Horse pulls, woodsmen's competitions, a truck rodeo, light horse obstacle races, a queen pageant, a children's variety show and an acrobatic act by former Moscow Circus performers are just part of what's in store at this year's Albert County Exhibition, which runs from Sept. 11-14.
Other than that, the only other thing that's needed is some warm weather to make it perfect, according to organizers.
In doing A&E reports for Voiceprint the most personally shudder inducing sentence I've had to read... over and over and over and over is:
Something for Everyone.
In fact most events that say they offer something for everyone usually only offer somethings for a few people at best.
I haven't come across many festivals offering anything I'd particularly walk more than seven minutes to see... and then only to get them to knock off the noise.
I'm starting a feature on these... reprinted from their original Newspaper appearences.
One of the side effects of working jobs that run through your "private" life like kudzu is a difficulty disentangling the parts of you that aren't work related. It also makes it oddly difficult to plan a vacation... partly because concentrated time off is hard to come by... partly because you forget what it is people "do" on vacations.
What do I do?
I tend to prefer being away from cities... but I'm not an outdoorsman. I like roughing it in cottages that are warm and dry and have a way to play music and keep your beer cold, but have no television or computers and you can cook your food outside and stay up until you get sleepy... take a nap in the afternoon... write until the sun comes up... drink orange juice while your feet are being tickled by the tide.
That sort of thing.
I thought about doing something like that. But the other plan... you could call it plan B... was to stay here in Fredericton and hole up in my apartment. Not just hole up, though. But renew the surroundings... make it liveable... make it a little more like that cottage scenario all year around. Not that I'm pitching out my movies or blogging anytime soon... but I wanted rooms where the focal point wasn't the outside world.
I'm getting more and more tired of the outside world, truth be told.
Anyhow this is a brief recap of the weeks move:
From Chaos
To Managed Chaos
I haven't had much of a chance to give these new rooms a spin... the two job schedule started anew this Monday. But I will... and I'll show you what I come up with.
"Honestly... I like the way Andre 3000 dresses. I think he's right funky."
I have a young man in the store trying to impress a girl who's obviously slept outdoors a few nights by showing off how much he knows about Trent Reznor and... apparently... hip hop.
You know how some people are really deformed, get plastic surgery and still look... wrong?
The same is true with some folks' deformed perception of what is genius and what is luck and smokescreens. You could work and work and work on them... and they'd still come out... wrong.
Arriving at the store yesterday I was blessed to overhear a bit of an intense conversation as I was wedging my "open" sign up against Radical Edge's goddamn bike display. Two gentlemen... one in his late 60s, tubby, wearing a powder blue "Top of the Rock 33" T-Shirt and what appeared to be a freshman college beanie... the other in his 40s wearing birks, brown slacks/shorts and a striped shirt (of course). The exchange went thusly:
Beanie: You just can't beat a Broadway musical for entertainment!
Stripie: No, that's true.
Beanie: Those folks have such great talent!!
Stripie: Not just good.
Beanie: No. Great!!!
As I've probably previously commented on... I get a lot of resume clutching late-teen/early 20somethings, especially in summer months. In 96.8% of these cases it will be the one and only time I'll ever see these folks in my life... so I know our Yellow Pages ad must be working... at least as a beacon of sorts for slack-job seekers.
Yesterday I had two appliers... the first a young lady who looked liked she'd been sent in from a 40/50s Hollywood central casting office for the role of "Sassy Older Sister." She was wearing cutoff jean shorts, a plaid shirt knotted just above her belly button, a little rash of acne on her chin and a Darla from Little Rascals bangs and big curls 'do. Her resume had a cover page from a program called Youth Options, with a first line whose intent outlined: "to provide interventions to youth at risk, before they come into formal contact with the criminal justice system."
The rest of the resume made me wonder what the cover letter was about... listing girl guides, air cadets, tae kwan do, sandwich artistry and papergirl of the month awards amongst her many achievements. Only the fact that the pages were stapled out of order... and that her high school achievements included "maintaining a 90.6% averaged."
The second applicant was a young gentleman who strode into the store cowboy-legged, like he had an ostrich egg swinging between his knees, and greeted me with a jaunty, "Hey bud!" Following this was his query whether not I "needed someone to help run this place." I let him know he probably would be of little help... he took this fairly well, cursorily examined a Def Leppard CD and sidled off.
----
What saved me from depression about my retail place in the world was stopping into Strange Adventures this morning just in time to overhear what I imagine is a more or less ongoing monologue in the store... the gentleman (in his late 30s/early 40s) picking up his comics expounding on the relative virtues of recent superhero movies. Highlights included when J, who works there and obviously has to occasionally interact with these folks, interjected how another customer preferred the recent Hulk movie to the recent Iron Man movie... to which the customer said, "Let me think on that." I nearly tipped over a rack of trade paperbacks. I then had to hurry out while he began explaining why Jennifer Connelly was a much better Betty Brant than Liv Tyler had been in the last Hulk movie (though she had undeniably been stellar in Lord of the Rings).
I know I haven't been writing here much this spring. That's normal enough... given that I don't have my work-imposed 20 hours of weekly computer time to spur me on. Except... this spring... or at least over the last few weeks, it's been because my quasi-work imposed 40+ hours of weekly computer time has been consecrated to way too many other portals of communication.
For the last month I've been sitting at the computer doing the following:
Typing/transcribing an interview/review with Nick T. from the Islands.
Doing any number of other reviews for Exclaim! (the same reason I was doing the above).
Setting up a Facebook page for Surgery (slow going) and Backstreet (fast going).
And editing and relaunching the Goose Lane-related blog, Branta.
In the meantime I got drawn into helping out at a dance/improv show called Uranium and Uranus.
This is not from the show... Just JB doing homework hiding in a closet:
For the performance I purchased a fun little doo-hickey... Kaoss Pad. Or at least the junior version of it:
The show went better than it had any right to... given the limited prep/rehearsal time... from a technical standpoint. Lucy May, the dancer in charge of staging, had a lot of great ideas... which was actually frustrating, because with more time to link the ideas to actions rather than a large portion of "winging it," it could become a really impressive multimedia show. Who knows. Maybe it still will.
I've also been on a peculiarly unplanned movie buying kick lately.
An acquaintance has started working up at HMV and I mentioned having seen a box set of Alejandro Jordoworsky films at the store back before Xmas that had disappeared since. He mentioned he might have seen it back in the stockroom so I, without much thought said, "well, put it aside for me if it is." Which it was. So now I have it. Yay?
I don't know how to explain these films. Holy Mountain is probably the most famous of the three full lengths (there's also a short "long thought lost" film and two soundtracks to round the set out). Within ten minutes of the mostly visual, dialogue-free film you're show a monk-like character in a comically wide-brimmed hat shaving two naked women bald in what appears to be a white tiled steam room; a Christ-Like figure pelted by S. American Indians rescued by a multiple-amputee'd dwarf who he smokes drugs with then carries into a marketplace. There they are set upon by similarly dressed prostitutes age-ranged from about 8 to 38. The Jesus guy destroys a showroom of plaster Christ's then pretends to be a frog looming over a minature model of an Aztec(?) city that is then overrun by actual frogs dressed in Crusade singlets and showered in blood from above. That's the first ten minutes. I turned it off and napped for about six hours and haven't gone back since. But I'm sure I will.
My "less challenging" purchases have included:
A proper version of Cloverfield. (see below post for some further description).
The Mist... an adaptation of a Stephen King novella by Frank Darabont who also helmed adaptations of King's The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. The Mist isn't set in a prison... and it has giant pan-dimensional monsters... so it's a bit different.
About a Son... the image-poem to Kurt Cobain narrated by the interviews he did with Michael Azzerad for his book Come as You Are.
30 Days of Night... a vampire film adapted from a graphic novel of the same name... set in Barrow, Alaska, the "northrernmost town in US." The story occurs during the town's yearly month-long sunless stretch.
The Assassination of Jesse James... because Brad Pitt being quiet and spooky is just as much fun (and maybe moreso) than Brad Pitt being loud and herky jerky
Once... Indie Irish film about finding love out of writing heartbroken songs... starring the singer from The Frames... if that's relevant ot anyone. I read good things about it.
Margot at the Wedding... Noah Baumbach's follow-up to The Squid & the Whale. Stars Jennifer Jason Lee... who I usually like, but can be a loose cannon... Nicole Kidman... who I'd like to like more, but you get the feeling a wax figure from some British museum took over from her about 5 or 6 years ago... and Jack Black... who'd I'd like to not ever like, but he somehow gets in the way of that every now and then. Whatever psychic Baumbach (and his pal Wes Anderson) endured from their parents growing up, their film career is benefitting from it now.
Rodger Dodger... I've had this for a while on VHS. I like this kind of morally ambiguous movie... recently jilted by his (older) boss (played by Isabella Rosselini) Rodger (played by Campbell Scott) has his teenage nephew unexpectedly show up, supposedly checking out College campuses but in reality to gain Rodger's insights into the female psyche. Campbell's Rodger is an effective predator when it comes to spotting weak spots... except when it comes to his own. So it's one night of many bad decisions in NYC.
The Eye 2... Pang Bros. Chinese horror. Adultery. Botched suicides. Unexpeceted pregnancies. Old Ghosts. Mayhem.
There's more... you can be sure... but that's enough for now.
The transition from the two job/not a lot of downtime schedule to one of relative normalacy has been quite smooth this spring. The key, perhaps, was not going directly into a spell of complete lethargy (my general preset)... nor setting myself up with that old standby, "now I'll have time to get all those projects on the backburner done!!!" Instead it's been somewhere in between... dedicating myself to pushing creative and/or necessary tasks forward, but also nurturing my softer side... that would be the gradual spongification of the brain.
The only snag over the last few nights has been this null space between 2 and 4 a.m. where I start to shut down operations only to suddenly come back to (nearly) full wakefulness after only a brief, brief sleep. It makes for crappy, attention impaired days after, I can tell you.
So here we are.
What have I been doing lately?
One of my Spring projects has been a new job through Goose Lane Editions, a publisher here in Fredericton that I've done work for in the past. This time around they've retained me as a kind of blog editor for an online magazine of sorts called Branta. Essentially it will sit parallel to their website and provide entertainment, information, and a reason for people to keep coming back and... maybe... buy a book or two?? My part has been to secure regular contributors who will provide what I've been thinking of as bylines... periodic columns that will be either about the same broad topics each time, or something completely different connected aesthetically in some way. Pretty nebulous, no? Most posts will have some tenuous connection to writing, or being a writer, or reading... you get the idea. Initially this was all meant to launch back in April... but now it's been pushed back to a couple of weeks from now in June... corresponding with the website's relaunching.
On the fun side... I've been catching up with some film/series watching:
The good:
No Country for Old Men I've always been a Coen Brothers fan, but they've been slipping lately with a couple of misses like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers it shook my faith a little. This restored it. Though it's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel... one of the few of his I've not yet read... it has all the trademarks of the bros. best films: A loser who suddenly has an oppotunity for something better. Here that's trailer park cowboy Josh Brolin who finds a ton of drug money. In Raising Arizona it was ex-con Nicolas Cage who kidnaps a baby to save his marriage; in The Big Lebowski it was bowler Jeff Bridges who gets handed a satchel of cash to be bagman for a convoluted network of schemers. It has Javier Bardem as the cypher-like hand of doom (think Peter Stormare in Fargo or Randall "Tex" Cobb in Raising Arizona. It has Tommy Lee Jones as the overly-wise but still-stymied philosopher cop (Frances McDormand in Fargo). It's bone-dry and downbeat, too. Good times.
Cloverfield So producer J.J. Abrams got his household name status on Felicity, then cemented it on Alias and Lost. The first show I made fun of, though I never watched an episode... the second I occasionally tuned into to see if Jennifer Garner was wearing something made of latex and the third I've avoided because I always avoid things everyone else doesn't. Here he teams up with fellow Felicity alum Matt Reeves... and despite the potential for getting things really wrong, they don't. It's a monster movie shot in the handycam aesthetic tacked on top of a framework of a guy who found the girl of his dreams and fucked it up. It works because (a) we can identify with the guy's bonehead moves and then the monster destroying NY becomes a massive externalization for his internal trauma and (b) the way the monster is shown in glimpses and distances makes it way more effective.
Battlestar Galactica Season 3 The cracks are beginning to show a little, especially in the latter half of the season. It happens in most television dramas and is perhaps unavoidable... that the focus turns more and more directly onto the characters and away from the situations they find themselves caught it. I found myself not really caring about the Apollo/Starbuck love affair. The device that is meant to create chemistry through tension has been overused since its initial (over)use in Moonlighting and Cheers. What is interesting was the gradual disintegration of order within the Cylon ranks. As they become more human, they become more and more fucked up. I don't know how the revelation of four of the five remaining Cylon models will play out... but I kinda wish they hadn't all been already established semi-major characters.
The trip began Sunday Morning around 5:30 a.m. Atlantic. These were stoic men with a long day ahead:
Stoicism is not always defined in terms of capacity.
Nor the respect of property.
In Ottawa the weather allowed the enjoyment of plenty, both in it's basic form:
And cooked:
Three of us spent some time in Marc L.'s Ottawa estates... while Marc B. disengaged to a realm more "keggy." This is also a rare picture of John awake as he spent most of Monday suffering a stomach bug and sleeping roughly 18 hours.
On Tuesday in Montreal we ate soup.
The went to a Masonic Temple where we saw Christopher Willits wield a guitar whose sound was routed through laptop and various other electronics to fine results.
At intermission we spied Sam Thulin sitting with John.
John's illness was ongoing and he would sometimes revert to zombie status.
