Boo! :c (Supposed to be a vampire.)

Happy Hallowe'en, everybody. Ali and I had a really nice time in Wolfville and we'll probably post some pictures on here when we have more time. But first, here's a not very spooky little tune we created from scratch in the practice space tonight and recorded on my scrappy little dictaphone.

[It's gone now. It was pretty scrappy, and not very spooky. Seriously.]

Could become something decent, I think.

We're rereading Breakfast of Champions now 'cause we were in the mood for something light, and I'm happy to say it's held up pretty well. Very amusing and eerily relevant thirty-something years later. Hmmph.

OK, here's one photo from Wolfville that Ali worked on today. It kind of goes with the kind of spooky song.

Later.

- Andrew

Plans, Pipe Dreams, and Just Plain Irresponsible Brain Cell Use

As you may or may not know, Hallowe'en is the anniversary of Alison's and my first meeting, which was at a costume party in Montreal 11 years ago. I was Gilligan, and I lucked into a perfect cross between Mary-Anne and Ginger, with absolutely no Mrs. Howell. So to celebrate that blessed event we're going to Wolfville this weekend and staying in the same inn we stayed in last year at this time. I've been working like crazy with next to no free time so I'm really looking forward to it. Ali's actually going to be helping to shoot a wedding in Wolfville most of Saturday, which is how the whole thing got planned, but that's fine with me. It'll give me plenty of time to catch up on my Sudokus and maybe pass the halfway point in Swann's Way. And as Alison points out, there'll be no computers or telephones around.

OK, so did anyone else watch The Apprentice last night? What th' aitch? How could he just go and fire four people at once? Doesn't that mean the show will be three episodes short now? And what's with "step up"? When did everyone start saying that? We've added it to the drinking game for a more rollicking time. "At the end of the day, Jennifer M. just really needs to step up to the plate." Sheesh!

By the way, we finally made it into the practice space on Monday, and it was pretty fun. The Microkorg is our unimaginative if temporary drummer for now. I'm working on some jammable basslines to teach Ali for next time, but eventually I really want to try putting together some kind of long, slowly evolving, repetitious and modal keyboard piece in the style of Philip Glass's "Music in Twelve Parts". I'd like to out-serialize Stereolab. Might be kind of hard to do effectively with only two people playing at once, though. We'll see.

I've added another magazine website to our links: Make Magazine. I heard about it on CKDU because they were giving away a subscription to it as a prize during their funding drive. It's pretty cool, in a very extended sense of the word. Scrappy projects for bohemian techno-geeks. Definitely worth checking out.

And that's how I've been wasting my time lately. How about you?

- Andrew

The Nature of Things.

Today, downtown, there was a young owl in a tree nearby my office. People came in to tell me and Shirley about it. Of course we had to go check it out and take pictures! I only had my little digital so you can't see it too well. As we were watching him some crows started ganging up on the poor little guy...they were making a racket and flying at him and trying to either boot him out of the tree or hit him or something. It was horrible to watch...so we left. Shirley had to go on a job anyway and I couldn't stand to witness anything more brutal. I hope he's okay. Maybe his mom swooped in and saved the day. That's how it'll end in my mind anyway.

Puppy!

Okay, so I'm a sucker for the all the little fuzzy creatures in the world. Everyone knows this. As soon as I sat down at the hair salon the other day, the owner came over and plopped this into my lap! I went snap happy after that. Her name is Lola, btw. -Ali




Stay still Lola! Lola...Lola! Lola?

We have no phone again!

This is getting pretty annoying. I really wanted to call birthday people tonight, and especially to wish Mom & Dad a bon voyage, since they're leaving tomorrow. We'll have to finish our chess game later I guess, Dad. I can't see any quick way to end it, besides losing which could easily be accomplished in one move.

I'm hooked on Sudoku puzzles these days. Has anyone tried them? It's a 9x9 grid divided into 9 3x3 grids, with a few numbers from 1 to 9 filled in in spaces here and there. You have to figure out where all the other numbers go so that every row, every column, and every 3x3 box contains each number once and only once. Eri, I think you especially would like them, because they're pretty similar to those logic problems I remember you used to be really into.

Have to go design a Xmas card now. It's a competition at work to see who comes up with the best one, and they're due tomorrow. I haven't started yet and I have to be in bed in an hour to go in early in the morning. Feels like high school, except without that nice free period I would always schedule for first thing in the morning. Wish me luck!

- Andrew

Just so everyone knows

We are still alive and in reasonable mental health and no one is holding a gun to our head making us type this with our temporarily unhandcuffed hands. And he doesn't have a moustache and a Felix the Cat earring in his left ear either. We just haven't had any any time, I don't really know why. And then our phone was out all day Sunday from the poor weather, so we couldn't even call people. So happy birthday, Dad, Eri, and Jason. I hope you guys had a real swell time. Ali tells me there's pix on the St. Louis blog, which I'm going to check out right after this though I really should be in bed.

We went into the practice space, by the way, tonight. Pretty fun scrappy jamming. I think the other people in the space assumed we had ceased to exist, because our stuff was pretty much buried and there was no space left in which we might play. Kinda smelled bad, too. Here's a picture of Ali rocking out and a movie of me getting down. I don't know why these movies always turn out so dark; they look alright on the camera's screen. Whatever, man.

- Andrew

Trees!

There are so many trees in this city and I love them all. I walked around a little yesterday on my way to and from the dentist and took a few snaps. These two are my favourites. (ali)

Hmm... no real theme I can discern here. Suggestions?

Boy, do I ever need a haircut. It's getting to be windy-rainy-Turneresque-sky season and my mane does not look so good in that kind of weather when it gets moppy. I'm a little vain, yes. But luckily I thought to take a picture of how I like it to look so I can show it to Krista and make her job that much easier:


I'm looking for a cheap mp3 player right now so that I can take rhythm parts from songs I've recorded, copy them from the computer onto it, and use it as a robot drummer for Our Igloo. The band that we went to see on Saturday, Hexes and Ohs, did a similar thing with a laptop and I was worried that they would make my idea redundant, but they actually had quite a lot pre-recorded and played a style of music that was quite a bit more "fascistic," for want of a better term, than what I've been imagining. More electronic-based, I guess. I want to keep it pretty scrappy and folky, and not at all become a slave to the recording. So any old player will do, as long as it's not the kind that can only play in "shuffle" mode, as that would be a little bit more anarchic than what I'm planning.

Here's a picture I took of Ali tonight when we went out for a walk. The moon was full and really pretty in the thick clouds, but by the time I could get the camera to work it had gone behind the clouds completely. I didn't want to use the flash and didn't have a tripod or anything, so that's why it's so blurry. I still like it though. The bright lights in the background are the oil refinery. The not as bright lights are the mental hospital. The really dim bulb in the sky is the moon. (The one behind the camera is me.)

- Andrew

Peechers

Documentary-style post. Weather here is crap but life is good. There are a whole lot of pictures that we've been wanting to put on here, so I'm gonna mostly clam up and let the pixels do the talking. Let me just say Ali and I went out for lunch, we visited our friend Krista whose cat is named Ralph, Flat Bunny had a nap, we went to see a two-person-and-a-laptop band called Hexes and Ohs who were thankfully nothing like Our Igloo despite identical instrumentation, I played chess with my friend Steve (and won!), we caught a bus home in the rain with our groceries, and we had our usual laundry and brunch this very very windy morning. Been a busy weekend.

- Andrew

OK, one more...

I almost forgot -- then some anonymous person's pets went apeshit in their hallway.

- Andrew

How Invention Can Improve Modern Living

Maybe I neglected to mention this, but Our Igloo is still in hibernation. We keep meaning to have a jam session, and then some stupid thing or other comes up and we very quickly cancel our plans. So I've been going through this creatively kind of dry and therefore emotionally kind of out-bumming period, getting less and less willing to pick up an instrument for fear of what might or might not come out.

Then last night the boys and I finally got together to practice. The boys being the two guys with whom I've sometimes been working out some as yet undefined tunage. There was a fourth person playing bass, but I guess she dropped out, so last night it was just the three of us. Nobody seemed too excited to start plugging away again at the barely worked out stuff we'd been working on a few weeks ago, so I picked up the bass and we just started jamming. Boy was it ever fun. We were coming up with some pretty great "songs" too. It felt so good to just start making something up on the spot and then respond to it -- just what I needed. I came home in such a good mood I didn't even care that I'd missed the Martha Stewart Apprentice, and then it turned out to be on an hour later so I hadn't even missed it!

The other uplifting piece of recent news is that I got this great little nose and ear hair trimmer for like fifteen bucks the other day. You probably are not that interested to know this, but I have this crazy fishing line hair that grows out of my ears. Looks insane and hurts like hell to yank out. And don't even get me started on my shameful history of nostril pelage. So this little guy is just the tool I've been looking for. Works great. The only thing is, the instructions are not very helpful: "To trim nose hair, gently apply to nostril. Use same procedure for ear and eyebrow hair." Um, I don't really think that's going to work.

- Andrew

Happy real Thanksgiving.

OK, so we're having the tofurkey tonight because we ran out of time last night and also didn't realize that we were missing a bunch of ingredients. Soup and sandwiches instead. Duh. But tonight will be a real feast, with dumplings and everything.

Here's a little animated movie I made with the digital camera. Cameo by Buster at the end.

[It's been deleted in the possibly vain attempt to get the other Castpost stuff on this site working. What the heck's going on?]

Actually, it required some work on the computer too. Once you stop recording the camera starts a new file, so I ended up with a whole lot of half-second movies which I had to later edit together. It was a very frustrating experience, leading me to make a much simpler and probably better version, before I figured out how to edit on the Mac.




Soundtrack: Try humming "Afternoon Tea" by the Kinks.

Last night we went to see Al Tuck play at Gus' Pub, and he put on a really good solo acoustic show. There's some footage from it, but the sound is horrible and you can barely make him out, so forget it. I found out today in trying to upload the animated cups that we have pretty limited space on Castpost, so I had to delete a bunch of older sound files. So get 'em while you can, I guess is the moral of that excruciatingly dull story.

Ali and I will have been together 11 years at the end of this month. Wow. I guess we've pretty much got this awesome relationship thing down, which is definitely something to be thankful for. Here was our conversation on the way home from the store this afternoon:

Alison: We'll have to think about all the things we have to be thankful for tonight.

Andrew: There's a lot of them.

Alison: There sure are. We've got a lot.

Andrew: Yeah. [Starts singing] We've got tonight... Who needs tomorrow....

Alison: Don't sing that! That's about a one night stand!

Andrew: [Just getting into it] Let's make it -- It is? Oh yeah! So it is!

Alison: Are you kidding?

Andrew: No! I guess I always thought he was expressing some kind of Buddhist, live in the moment thing or something.

Alison: You are an idiot.

Andrew: Yup.

Happy Thanksgiving, Gracie.

- Andrew

You probably already heard this on the national news...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. I know it's actually tomorrow, but I think most people do the dinner thing today, including us. We'll be having a nice tofurkey with all the tofixings, thank you very much.

We went to the laundromat/hippy restaurant this morning, as we do every Sunday, and had a nice brunch with the crossword while the wash was being done. Of course we took the new camera.




It's been pouring rain all day, so we had to take a cab to get there. On the way, the driver broke the news to us that Martha would not be making it, as planned, to the Pumpkin Festival in Windsor where she was supposed to be racing a giant pumpkin boat which she would make herself. She got stranded in Moncton on account of the rain. According to the cabbie, about 20,000 people showed up for the festival, and I have to admit, I'd strongly considered being one of them. Too bad, man. I was really looking forward to this:


- Andrew

Day of Consumption

Don't worry, no one has a deathly old time-y disease. We just spent all day at the mall, spending money like good little capitalists today. I know I said we would be going into the practice space today, but instead we caught the bus out to the pedestrian-unfriendly outskirts of the city to support slave-wage labour in undeveloped countries. And when the time came to play some music, six hours later, we were still enjoying the loud "easy listening" music, dour service, and general homogeneity so much that it completely slipped our minds.

I needed some new clothes, y'see. Pretty badly, actually. And I have to say I was surprised to find that there is actually quite a lot of men's clothing to be had out there that I don't hate. And some of it's not even that expensive. What's been going on in the world, anyway? Now I feel like everyone around me must have been wondering for some time what's going on with that bum whose duds are all second hand and ill-fitting.

Why do I look so gigantic in this shot? "Curioser and curioser," said Alice.

I ended up getting four shirts and a pair of pants, and I may have to go back to pick up a few other items. The store was called "The Cleft" or "The Notch" or something like that. I don't know if you'll be able to find one in your area, but if you can it's really worth checking out.

But so anyway, while we were in bourgeoisieland we broke down and finally bought a cheap digital point-and-shoot camera, with which we took these pictures when we got home, and ..... movies! Check it out:

-- A super dull movie of Ali cooking dinner that's been removed for memory reasons. --

OK, so Akira Kurosawa I ain't. I may have to learn a thing or two about lighting, for instance, but still. We're in the 21st century! I'm not ready for the scrap heap yet.

Jams will be kicked out tomorrow.

- Andrew

-- This was a really dark and boring movie of me petting Buster, our cat. It's been deleted to make room for marginally more interesting things. --
If you listen really closely you can hear Buster purring underneath the annoying mattress salesman.

Diggin' the digi.

I am soooo excited to have this new little digital camera. Now I can post more spontaneously. For instance, here's a photo of Andrew blogging and Buster watching me. It's fresh and new. It just happened! Strangely enough, if you zoom in, you can see that Andrew is looking at himself in the video I shot earlier this evening. Freaky.
Talk to you all real soon,
Ali:)
p.s. bug free sleep last night in new bed. Yay!!!

Poets, Dead and Alive

Well, this doesn't have anything to do with the title of this post, but as promised, here's a scrappy scrap of Our Igloo practice, circa July 2005:

-- No longer here, as more current sound files took precedence. --

Did anyone else see that Bob Dylan documentary by Martin Scorcese that they showed on PBS in two parts? We watched it last weekend with Johanna, and it was really good. We were kind of missing commercials, because we kept wanting to start discussions about it but had to pretty much keep our mouths shut for four hours! Very inspiring, though. And who knew he could speak so coherently? Almost like a normal person.

I don't really have anything to say today, so I'll give you a poem by Alden Nowlan, one of my favourite poets, who was born in Nova Scotia and grew up in New Brunswick, and to whom our friend Jeff turns out to be vaguely related. He's dead now. Alden, not Jeff. A question period and crumpets will follow.

- Andrew

Canadian January Night

Ice storm: the hill
a pyramid of black crystal
down which the cars
slide like phosphorescent beetles
while I, walking backwards in obedience
to the wind, am possessed
of the fearful knowledge
my compatriots share
but almost never utter:
this is a country
where a man can die
simply from being
caught outside.

- Alden Nowlan, 1971

What a bore!

That was quite a rant last night. Sometimes I get so concerned with getting my thoughts down accurately that I forget to make them interesting to read. If I were a preacher I could at least thump my bible every once in awhile, or belt out a hallelujah.

So, yeah, according to the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History, there's no evidence that we have bedbugs. But I say whatever's been doing it must be dead now after all that cleaning and spraying. Plus, we're going to buy a brand new futon any day, so I'm convinced that little episode is over. Alison is skeptical, though.

We took the rent money in last night for our shared practice space, and signed up for a Saturday evening session while we were there. Our Igloo will live again! I'm really looking forward to it as I haven't been playing any of my own music for about a month and a half. Maybe tomorrow I'll post a sample from a practice I recorded on my dictaphone when Matt was still here.

I don't know why, but I really hate Tuesdays. They always put me in a bad mood. Tonight we're going to take it easy and watch Ghost World, the movie based on Daniel Clowes' excellent comic book story, for the second time. I think it was pretty great, if I remember correctly. So that should keep me out of grouchin' trouble. Plus I have to decide on my next email chess move before my Dad gets fed up and moves for me. That might not be so relaxing, as I'm currently in big trouble, but who knows? Maybe I'll have a breakthrough.

I seem to be in danger of repeating last night's mistake. Better get out of here.

- Andrew

Now what?

This is not a bedbug. It's a spider beetle. This is what we found in the bed. They don't bite people. Soooo...what the hell is biting me? I'm going craaaazyyyy!!!!

Fumigation Rumination

This morning I got up nice and early, which I always mean to do but for some reason lately have a hard time making happen. The couch cushions on the living room floor ended up being really comfortable and I didn't feel like getting up to do exercises but I just made myself do it through sheer will. And it felt pretty great once I got started, and then I saw the sun come up and felt even better, and I continued to feel pretty great throughout the rest of the day.

So why — or rather how — is it that I can not want to do something that's going to feel good and increase my physical health, even when I'm conscious of that fact? And not only not want to do it, but regularly act in an unhealthy way, based on my not wanting? Shouldn't someone who acts like that be an anomaly of the species, a glitch that will soon work itself out through the normal mechanisms of evolution, rather than the norm? How have we learned to so easily override evolutionary biology?

People smoke cigarettes, for instance, and it kills them. Shouldn't that decrease the chances of more people being born who will be dumb enough to light up a cigarette even though they know the health risks? No, because as intelligent, social animals, we have a culture that has evolved meaning and signifiers, like non-conformity and looking cool, that transcend the biological laws that have brought us here. Or rather, those biological laws have lost significance because the culture that has evolved out of us who have evolved out of the biological laws can adapt and in fact change the very environment in which it exists much faster than anything purely biological.

But the culture still depends on our existence, which in turn depends on very physical, material criteria. Having transcended these criteria, though, the culture would like to forget about them. Having conquered the physical world, we would now like to live in a purely mental one, even though it doesn't take much inspection to see that we're still very unsure of our footing in that realm. And meanwhile, the "conquered" physical world has started to behave in some unforeseen ways since we turned our backs on it.

If I had more knowledge about history, I might feel confident enough to make the argument that the downfall of Rome came about from a similar forgetting of roots. But I guess I just want to say that it kind of bugs me, and I think that this broad view of the problem is the best kind of environmentalism. Maybe activists should start going around with alarm clocks at 6 in the morning, forcing people out of bed. Yeah, that's always a good bit of salesmanship.

- Andrew

We unwittingly let them bite.

We have bedbugs. Yuck. Alison's been waking up with one or two new bites on her for a couple of weeks now. We've been trying to figure out what the heck is going on, because I never get bitten at all. She insisted it was bedbugs, and I thought maybe she had fleas or something but it always happened overnight so it seemed like she was right, but still, I mean, why have they been biting her and not me? Very mysterious.

Then yesterday morning we finally saw one. They look like a little red spider ("Yeah, red with my blood." - Ali) but with only six legs and they're really boring movement-wise. No giant leaps or flying or anything cool like that. Ali did a bunch of research on the internet and found out they can't survive in water, so I figure if we just wash everything we'll be rid of them, but I guess they're also good at hiding in cracks and things around the bed, like piles of clothes, of which we always have lots. She also found out that it's unjustly common for women to get bitten and not the insensitive men who share a bed with them and say things like, "Maybe they'll just go away."

So this morning we went to the laundromat and washed everything. Had a real nice brunch there too, except that this woman sitting behind us had a CRAZY voice which was freaking us out a little:

-- There was a sound file of her here, which I've since removed. It was kind of mean, but pretty funny. She was saying: --

"And we went very slow. Mack hurt his leg so we were walking very, very slowly."

Then Alison went apepoop vacuuming and dusting and spraying while I went into work to get yet another last minute project done. I hope that'll be the last of those for awhile. I came home to an unrecognizably clean bedroom which is so full of toxic bug spray now that we have to sleep in the living room tonight.

- Andrew

P.S. Me and You and Everyone We Know is a veeery veeeery worthwhile film, if you get a chance to see it. Incredibly dirty, but also very sweet at the same time. Similar in that way to The 40 Year Old Virgin, which is also worthwhile in that it's one of the funniest movies ever. Alison guesses that must be the new aesthetic -- shocking empathy. Nabokov would be proud.

))<>((