<< September 2006 | | November 2006 >>
October 31, 2006 >> ZineCanzine was a hustling, bustling spectacle of leaflets and buttons, counterculture and cut-up. Every year, indie publishers gather in a cramped hotel lobby to distribute their flimsily bound masterworks and cool-cool-wink-wink merchandise. Some of these creatives put a lot of effort into their side projects; others throw together a photocopied pamphlet in what appears to be 47 seconds before the show. It's all small time and it's all fascinating: what Canadians are working on, out of the limelight.
Upstairs, in a room filled with dead leaves and pine branches and semi-clean hippies, I read journal excerpts from young tree-planters up north. Everything smelled like pine. If the black fly heads embedded in your skin don't get you, I learned, then the trenchfoot from planting in knee deep mud will. Now I sorta don't like trees anymore. They are born in a massacre.
An older filmmaker tried to elaborate on the benefits of anti-corporate collage. He was interesting but his movie was just mash-ups from CNN news broadcasts.
A Korean artist was displaying a picture of a mermaid in a bathtub that looked exactly like a drawing I saw on the bottom of an ashtray, in a love motel in Danyang. I told her she had twin vision. Now I might be teaching English to her mom.
I bought a zine called "First Fucks". It made me laugh because first times are always a deflating letdown or an embarrassing travesty. This literature doesn't know anything about flickering candlelight or simultaneous orgasms; it's the basement, the parked car, the 'let's just get it done'. Honesty is the best policy.
One girl was selling series photos of heartbreak. Four images, one quotation, you figure out the story yourself. If your heart is broken over a dropped pineapple, smashed on the floor, you know it's time to stop listening to Bright Eyes.
I lost Carly and Corwin pretty early on. Corwin is tall but Carly blends in with the hipsters. At one point, I was talking to an aspiring illustrator who had a book with a wide-eyed puppy dog on the front. He was a rad guy, but then Carly came by and I said something about boiling her dog in hot broth and the artist was kinda pissed about that.
They drew a smiley face on my hand when I first came through the doors. The next day, I saw the half-scrubbed remnants of identical markings on people everywhere. In my classes, on the subway, buying a hot dog. I wondered: if everyone pressed our smileys together, would we transform into a gigantic, poorly-photocopied robot covered in tiny buttons?
I want to make a web comic now. It will be about Uncle Parsnip, the elderly defiler of ripe vegetables with nothing but promise in their starry young eyes (seeds? I still need to work out some details). Uncle Parsnip is the reason you get sad, deflated looking lemons in your Caesar salad. He is the one who turns your pantry into a garden of sorrow.
[Toronto] [Canzine] [independent publishing]
Posted by Chris at 12:18 PM >> Commentations (7) | Permalink
October 29, 2006 >> Clock set match
I am always a bit perturbed when Daylight Savings rolls around. I'm up late, wasting minutes, and suddenly notice my computer clock (which updates itself) and the Other Clocks (which don't) are no longer congruent in their reflection of time. It's a little bit scary, because it puts the barest hint of a suggestion in your mind that maybe one day these timepieces will rebel. If we can't trust them to do one simple job in unison, can we really expect them not to murder us in our beds? Can they honestly forgive us of all the time we've killed?
For now everything has been re-aligned. The wind is hammering at my window and clouds are racing across the sky and, except for the gleaming SUVs on the streets below, I really have no assurances that things are not moving backwards today.
Posted by Chris at 10:36 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
October 26, 2006 >> The Anti James Bond
Kyle is avidly playing through this Splinter Cell game right now. He's a special agent with all these cool guns and toys of violence, and yet he insists on not killing anybody. So he's choking all these Mexican cruise ship personnel unconscious and leaving their bodies in a kind of gay sex tableau underneath a kitchen sink instead. Apparently this is more humane? Anyway, it means that his little Government Approval Ratings bar doesn't drop, at the bottom of the screen, and supposedly this is an essential factor in becoming a successful spy. These games are getting too damn realistic.
Posted by Chris at 01:18 AM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
October 23, 2006 >> Slightly Prior to the Dark
The Toronto After Dark Film Festival is a rather cool idea: collect brand new, relatively obscure horror movies from around the world and offer them, point-blank, to the general public. It's a weekend series of ONE-TIME-ONLY showings, appealing to arty folk still salivating from last month's International Film Festival.
There are a whole subsect of people willing to sell their balls/vulvas just to see a flick nobody else knows about. This kind of festival is a feeding trough for smug little pigs to boast about eating at; a valuable medal of authenticity on the indie lapel. I suppose it's not a crime to look for new and interesting culture, but people should get a prison-rape sentence for idolatrizing something solely because it's underground and obscure. And this, my friends, is what is known as a "vindictive tangent."
Horrible hipsters aside, I fully recognize that horror is quite a varied genre and many people are genuinely interested in its numerous faces. I, myself, am not very partial to the horror experience, having led a sheltered Christian lifestyle during my formative years. My first covert experiences with slasher and suspense films were consequentially rather terrifying and, coupled with an overactive imagination, resulted in nightmares beyond my wildest... nightmares. I remember having a lot of trouble with mirrors and what might come out of them. Would it be a ghost? A ghost with hooks for hands? How about a Chinese acrobat? These were the questions that seemed pressing when I needed to pee.
I have since conquered my fears, for the most part, through sheer will of desensitization. But I still get jumpy when the music gets a certain way. And what's with little girls always saying creepy things and holding knives and stuff? It's fucked up, but I figure I should be able to take it by now.
And so me and the girl with Pac-man eyes boldly strode into Retribution, a Japanese film that happened to be about evil ghost women coming out of mirrors. Of course.
Before the feature, we were gifted with a SUPER SECRET SNEAK PREVIEW of a forthcoming Russian movie entitled Dead Daughters. The footage made very little sense and loosely implied that little girls were busily engaged in eviscerating their parents with knives. Also there were close-ups of somebody's eye being slowly torn in half. Then the screen went black and everyone clapped wildly except us.
Next was a showing of a short film, The Veil, which was basically an H.P. Lovecraft story. H.P. Lovecraft is pretty sweet because, let's face it, evil subterranean gods are awesome and Lovecraft is forever sacrificing his main characters in horrible fashion to these gods. Let's just say that sometimes amateur sleuthing doesn't pay off. The Veil was enjoyable, and especially so because it was impressively produced in just 48 hours for some speed-horror competition. We clapped for this one.
And finally: RETRIBUTION. The name echoes from wall to wall and most certainly implies some sort of retaliatory action of the violent type. In this film, Japanese folk deal with tiny earthquakes and drown each other in puddles of salt water. There is a lot of crime intrigue as our fearless detective (Japanese) begins to uncover evidence that suggests that he himself is a murder suspect. When a shrieking woman in a red dress (also Japanese) begins to haunt his steps, things really start to get wild!
Spooky things happen in mirrors and through windows and in shadows, but most of the terror is offset by the fact that our woman in red (Japanese, remember) is forever flying around like a Japanese Mary Poppins and there's no way you can't laugh at that. As far as genre innovation went, Retribution seemed to borrow rather liberally from other scary-girl movies like Ringu, as well as the old 'once-people-died-here-so-haunting-is-now!' schtick. Pac-man Eyes passed out repeatedly and I only felt my leg hairs bristle twice during the showing. This is a fairly tame bristle ratio for Retribution, and so I will only venture to recommend the film to small children and those who will heartily applaud any movie as long as it has subtitles.
[Toronto After Dark Film Festival] [Retribution] [horror movies]
Posted by Chris at 12:04 AM >> Commentations (4) | Permalink
October 22, 2006 >> Sexpo
This weekend we went to the Everything to do with Sex Show, an exploration mostly fuelled by free passes but also by an idle curiosity to see freaky-deaky things.
In the Exposition Center, rows of booths hawked bargain price dildos, hedonism resorts and S&M art. Convict strippers thrashed vigorously and threw their striped jackets aside to she-screams of approval. Girls dragged their overwhelmed boyfriends through the crowded isles in search of devices for spicier sex. This debauchery was all very much what I expected.
The vast majority of attendees were seemingly straightlaced hetero couples, although the occasional old man in a "Wanna bone?" shirt added dirt to the grounds. And did you know that Klingon counts as a valid sexual fetish? I caught sight of numerous dudes in full regalia who I assumed wandered into the wrong convention, but who were apparently looking for Star Trek love with furrowed foreheads.
I was very amused by two 'ladies of the night' who slinked and slithered across the top of a hearse, which had been remodelled to include a love bed in the back. From coffin to coitus, this vehicle was destined for strange days. Rows of men took pictures of the two cellulite-sprinkled performers while their (much hotter) girlfriends waited behind them impatiently.
One exhibitor was very proud of his home-brewed device, which essentially resembled an outboard motor with a fiercely plunging phallus attached to one end. He informed us, quite congenially, that his machine was designed for "four friends... or enemies... whatever," which conjured up images of a small group of ladies battling it out for a turn on the Super Eviscerating Penis Contraption.
I purchased a chocolate representation of two pigs sexxxing it out, which I vowed to eat only if I was very, very drunk.
We also found a perfect shirt for Kyle, pictured below. Unfortunately - and I mean unfortunate in several senses of the word - the shirt was designed to be worn by an infant.
At one booth, skeezy looking characters were recruiting future adult film stars from the general public. The booth poster depicted a chubby naked man amongst the hardbodies, presumably to suggest that even fatties can bang for cash-money in the wondrous, burgeoning economy of pornographic movies. I wasn't buying it - that dude is probably one of those guys in leather gimp suits who get horribly beaten by German death-femmes. Not an ideal line of employment, in my opinion.
Titles for porno movies are always hilarious, intentionally or not, and we spent a while merrily combing through the filth. I won't bother cataloguing the depravity - what, you can't find silly porn on your own? - but my favourite was There Was an English Lass Who Loved Cock Up Her Ass, if only because the box proudly proclaimed that its contents contained 94.8% Anal. That leaves, what, 5% for the plot? For regular intercourse? For CREDITS? The film was mysteriously problematic, a statistical conundrum.
Finally, our wanderings nearly complete, we attended a conference on G-Spots and P-Spots which was packed beyond capacity. An older woman liberally told us all about the proper way to insert fingers... or carrots... or whatever into poop-holes for maximum enjoyment. She lay on tables and wiggled her hips. Complete with anatomical diagrams, her presentation was frank and unabashed. I think I learnt a lot - who knew the G-spot wasn't just a feminist myth??
And who knew that Torontonians were so ravenous to find new ways to get themselves off? Me, now, I guess. And you.
[Everything to do with Sex Show]
Posted by Chris at 05:57 PM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
October 19, 2006 >> Kentucky Fried Chagrin
I do, from time to time, enjoy fast food. Some of those times I am by myself, either through circumstance or a distinct lack of friends. And let me tell you that there is nothing more humiliating than having to order certain things without support.
KFC: WelcometoKFCwhatwouldyoulike?
Me: *pointing at overhead menu board* Uh... I'll have that one. The combo there.
KFC: *barely looking* WHICH one, sir?
(Side note: I also love how they have to call you sir even when they think you're a total fucking loser. It adds a certain timbre of hatred to their voices.)
Me: Er... the... Funmumblemumblemumble.
KFC: What? Sir?
Me: The... *big sigh* the Fun for One combo.
KFC: FUN-FOR-ONE! ONE FUN-FOR-ONE COMBO FOR THE GENTLEMAN!
FUN FOR ONE...ONE...ONE!!!
*everyone falls silent as they turn to look at me disdainfully*
Me: Thanks.
Why do they choose these painful, overwhelmingly awkward names for their special promotions? I may want that chicken burger, yes, but I sure as hell don't want to verbally admit that I would indeed like an "Xtreme Scream Sandwich Combo". X. Treem. Scream. God, I can't believe that they actually make you say it. It's sadistic.
Of course, dropping a little number or letter or SOME other signifier on the menu would help. It's a lot easier to ask for Combo #3 than the Greasy Chicken Finger Flinger Combo. If only they could give you something cool to say, something you could deliver with confidence. Chicken Infinity. Fireburger. But no... I will continue to be molested by KFC's horrible promotion marketing team, muttering and staring at my feet as I stand by that accursed register. Waiting for Fun For One.
Posted by Chris at 02:07 PM >> Commentations (5) | Permalink
October 18, 2006 >> Rather honest at 3 am
I've found that, in life, it's important not to care if you die. That's not to say that I recommend becoming laconic or suicidal - you're not supposed to give up - but accepting inevitability seems to be a key factor in navigating such formerly pressing issues as:
-what the fuck am I doing
-is it okay to smoke this many cigarettes
-how will my individual skills become economically viable in the future
-why is this chicken breast not cooked correctly... it is blue in the middle and bleeding on my fingers
-will anyone remember me for anything good i've done
Somewhere in the middle of all this madness is a strange transcendence in no longer caring. Just... trusting. It's a bit of a battle, pushing this concept through my eyes and down, but when it's working I am no longer afraid.
And I look at all the lights outside my window, and the airplanes overhead.
Posted by Chris at 02:53 AM >> Commentations (5) | Permalink
October 16, 2006 >> Scintillating Media Review!!
This weekend I pulled a double-header at the cinema. It's a strange feeling: standing up as the house lights come up, stretching your legs and slowly ambling out of the theatre, only to cross the plush hallscape and find your seat for the next movie. You feel like a lazy fucker actually, but in my case it was necessary for academic purposes. I won't go into details, mostly because I am a lazy fucker but also because I visited the Hot Box Cafe first.
Trailer Park Boys was a lot more slick than I expected. In fact, the slickness sorta took away from the charm of the older show, where the camera work was shitty and Ricky was forever telling the boom mic operator to "fuck off or help out," with robberies and the like. It seemed like the movie was trying to sell itself on the characters alone, which is a decent sell but not altogether satisfying. A lot of plot was a hasty-mart recap of the various relationships in the show, a concession which was clearly made to new viewers (read: Americans). There were also some new characters: a stripper girlfriend for Julian and what appeared to be a new actress for Ricky's daughter Trinity. They felt like ticky-tac add-ons at times.
However, I loved the throws to Canadian culture: one scene in a movie theatre has posters for FUBAR (yay!) and Foolproof (bleugh!) in the background, and Ricky is continually trying to get back to jail so he can play in a hockey tournament. And the closing credits, scored by the Tragically Hip, force you to leave with a smile on your face, knowing that all is right in Sunnyvale Trailer Park even under new management.
Employee of the Month is about as awful as one might expect. Jessica Simpson's character has some inspirational speech about how she's not like other girls, and how everyone seems the same, blah blah blah, and this was probably the most entertaining (and ironic) part of the movie. Jessica Simpson is a tool, but you probably don't need to be told that. Employee of the Month has some interesting looks at big-box store culture (like the guys who make a rest lounge for themselves up in the rafters, surrounded by boxes and boxes of VCRs), but the story devolves into romantic misunderstandings and painfully obvious self-realizations. I found that digging in the dirty popcorn and sticky residue under our seats for another joint was the most engaging part of the whole experience.
My ass hurt from the theatre seats and my fingernails were dirty, dirty as hell.
[Trailer Park Boys: the Movie] Employee of the Month
Posted by Chris at 12:53 PM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
October 11, 2006 >> Your Place in Society: Mask Sexxor
I am trying to decide whether I like work or school better.
See, work (in my experience) is usually a fairly well-defined activity: put in your hours, engage in some mild jackassery, and the rest is all free time to enjoy or dedicate to various other pursuits. Like raising miniature horses, if you're into that kind of thing. The working life sucks in its routine, but sometimes a well-compartmentalized existance lends itself well to true relaxation at the end of the day. Still, you're a drone and every single hipster movie about suburban hell will never let you forget it.
School, on the other hand, involves far less rigid scheduling and far more sporadic bursts of stress. You have a week of nothing, and then a week of absolute insanity, whereby you continually daydream about somehow killing yourself with a toaster. How would you even do that, anyway?? Maybe fit your ears into the slots or something, I dunno. It's something I often wonder about when the deadlines come rolling in, probably because I like to pace a lot and the toaster is at eye level in our kitchen. Anyway, on one hand, every week as a student is a fairly diverse and new experience; on the other, your nights are filled with guilt as you realize all the work you should be (and conveniently are not) doing. It's a tortured existence, and that never worked out for Hamlet if you recall.
In the end, neither solution is ideal. My recommendation is that you should just have sex with a wooden Chinese demon-mask until it explodes in a shower of splinters and fragments your reproductive system, and then proceed to enjoy unlimited freedom at the asylum. Best years of your life.
Posted by Chris at 01:41 AM >> Commentations (7) | Permalink
October 08, 2006 >> A Bent Barrie Thanksgiving
Driving home on Highway 400, in the southbound lane, traffic slowly grinds down to a limping dog's pace. We soon see why: across the meridian, on the opposite side, emergency vehicles are haphazardly sprawled across the road. A now-or-eventually corpse lies on a stretcher; SUVs are bent into impossible angles. And we are going slowly because everyone wants to see.
The northbound traffic behind the accident has realized the gravity of the situation. They aren't moving anytime soon. People have spilled out of cars to eat picnic lunches. Others move forward to take photos of the carnage - I am appalled, but hypocritically so. If I had a camera I would take pictures too, out the window as we quietly roll on by. Club music blares from a sedan and the whole scene looks a bit like a neighbourhood block party, an impromptu gathering of steel and glass and flesh snaking kilometres long. As always, it takes a tragedy to pull people out of their Toyota shells and into awkward small-talk about cottages and forthcoming turkey dinners.
I've been in Barrie. With a faraway family, I am always reliant on the generosity and goodwill of others for delicious Thanksgiving feasts. This year I went to "Big France" Kyle's house and argued with his sister over custody of Mr. Hoppy, a murderous orange space hopper. Unfortunately for me and Kyle, Mr. Hoppy is an essential childhood memory.
We drink rum and go to Queens, which is a bar. The Barrie downtown scene is exactly like I've always pictured it: a whitewashed assembly of kids who return for the holidays to nostalgically pursue the past, and those who never made it out at all. Hags, Kyle and Kyle's Little Sister have a joyous high-school reunion while me and Alicia - who is really into her journalism these days - conduct interviews on each other about man-sluts and the politics of grinding.
Alicia also critiques my dancing and offers the following helpful guidelines: move shoulders, not arms, and avoid the natural urge to jerk spasmodically into walls and hot girls' drinks. The less motion, the better. Do like black guys do. This is difficult, considering Kyle's Little Sister has insisted on tying my jacket around my neck and I look like an asshole Harvard preppie. Eventually Alicia wraps the jacket around her massive purse, declaring herself the Jacket Queen or somesuch, and I am thankfully free once again to engage in battling my Caucasian handicap.
Good times are had by all. Time rushes by, and we scrape through the traffic jam - metal and blood, recall - to find ourselves on our North York apartment deck looking out on good ol' Jane & Finch. The leaves are turning beautifully, all orange and plum. Several stories below, a hip hop version of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" blares to raucous ethnic approval. I wonder if they are dancing, this Thanksgiving weekend. I wonder if they are moving their arms.
[Barrie, Ontario] [Thanksgiving]
Posted by Chris at 02:00 PM >> Commentations (0) | Permalink
October 07, 2006 >> Fashion Narrative
The process of reading American Psycho is rather gruelling. First, you begin identifying everyone you meet by what brands they've got on: "Professor Elder is wearing plaid jogging pants from Sears, a tweed jacket by Estobar MacEnrow and a frightful cardigan pullover designed by Versace Jr. He looks dour." Then you start seeing corpses piled in the corners.
Posted by Chris at 02:06 AM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
October 03, 2006 >> In standard format and style
In academic writing, it's standard practice to include detailed definitions for the simplest of everyday terms, e.g. "Instant messaging (IM) is when you type shit to someone else and then they type back and there are happy faces and also devils and sheep and little birthday cakes!" You have to meticulously over-define the obvious, to make sure every reader starts from the same point. And then you proceed to write an analysis using the most complex, elitist terminology and theory speak you can possibly cram into a paragraph without it becoming top-heavy and crashing off the bottom of the page.
It's a dirty contradiction, to say the least.
Posted by Chris at 10:59 PM >> Commentations (3) | Permalink
October 02, 2006 >> Sadly Gradly
So tonight I started making a collage of my dreams out of construction paper and had to stop and think, "...so this is grad school?"
Grad school also involves realizing that every topic and conceivable thing one might want research has already been done, and by somebody better than you. The best you can do is hunt for a spinoff so obscure that nobody else would think it important, and then hope that, say, a theory of representation study on Donkey Kong (1) might somehow become academically significant in the future.
So basically you're halfway between retarded and irrelevant.
I think many grad students wrap themselves up in a scholastic straitjacket, getting so involved in the big wide arena of conferences and funding that they lose track of the outside world. It's kind of tricky, convoluted existence, this churn of knowledge, one which doesn't lend itself easily to broader perspectives. I mean, everyone's smart, but they're also not, y'know? The eagerness in the newcomers reminds me of an imploding star when placed beside the general malaise and weary bitterness of upper-year black holes.
Funnily enough, I'm not unhappy. I just write sad because that's what I see.
Posted by Chris at 12:36 AM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink