back to it, then

So why'd you ask?

2011-09-09T12:11:00.001-03:00

Here's one I never understand.

Scene: Two guys, one browsing the vinyl (he has an Enya album picked out), the other clutching a binder to his chest, dreamily looking at the ceiling. I'm playing the most recent Esmerine album which is mostly instrumental and currently on a fairly quiet track featuring guitar and marimba.

Binder Clutchy Guy (to me): What is the name of this music playing overhead?
Me: It's a group from Montreal called Esmerine.
BCG: Oh? It's nice.

BCG (to Enya Vinyl Dude): This is nice, isn't it?
EVD: Hm, what?
BCG: What's playing. It's a group from Montreal called Esmerine.
EVD: Ah? Yeah, it's nice.

A few more tracks play while EVD browses further and BCG looks at the ceiling.

BCG (to me): Do you sell this particular music here?
Me (reaching into display case and handing it to him): Sure, it's this one.

BCG looks at it (it's sealed and $16.98) front and back, probably seven or eight times.

BCG (to me): Is what you're playing a selection of tracks?
Me: No, it's that album you're holding.
BCG: Oh? It is?
Me: Yes.

BCG flips the album back and forth another three or four times, puts it back on the counter.

BCG: Thanks.
Me: No problem.

A few more minutes go by, EVD buys his Enya Vinyl and they both leave.

(scene)

So...

2011-08-30T14:07:00.000-03:00

guy: ...does some vinyl come in 180 gram pressing?
me: A lot of newer releases are done that way, yes.
guy: I have a buddy who bought one and he says it skips on his turntable. Should he put, like, a bunch of quarters on the arm? Will that stop the skipping?
me: It will, probably. It will also destroy the record and the stylus.
guy: OH! Really! Well I guess he shouldn't do it then.
me: That would be my advice.

[scene]

First thing in the morning

2011-08-27T15:07:00.000-03:00

Guy: I have a few CDs I'd like to sell for cash
Me: I'll have a look, at least.

Open bag: 7 Nickelback CDs

Me: I can't really do much with Nickelback... no one really looks for them up here.
Guy: I guess. I cringe when I hear them, now.

[the question arises why it took 7 CDs to arrive at this].

Me: I can understand that reaction.
Guy: (pauses) So there's no way I can get even $10 for them?

[this is a common follow-up to me telling someone that I can use what they're trying to unload. I've yet to get the logic of expecting money for something I've already said was utterly valueless to me. In my opinion this is a rung below panhandling]

Me: All I'd be doing them is putting them on the street for cars to drive over. That's not quite worth $10 to me. Sorry.

[scene]

KISS Army

2011-08-26T12:06:00.000-03:00

Day one (telephone):

Guy: You buy records right?
Me: We do if we think we can resell them.
Guy: I have a bunch I'd like to sell.
Me: What kind of titles are we talking about?
Guy: I'm not sure.
Me: You don't know what you have for sale?
Guy: Well they're in a bag. I think there's a Heart album in there.
Me: Hmm, well we might take that if it's in good shape. Basically we're looking for classic rock, punk, metal, folk etc. We don't take classical, country, easy listening or compilations like K-Tel, Time/Life etc.
Guy: So classic stuff like Zeppelin, Floyd and KISS, right?
Me: Yeah those are titles we can sell provided they are in good shape.
Guy: Well I have a lot of KISS albums, but I'm not looking to sell those...
Me: That's too bad, we can always sell KISS.
Guy: Yeah there's a bunch of others in the bag, but I'm not going to sell my KISS. Are you going to be in tomorrow?
Me: Yes, from 11 to 5pm.
Guy: And your name is, so I know who I'm dealing with?
Me: I'm Eric.
Guy: I'll see you tomorrow.

Day two (instore)

Guy: Are you Eric?
Me: Yes.
Guy: I talked to you on the phone, these are the albums I had to sell.

(produces cloth bag with about 25-30 7" records without sleeves rattling around and two copies of AC/DC - Back in Black, a copy of Michael Jackson - Thriller, a copy of Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil and a copy of Loverboy - Get Lucky. The sleeves of all of these have dozens of hand drawn KISS logos more or less completely obliterating all of the artwork).

Me: I don't think I'd be able to resell them in this condition.
Guy: Oh really?
Me: Yeah, sorry

[scene]

You always forget the ones you love.

2011-04-26T12:30:00.000-03:00

Woman: I only have a minute because I called a cab... but I just wanted to check with you.... I had a tape... 89/90... and it had a couple of songs on it that were hits. And I don't have the tape anymore... and I've been looking for it ever since. Those two songs were just fantastic and I really wanted them again.

Me: (after a long silence hoping there was more information). This was a tape called 89/90?

Woman: No, no, no... that was the year, I think, it CAME OUT. No, no it was an album by a group around then that had two songs on it. One was a hit right away... the other later got used somewhere for something and became really well known. But I don't think the group did very much after...

Me: There are a lot of groups this description could apply to... Hundreds, Thousands, even.

Woman: Oh, really? Oh shoot.

Me: You don't have any other information that would be helpful?

Woman: No, well, they had kind of a Celtic thing mixed with pop... and the song they had... the famous song had like a waltz or "midnight serenade" feel to it. Around 89/90 they came out.

Me: Hmmm. Maybe The Corrs, no? And you don't remember the name of either of the songs?

Woman: No, but if you said the name, of the song or the group, I'd remember it right away. My sister and I really loved those songs. She didn't have them, I had the cassette. She went up to HMV and they said they'd look into it.

Me: Well maybe they'll turn something up... but I'd need a little more to go on. If you can think of anything else come back in and we'll see what we can track down.

Woman: OK, thanks.

I think I've figured it out

2011-04-08T12:28:00.000-03:00

5 for Friday 3

2011-04-08T11:22:00.001-03:00

Five songs, chosen without a plan, brought together to see.
Download and enjoy:

01 "Another Planet"
The Notwist - Shrink (Community/1998)

02 "Isolation"
Joy Division - Closer (Factory/1980)

03 "Kule Kule"
Konono #1 - Congotronics (Crammed/2004)

04 "Dial: Revenge"
Mogwai - Rock Action (Matador/2001)

05 "Orange Disaster"
David Grubbs - The Thicket (Drag City/1998)

Duration: 16'53" Size: 25.5 Mb
Download

Five for Friday 2

2011-03-25T10:41:00.000-03:00

[photo stolen from Mike Nason's Facebook page]

Five songs, chosen without a plan, brought together to see.
Download and enjoy:

01 "Roman Candle"
Bedhead - Beheaded (Trance Syndicate/1996)

02 "Femmes Damnées"
Geoff Farina - Already Told You (Southern/2005)

03 "Écologie + Histoire part 3"
Vitaminsforyou - I'm Sorry Forever And For Always (Intr_version/2003)

04 "Blankets & Shields"
Canyon - Empty Rooms (Gern Blandsten/2001)

05 "Fields and Parks of Easy Access"
Town & Country - Up Above (Thrill Jockey/2006)

Duration: 14'03" / Size: 20 Mb
Download

Five for Friday

2011-03-18T23:00:00.001-03:00

Five songs, chosen without a plan, brought together to see.
Download and enjoy:

01 "Afraid"
Nico - Desertshore (Reprise/1970)

02 "How Much Progress One Makes"
Pan.American - White Bird Release (Kranky/2008)

03 "Walking and Falling"
Laurie Anderson - Big Science (Warner/1982)

04 "Come Close My Eyes"
Flying Saucer Attack - Further (Drag City/1995)

05 "Two Blue Lights"
Songs:Ohia - Didn't It Rain (Secretly Canadian/2002)

Duration: 15'30'' / Size: 22 Mb
Download mp3

CHERRY (2009)

2011-02-22T20:57:00.002-04:00

Lady in the Radiator

2011-02-07T21:35:00.000-04:00

via If We Don't, Remember Me

“In Heaven, everything is fine. … You’ve got your good things, and I’ve got mine.”
Eraserhead (1976)

A Sequence of Lines Traced by 500 Individuals

2011-02-07T21:23:00.001-04:00

via Roomthily

A Sequence of Lines Traced by Five Hundred Individuals from clement valla on Vimeo.

Tasnafanuary

2011-01-08T10:18:00.000-04:00

I hope everyone is having a great Tasnafanuary. If you haven't already I encourage you to get a tattoo of a snake on your face in support of Hepatitis C research.

High Resolution

2010-12-25T14:19:00.000-04:00

This may sound like a peculiar statement, given what most of you know about me, but I'm making a pledge to listen to more music in 2011.

OK. Maybe that needs some clarification.

It's Xmas (merry xcetera, btw), and since I find myself at home in Fredericton for the holiday for, I think, the first time (?), I've been spending the morning cleaning and organizing. Don't ask me why, but holidays make me want to do anything but relax... which is what I do the rest of the time, I suppose. Of the elements needing organization in my life the most constant is my music. Besides the fairly well stored already sorted collection there are always stacks and stacks (and stacks) of CDs that have come in since the last mass alphabetization. Usually I try to keep these intervals down to a month or two at most, but 2010 has been a year of fairly constant crisis and/or minor distraction. As a result there are approximately 200-300 CDs that have accumulated in piles both minor and major all over the house.

Here is a break down of the stacks and their specific species designation.

(1) CDs that I bought and/or got as play copies at the store. [these need only to be inserted into the collection]

(2a) CDs that I received from Exclaim! to review [as yet unreviewed]
(2b) CDs that I received from Exclaim! to review [reviewed and vetted to keep]
(2c) CDs that I received from Exclaim! to review [reviewed and vetted to dispose of either through sales at the store or some other manner]
(2d) CDs that I received from Exclaim! to review [not reviewed and past deadline, but still need listening to determine whether they are keepers or not]

(3) CDs that I received from labels and/or services for the Surgery podcast. These are not usually divided into subsets as quickly, but are currently in need of a good purge of the titles that likely won't get any further listens.

(4) The big pile on the hallway bureau that is a weird combination of all the other types and sits gathering accusatory energy beneath my mittens and toques.

These stacks have been built and dismantled and scattered and recombined multiple times since late Spring. And now I'm taking another run at it. Today. Xmas day. Simultaneously I am compiling my top 50 for 2010 in preparation for both the Backstreet Blog and the NYE party next week. Other than a co-mingled sense of pride, accomplishment, shame and panic it occurs to me that of these few hundred CDs I've not really given even half of them more than a cursory perusal. So the question I ask (and have asked previously in truth) is "what's the point?"

So I come back around to the resolution: to make next year a time to listen... actually listen... like for pleasure rather than critical evaluation or utility... to more music.

Right now I'm listening to John Fahey's The Yellow Princess... a CD that I purchased to put into my collection sometime back in July, I think. It's a good sunny December day album (Xmas music is not my thing). What's up next? We... shall see.

My First Dragontape

2010-12-16T00:14:00.002-04:00

---
UNCUFFED
(00:59:55)
---

1. Sparklehorse "Home Coming Queen" (03:36)
2. Sam Amidon - 'Saro' (04:04)
3. Juana Molina (05:52)
4. Helado Negro- Dahum (03:46)
5. Castanets - Cathedral 4 / Sway - A Take Away Show (05:21)
6. cLOUDDEAD 'Dead Dogs Two' (BOC mix) Music Video (Unofficial) (05:01)
7. The Notwist "One With the Freaks" Director: Keith Schofield (03:40)
8. MEGAFAUN - Impressions of the Past (05:33)
9. Sleater-Kinney Modern Girl Burn To Shine (03:13)
10. Parts & Labor - "The Gold We're Digging" Jagjaguwar Records (03:01)
11. Telekinesis - Call All Doctors (Live on KEXP) (03:21)
12. Nina Nastasia - Cry, Cry, Baby - Fatcat Records (04:03)
13. Scout Niblett (Feat. Will Oldham) - Kiss (06:09)
14. Palace Brothers - You will miss me when I burn (03:15)

---
Created by surgeryradio (Thu Dec 16 04:09:42 UTC 2010)

Make your own: www.dragontape.com

Well, maybe not every day.

2010-12-14T17:55:00.002-04:00

Did you know that it's ANIMATED_GIF_A_DAY week?

2010-12-08T20:48:00.001-04:00

Did you know that the ANIMATED_ GIF_A_DAY week starts on Wednesday?

Now you do.

Welcome December

2010-12-02T18:39:00.000-04:00

One of THESE days:

2010-10-14T20:08:00.001-03:00

Fredericton, my Fredericton

2010-10-06T14:27:00.000-03:00

While it's true that I haven't lived in very many places... and therefore my opportunities for comparison are slim... I feel like Fredericton has more than its fair share of peculiarities that make it an alternately fascinating, wonderful, frustrating and sometimes truly fist-clenchingly dumb town. Let's throw light on a few of them over the next few posts, shall we? OK.

King's Place Lines and Service.

The straightest route between home and work takes me through King's Place each morning. The businesses I frequent there most often are the Scotiabank (bank machine only), The Dollar Store, The Smoke Shop (or whatever it's called), Shopper's Drug Mart, The Key Cutting Place (or whatever it's called) and the Food Court. What all these places have in common are frequent long lines and nearly-as-frequent dubious service.

The Scotiabank: while this is not uniquely true of it's bank machine, there always seems to be someone at the front of the line that (a) is trying to do something very, very complex through their apparently dozens of accounts than (b) requires finding at least three banking cards, none of which they though to start looking for until they begin the process at the machine itself.

The Dollar Store: I have no real complaint about the staff here. Some of them seem quite funny and charming despite what must be a daily exercise in self-flagellation. But while many Dollar Stores are cramped this one is truly claustrophobic, with aisles so tight they cannot contain their often doublewide customer base. It was yesterday's peculiar moment that gave me the idea for taking a look at the duality of our fair city. I dropped in to buy a new chord for the store's phone handset... I was a little bit in a hurry it should be said... and so when I was wedged at the counter behind two native ladies in their late 50s perusing the Dollar Store nose rings... ... ... .... I mean... Dollar Store... NOSE RINGS!!! WTF!!!

The Smoke Shop (or whatever): I know this is, again, not uncommon elsewhere... but how many times have I been making steady progress towards my working day only to be derailed at this little hemorrhoid of a "convenience" store by a queue of pensioners either checking their losing 6/49 tickets or chosing $27 worth of scratch tickets while their cats go hungry at home?

Shopper's Drug Mart: No I don't have a fucking Optimum Card... why don't you just lower all your prices by 5% and call it even, ok?

The Key Cutting Place (or whatever): Generally is totally fine... innocuous... benign... but yesterday (the other half of my Dollar Store debacle/progress halter)... I needed three keys cut. Now the shop owner and all-the-time counterman was not in for the first and only time I've ever witnessed. Instead there was a gentleman I would often see hanging out at the counter (Fredericton... and especially King's Place... specializes in human fixtures... the omnipresent loafer that's graduated to malingerer.) But today he was my cutter of keys. He got 2 of the three more or less right (many of the duplicates the shop make seem to share the same flaw... a need to sing them fully into the lock then pull slightly back out while turning in order to unlock the door)... but the 3rd would not even go into the keyhole. I went back over and let him know... and he confessed that he was lacking in key cutting experience and that the owner would be back on Friday (this was Tuesday). I tried to think if there was another place downtown to get this done right away... but while I was coming up empty he decided to have another crack at it. I volunteered that the owner had made another copy of this same key a little while back and that he had to consult a guide since the original make was no longer available, but that there was an adequate substitute that had worked. I also mentioned that the key head was oval... that much was very very definite in my memory. Rather than confine himself to this information he cut two more keys, both with diamond shaped heads, and said confidently, "I'm sure one of these will do the job." Neither did.

The Food Court: I logically know that I shouldn't buy food at McDonald's. I know this. Still. I do. So I look at the break time death marches and counter incompetence as my punishment for going against my better judgement. McDonald's offers free refills on coffee and soft drinks and this often makes up 75% of the liners up... so the line usually progresses fairly quickly. Except of course when the Fredericton-style confusion sets in and certain persons-of-the-line decide to express their individualism by, for some reason, positioning themselves 8-10 feet abreast of the actual line. Now it's important to make the distinction here that they are not starting or standing in another imagined line... they are really somehow in the same line you are a part of, only... you know... really to the left or right of it. Puzzling. On the other side of the counter it always seems that the King's Place MacDonald's is the Australia to all the other MacDonalds's Victorian England. The long-time staff mostly are confined, Oompa Loompa-like, to a behind the scenes role of labor while the front of house staff is a rotating cast of young folk and seniors banished from the high profile Prospect or Regent Mall locations. They routinely run out of things like... you know... cups, napkins, burger wrappers. They will forget to make coffee, put fries or hash browns down. Generally the "fast" notion is downgraded to "moderately rapid" food. Serves me right, though.

So that covers the first small segment of the Fredericton Experience through my own private lens. Maybe next we'll cover how there are several dozen hair cutting places, massage therapists and tattoo shops but only two bookstores and one record store downtown. OK? ok.

Weird Discoveries

2010-09-29T21:11:00.002-03:00

Did you know that actress Kyle Richards:

whose most recent role was a stint as Nurse Dori on ER (not counting her current appearances as herself in Real Housewives of Beverly Hills), is not only Paris Hilton's Aunt:

but also starred as one of Jamie Lee Curtis' terrified babysitting charges (Lindsey) in the very first Halloween:

The Bananas Split

2010-08-18T14:03:00.000-03:00

Early Monday morning, August 9th. I'm in the store doing a little prep work for the week. So the phone rings... so I pick it up, as I'm trained to do.

Me: Backstreet
He: Backstreet?
Me: Yes.
He: Oh, hey, yeah... I'm hoping you can help me. I'm looking for a Deep Purple album and I'm having a hell of time tracking it down.
Me: OK... what's the title?
He: It's one I had a long time ago, then I loaned it to someone and, yeah, well [chuckles], you know...
Me: OK... what's the title?
He: Oh... yeah, man... it's called Bananas.
Me: Bananas? I'm not familiar with that one... we definitely don't have it in stock at the moment.
He: Well I did have it at one point... I think I bought it at the record store in the Fredericton Mall, when there was a record store at the Fredericton Mall.
Me: Was it an older title, or a live one... it might have been an "official bootleg" or something along those lines.
He: Well I don't know... I don't have a computer and I'm on disability... so I can't really check...
Me: All right... well, I don't actually work today, I'm just in setting up the store for the week, but give me your contact info and I can check and get back to you later in the week.
He: Cool... I'd really like to get me hands on that album.

Information is provided.

Later in the week... I've done the research, but because I wrote the contact and album info on a piece of scrap paper and not in our order book... and that piece of paper is somewhere in a stack of semi-connected pocket detritus in my apartment... I'm unable to call him back on Wednesday and Thursday... but he calls back on Friday morning, August 13th. In the meantime I've found this out about Deep Purple Bananas on Wikipedia:

Bananas is the 17th studio album by English rock band Deep Purple,^[1] released on October 7, 2003.^[2] It includes "Contact Lost", a short, slow instrumental about the Columbia astronauts, written by guitarist Steve Morse when he heard the sad news of the crash.^[3]
This is the first Deep Purple album to feature Don Airey on the keyboards, replacing founding member Jon Lord.^[4] The album was recorded in Los Angeles during January and February of 2003.^[1]
It is also notable as being the only Deep Purple album that features Ian Gillan being backed by vocals other than his own, with the song "Haunted" featuring a female backing singer, Beth Hart.

Me: Backstreet
He: Hey, Backstreet, yeah... I called earlier about a Deep Purple album...
Me: Oh yeah... I looked into that... it does actually exist after all. It's not a bootleg, but it's fairly recent... from 2003.
He: I don't think so man... the album I had was from the 70s...
Me: Well all the information I have seems to indicate it's from 2003.
He: Well, sure it was probably reissued in 2003, but it's a 70s album... it has all the guys from the 70s on it.
Me: [double checking on the official Deep Purple site... confirms the 2003 release date, I read this paragraph from the "History" section over the phone]:

“Bananas,” the first record following Lord’s retirement from touring and his replacement by exquisite ivory-tinkler Don Airey, brought elements of pop to the table, grafted on some of “Purpendicular’s” ambition, and encapsulated the ensemble-riff power of “Abandon.” Tours behind both of these albums revealed this still-young band’s continued growth as a performing unit. By the end of the "Bananas" marathon, Airey had marked his apotheosis, from "replacement" to fully-integrated band-member.

He: That's bogus, man... I had that album on vinyl in the 70s and then I bought it on CD sometime around 2003 to replace it... then I loaned it out... or brought it to a party... or something...
Me: Well... I don't know what to tell you, all the information I have says it's a 2003 release, featuring most of the original line up, but still a new album. Are you sure you're not mixing up two different albums?
He: No man... like... I know the cover... it's a shot of a dude sitting in a truck full of bananas, right?
Me: Let me check... [checking]:

Me: Yup, that's the cover at Amazon... but they say it's a 2003 release too.
He: Well that's just not right, man... I held that album on vinyl in my hands in the 70s... and then I had it on CD later on then I loaned...
Me: ...it to someone, or brought it to a party... yeah, well I can only go by the information all these sites have... and well...
He: Yeah, man, totally... but it's a 70s album. Can you get it in, though?
Me: [anticipating that this whole thing could turn into months of trouble ending up in mutually dissatisfaction... I lie] No.
He: No?
Me: No. It looks like you could get it as an import from Amazon, but no one we deal with in Canada has it.
He: I figured it might be hard to get... yeah.
Me: Yeah... maybe you could get someone to get it for you online?
He: ...yeah, but you said you had a picture of the cover there?
Me: ...the one on Amazon, yeah?
He: Well, I actually have the tracks from the album saved on my Xbox... but I just don't have the cover... do you have a printer there?
Me: [started to get a little freaked out by all this] No I don't have a printer.
He: Do you have access to computers with a printer anywhere?
Me: Not at the moment... and the picture's kind of small to print off...
He: But you can see the dude in the picture... you can see his eyes?
Me: Not really well... it's a small picture.
He: Too small? There's something about his eyes, though, man... you know?
Me: Not really, no...
He: Yeah... I really need that cover to check out those eyes... I remember it from the vinyl I had in the 70s.
Me: ...um, ok.
He: And you can't get it in?
Me: No, sorry.
He: And you can't print the cover off... cause I'd give you dollars, man, dollars.
Me: Can't do it, maybe someone else you know with a computer and a printer.
He: That seems unlikely right now.
Me: ...
He: Well whatever, man... I'll get it somehow, I suppose. I'll be in sometime to take a look around, buy something else from you.
Me: Cool. Have a good day.

Forgotten Sidekick Week: Orko

2010-04-28T16:45:00.000-03:00

Orko

born 1980s in the Trolla dimension (not to be confused with the Trololololololo dimension).

Most likely because the beneficiary of his sidekickerage had no real need for it, Mr. Orko could be classified as one of those helpers who actually hindered the hero's progress. Accidentally ending up in Eternia during some cosmic flimflammery Orko saved young Prince Adam and his pet cat Cringer from a tar swamp. While this was fortunate for Prince Adam, who later in life took on the mantle of He-Man, it also seemed to be one of the few helpful attempts that didn't backfire for Orko. Combining a lack of control over his magic powers with a zest to help and a curiousity about life in Eternia, Orko was the source of iritation to others like Man-at-Arms and of laughter for we the viewers.

Interesting tidbit: the original character prototype for Orko was called Gorpo, but because animaters often would flip cells to double their usefulness a non-symmetrical character like "G" would produce continuity problems.

Lou Schemer (credited as Erik Gunden) provided the voice of Orko.

Forgotten Sidekick Week: Pamela Hensley

2010-04-26T13:29:00.001-03:00

Pamela Hensley

Born October 3, 1950 Glendale, CA

Proving that Sidekickology is not restricted to either men or shady characters, Ms. Hensley served as aide du camp to Matt Houston, titular protagonist of the ABC series that ran from 1982-1985. Lee Horsley played Matlock Houston, a billionaire Texas oilman who, for some reason, also worked as a private investigator in his ample spare time. Ms. Hensley played his lawyer, C.J. Parsons, who provided sage advice, someone to become imperiled very frequently and a Commodore VIC20 that seemed to have an anachronistic amount of networking/database capabilities.

Ms. Hensley is perhaps better known (especially to young men now in their 30s and 40s) for her previous role as the mischievous Princess Ardala on the 1979-80 series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Matt Houston seems to have been the venue for Ms. Hensley's last onscreen activity. Wikipedia reveals her more recent activities have included the 2004 publication of a small cookbook called The Jewish-Sicilian Cookbook authored under the name Pamela Hensley Vincent.

Forgotten Sidekick Week: Thom Bray

2010-04-25T12:04:00.001-03:00

Thom Bray

Born April 30th 1954

80s television crime dramas saw the rise of pastel casual wear, colourful and exotic locations and a sidekick culture that ran parallel to the tried and true ex-con / small time hood paradigm. It was the hour of the nerd. On Riptide Mr. Bray played Murray "Boz" Bozinsky, a scientist / computer hacker who sidekicked Vietnam vets-turned private investigators Cody Allen and Nick Ryder, played by Perry King and Joe Penny. Boz himself had a sidekick of sorts: a non-verbal robot dubbed "Roboz." The name of the show was also the name of the boat the trio used as homebase in King Harbor Marina. The show ran from 1984-86 on NBC.

His post-Riptide credits include stints as writer and producer on shows such as Designing Women and Nash Bridges. He is currently a drama teacher at Five Oaks Middle School in Beaverton, Oregon, and also teaches Television Studies at Portland State University.

Forgotten Sidekick Week: Charlie Callas

2010-04-24T10:49:00.004-03:00

Charlie Callas

Born December 20. 1924 in Brooklyn New York

As a stand-up comedian Mr. Callas' defining moment was, perhaps, getting banned permanently from the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson after shoving Johnny on-air in a desperate attempt to generate laughs. That was frowned upon, apparently.

His sidekickerage came at the service of Robert Wagner and Eddie Albert for three seasons of Switch, a CBS series that ran between 1975-78. Wagner and Albert were a crimefighting duo, the latter playing a retired cop and the former an ex-conman who threw together to form a Private Investigations office (as was the way in the 70s) whose speciality was "out-conning the cons." Callas played Max Argos, another former con-man and associate of Wagner's character, Pete Ryan. His concurrent function, other than providing ex-con-man insight, was running a restaurant where the crew could meet.

Mr. Callas, apparently also an avid photographer and astronomer, just wrapped production (a cameo appearence) in the as-yet-unreleased 3-D movie Horrorween which also features appearences by Jenna Jameson, William Shatner and Donald Trump.

Here he is with Dom DeLuise.

Forgotten Sidekick Week: Bart Braverman

2010-04-23T13:00:00.001-03:00

BART BRAVERMAN

Born Februrary 1st, 1946 in Los Angeles, CA

Mr. Braverman is best known/best forgotten for his role as Bobby "Binzer" Borso on the ABC televsion show Vega$. His sidekickery was in the service of Robert Urich who played the leading role of P.I. Dan Tanna. He appeared in 21 episodes between 1978-81. Wikipedia describes Binzer's character arc thusly: a college student who did Dan Tanna's leg work and usually provided comic relief. In the beginning of the series, Binzer was a petty thief who fled to Vegas to escape his former partners in crime from back east, as described in one episode... Tanna seemed to have taken him under his wing and used his knowledge and connections of the street.

In those halcyon days Mr. Braverman also made several appearences on pre-Reality Show degradation programs like Match Game, Hollywood Squares, Love Boat, and Fantasy Island... the last of which featured segments titled Cyrano/The Magician where Mr. Braverman played a character called Timothy Potter. Potter... Magician... sound familar??? That Fantasy Island episode also featured a guest appearance from Judy Landers who coincidentally was also a recurring character on Vega$.

Mr. Braverman continues to work in Hollywood, most recently in a 2007 appearence as "Ambassador" on "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody"

I wish I was just making this stuff up:

2010-02-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

Ring Ring

Hello, Backstreet

Yeah... do you have TV CDs or is it just music?

I'm not sure what you mean by TV CDs.

You know, CDs of TV shows...

You mean like TV themes, because that IS music...

No no no... CDs of seasons of TV...

You mean DVDs... right?

Yeah... DVDS... do you have any?

Yes we have some...

Do you have Reality?

No we don't have any reality shows.

Oh... ... ... so... do you have a list of what you have?

No... but I know what we have...

Do you have Dog the Bounty Hunter?

No we don't have Dog the Bounty Hunter.

What Reality do you have?

We don't have any reality shows.

You don’t have any Reality?

No.

OK goodbye.

click

A life in letters.

2010-01-26T21:56:00.000-04:00

I've been wasting my time with my fancy bloggin'. Apparently this is how you do it:

Taken from here.

Prabhupada Letters :: 1966
a.c. bhaktivedanta swami

31 January 2004
JOURNAL: Monday 31 January N.Y.

Today I met two Foundations Carnegie Corporation of New York & Russel Sage Foundation. To contact again tomorrow by phone.

Expenditure. Busfare .30 test | 01:12 |

30 January 2004
JOURNAL: Sunday 30 January Too much snow falling today and the wind blowing very severely. So I could not go to Dr. Mishra's apartment for meals. Some how or other I managed my bath and meals in the studio.

Purchased milk & butter .51. test | 01:10 |

29 January 2004
JOURNAL: Saturday 29 January Mr. Hill will call me at 10-10/30 am.

Geeta meeting at Studio at 4 pm.

Mr. Hill informed that Sachin Mazumdar can be contacted on phone and thus meet him. Mr. Cohen came at 4 pm with friends and heard me for one and half hour up 5/30 pm.
He has taken away one set of Books on approval.

Two sets of book received back from Paragon book gallery making altogether 3 new sets taken back from them.
Expenditure: Banana - .26
Busfare - .30
.56

To Sri Sri Adwaita Prabhu's appearance observed by fasting like Ekadasi test | 01:09 |

28 January 2004
JOURNAL: Friday 28 January N.Y.

Purchased vegetables -- .42
Busfare -- .30
Expenditure .72

Saw Mr. Cohen at his place. He is to come here tomorrow at 4 pm. test | 01:07 |

27 January 2004
JOURNAL: Thursday 27 January Mr. Hill gave me the address of Sachin Mazumdar.

Enquired from Camera House about T.R. Mr. Eric's friend Mr. Dick.

One set books price of $16.00 paid by Mrs. Milapsky.

Today Mr. Cohen* met. He gave his address and invited me to see his apartment in the Down Town.

No Expenditure. test | 01:05 |

26 January 2004
JOURNAL: Wednesday 26 January N.Y.

Meeting at the Church at 4 West 76th St at 7 pm.

The following letters despatched.
(1) Sally Agarwal 603, N. Walnut St Re: Books
Dover, Ohio.
(2) Miss. H Sattley, Bureau of Libraries Re: Books
110, Livingston St. Brooklyn N.Y.
(3) Dr. Seymour Fersh, Asia Society Re: Books
112, East 64th St. New York City.

Went to see the Tape-recorder. Found no good.

Expenditure
Butter -- .44
Busfare -- .30
.74

one set book sold
at the Universalist
Church of Divine Paternity
Central Park West at 76th St. N.Y. test | 01:02 |

25 January 2004
JOURNAL: Tuesday 25 January N.Y.

Received letter from Mrs. Sally Agarwal* 603 N. Walnut St. Dover Ohio intimating that she is taking my book to her new residence. It appears that she has had not received my letter Dt 18/1/66.

Decided to purchase one Tape Recorder Martel. From the advertisement Times of New York.

No Expenditure today.

one set of books taken by Mrs. Milapsky she promises to pay on Thursday 27/1/66.

Lectures delivered in the studio on the test of spiritual realisation. It means no more any artificial demand for the body and mind. People appreciated.

No expenditure today.

The Year in Reviews

2010-01-06T20:00:00.002-04:00

For my own amusement, if not yours, I compiled and linked the articles and reviews I did for Exclaim! in 2009.

Articles/Interviews:
Fennesz
Jacob Kierkegaard - Labyrinthitis
The Decemberists - Hazards of Love
The Field
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
Mark Templeton - Inland
We Are Wolves
Year in Review: Animal Collective
Year in Review: Mountains
Radian - Chimeric

Reviews:
Murcof - Versailles Sessions
Ulaan Khol - II
The Welcome Wagon - Welcome to the Welcome Wagon
IMPS - Remixed
Gregory and the Hawk - Moenie Kitchi
Loney, Dear - Dear John
Made in Mexico - Guerillaton
Aethenor - Faking Gold and Murder
Asher - Landscape Studies
Astral Social Club - Octuplex
Bohren and Der Club of Gore - Delores
Dirty Beaches - Horror LP
Ethan Rose - Oaks
I8U - 10 -33 cm
M. Templeton & aA Munson - Acre Loss
Manual - Confluence
Nick Butcher - Bee Removal
Northern Valentine - Distance Brings Us Closer
Pan.American - White Bird Release
Reigns - House on the Causeway
Sylvain Chauveau - Black Book of Capitalism
Zak Riles - S/T
Intrusion - Seduction of Silence
Robert Henke - Atom/Document
Arboretum - Song of the Pearl
D.Rider - Mother of Curses
Drones - Havilah
Sin Fang Bous - Clamour
These Are Powers - All Aboard Future
Animal Hospital - Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues
Aughra - Proof of Dark Matter/Light the Lights
Balmorhea - All is Wild, All is Silent
Black Dice - Repo
Tomasz Bednarczyk - Painting Sky Together
Montag - Hibernation
Various - Pop Ambient 2009
Last Days - Safety of the North
Pontiak - Maker
Fridge - Early Output 1996-1998
Storsveit Nix Noltes - Royal Family Divorce
Baja - Aether Obelisk
Dntel - Works for Me if it Works for you II
Various - Enjoy the Silence
Akron/Family - Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free
Belmez - Apariciones
Kingsbury Manx - Ascenceur Ouvert!
Our Brother the Native - Sacred Psalms
Anduin & Jasper TX - The Bending of Light
Comfort - Sleep Talking Shared
Martin Schulte - Depth of Soul
Bachelorette - My Electric Family
Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
City Centre - S/T
The Curious Mystery - Rotting Slowly
Magik Markers - Balf Quarry
Matt Krefting - I Couldn't Love You More
Wand - Hard Knox
The Wooden Birds - Magnolia
Wooden Shjips - Dos
Monahans - Dim the Aurora
AGF + Sue C. - MiniMovies
Christopher Tignor - Core Memory Unwound
Francisco Lopez & Lawrence English - HB
Rapoon - Dark Rivers
Sleep Whale - Little Brite
William Fowler Collins - Perdition Hill Radio
Plastik Joy - 3:03
Various - Iceberg
Vitaminsforyou - He Closed His Eyes So He Could Dance With You
Bowerbirds - Upper Air
John Vanderslice - Romanian Names
Manchester Orchestra - Means Everything to Nothing
Masha Qrella - Speak Low
Mankind - Ice Machine
Peter Broderick - Music for Falling from Trees
Icarus - Sylt Remixes
Desolation Wilderness - New Universe
Gary Higgins - Seconds
Pastels/Tenniscoats - Two Sunsets
Aarktica - In Sea
Kreng - L'Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu
Lokai - Transitions
Pedestrian Deposit - Austere
Risil - Non-Meters Vol. 1
Stade - Freewheel
Yoshi Wada - Earth Horns with Electronic Drone
Altz - Escape
Brock Van Wey - White Clouds Drift On and On
Porn Sword Tobacco - Everything is Music to the Ear
Helado Negro - Awe Owe
Black Feather - Silhouette
Black Feelings - S/T
Black Mold - Snow Blindness is Crystal Antz
Dial M for Murder - Fiction of Her Dreams
Holy Sons - Criminal's Return
Lightning Dust - Infinite Light
Ramona Falls - Intuit
Thao with the Get Down Stay Down - Know Better Learn Faster
To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie - Marlone
Royal City - 1999-2004
Mem 1 - +1
Ethernet - 144 Pulsations of Light
Fieldhead - They Shook Hands for Hours
Mungolian Jet Set - We Gave it All Away
Early Day Miners - The Treatment
Lights - Rites
Ambarchi/Fennesz/Pimmon/Rehberg/Rowe - Afternoon Tea
Wooley/Lytton/Grubbs - Seven Storey Mountain
Klimek - Movies is Magic
M - Pop Muzik: 30th Anniversary Remixes
Black Heart Procession - Six
Capybara - Try Brother
Castanets - Texas Rose, The Thaw & The Beasts
Glass Ghost - Idol Omen
Hallelujah the Hills - Colonial Drones
Low Low Low La La La Love Love Love - Feels, Feathers, Bogs and Bees
Mountain Goats - Life of the World to Come
Tickley Feather - Hors D'oeuvres
Todor Kabokov - Pop Music

Hey 2010... Yeah!!! Next.

2010-01-05T20:49:00.000-04:00

Today's Listening:

Dub Tractor - Sorry (City Centre Offices)
Akira Kosemura - Polaroid Piano (Someone Good)
Pit er Pat - The Flexible Entertainer (Thrill Jockey)
Crushed Stars - The Refracted Light of (Simulacra)
The Shaky Hands - Let it Die (Kill Rock Stars)
Nikasaya - One Summerheim (Someone Good)
Anduin - Abandoned in Sleep (SMTG)

Tuesday is weird coincidence day.

2009-11-10T21:43:00.001-04:00

So it's Monday afternoon and I have the rest of the day off. Rather than do something productive like write or even put away laundry that's been in my tote since mid-October I decide to pick a movie off the shelf to watch. I settle on Babel, mostly because I've been watching nothing but horror movies since Halloween (the day, not the movie).

So the DVD automatically cues up the trailers for some reason and rather than go to the main menu I just let them play. Second up is the movie Perfume, Tom Twyker's film that I'd ignored for a little while before finally watching (and liking) last summer. As the montage unspooled I noticed the red-haired actress that played Laura, one of Grenouille's perspective victims for essence of scent. I tried to remember what her real name was but couldn't.

So tonight I go to IMDB and pull up the movie page and the actor credits are listed in order of appearance or something, but I notice her picture in the links at the top:

So I click on the link and bring up the picture which also has her name:

So, you know, I click on that link to see what she's been in since, or is coming up in:

So (1) I notice that she is much younger than I remembered. In fact she must have been 15 when she filmed Perfume. So that kinda creeps me out a little. And (2) she's been in a couple of brainy sounding British films this year that I'd read about but haven't seen. Finally (3) she is set to star in what looks to be another sweeping epic next year.

I've been going to this fun film-slash-stock market site called HSX or Hollywood Stock Exchange for a few years now. It essentially is a play funds site where you can buy stock on upcoming films, stars or predictions of opening box office, betting on how well they will do. I'd lapsed for a year or more, but recently went back to reconnect. It's a quick and interactive way to get some insight into films as they progress through development and into production.

So after seeing Rachel Hurd-Wood's building filmography I go over to HSX to log in and see if she has a StarBond stock yet. I type in the URL and the home page comes up revealing this:

....Aaaannnnnd Synchronicity!!!!

Scene.

Exit.

Lights Down.

Monday is... well, you know.

2009-11-02T20:41:00.002-04:00

This is his web cam @

Monda....

2009-10-27T00:38:00.001-03:00

Wednesday is "Trying too hard but it's still..." Nothing Video Day

2009-10-21T23:53:00.002-03:00

It's a box. It's a set. It's a complete box set.

2009-10-14T20:45:00.004-03:00

Those who know me well know that I am not an impulse buyer. I tend to think, overthink and most often rethink purchases with the end result of talking myself out of ponying up the bucks. For example:

My stereo... the amp and speakers were purchased second hand in 1985 and they remain the only ones I've ever bought. I've gone through 3-4 different turntables since then and don't have one now. My CD player(s) have all been portables that I've plugged in to the stereo and I've gone through about 4-5 of those since 1985, only the first of which did I spend more than $100 on (it was a first gen Panasonic bought at Magic Forest around 1989-ish for, I think, about $350) I've never bought a DVD player... the two I have were cast offs from an upgrader. I've never bought new furniture. My television is an obelisk that weighs about 50 kg. My computer is a ten year old Mac I paid $75 for.

You get the point.

Still this past Sunday I was at Future Shop picking up some computer accessories for work and I rounded the corner into the DVD box sets. And there it was. I was already spending around $100 for the other items and it seemed the time to let the knee jerk. So I tucked it under my arm and brought it up to the cash.

I regret nothing.

Tuesday after Thanksgiving Monday is Nothing Video Day After Day

2009-10-13T19:32:00.002-03:00

Fixed... sorry for the confusion.

Monday. Nothing. Video. Day.

2009-09-21T20:06:00.001-03:00

Best distorted in-restaurant thing ever.

...also yesterday was Nothing Video Day

2009-09-15T23:17:00.000-03:00

Taxi Cab Confessions

2009-09-15T21:21:00.005-03:00

So I switched cab companies over the summer. I had be going with Checker since they started the "VIP" program... that's the one where they initially handed out actual cards you could show when getting in that would get you 50 cents off your fare, then since no one actually kept the cards you could just say the word VIP and get the same discount. This essentially devolved to be the basic fare (was anyone not a VIP?) However you sliced it Checker was the cheapest cab going circa about two years ago.

When the gas prices spiked last year fares rose in sympathy and so the price of a cab from downtown to campus went from $5.50 to $6.50. My assumption was, based on infrequent non-Checker cab interactions, that everyone had put up fares... so I stuck with my VIP-loving buddies.

However late this Spring I grabbed a cab from King's Place to uptown and noted that the fare was less than I expected. What I eventually discovered was that after the gas prices slumped back to under a dollar a litre most cab companies had lowered their fares where as Checker hadn't... making them now the most expensive cab ride in town (as far as I know... and I don't know much).

With a new cab company comes new cab drivers with new stories and new mannerisms... and while there have been a few quirky ones my favourite to date was the one I rode with a week ago. Firstly this new cab company (that I won't name in an effort to minimize any embarassment) seems to have some stake in employing, shall we say... LARGE drivers... and I've seen some large cabbies in my time. This particular driver had all of the drive-through gourmands beat by far... to the point where he was obviously unable to buckle the van's seatbelt. This was made glaringly apparent by the warning chime that would go off every... five... seconds. The ten minute ride nearly drove me bonkers making me wonder why a full shift hadn't reduced him to poo flinging... again as far as I know it hadn't, but.... The other factor was, after finding out I was going to campus, how he volunteered without any prompting... "You wouldn't know it to look at me but I had a 3.3 GPA." Aside from the fact no one asked is the other fact that 3.3 isn't exactly a stellar GPA... not at bragworthy levels at least. This opening claim was followed, again unprovoked, by a list of all the politicians that had shaken his hand (Brian Mulroney, Shawn Graham, Steven Harper... again all underwhelming brushes with celebrity). Between all the binging and "bragging" and namedropping I was glad to finally get out of the cab. But what occurred to me a little later, as the echoing of the seatbelt alarm finally subsided, was that he was never actually leading to a point about anything... it was truly pure storytelling. Bravo.

Monday is nothing video day (again)

2009-09-07T17:26:00.001-03:00

Happy Labour Day.

Some Some Some Some Some Some Summertime.

2009-07-09T14:50:00.007-03:00

Even though it's been over a month since that last entry it seems like life's more or less been cascading from mid-May's events.

It set a kind of tone.

The third part of the equation... part one being finding a new part-time employee for the store... part two being having to go to a funeral on the very day that new employee was scheduled to start traing... the third part was coming back to find out firstly that everything had worked out ok at the store, better than ok even. Secondly, while basking in the ok-ness of things getting e-mails from my landlord saying she'd sold the building my apartment is in, and from my aunt saying she was concerned about my mom's health. The second half of that is a complex situation and not really a public-blog matter, so I'll just go on about the first.

I've lived in my apartment for around 15 years. Day/hour wise that means it has just recently inched into first place past even the house I grew up in. Now it's not an exceptionally nice apartment... but it is on a good street, in a convenient area and until recently it was madly affordable given the amount of space I had. My previous landlord had struck a "temporary" deal with me about 6-7 years ago that saw me as the sole occupant of this 3 bedroom for a 1 bedroom apartment rate. This was supposed to be for one year until renovations were completed and she could get three more people in. In actuality 3-4 years went by with no further mention of renovations... then one July evening she drove up while I was having a coffee on the front step and told me we "had to talk" about the rent. I assumed she'd be asking me to vacate so three new folks could move in... or at least have me get a couple roommates and raise the rent back to its previous rate (at bare minimum). Instead she said that she "had to put up my rent by $40/month," which was still equal to or less than what most people were paying for actual one bedrooms. Joy.

The new landlord seems to be pretty flexible... so far anyway... and all the actual one bedrooms I've looked at are pretty gross, so I think I'll be staying put for now. I'll catch you up as things progress.

*note this was sitting around in Drafts for some time.

All of the below.

2009-05-23T22:00:00.003-03:00

So it's about 7:00 am, Friday May 22nd. I got to bed around 2-2:30 am... and I know I have to get up around 8:30... my body knows it. I set the alarm, and if I bother to set the alarm I hardly ever sleep up to the point where the alarm will go off. My body usually provides what I've come to think of as a pre-snooze alarm where I wake up at least half an hour before the beeping and then doze in 5-7 minute increments until just before it starts, and turn it off.

But it's not 8:30 am... and it's not even 8:00 0r 7:30... it's 7:00 am.... and I'm awake. I'm awake because something is biting my ankle. In my sudden fuzzy alertness I grope down to my ankle half-expecting it to be a morning cramp only to finger what I assume is an ant making a snack of my foot joint. I do quick "sweep, sweep, sweep" motion at my ankle and sit up in bed but the little fucker is nowhere to be seen.

And I'm up.

It's been that kind of surreal month since I finished work at the lab for the term (which is why you haven't been enjoying nothing video Mondays... I'll try to post these with some regularity once things normalize a little).

Jumping around through the month this stuff happened:

I got to interview Dave Longstreth from The Dirty Projectors about their new album, Bitte Orca that comes out in June.

I've been working on writing with some success and some frustration that will hopefully lead to even more success.

I was readying myself for a kinda easy-going May with a stripped back work schedule at the store, but as it turned out my plans conflicted with Chris' securing a new job that takes him to NS four days a week... and eventually out of Backstreet completely. On the plus side when mentally narrowing down the candidates to take over for Chris one of the first people I considered approaching actually approached me... taking the guesswork and pressure off.

On the other downside of that same situation is the fact Steph was scheduled to start his Backstreet journey this coming Monday... but this past Friday, not four hours after my little insect interaction, my mom called me at work to tell me that my aunt (actually grand-aunt) Marg had passed away. She had been in the hospital for two months following a fall that had required hip replacement... a surgery no one expected her (she was 89 and had undergone heart surgery and the installation of a pacemaker in the last year) to pull through. She had pulled through and immediately began campaigning to get out of the hospital in time for Easter, but that date passed and her appetite began to fail, and her breathing was becoming troubled... and her body eventually gave up. So Steph's first day at work will unfold while I'm on a bus headed for the North Shore.

In other medical news... a couple of week's back I was working on a little recording experiment involving a glockenspiel, a microphone, a guitar pedal and a Kaoss pad. While the result was impressive... it also unleashed a burst of feedback that daggered my left ear drum. Over the next few days there was ringing, weird crunching, sensitivity etc. Making the mistake of telling a few people their amateur diagnoses (based on experiences and hearsay) had possibilities ranging from ear drum devouring infections and the need for MRIs. Panicked enough to make a doctor's appointment, by the time the intermediary ten days had passed all my symptoms were gone... but I went to my doctor's anyway. At the very least to make sure she was still around, given I hadn't been to her in four years. She looked in my ears and said everything looked fine... except for the massive amount of wax buildup she found. Now in another week I have to pay a return visit for an "ear syringing." I wonder what the world will sound like after?

What else?

I've watched a lot of movies... I bought the first two seasons of Miami Vice with built up points at Rogers... I wrote a lot of reviews for Exclaim!... I watched the season finales of Dollhouse, Life and SouthLAnd... I discovered that my average possible viewing time for any music-related channel before I'm irritated enough to throw a shoe is about 7.3 seconds... I fell in love with Emily Vukovic on the Weather Network (weekend evenings,yo)... I listened a lot to the new Akron/Family, the Iron and Wine b-sides compilation, The Wooden Birds (side project from a member of American Analog Set), Mark Templeton, etc.... I suffered my kitchen sink's leaky ways... had a customer rush in with two six packs as a thank you for running a records store in Fredericton... had another customer give me a can of Stella for staying open an extra ten minutes for him to come in and get his Tapes n Tapes vinyl (I'm liking the trend)... renewed my affection of Dimitri's gyros, microwave popcorn and egg salad sandwiches... renewed my dislike for Joan Rivers and Donald Trump by stupidly watching Celebrity Apprentice... cared about the Boston Bruins for a few minutes there... forgot one of my best friend's birthdays for the second year running (April, not May... April)... got a haircut and new shoes... paid nearly $900 in income tax... took some pictures of unpaired socks.

I'll go into greater detail about some of this stuff in days to come... but for now, I'm going to finish by veggie biryani and call it a night.

'night.

With one breath, with one flow

2009-04-20T19:13:00.009-03:00

It may be overstating the case, but I think I owe a debt to Sting for introducing big brained concepts into his music. Specifically I'm referring to the album Synchronicity that he and The Police released (as their last) in 1983. Besides providing them their biggest hit single, "Every Breath You Take," a creepy stalker ballad misused as both crush tape and wedding song fodder by folks who don't pay much attention to things, it had a pair of songs that weirdly tried to shoehorn a Jungian philosophical principle into a pop music format.

Here is its Description, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The idea of synchronicity is that the conceptual relationship of minds, defined as the relationship between ideas, is intricately structured in its own logical way and gives rise to relationships that are not causal in nature. These relationships can manifest themselves as simultaneous occurences that are meaningfully related—the cause and the effect occur together.

Synchronous events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework which encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems which display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.^{[citation needed]}

Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s but only gave a full statement of it in 1951 in an Eranos lecture and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle, in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.^[1]

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious,^[2] in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history—social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence but are later found to be causally related are termed as "incoincident".

Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.^[3]

One of Jung's favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards".^[4]

Despite the complexity of the ideas what it broke down to for pre-University Eric is that there were freaky coincidences that signalled an unidentified universal force at work. The kind of weirdness socially awkward teens love, right?

All of that preamble to say that I've been experiencing some fairly freaky coincidences over the last week or so. This example is a multi-faceted little gem of a co-inki-dink.

I've been rolling around the kernel of an idea about teaching a course on the films of David Lynch for a little while. Initally I thought it could fit under a creative writing heading focussing on the creative uses of the unconscious/subconscious for inspiration in poetry. Lynch often strings along his narrative with symbols and imagery that are connected very tenuously by tone and other poetic devices. So there's that. On a trip down to and back from Saint John Marc B. suggested that I talk to Allan Reid about adding it to UNB's expanding Cultural Studies program which is folding in the Film Studies minor in the not-too-distant future. So, yeah... that made sense. That was back in January or February (I think). I let time pass.

In the meantime I'd been reading a book I'd gotten for Xmas called New Kings of Nonfiction, an anthology edited by Ira Glass of This American Life. One of the standout pieces was "Host" by David Foster Wallace that took an in depth look at the Talk Radio format. When I finished the book I decided to see what else Wallace had in print, only to discover that he had committed suicide last September. So there's that. Nonetheless I decided I'd order in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of essays at Westminister Books.

In the meantime the weather was getting warmer, the snow was receding. A feeling of possibility seem to be escaping from the unfreezing earth. So I went ahead and finally e-mailed Prof. Reid about my idea for a David Lynch course. The next day the book came in at the store and I picked it up and flipped through it at work. Now I have to clarify... I did not research the book's contents before ordering it, beyond knowing it was a collection of essays... ok? So halfway into it the book has an essay entitled "David Lynch Keeps His Head," a lengthy piece originally written for Premiere magazine dealing with Lynch's Lost Highway. So there's that. That evening I checked my e-mail to see that Prof. Reid had quickly responded with a fairly affirmative tone. He suggested we set up a meeting. It was just before Easter weekend, so I sent him the list of days the following week I could meet.

Returning from Easter there was an e-mail that said the upcoming Friday would work well for both of us. So... cool. I thought of bringing up the coicidence about the Wallace essay... at least as an icebreaker. That Thursday (the day preceding Friday on the calendar) before work I drop into Read's to see the new magazines, and who's face do I see on the current Stop Smiling?

I know?!!!?

The interview was good, though fairly unrevelatory (Lynch seldom talks about his films), but in the introduction it mentioned two external references... the David Foster Wallace piece from Premiere and a book about Lost Highway written by Slavoj Žižek, a respected Lacanian Marxist who also is apparently somewhat of a film buff too (I'd bumped into him in the extras to the DVD for Children of Men). Mental note.

So the meeting went well... despite the usual and somewhat expected University jump-a-hoopiness that will stand in the way... optimism is still warranted. The weekend was a pleasant one. This morning I had some errands to run downtown and when they were done I stopped in at Read's again to get a Lemon/Blueberry tea, a copy of WIRE and to do a quick Google search on my iTouch for the title of the Žižek book. Sitting next to me, laptop open and on her cell phone is a student complaining to her friend how she had screwed up a question on a final exam she'd just taken. So just as the Amazon page with the book title comes up... at that moment... she says indignantly, "I know!!! It's just so ridiculous!!!" Swear to God.

Monday. Video. Nothing?

2009-04-20T19:04:00.002-03:00

This one is probably something... but I have no idea what that something is. So, it qualifies.

Surreal Nothings

2009-04-12T18:35:00.000-03:00

Happy Easter.

Monday is nothing video day.

2009-04-06T19:20:00.000-03:00

If this wasn't a test there'd be more Godzilla.

The sun always shines on...

2009-03-30T20:47:00.008-03:00

Sadly I could not find a nothing video for today. There were a few nearly nothings, but nothing truly nothing-like that would truly waste your time for having watched it.

Instead I will thrill you with tales of my television watching.

Now that Battlestar Galactica is wrapped up and we are only getting a little taste of Caprica with a DVD kickoff later in April (the series is starting sometime in 2010 from what I gather) the great hope for something new to fill the cathode dream machine was Dollhouse. For those not entirely in the know Dollhouse is the new series from Joss Whedon, producer and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly.

It stars Eliza Dushku as Echo, a young woman whose identity and personality has been "wiped," creating of her a blank slate that can be imprinted with any combination of attributes desired by a client who hires her. She is referred to as a "Doll," one of many offered up by the "Dollhouse." This company is a bit of a grey ghost, and their "actives" are rented out to the very wealthy for tasks that range from hostage negotiation to being straight-up playthings. So there's that. Because it's a Whedon show there are several backstories slowly simmering behind the action.

There is, for instance, the wildcard FBI agent (played by Battlestar alum Tahmoh Penikett) who is the only one outside who seems to believe the Dollhouse exists, and an ex-Doll called Alpha who malfunctioned and is at large, seemingly with his sights set on Echo and with some super-ninja programming in place.

I admit to being overly onboard to Whedon projects (I have all the seasons of Buffy, Angel and Firefly on DVD, for example), but after seven episodes I'm getting a little worried. He seems to be aiming closer to the center... and the unfortunate whiff of Alias hangs fragrantly in the air. The trademark irony and sardonic wit is dialed way down on this one... as is the team dynamic that informed all of his previous work. And the backstory is parceled out very sparingly, leaving unfortunately ho-hum lead stories to fill the time.

Dushku is doing ok, but the character is a little problematic. What might seem like a dream job, being able to play a new role every week, is undercut by the fact that, at the root she has no character at all. That element is well played, but hard to get behind as an audience straining to build a relationship with her. Whedon seems to be building on some grander statement about identity and will, but that has only been made rather obliquely so far.

The other characters have the job of advancing the arc, and that has it's high and low points. Harry Lennix plays Echo's "handler" Langton. His job is to oversee and return her at the end of her assigned task. He plays the outsider... our viewpoint into the situation... and someone not entirely invested in the company, which works fairly well. The aforementioned FBI agent, Ballard, is a little stereotypically misunderstood and lone wolf-y. Though he is starting to flesh out a little. Whereas the head of security character Laurence Dominic is barely two-dimensional... he is a company man, and not much else at this point. Olivia Williams plays the oh-so-properly British Miss Dewitt... sort of the Giles to the Dolls I suppose, but she too remains underdeveloped. Finally there is Fran Kranz as Topher, who is the youthful wisecracking genius brain chemist and computer nerd who programs the Dolls. He is the "zany" character, a Xander/Andrew (from the Buffyverse) composite here to provide "magic" solutions and comic relief to the precedings... and he's very very very annoying. What made Xander and Andrew work was their outsider status and struggles to gain a place in the world. Topher is already "in" so his quirks are more like an overextended SNL Tech Support sketch.

When Firefly met its premature demise one of the story threads Whedon confessed to have been running in the background was the "Blue Sunshine" corporation, ostensibly a company concerned with the manufacture of junk food and soft drinks. Here he is developing the notion of a corporation that may or may not be evil running another service which may or may not be immoral with someone on the inside trying to undermine things to an end that also remains unrevealed. It's a whole lot of opaque to deal with.

So... I'm going to stay with it and hope for the best. If it goes balls up I'll go back to Life (which I've gotten behind on watching and so have been putting off catching up until the season is over). Otherwise there's always reading, right?

In related news this was linked on IMDB, sadly.

Tuesday is a day late for nothing video day. Yeah? OH YEAH?

2009-03-25T21:33:00.000-03:00

enjoy.

Spring Horrors. Recommendations.

2009-03-16T18:11:00.004-03:00

I've been watching a lot of movies lately... and still pretty stuck in the horror genre... hoping to find some hidden gems. Here are three recommendations for things either just released or soon to be.

Splinter
Released April 14, 2009.

A couple on a less than idyllic camping trip are carjacked by another couple trying to get out of the country. They come into contact with a bizarre plantlike virus that culminates in a standoff at an isolated gas station. A little derivative, but the characters are not nearly as predictable as the majority of horror film clones.

Trailer:

Dorothy Mills
Released February 10, 2009.

The promo posters make this seem like it's another possessed girl movie, but that's a little misleading... not entirely... but... anyway. A psychiatrist from Dublin is travels to a small island where a teenage girl had assaulted a baby left in her care to babysit. She's given the task to determine how prosecution of the girl should be handled. There are definite echoes of Wicker Man and Straw Dogs as the outsider is not exactly welcome with open arms. And the girl, Dorothy Mills, well there's something a little more complicated going on than just bad behaviour. Great performances, especially by the spooky Jenn Murray in the title role. The "revealing all" moment near the end of the movie stretches belief's suspension a little, but overall solid and creepy.

Trailer:

There doesn't appear to be an English language trailer online anywhere.

The Burrowers
Released April 21

A horror western. Why aren't there more of these? When two families sharing a patch of land are attacked leaving some dead and others abducted a search/rescue party sets off with the assumption that Indians are the culprits. The party is under the command of a narrow minded Army Seargent who's mind is made up despite conflicting evidence. Eventually a smaller party including Coffey, an Irish settler engaged to one of the abductees, Walnut, an emancipated slave and army cook fed up with the Sgt and a couple of roughneck frontiersmen splits off to follow a trail that hints something other than Natives might be behind the kidnapping. This works well because the filmmakers are careful to get the Western part right before introducing the horror elements. They also manage the difficult feat of creating tension in the unlikely wide open prairie.

Trailer:

Today's Nothing Video. It may be angry. I'm Not Sure.

2009-03-16T18:04:00.000-03:00

Nothing and Everything... or Something.

2009-03-09T23:59:00.002-03:00

Hey kids look: It's nothing video day!!!

To offset the nothing videos here is a something video from someone cool I stumbled across last week. I think I may have a new favourite nerd. Sorry Anthony Edwards :(

The Day after Monday is not officially Nothing Video day... but, so what?

2009-03-03T17:51:00.001-04:00

Sorry. I forgot this yesterday.

In anyone wants to take a crack at translation.

And in case you needed to witness our winter.

2009-02-24T20:52:00.003-04:00

The view from my front door.

A view of my front door

The smaller of the two banks in front of the apartment.

The larger of the two banks.

The "sidewalk."

Please note that this is fully 24 hours after the storm was done.

Today's Nothing Video

2009-02-24T19:28:00.002-04:00

There are times when you are somewhere. This obviously was one of those times.

By the way Monday was a snow day... that's why "Nothing Video Day" is being held on Tuesday this week.

Monday is Nothing Video Day

2009-02-16T18:31:00.004-04:00

I've become curious about YouTube videos that have no purpose, are completely nonsensical, or just plain misguided. I will post one every Monday. The only stipulation is that it must be under 30 seconds long... and preferably under 10 seconds long and posted on the day I put them up:

Is your bread flat or are you unhappy to see me?

2009-02-10T20:42:00.014-04:00

By request my Tuesday Morning Off.

Mostly I loafed around and picked away at reviews for Exclaim! But first...

This is what I started at 8:30 am

The flat bread I made last week has gone stale.

The process begins again.

Also Kenyan Ground Beef Curry.

The beef and onions.

The tomatoes.

My ginger is a little soft... but it'll have to do.

Frying.

Frying.

Then comes the Little Bear.

Roll it out...

...nice and thin...

..and into the frying pan it goes.

Meanwhile.

The bread is becoming flat bread...

...and it goes in here to stay warm.

City of Stately Elms? No, City of Feckless Dickweeds.

2009-02-02T21:19:00.007-04:00

Here's where it started for me on Tuesday last week:

http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/search/article/553681&p=2

I went to the Postal Outlet at King's Place to cash one money order and get another done up for a CD order I'd done... only to discover that the Postal part of the corner store had been removed. As the article makes clear the owner was found to be conducting her business in a haphazard manner counter to Canada Post training. I would not argue with that... though most of the counter people who'd worked there for some time were nothing but helpful and pleasant to deal with... the woman herself seemed slow and confused, so to find out she was the owner... well, it actually makes some sort of sense.

The comments on the story are the usual brand of inane that online articles seem to attract. There are a few that seem to hint that bringing hapless East Indian work habits to N. America is wholly unacceptable and that we [Canadians? New Brunswickers? Frederictonians? Whites?] would never go to India and fuck up their mail system.

I propose that bad service knows no racial boundaries. What's more it's really what we [Frederictonians especially] deserve. Sure we wait in long lines at Tim Horton's and don't get what we ordered... but why did we have to be carrying on a cell phone conversation taking down orders for two dozen people at our office in the Centennial Building? Sure we're pissed off when we find out the interac is down at the restaurant after we finished our meal, but why don't we have $20 on us... it might come in handy (or at least $2 for a coffee at MacDonald's you Visa-carrying moron).

Friday afternoon I was at the laundromat and bracing for the blank stare I usually get when I describe the change I want back after buying detergent. However this time there was a woman just ahead of me at the counter who smelled of lavender and hard candy bringing back a jacket for an alteration of something for what was obviously the second time. This is how the coversation went:

Counter Person: Sorry about that. Here is your tag to claim it next week. If you could sign here it'll show that it's been paid for.

Dried Up Lady: I'm not paying for this a second time.

Counter Person: No, you're signing it to show that you'd already paid for it... that way you won't have to pay a second time.

Dried Up Lady: I'm not... signing... anything.

Counter Person: Well I hope I'm the one who's working when you come back in, otherwise it'll be confusing.

Dried Up Lady: Hmmmph.

So, was the DUL justified in being upset with the job she'd had done? Probably. You pay for a service to be rendered and you expect it to be done fully and properly. Does it give her license to be a shithead? Why should it? It's not like someone left a surgical sponge in her lung. Lighten up.

Back to the post office thing.... What bugs me most about it is that it's one more service that downtown loses... like a phone payment centre, and a power bill payment centre, bottle recycling centre and a liquour store. Why not push people into their cars to run every errand? Why not send everyone up to the mall or to the outskirts of town? What does the term city centre mean?

Aside from that the weekend was pretty cool. Went down to Saint John with 3/4 Piper Perabo for a Backstreet SJ instore. Had a great meal at Taco Pico. The show was great (though the crowd was small), acoustic Piper is a different beast, but a relaxed and fun one.

Watched Quarantine when I got back, which was kind of a kitchen sink blend of handi-cam stuff like Blair Witch or Cloverfield, zombie (sorta) craziness ala 28 Days Later and haunted house survival in the Alien mold. It's a remake of a Spanish film called [Rec] done by the original's film director. If the original is even better than the remake that'll be something.

On Saturday I bought myself a small ceramic heater for my bedroom and a copy of Bruce MacDonald's first film Roadkill. Need I say more?

Then this morning I dove into my Extending the Table cookbook and made some flat bread... so easy, why haven't I been doing this all along? And also something called Groundnut Stew, a Kenyan recipe. It's essentially a beef stew prepped with onion, garlic, ginger and pepper but with a second stage where you add peanut butter. It's pretty tasty, but I think it could use another solid beside the beef to chunk it up a little. Maybe a sweet potato?

So in conclusion, Fredericton... don't take your bad mood out on others. If someone pees in your soup you'll be partly to blame.

Braille Tazers.

2009-01-28T20:23:00.009-04:00

Note to self: when the dog is too tired to play anymore and there's no beer left with your brand label... end the evening.

Otherwise Sunday starts much later in the day.

In the meantime I've been accruing some pretty swell ambient music this January through a variety of means. Three standouts:

Manual - Confluence (Darla)

Tomasz Bednarczyk - Painting Sky Together (Room40)

Elm - Woven into Light (Blackest Rainbow)

My other time waster lately has been watching YouTube clips from Chelsea Lately... a late night talk show on the awful E! network. I can see how some would quickly grow tired of the host, Chelsea Handler's, somewhat grating voice and overly inappropriate approach to humour... but I am not one of those people. At least not yet. Enjoy the sample below:

Plowed under.

2009-01-21T20:41:00.005-04:00

Even though winter is a couple of months from loosening its grip some of us need a few moments where we can shed our burden...

...and just recline in the gathering blue of late afternoon.

Tube of Ydiot.

2009-01-12T17:33:00.008-04:00

Scissors.

Rock breaks scissors.

Paper covers rock.

California forest fire burns paper down.

A golden flow from the heavens above not only extinguishes the California forest fires, but revitalizes the region, stirring new beauty from the charred remains of what was once only desert and tinder, and now is home to some of the most wondrous creatures to so far walk the blue orb we call Planet Earth.

As on ABC's blockbuster True Beauty.

Co-created by the golden brain powers of Ashton Kutcher and Tyra Banks.

...and we just can't find the sound...

2009-01-06T19:51:00.005-04:00

For your enjoyment a recipe I've made twice. First for the usual reason of happening to have these particular ingredients already in the house, and the second time to see if the first time was an accident.

*Pork Stew/Soup

1 tray of stewing pork
1 large white onion
1 container of **chicken broth
1 can of chopped tomatoes w/ garlic
1/2 bag of shredded carrot
1 cup of dried split peas
1/4 cup flour
salt
savory
basil
hot sauce
canola oil

Take the pork cubes and cut them in half or thirds. Chop the onion into smallish chunks. In a medium sized sauce pan heat up the oil over medium/high and add the onion, stirring until it's a little translucent. Add the pork and mix together. Mix in the can of tomatoes. Add hot sauce of your choice to taste. Mix in the savory, basil and salt also to taste. When the pork is nice and white (you don't want to overcook or sear it) add the broth (**I used chicken, but I'm sure beef or vegetable would be fine too). Take the split peas and wash them under cold water in a colander and drain, then toss them in too. Finally the shredded carrot goes in (I had bought shredded carrot to use in salads and found I preferred it in soup recipes because it cooks more quickly and still retains a little crunch of texture). Bring the mess to a boil then reduce heat to a simmer. I add the flour, mixing quickly so it doesn't clump, to give the whole thing a more "stew-like" countenance. You can also coat the pork with it at the beginning if you prefer, or omit it completely if you prefer a more "soup-like" experience. Simmer for a couple of hours and there y'are.

The reason I like it is the balance of textures and flavours. The hot sauce seems to be the key to give it zing, and the split peas make it kinda old timey. I have some in tupperware just beggin' to be nuked right now.

Zing.

As the twilight gathered.

2008-12-18T21:25:00.002-04:00

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.

(7) Many crows and seagulls.

Xmas moments part 1

2008-12-05T10:48:00.004-04:00

I was wondering if you had a specific artist.

Sure.

I'm not sure of the pronounciation, but I think it's SAWN-Dray Lurch.

Yeah, Sondre Lerche. We've had his stuff in before... but nothing at the moment. I don't think he's had anything new out on a while.

Oh? I heard him on the Ghomeshi show this morning and so...

He may have something just out, or coming out. We could order it for you. It would take about a week or so.

Oh no, I have a package going out later today.

Ah.

Well there's a few more things on this list. How about... the ABBA Greatest Hits??

Uh, no... not right at the moment.

Do you carry DVDs?

Yes, we do.

Would you have the movie Dirty Dancing?

I'm getting the sense you may need Wal-Mart on that one.

Things to do in December if your shopping is on the backburner.

2008-12-04T19:55:00.004-04:00

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.

Here are a few recent first listing results:

Badger Cam.

Two Pack Shack Cure.

Monarchist Bingo.

In the green room.

2008-12-03T21:19:00.005-04:00

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!

Or... Yanni?

2008-11-27T21:35:00.003-04:00

It must be nearly Xmas. I had my first phone call wondering if we sold any John Tesh CDs today.

Community Planning.

2008-11-25T17:46:00.002-04:00

I think this may have been the problem with the old house.

Cat Hode.

2008-11-19T21:35:00.006-04:00

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.

Things to do in November when you're not dead.

2008-11-04T21:35:00.002-04:00

AW TUM.

2008-10-29T17:47:00.006-03:00

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.

EAT IT.

Skold.

2008-10-22T19:30:00.005-03:00

I've got a new roommate.

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.

How's your autumn going?

huh?

2008-10-01T20:45:00.002-03:00

The weekend in pictures.

2008-09-30T21:28:00.008-03:00

Something for Everyone II

2008-09-11T18:44:00.001-03:00

Queens County Fair starts today

By DOUG WATLING
For The Daily Gleaner

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.

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.

Something for Everyone I

2008-09-11T18:41:00.003-03:00

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.

Something for Everyone

2008-09-11T18:34:00.001-03:00

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.

Hermitage

2008-09-10T12:17:00.009-03:00

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.

Take that outside world.

"Wooooah. What's that? A T-Shirt?

2008-08-26T13:22:00.003-03:00

"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.

So... is it the heat, Fredericton... or... What?

2008-07-10T11:32:00.007-03:00

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).

My freaks or yours?

There's no business... or is there show business?

2008-06-13T13:38:00.019-03:00

So...

now...

What do I have left to say.

Ok. well.

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).

Keeping up posting to Backstreet blog and MySpace.

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.

ahem

2008-05-29T13:34:00.002-03:00

Sheeeeeeep!!! Where are you SHEEEEEEEP!

2008-05-28T03:44:00.005-03:00

Been having trouble sleeping lately.

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.

Well... I guess I'll take another crack at sleep.

Wish me luck.

Fredericton - Ottawa - Montreal - Fredericton

2008-05-02T22:02:00.024-03:00

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.

Headliners Stars of the Lid:

We left Montreal after the show... around 12:15 a.m. Eastern and departed for Fredericton.

Even with the wisdom that comes with worldliness, some patterns are unbreakable.

The light bloomed in the Eastern Sky as we neared New Brunswick.

I spent Wednesday in bed.

The end.

appendix:

Here are some brief (bootleg) videos of the show:

Christopher Willits:

Stars of the Lid:

Brown and Yellow on both sides now.

2008-03-31T21:11:00.004-03:00

Although it perhaps isn't exactly Cal Ripken Jr.'s record of 16 pro baseball seasons without missing a game... I had managed to work for over 12 straight years (full time) at Backstreet without taking a sick day. Not that I've been the picture of health or the video of vigour... it's just that aches, pains, coughs and wheezes have been so far within tolerable levels. Any instances of more debilitating malaise have cooperatively come over weekends or on official holidays. Thanks weirdly chrono-savvy constitution.

This past week my streak went down in flames.

After the long weekend (and concurrent house explosion... see below) I settled back into my two job routine... troubled only by a little throat tickle and cough I couldn't seem to kick. Tuesday night after getting home, feeling fine, I had a bit of a flippy floppy feeling in my gut and I hurried down to the washroom and unleashed a torrent of loose bowel debris... and that signalled a three day cycle of eat/drink/ditch that devolved into surrealism quite quickly.

As a drinker and a sickly child I've had my fair share of stomach gymnastics... but I can't say anything quite like this has darkened my bathroom door before. For example, no nausea? After a day and a half my head was swimmy with dehydration and no coffee, but none of the usually cramping or hiccuping you get. And everything went through my digestive system... chicken broth, crackers, green tea, even water... nothing got turned to pee pee for the whole three days.

Then on Friday afternoon... food started doing what it's supposed to do again. I could pass gas with confidence... not needing to fear a wet surprise.

Whether this is my one sick chance to take the middle of the week off... or the sign of more sick days to come... who can say. It did give me the opportunity to watch the continuing parade of people driving by to peek at the empty lot which was once a house. Do these people enjoy empty lots? Do they have to have been full previously, or will any empty lot do. My urge to put up a "Welcome to Scully St.... Please enjoy our HOLE!!" sign grows daily.

In adding insult to injury news... the company who cleared away the remains of the house is called Disaster Kleenup... that I've just now discovered is a national one and not just a bunch of local retards with a few trucks like I first would've guessed. I guess just because your community has been decimated by floodwaters and half of your family is missing and presumed dead... that's no reason not to look on the bright side and call in the KLEENUP KREW.

fuck you.

So my place didn't burn down over the holiday weekend, but...

2008-03-24T23:30:00.004-03:00

To get a better handle on the absurdity of the following video presentation you should be aware of the following.

The street I'm speaking of is exactly a short city block wide.

It comes off of a major North/South street, but it really isn't on the way to anything other than two baseball fields, a pool and a playground... all of which are buried under a winter's worth of snow and ice.

On an average Monday night a car might pass in front of my house every fifteen minutes or so. About a third of those live in the neighbourhood.

The video is a little edited, but all the action took place over about a 5-8 minute span... and it got busier after I put the camera away.

Enjoy?

Fly like an Eagle, or Something that flies straight... maybe a crow. yeah.

2008-03-17T20:30:00.008-03:00

It's long been one of my secondary survival skills... my ability to get home and find my bed no matter where I am when the shut-down impulse kicks in. But there have lately been obstacles in my path... nearly (but not quite) thwarting me.

The first obstacle has been getting a cab. Specifically getting a cab to get home from my friend Howard's. Specifically getting a cab anytime between midnight and two a.m. to get home from my friend Howard's instead of walking the hour to hour and a quarter back across the river to my place (especially given the fact that the price of the cab ride is an absolutely ludicrous $6.50). The time before last I called after Howard had passed out in a chair watching the DVD part of the last Akron/Family album. I went downstairs, called the cab... and waited, and waited, and sipped my last beer, and waited. My sozzle-senses started tingling with this idea, if I start walking out to the end of the driveway... reaaaaalllllyyyyy sloooooowlyyyyy... the cab will just arrive as I reach the street. And you know what? That's exactly what happened.

So last time, two weekends ago, as Howard and I sat in the kitchen downstairs, waiting, and waiting and waiting, and sipping our last beers... I thought... It's gotta work again, right? It was one of those night where a storm had gone from rain to freezing rain (little stinging balls of fury) and then just quit... leaving behind a strong but mildly mild wind. So I walked reaaaalllllyyyy sloooooowlyyyyy to the end of the driveway... and stood there... and stood there... and listened to the wind... and looked up at the tree next to the end to the driveway and really noticed how fucking tall it was... and how it was really swaying in the wind... and how I couldn't hear if any cars were anywhere near Howard's street... and then Howard called out from the kitchen window, "Why don't you come back inside, idiot?"

This past weekend I had two oddball end of night occurrences:

First was on Friday night when I went for dinner at my friend Andrew's place. He lives up in an area of Fredericton called Skyline acres... near the highway that travels east towards Saint John and west becomes Prospect St. The streets are little fishscale crescents that double back upon themselves... and given all the snow we've had, they look all the more same-ish. But no matter... I'm familiar with the area... it was fairly warm around midnight when I was leaving... I had my CD player... and my planned route was as illustrated below:

(1) is Andrew's place the starting point... and on a downward and vaguely westward trajectory you eventually come across (2) which is the shortcut across the highway on/off ramp and into campus and then hoppy skippy jumpy home... about 40 minutes or so all told.

Unfortunately this, I think, is the route I actually took:

(1) same starting point, but I must've whipped around Bristol in the wrong direction and slowly corrected course... although I was keeping an eye out for Canterbury I never saw it... though I had to have crossed it at some point... (2) is the large snow covered field I crossed... thinking I was at some weird new corner near campus only to emerge at (3) Forest Hill road... well above where the overpass leads to the Princess Margaret Bridge but a straight shot down towards the foot of campus... albeit about as far from my apartment as I had been when I left Andrew's in the first place.

The last homeward bound adventure was on Saturday night. John, Marc B. and I had been out with a brigade of fake mustache rocking Haligonian Voiceprint folk. Our night wrapped up at the former taproom and I split from the group and headed home up around the graveyard between Brunswick and George. As I neared the corner of Carleton Extension where I usually turn up I heard a voice from nearby behind me squeak out, "Hey hang on for a second... wait, wait." I turned to see the backlit figure of a smallish woman I assumed was someone I knew... but as she passed under the next streetlight I realized this was not the fact... I also realized she was wearing just a T-shirt and a skirt on this sub-zero night. As she pulled up to me she unwound her woeful tale... coat check took her ticket at Nicky Zee's, but offered her the wrong coat, which she didn't take... and now was shivering her way home. For some reason she targeted me as a suitable source of body heat... requesting that I escort her home so she didn't freeze to death. Home was only up around the corner onto Regent... more or less on the way... so I agreed, tucked her under one side of my coat and headed home.

If I were Matthew McConaughey this would have culminated in some exotic evening of Greek wine, conversations about Hopper paintings or more likely Charley Pride records and a lifelong friendship that deepened... for a time... into a brief, bittersweet romance. But since I'm, in fact, me I was offered a Corona, which I turned down, and then quizzed on whether I knew some of the same people... most examples of which were brought up turned out to have recently died.

Instead I just released her from beneath my jacket and (easily) found my way home... for once.

Trapped in a lab...

2008-03-01T16:47:00.003-04:00

...in a snowstorm. Alone.

All I can say is Piper, where are yooooooo oowoooooooo ah!!!

Black Mountain, White Snow

2008-02-28T18:53:00.005-04:00

So Tuesday after work we packed up the station wagon four man strong (or four strong man strong... or at least one strong man and a few milquetoasts... or... something) and headed down to see Black Mountain in Moncton.

Traveling for rock shows is a proud tradition for some of my fellow journeymen, and I've been known to do so in the past... so company was tight.

The show was at the Manhattan, so we parked nearby... then on PJ's recommendation went to a nearby Irish pub called Triangles for dinner. I had pretty good Curry and Chips... Howard had something called Irish Tea Break which was two enormous slabs of beef and pork resting A-frame style atop a mound of roasted mash potatoes all topped with curly fried onions. Zany.

There were two openers... a solo act (ex-Deadly Snakes member) from Toronto going by the name Nordic Nomadic unspooled some spacey Tim Buckleyesque guitar swoonings. Next was Wisconsinite band (also on Jagjaguwar) Bon Iver... a three piece, two guitars and drums who's stuff veered from slowcore jams to what TV on the Radio's sound might be had they grown up around tractors instead of fire hydrants.

Black Mountain came out and ripped through most of their new album... tossing in a couple of nuggets from the first... did a three song encore (no 16 minute epic as I had predicted) and then it was 1am and time to hit the road again.

All three bands put on great sets, but they were compromised by the less-than-stellar sound the bar provided. The Manhattan is a restaurant/bar built in what used to be the back end of a movie theatre... the architecture of which means the ceiling above the stage is between 30-40 feet high. It seems like all the low end of Black Mountain's guitars and bass were sucked up into the void or bounced around the room until it sounded more like a boom than a groove. Still they brought the rock.

The drive back was into the eye of a snowstorm that grew steadily from the time we left the Irving in Salisbury until we hit Gagetown... at which point it was like having a drunk Santa pull you too close into his beard.

These are the little footprints I made coming home at around 4:30pm.

Ah rock and roll lifestyle... so glam.

Tonight:

Stories that need no ending #1

2008-02-21T19:15:00.004-04:00

"So I know this bar where you can do body shots off toddlers..."

It's a leap year!!!

2008-02-20T19:13:00.009-04:00

February's kinda wearing me down.

I've had some pretty good fun over the last couple of weekends. First the ECMA weekend... which kicked off a little slowly. I had anticipated a crush of shoppers so made an effort to stock the store with appropriate goodies only to sit (or pace) by myself for most of the day. We made $41 between 11am and 4pm. Friday was better... but finally Saturday we threw a little event that brought people out:

The "surprises" part was Julie Doiron who graciously accepted to play in a stairwell in the afternoon and even busted out some unrecorded material for the faithful. The day was a blur of music and smiling people and... hrrm... shoppers.

That night we tried to actually take in some showcases, but the venues were so packed and fully lit with PDAs that our only recourse was to retreat to the 20/20 Club to listen to Footloose on a system with no high tone... which in fact is more truly East Coast music. When you think about it.

The next weekend was also musical... and very East Coast. I decided to gather together my struggling music playing friends and my struggling music listening friends and put them all under one roof... or more accurately under one floor under one roof:

There is some video of the Windchimes set on the Ker. MySpace page or just check this out:

It culminated in much drinking on several different levels of homestead and a multi-street cheeseburger trackdown. How many drive-thrus are open late in Fredericton? Not many it turns out.

But one side effect of special event fever is that it brings along with it a special kind of crash on the weeks after. The mundane seems that much more mundane. The banal seems... painful.

This fact was illustrated and heightened by a convergence of three of my "What do they do?" people so far this week. These people are folks who, over the years, have regularly and relentlessly visited the store yet have perhaps purchased a sum total of 4 items between them over a decade of browsing. But they are also people who I unfailingly see everywhere else I go in town... uptown, downtown, Northside, industrial park, wading pool... everywhere.

The first was the "Gasman." I actually hadn't seen the Gasman for a couple of years and believed him to have either exploded or floated away... but I bumped into him up at the Regent Mall waiting for the bus I was about to disembark. When he (regularly) came into the store he would rustle his oily army jacketed self over to the cassette rack and clack through them... burping, farting and whistling his merry tunes. He would also mumble unintelligibly things about each cassette he was holding. I eventually realized he was talking to me... but because he never turned around I had no way of making out anything he said.

The second was/is the "Walker." Aside from the store you can spot him at the Carleton Street Library, buying coffee at MacDonald's, walking up or down York Street, Regent Street, George Street, Charlotte Street, Brunswick Street... any hour of the day or night. The store seems to be a 20-40 second segment of his path as he routinely comes in, walks one slow circle around the perimeter and then back out the door.

The last was/is the "Bike Guy." Bike Guy is the most dynamic of the trio... and the least frequent. Dynamic because... well he has a bike for one, and also because he also speaks in close to full sentences in a nearly clear linguistic pattern. Unfortunately he says things like, "It sure is icy out there today." I guess when you're the Bike Guy this has a potent impact upon all aspects of your life. Dynamic also because he seems to do things like buy groceries and go to the Salvation Army, whereas the other two seem to be handled by some firm that possibly also hires out movie extras. Meaning they are somehow magically clothed and fed by some external force. But the other distinguishing trait of Bike Guy is that every outfit he does wear seems to have some prominent rip involved. Today it was in the seat of his corduroy pants.

So... the good thing is I've gotten my involvement with these folks out of the way for the week... which means either clear sailing, or that I won't see anyone else from here on out.

Ah February.

Nyooooooooooo. Nope.

2008-01-31T20:26:00.000-04:00

So like I was saying...

A whole month has been and gone since my last post... Januaries will do that to you. Most of my postal work has been over at Backstreet and Surgery. Excuses? Excuses.

Also a good amount of energy has been devoted to furthering the legend of Piper Perabo. No not that Piper Perabo... this Piper Perabo.

I have seen the quartet at work no fewer than five times in just over a month... two house parties, two Northstar Sports Bar engagements and a co-headlining gig (with The Windchimes) at the Capital (not Capitol, by the way).

Next up is a post-ECMA stint at Howard's Basement. More on this later.

The ECMAs are in Fredericton next week from Thursday through Sunday. I'm not really sure what to expect. Other than a lot of posters that've been up since before Xmas wondering if Fredericton is READY... there hasn't been much in the way of available documentation. Perhaps Fredericton wasn't READY. Still I'll get the store ready for what might be just another week. We'll see.

I've started doing volunteering at Voiceprint. It's a national service that provides broadcast audio of local news, sports, entertainment, grocery specials, obituaries online, on cable and on satellite television for people with issues of literacy, vision, age... or just plain lazy folks maybe. I do the Atlantic Arts and Entertainment report... recording between 10-12 Fridays and uploaded for broadcast in the afternoon. It's something I can do and feel good about giving time... but I still don't have to touch anyone stinky. Unless I want to.

Well, I'll keep it short this time so I don't get a cramp. Somn\e of my favourite things of the last month have been the signs outside what was formerly Boldon's/Kelly's Café on Regent... now re-christened Regent Convenience Café and Kebab. The grand opening sign went thusly:

Now Open

Coffee and Kebab
50% Off

Others
10% Off

The new one that was up when I walked by today was:

Now Offering:

Espresso

Cappuccino

Café Latte

Phone Cards

I feel like I haven't been keeping up with the advances in coffee culture.

XXX MMMy AAA SSS

2007-12-18T19:57:00.000-04:00

(Season's) Greetings.

It is officially crunch time... some ten thousand minutes before Xmas.

It's been a couple of peculiar weeks. For some reason I can't seem to accumulate enough sleep. Not that I can't sleep. Rather the opposite... I've been sleeping 8-10 hours a night and napping in between, but I can't seem to become revitalized by it.

Perhaps it's just to escape the stresses of the season. When you work both in retail and at a University you tend to have your few small stresses... but then you also are bombarded with several others' larger stresses, either real or imaginary.

One aspect that's been ongoing is the sluggish and unpredictable shopping patterns over the last month. November was deceptively busy (compared to previous years) but there hasn't been the hoped-for consistent increase that leads up to Xmas. I was beginning to assume it had mostly to do with a strong Canadian dollar and an increase in cross-border/online shopping... but today the first 10 people were fear-eyed older ladies with lists written in English that they still could not read. Therefore we have the XMAS OF BAD PLANNERS.

The thing about the bad planner is that they don't understand the error of their ways. The bad planner operates under the delusion that in the 21st Century every store that specializes in something (i.e. music) must contain every item available (or even out of circulation) that falls under the general descripition... even if said store is only 15 feet by 15 feet in size. To make matters worse they usually come to me at the recommendation of a larger store who also didn't have their hopelessly obscure item in stock... thus, because we were recommended, they fully believe that we must have it... making their disappointment all that more poignant, or pungent, or something.

Another added stress is that I've had problems helping even the good planners due to not one but two orders over the last week that ended up not shipping when they were supposed to. I don't mind dealing with incompetence from the customers... they give me money... but incompetence from the suppliers... who I give money to (sometimes)... well that gives me bad breath.

A retail unrelated stress came at the end of a great stress-relieving event:

Here are some pictures from the event.

The Squaredance Kid

ImageisEverything

Notorious D. O'Rea

Vehicle Lasso

and the mighty Piper Perabo

The mishap (stress inducing) came near the end of the evening after I took a picture of another member of the audience who spent much of his time lounging on the clothes dryer in the washroom:

Tito

Obviously offended by the invasion of his personal space he slapped the camera out of my hands and it fell to the floor with the lens extended. Or I might've just dropped it 'cos I was drunk. In any case the lens was tipped up at an off angle and wouldn't retract. I gently popped back in line and it went back in when I turned the power off... then came back out when I turned the power on... whew!

However the next day at breakfast I had hoped to get some day-after pictures from our assembled crew only to discover the lens on longer wished to come out. I supposed if I had been dropped on my head from a height I'd feel the same.

In any case there are three more stress/shopping days to contend with and this is my last evening at the lab until January 7th.

I will try to keep you apprised of my comings... or at least my goings... over the holidays. With or without photographic assistance.

An Open Letter to Lee Horsely

2007-12-09T09:24:00.000-04:00

Hey.

Don't think we aren't aware of what you were trying to pull, man.

First up... the whole Tom Selleck thing. Sure you had the muscles and swagger to make the young women swoon... just like Tom. And sure you had the rug-like chest hair and porn star mustache to bring in the gay crowd... just like Tom. But then you had to try to one-up him.

You had to be a private eye... just like Tom, er Magnum... but it wasn't enough to know rich people, you had to be rich people. Texas millionaire Matt Houston... you thought you were Magnum, Higgins and Robin Masters all-in-one, huh? You had to fly around in your helicopter and, first season anyway, solve crimes brought to you by your slightly backwards relatives from "back home." You had to bring along your slightly backwards ranch hands Bo and Lamar, for no other reason than to secure the soon-to-be Red State viewers and keep Jeff Foxworthy glued to the set taking notes while he ate Zoodles straight from the can.

Aaaaand you had to bring along Pamela Hensley so that people who didn't buy into any of the above (but still harbored a Buck Rogers-inspired lust for Princess Ardala... or Charlie's Angels big hair... or both) still felt compelled to watch.

You thought we wouldn't ask questions like, "How does a multi-millionaire oil man get away with taking 70 hours a week tracking down his great-aunt's embezzled insurance money?" If you had that much money why didn't you hire someone to do it? Someone smarter.

Oh, and don't think we didn't spot the whole "Matt is short for Matlock" thing to bring in the blue hairs... and when that wasn't so much of a sure thing you actually get Buddy Ebsen as a guest star? For shame.

Couldn't you track down a black guy in a wheel chair or an Asian with a hearing aid?

But now Tom Selleck is on Las Vegas and your website is under construction. So...

Good luck to you Lee Horsely (formerly Matt "Matlock" Houston, PI)

Food for thought

2007-11-21T20:59:00.000-04:00

Pleased to reintroduce myself

2007-11-19T20:33:00.000-04:00

This is a pretty enough image, but in fact it came as an afterthought while I was trying to get a shot of the *hundreds* of crows who trek from Odell Park and surroundings areas into the tiny patch of woods behind the Student Union Building on campus. The sound they make once they're settled in is pretty bone chilling.

Its been awhile since I added anything here. Combination of busyness, forgetfulness, and general seasonal lassitude.

We have several conflicting seasons this October and November.

There's autumn.

Winter.

And not pictured is the Spring/Summer we had last Friday (November 16th) where it rained in torrents and the temperature went up to 17 degrees celcius.

Apart from that... what's been going on?

Well the weather turn toward the cold seems to have spawned a kind of hibernation impulse.

I've been listening to a bunch of the year's music to start compiling year end lists for myself, for Exclaim! and for the Surgery Radio website. The Exclaim! one is done... though as with previous years as soon as I send in my top tens I hear something that bumps my other choices down a few notches. I'll start posting little tastes of the top 50, though not the actual order... such as:

Air- Pocket Symphony (v2)

Not what you expected? HaHaHaHA!!!

I've also been watching movies... though mostly from my own collection, and mostly only as sleep aids. As I may have mentioned before I've found that a sure lullaby for me is the director commentary on any DVD at just... the right... volume. One second Michael Mann is explaining how Jamie Foxx rode around L.A. with a number of cab drivers in preparation for.... ZZZZZzzzz. The only downside is that when I rent movies and actually want to listen to the commentary tracks it still has a tendency to knock me out.

One such instance was with one movie I did rent recently... Canadian Classic:

Goin' Down the Road

For those of you unfamiliar... this is a 1970 movie by Don Shebib that tells the tale of two Maritimers escaping the dead end life on the East Coast and heading to... Toronto!!! The bulk of the film focuses on their quick and modest rise to solvency (loading and unloading trucks with bottles) and their eventual quasi-dramatic fall. It's a low-low-low budget slice of life film that meanders more than narrates, but in the end is immensely likeable. Of the two leads, Paul McGrath and Doug Bradley, only one was actually from the Atlantic provinces (McGrath)... and he was the one with acting experience!! In doing the quick research it turns out that McGrath is still acting... even had a part in John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. A small one, but still.

Perhaps the biggest revelation was that Jayne Eastwood... one of Canada's enduring female actresses... age 23 when she appeared in this movie... was kind of a hottie!!

Jayne now.

Jayne then.

There were two commentary tracks for the movie. One by the director, Don Shebib... who was refreshingly a bit of a windbag; not the modest "aw shucksy" Canadian we usually expect. Unfortunately he is also pretty numbskulled... making pronouncements such as, "images aren't really important in movie making... it's really all about time and how time passes." Call me nuts... but they do call them moving pictures, don't they? Second commentary is by "Toronto Star Critic..."

Geoff Pevere (believe it or not this is the actual press photo he seems to have chosen to represent himself on the internet).

I've always found it strange, given our affinity as Canadians for the arts, that we've never seemed able to produce a film critic (esp. on television) that wasn't at least 75% full of shit.

i.e.

Richard Crouse.

Mose Persico.

I could go on... but I feel a little upchuck in the back of my throat already. Though if you want to learn more about Mose... his... errrrr... uh, fanclub is here.

Oh, yeah... the Geoff Pevere commentary? Fell asleep about six words in. Thankfully.
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Well it's getting to be closing time up here... so I'll leave you with a picture from my recent visit to my folks. The maddest, fattest black cat I know:

What's good.

2007-10-22T20:24:00.001-03:00

Red Road.

First full length by British filmmaker Andrea Arnold who won an Oscar (and a bunch of other awards) for her 2005 Short Film Wasp.

The film is a nicely slow unraveller that follows a woman named Jackie who works in Glasgow as a surveillance camera monitor(er?)... that is, she monitors the video feeds of various public space video cameras for crimes and other emergencies. One day on the job a glimpse of a certain man sets her off on a single-minded pursuit that is hinted at but not fully explained until near the film's conclusion.

Arnold does some truly interesting things with p.o.v., both in the video surveillance and in the filmed reality... especially (not trying to be titillating, but...) the sex scenes that are shot atypically and provocatively. In colour and composition it reminds me of Morvern Callar; another UK film by Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay. Above all it is a very quiet film... very sparse dialogue... very rich imagery... and the violent undercurrent is always uneasily there, but still shocks when it erupts.
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I sporadically watch Vice TV... one of the few online video entertainment sites that actually provides something better than "real TV" and is watchable. This is part of an interview from one of their programs called Soft Focus that is hosted by Ian Svenonius, who used to front the groups Nation of Ulysses, The Make Up and Weird War. The interviewee is the enigmatic Will Oldham who records as Palace, Palace Bros. and most recently Bonnie 'Prince' Billy. This is part 3 of 4 recorded in front of an audience at the Guggenheim Museum.

umm...

2007-10-21T13:46:00.000-03:00

Best question of the day.

Female student comes into the lab.

She: I don't know where I'm going... I have to watch a video for English class.

Me: I think you're in the right place, what movie is it?

She: Twelfth Night.

Me: Yeah... it's right back here (bringing her into the TV room and setting up the video). OK this is the VCR remote... and this is for the volume.

She: So I just sit here and watch it?

Me: ...yes.

How beauty is truth, but truth could be full of germs.

2007-10-16T19:54:00.000-03:00

So I took a stretched out weekend and headed for Florenceville... taking off on Saturday night. Taking off on the Acadian Lines bus system is not exactly foolproof, though. It is proof of foolishness. The last two times I've taken the bus towards Carleton County I went to the terminal in Fredericton, getting there at least 15-20 minutes ahead of departure time (7:45pm). Both of those time I ended up waiting until around 8:30pm before the bus actually left. This time I thought I'd be pro-active while I bought my ticket and asked, "When is the bus really really leaving tonight?" The ticket agent said, "Well... we had to pull one of the buses off the line, but he should be here by 7:45pm, but he may be running late." Normally there are two buses that leave "around" the same time from Fredericton headed North... one is an Express that stops at Woodstock, Bristol, Edmundston and Riviere-du-Loup before transferring folks headed to Quebec City, Montreal Toronto, etc. The other non-express bus stops at all the little stations in NB to load/deliver people/parcels, etc. That is the one I usually get on... but tonight there would be only one bus, apparently.

When the bus pulled in (around 8:20pm, not 7:45pm) I had cleverly positioned myself near the loading area so I could be assured of getting a seat if there happened to be an overflow of passengers. The driver of the bus came out to unload/load luggage and I said, "so there's only one bus tonight, right?" He, of course, said, "No, no... this is the express, there'll be another one to take people... where are you going? Florenceville? Yeah, one is coming from Saint John, or, if not, they'll call you a cab instead?" There was an unspoken wouldn't that be lovely? tone to the cab part. So I went back in the terminal and sat, with a few others like me (or somewhat like me) and waited for the boarding announcement... that, of course, said the one and only bus would be loading all express and non-express passengers. A new driver was taking tickets, as the other's tour ended in F'ton, and I asked, "So this is the only bus, right?" He looked at me as though I had asked the most ridiculous question ever and said, "Of course, and there's plenty of room!" So I got on.

Luckily, once safely in Florenceville (since we got there much later than scheduled the Irving we stopped at was already closed and dark... the bus driver seemed especially concerned as I got out, asking, "Do you have anyone meeting you?" I told him I thought I'd be OK), the vibe was much more relaxed. On Sunday M. and I got up at a reasonable hour and she had prepared Crepes with ham, apple and other good stuff for filling. That and a good cup of coffee started things off quite nicely.

After noon we stopped at Burnt Normal, a coffee shop/artist gallery run by Lee Clark and his wife Yolanda. It's a cool little spot right on the river. We chatted with a few folks, including an older guy named Bill from Florida who was site-seeing from his camper and who presented me with a flier about exercising my brain through specialized physical movement. I said thanks.

When then headed up river a little ways to the Shiktehawk Stream Trail System for a walk in the woods.

It was successful.

For dinner we had Oktoberfest: German beer, sausages, carrots and I was given the task of making Spaetzle, a kind of German noodle dish I'd never had, or seen for that matter. It consisted of a batter concoction seasoned with fresh herbs and forced through a strainer to make the noodles. The kind M. had tried before in a restaurant was longish noodles, but I had no luck squeezing out more than little teardrop-like blobs into the boiling water. It looked a little like the picture linked above... but not quite. The boiled noodles were then fried with onion, mushroom and more herbs with a little chicken stock. All in all it came out successfully. I think.

The next day we meandered around Woodstock, doing a few errands. I was leaving on the afternoon bus that went through Florenceville around 2:30-3pm. That is if things went as planned. Which, as evidenced above, never really do with Acadian Lines. Rather than drive back to Florenceville I thought I may as well just leave from Woodstock... so I went to the Irving to buy a ticket. Except, of course, the bus no longer stopped there. Even though it had on Saturday night. Instead it now stopped at Murray's Esso up on the highway. OK. The bus was still about 3 hours from leaving, so we thought maybe we'd just go back to Florenceville after all. It a fit of paranoia we decided to call Acadian Lines and see if this change affected anything else... and lucky we did, since the bus didn't stop in Florenceville in the afternoon at all. Giving in to external pressures we went up to the highway and I bought a ticket at Murray's Esso. In fact I bought THE FIRST ticket at Murray's Esso, since this was THE FIRST run going through there. It took two ladies to sell me THE FIRST ticket, that I luckily had exact change for because they hadn't thought far enough ahead to have a till or change or stuff like that. Small details.

So... yes... I can faintly hear someone whispering, "why don't you get your license?" But perhaps another question is, "why doesn't another bus company set up shop in NB and kick their asses?"

So many questions.

Oh... the germ bit (see title). Not an hour after I got back home did my throat start getting tickly. This morning I woke up with a full blown sore esophagus and now I have the achey fever thing happening. And of course tonight is the first busy night of the year.

Makes you want to take a bus away from it all... almost.

Fun things to do.

2007-10-11T19:09:00.001-03:00

(1) If you find a cell phone, like forgotten in a bar or restaurant, pick an overseas number you've researched and know to have a repeating recorded message, dial it, put the phone down and walk away.

(2) Pick a men's public washroom, preferably one you can monitor without appearing too creepy, especially one with a single urinal. To start put a penny in the urinal and leave. Check after fifteen or twenty minutes, then leave a nickel, then a dime, then a quarter, etc... all the way up to a Twonie. By keeping an eye on the bathroom you can discover who will pick up the smallest amount of pee-soaked coinage.

(3) When you answer the telephone and there's that 2-3 seconds of dead silence that warns you you're about to speak with a telemarketer, take a deep breath, prepare yourself, and when they say hello start your own telemarketing spiel on them. It's best if you have one already worked out, unless you have a flair for improvisation. My own favourite one so far has to do with helping out burned children... that way when they hesitate you can accuse them of supporting the burning of children. See if they can sell you better phone service then.