White

There has been an unusually large amount of snow falling lately in my world, and I am a little alarmed to think that we aren't even halfway through winter yet. To further jangle my nerves, I read this morning a prediction from Environment Canada that this will be the longest and coldest winter in about a decade. Great. I am trying as best I can to see the beauty in it, not only the physical reality of the snow, but in the broader themes of Nature renewing herself, of Planet Earth behaving as it should...but it is a daily struggle, and I fear I am losing. Another mortifying detail from Environment Canada's announcement: Canada is the second-coldest country in the world. I'm assuming Russia is first. I don't know why this surprises; I don't know why the tiniest germ of panic took life at the discovery of this fact, in black ink. It's not like any of this was a secret. It's not like I haven't been noticing the looks of disbelief on Canadians' faces when they learn we left Los Angeles for Toronto. Indeed, I find myself pining for LA more in the winter than any other time. I barely think of it in the summer, and can even think of one or two moments I felt grateful not to be there anymore. But that was July. This is December, and I find myself endlessly checking the weather in LA. It rained there last week; but now it's gorgeous again. About a foot fell here last night.

Why am I so affected by the weather? Why is it so important to me? T loves this weather. Sure, he misses summer, but he has perspective: this is the weather now, it will change, more nice weather will come behind it, life continues notwithstanding. Where do I get this kind of perspective? I am considering the possibility that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD...I know, isn't it pathetic). One sees advertisements for light therapy boxes in the newspapers here, glowing tabletop orbs of sun-mimicking radiance. Sufferers spend 30 minutes or so a day sitting next to one, and allegedly have much less inclination to check the weather in Southern California 17 times before lunch. Price tags range from $150 to $300. I am considering a purchase. Or at the very least a test-bask.

Nothing to say...

...but I'll post anyway, 'cause I know if I don't soon, I'll start hearing about it.

I've been sickly of late, nothing major, just sort of congested and tired. I spent pretty much all weekend in bed, as a result, with only a brief foray on Saturday to engage our downstairs neighbour in an altercation. Faithful readers will recall the characters of Ali and Ali, shoe purveyors, from an earlier cameo. Well, Ali 1 (aka Fat Ali) continues to labour under the delusion that music played loudly and bassfully will lend an impression of attractiveness to his egregious footwear offerings — and trust me, this is not merely sour grape-juice, they are egregious: I've seen Eastern European call-girls wrinkle their noses. Anyway, feeling more than usually put-upon in my unwell state, I marched my elevated goat down to his door and requested that he adjust his levels. And to my amazement, he refused. A somewhat clumsy argument ensued, marred equally by his imperfect grasp of the English language as by my imperfect comprehension of his version thereof. Little in the way of entente was achieved, an interest in involving the slum-, I mean landlord in all future dealings being the one point on which we were in agreement. I mustered what sniffling dignity I could, and exited.

Fortunately I care little for the fallout as we are moving — hooray! We finally found a place downtown that we can afford and that would not require a complete abandonment of our standards. It's actually fairly nice, parquet flooring notwithstanding, but the best thing will be its location: five minutes walk from Thom's work, a ten-minute bike-ride from mine, and a few short blocks from St. Lawrence Market and the waterfront. And best of all, we get to see the (wide) back of our dismal landlady. I suppose I'll miss the pierogies and the paczkies, and the long summer nights smoking non-filters with Jerzy and the boys under the brass pope outside the Catholic Credit Union...good times, but it's time to move on.

Debrief

I suspect I should feel sufficiently cowed this morning to delete the previous post, but that would be censorship of a kind — of my true character. Yesterday, at about 4:00 p.m., we received a phone call from our dinner guest of the previous evening. He had just checked himself out of the emergency room. Yes, taking a cab home at about 1:30 a.m., the pain had become insupportable and he diverted the cab to Mount Sinai Hospital. They informed him, after placing him on a morphine drip and doing a battery of tests, that he had a case of aggravated gallstones that would require surgical attention sometime in near future. Allegedly the doctor said it had nothing to do with my cuisine, but in my mind the connection is irresistible. Was it the pot-roast, the rice-flour soda bread, the gluten-free berry pie — or was it, all together, a recipe for murder?

In other news, to reward Canadians for having to wait months to see delayed broadcasts of the addictive drivel Project Runway, we have been given our very own version, Project Runway Canada — hosted by none other than Iman. After some initial awkwardness (she seemed at first like a second-rate actress playing a supermodel), she settled into what I suspect is her natural tone of ruthless disdain, like a panther recently awoken from a nap. Even her compliments, delivered in a velvety baritone, sound like veiled threats. The locks of hair on one of the final two contestants before elimination were literally trembling under her gaze! I anticipate a trail of tattered mediocre prêt-à-porter, and maybe even a little blood, in her languid wake.

What if...

A scenario for you: You invite someone over for dinner, serve them a meal you've spent all day preparing, of which they consume three gusty helpings. Sometime between the main course and dessert, however, your guest begins complaining of gastric discomfort, and begins belching to relieve it. Several belches a minute. Not swallowed discreet belches, either, but open-mouthed windy ones. Fine. You're friends and adults, not to mention males, who of course are predisposed in your undifferentiated masses to find irresistible humour in stomach-gases. OK. The guest starts to wince in a less-than-humourous manner, and adjourns to the bathroom. Some twenty minutes later, your guest emerges; you suggest, in your hospitable way, that he lie down, and your own bed being the only bed in the house, you suggest he do so there. An hour passes. The clock strikes midnight; your guest shows no signs of rising. Your partner, unconcerned with these developments, proceeds to watch a documentary on the ear-bleeding musical stylings of Bob Dylan. You are relegated to the kitchen where you have spent the entire day anyway. Hot acid fury drips down your brain...

Man down

I am writing this from our kitchen table, despite the fact it is 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. Yesterday morning, hubris overcame reason: rain notwithstanding, I chose to ride my bicycle to work. Outfitted with a slicker, I imagined all risks had been covered. Wrong. I forgot the advice of many a seasoned Torontonian bike-rider to navigate with the greatest of prudence the streetcar tracks that crisscross our city, and blithely took a downhill swipe at the most diabolical tangle of them, thinking to outrun a row of approaching cars. True to legend, tracks become slick as ice in the rain and will suck any incautious bicycle tire without ruth into their vortex. Down went I, hip-first, sliding in a spectacular diagonal across the intersection. Cars mercifully braked and their drivers paused expressionlessly while I gathered myself, my tangled bike and the shredded vestiges of my dignity from the rain-swept tarmac and hobbled to the corner. I can only imagine I was sort of numbed by shock and pain and rain, because after a brief inspection of the bike, I remounted and continued my journey to work, believing myself only superficially affected by the fall. But my concern slowly mounted in proportion to the increase of pain in my hip-joint. By the time I got to work, I could barely walk. It was fairly pathetic. I did a disposable ice-pack from our first-aid kit, which brought brief relief, but soon it became clear that I was quite helpless and very possibly facing a fracture or at the least a sprain. So home I came, hobbling at an excruciating pace up and down the staircases of the public transport system, too cheap (yes, me!) to shell out 25 bones for a cab.

It was a painful night, relieved by painkillers and cold-packs, and this morning I decided the attempt to get to work would probably do even further damage. So here I sit, never far from our institutional-grade walking-cane left over from T's bouts with sciatica in the early oughts, watching AbFab clips on YouTube and feeling the cool wave of laughter therapy wash my aching limbs.

To alleviate concern, I am on the mend; it can't have been a fracture or even a sprain, as I am walking mostly without pain. I imagine another day or two and it will be fine. It better be as I expect to get back on the bike tomorrow. I know, have I gone mad? Who is this person? Yatsu expressed some concern recently about the perils of my biking in the city, and I've thought about it a bit since then. There's an undeniable aspect of defiance, of independence, of daring fate to act. I wouldn't call it a death wish; quite the opposite; a life wish. For a person who has allowed fear to guide so many of his decisions, it feels great to conquer that fear in at least this one arena. It's not bungee-jumping or alligator-wrestling, no, but it keeps the small warrior inside me alive, if just slightly bruised.

Nuit Blah

On Saturday night, I learned the secret that has tickled the corners of Mona Lisa's mouth for the past few decades: people, when gathered in their droves, ruin art.

Nuit Blanche is billed as an "all-night art party" - hundreds of artists take over public spaces with installation art and the public comes to ogle from 7:00 p.m. to sunrise. What a great idea, huh? Emphasis on "idea" - just as the emphasis in the event tagline ought to be on "party". I am inclined to be charitable (in a patronizing, supercilious sort of way) to the hordes of wide-eyed suburbanites and stoned adolescents that flooded the streets of Toronto: perhaps it was a hunger for art that drew them out. I thought that at first, courting death on my bicycle, as I set out for the night. But one hour later, the only "art" I had seen was a homeless gentleman playing bones on a city trashcan. What "art" there was was either obliterated by the crowds or by the artist's concern to create something more likely to entertain, or mystify, rather than actually provoke thought or introspection or debate. What resulted was mayhem, at best a freshman Burning Man (a football field of spaced-out undergrads lying on the grass, pondering the grandeur of a string of blue fairy lights attached to a cluster of helium balloons), at worst an extended commercial (numerous pieces offering a number to text a message to, which would then be projected on a screen or building-face - all appropriately branded by a major phone company).

It was actually a very interesting event, at least philosophically and in retrospect, given my last blog about Warhol, who said at some point in the seventies that commerce was his art. From that perspective, this was the ultimate Warholian declension: an event ostensibly about art, branded to distortion by its sponsoring financial institution (whose name I refuse to give anymore airtime to), and dressed up like a party. I guess, in the end, the art itself was neither "art" nor "culture", but a collection of (unintentional) baits set up to draw the event into place, and demonstrate the actual state of culture: a braying drunken bloated thing, desperate to filter every experience through some sort of technology - a camera, a screen, a phone - and I suspect, heaving, on the evening after, a collective sigh of familiar relief in front of its television set.

OK, yes, I am an elitist. I have no problem admitting this. But am I in favour of separating art from culture (society), essentially the work from the people? I give myself that impression and it concerns me. I wonder, sometimes, if I am the one missing the point.

Musings

We have been watching (in installments) a documentary on Andy Warhol over the past few nights. It's from the PBS American Masters series — quite good, I recommend it. When T picked it up at the video store, I sniffed with disdain, in part at its four-hour running time. More significantly, however, I have just never been an admirer of Warhol or of his work, or at least the parts of it with which I was familiar. T, on the other hand, is a huge fan ever since attending a large exhibit of Warhol's work some years ago; T has frequently cited this in-person exposure to the overwhelming collectivity and scale of Warhol's original work (rather than reproductions in books and magazines) as being key to appreciating the man, and he repeated this dictum at the video store in response to my apathy. I retorted with some pique that an artist should not require that we view their œuvre in person in order to appreciate their greatness.

The documentary served me up a modest slice of humble pie, however. Warhol's early commercial illustrations (mostly of shoes for fashion mags) are really quite wonderful, as well as his more private drawings of dreamy young men in the all-together. His inked line demonstrates, as the documentary discusses, a mastery of the blotting technique — a nice trick that creates a "printed" effect at once clumsy and delicate — but what the documentary doesn't talk about is the "continuously drawn" effect of the line in his figurative work, reminiscent of Cocteau and even Schiele. It's a technique (also called "blind drawing") that I've always loved but haven't had much success with personally: drawing without removing your eyes from the subject, in other words, not looking down at the page. Of course, the truth is that the great practitioners of this technique probably did look down at the page quite a bit, but their genius is in leaving the impression that their drawings occurred in one breathless unstoppable line, as if the act of creation were reduced to the pen and the subject, with the artist subsumed into one or the other.

But I declined a second helping of pie. Warhol was a fairly cold-blooded character — not that this should affect at all our appreciation of his work and, indeed, it was to an extent this aspect of his vision that made for his early Pop Art successes — but sooner or later, I think, this quality began to overwhelm his art. The celebrity portraits become repetitive, ditto the consumerist works, and the film work seems sort of lazy — a laconic quality that feels generally true of all his work from the mid-sixties on, as if once he had obtained fame, he realized he need do only the barest minimum to maintain it.

The commentators in the documentary wax eloquent about his extraordinary grasp of ideas — but these are their ideas, not Warhol's. Sure, Warhol provided an œuvre po-faced enough to support the projection of all sorts of ideas, but is this artistic genius or simply a gift for deadpan? And must I really be an art scholar to be elevated by his work? I don't know. One critic spoke of him as a sort of seer, predicting the furture of celebrity culture — but I don't know that Andy so much predicted it as perpetuated it. And from our vantage point in history, is this really something worth celebrating?

The Birthday of DemonDoll

Today is the lovely DemonDoll's birthday. When I first saw DD, I was just a little scared of her beauty, humour and fierceness, and in my heterosexual confusion, imagined I should bed her in order to overcome that fear. She dealt with it as she deals with most things — elegantly, directly and summarily: she snogged me. A snog (for those of you who are not familiar with the term, or who may be more familiar with the British colloquial definition of "kiss") entails having a hand clamped over your mouth, and then air blown up your nose. It is followed by a fair amount of dizziness and disorientation, as well as, if administered by DemonDoll, the sound of demented giggling and the irrefutable declaration that you have been claimed, just as if you were a branded heifer. And indeed I was: owned by her ever since. She has made me laugh probably more than anyone I know (or at least as much as Yatsu; combined, they are lethal); she has also dispensed some of the most reasoned and loving advice of my life; she is generous and brave and literate and bawdy and she loathes the word "utterly". There is, in short, no one with whom I would rather chew a bun. Happy birthday, I love you.

Tired, cranky

Hello. I'm tired. Why am I so tired? I eat well, I ride my bike about an hour a day. I go to bed early. I don't, however, always sleep immediately: T likes to read himself to sleep, and though he uses a discreet booklight, he has a habit of rubbing his feet together at every semi-colon — don't know why the semi-colons make him do that, they just do. Actually, I have no idea if it's the semi-colons; that's just one theory. I have many theories, as many as the sleepless, self-defeatist minutes I lie there, anticipating and timing the foot-rubs, interpreting, qualifying, codifying them, parsing the satisfied foot-rubs (a particularly elegant turn of phrase?) from the dissatisfied ones (a clumsily hanging participle?). They take on a feel of punctuation themselves, commas and EM dashes and ellipsis for the tedious ramblings of my insomnia. I need more coffee.

Have you been to http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/? Extremely diverting.

Holy expletives

I'm full of adventure-clicking today! I followed one of DemonDoll's "Not so silent lurking" links to Crazy Aunt Purl, who seems like a delightful loon. Her rantings brought back many a fond memory of steaming, gut-searing road-rage on the freeways of Los Angeles. I cannot tell you how unfit I was to drive in that city, possibly any city. That I escaped alive and (so far) ulcerless is a work of the Good Lord. Speaking of the Good Lord (and, boy, did I, during the righteous fury of my daily commute!), Aunt Purl shares a particularly fine example of one of my favourite cursing sub-genres: the Christ-based expletive phrase. Hers, which I intend to adopt and spread liberally north of the 49th, is "Jesus Christ on a cracker!" I love it! In Catholic school, two decades ago, I may have coined (the memory is dim) my stock favourite ever since: "Jesus Christ on a bicycle!" (Of course, Catholic school was a hotbed of heretical fecundity in these matters, including the irreverent alternative lyrics to the Christmas carol, "These Three Kings": "These Three Kings of Orient are,/One in a bus and one in a car,/One on a scooter, blowing his hooter,/Chasing his fat grandma." Also: "These Three Kings of Orient are,/Tried to smoke a rubber cigar,/It was loaded and exploded,/That's why they followed the star." Ah, the religious education.)

Back to the Christ-based expletive: though while not strictly a phrase, "Jesus H. Christ!" is probably the oldest living relative of this form, which counts amongs its ancestors such bygone gems as "'Sblood!" and "'Swounds!" And then there is the ne plus ultra of Christ-based expletives, the one that makes even a heretic such as myself blush, that I reserve for only the most insupportable moments of crisis (or no more than three times daily on the 101), the appalling, the effective, "Jesus Fuck!" And yes, it is with a considerable amount of shame (and just a soupçon of wicked pride) that I must confess to being its progenitor.

Next blog deux

Oh dear, sometimes "Next Blog" yields some very dirty results. Does "Horny Asian Girl"'s mother know what she's up to?

Next blog

I have never clicked the "Next Blog" link in the header before — until today. I was taken at first to a goth blog called RESURRECTION, written in Spanish. I returned to my blog and clicked "Next Blog" again: now, one called "Poor Since 1959". A delightful, time-wasting feature.

In other developments, the emoticon labs have come up with thrilling new technology: the unibrowed smiley-face, l:) , and the unibrowed grumpy-face, l:( . A momentous step for multi-culturalism. [Credit to DemonDoll and WGD for inspiration.]

Nouveau look

My blog needed to feel pretty again. Does anyone know how to change the little image at the top-left?

(Dear faithful DemonDoll...when all others had abandoned hope! ;) Which reminds me of a little-known fact, or to be precise, not-at-all-known by me prior to recently: the adorable smiley-face emoticon turned 25 this week. I think the winking emoticon is somewhat younger, and younger still its party-hatted cousin. I wonder, among the emoticons, which is the youngest? And are they agreed on their various ages, or is there acrimonious, ageist in-fighting going on behind the scenes?)

In the wind

Hmmm, seems nobody's reading. Well, come on, what does one expect? Absent for seven months, people have lives! That's fine, though...sort of comforting, the idea of not being heard, sort of like talking to yourself in a public place, something I love doing but so rarely indulge in, for propriety's sake.

This California same-sex marriage thing is getting my goat good. WTF??? This law has passed twice now, twice! What difference does it make to Schwarvbcjhgvznegger? And what right does he have to ignore the will of his legislature and millions of Californians. He stupidly claims that prop. 22 indicated the people's will to ban same-sex marriage, but this was passed seven years ago! Things are heating up, though: first, a call for his lesbian chief of staff to resign in protest, now the news that San Diego's mayor will sign the resolution to overturn prop. 22 and become a "friend of the court" in constitutional hearings currently underway, after learning that his grown daughter is a lesbian. This is what needs to happen. People need to start realizing their interconnectedness. Your Republican mayor has a lesbian daughter, your Republican governor has a lesbian chief of staff, your friends, your neighbours, your co-workers are queer. I don't think most people want to discriminate, but I think these connections are not easily made for many people in conservative communities: the media offers only stereotypes and provocations, and the queers who occupy these people's lives are in many cases too terrified to come out for fear of repercussions. I was just ranting off about Jodie Foster the other day: no, I'm not asking her to become a political mouthpiece for queers, all I'm asking, expecting, is that she realizes that her silence implies shame (whether she feels shame or not), and that she should not in any good conscience be able to continue profiting from silence while millions of queers are suffering for being out. Visibility is going to turn the tide, and one celebrity (for better or for worse) can count for thousands of non-celebrities. I am considering a boycott of The Brave One.

Here's an abstract nude I just drew; started out as a doodle, but I sort of like it. Not sure yet, but it may still be in progress.

Anger-management yogi-style

My therapist-counsellor who told me I had difficulty expressing my anger — the same therapist-counsellor who ditched me to go into private practice with nary a hint that I might follow him with sliding-scale benefits (express this, dick-sweat!) — offered the following constructive, non-combative technique for dealing with anger:

• Kneel beside your bed
• Raise your fists above your head and breath in deeply
• Bring your fists down forcefully on the bed, at the same time pushing the air out of your lungs
• Repeat until serene

I tried it once with good results — however, red wine, preferably half a bottle, combined with a slab of dark chocolate, is most consistent.

(Two in one day, nay, one hour — impressive, no?)

Long time coming

It has been almost seven months to the day since my last post, and though I've experienced the odd twinge of contrition, I can't say I've lost too many hours sleep over it. Am I not suited to the blogopshere? What makes for a compelling blog, anyway? And by that I mean compelling for the blogger. Most blogs are about the blogger; the blogger is, therefore, the main subject. Does it follow then that if a blogger is not interested enough to maintain her or his own blog, said blogger is not interested in themselves? I am starting to suspect I require a more compelling subject. Take this dedicated soul, for instance: pancakerecipes.blogspot.com. Clearly this is a compelling subject, for both blogger and reader ("bloggee" is not, I believe, an appropriate term in this case; a bloggee would have to be one about whom a blogger blogs, and despite my fondness for batter-based breakfast foods, I cannot bring myself to anthropomorphize them) — or is it simply a cry for help?

TO allure

An uncommonly charming (though obviously not recent) view of the city I currently call home (Photo credit: my boss, aka Toronto's Biggest Fan):

White stuff

A view from my office building (though, alas, not my office):