Winnipeg!

We made it to Thunder Bay yesterday and now tonight we're in a hotel in Winnipeg, getting ready for bed. Seen many many trees and a few animals (crows (dead and alive), turkey hawks, black bear (Andrew), deer, bald eagles). On arriving here, we ate way too much food at a really good Chinese restaurant across the street. Then we went for a walk by the Red River as the sun went down. Really pretty, especially with the trees growing right out of the water and birds skimming bugs off the surface of the water, but unfortunately no camera for that part. We might take some photos in the morning.

What I do have photos — and video! — of is our visit this morning to the Kakabeka Falls on the way out of T-Bay. It was gorgeous, and made a nice beginning to another day full of sitting in a car.






Tomorrow: Saskatoon!

LOOOONG Road Trip

One thing about this one-subject blogging, it seems like I'm always a few weeks behind what's actually going on, and I'm never going to catch up. So here's a very short post to fill you in on what's happening RIGHT NOW.

We're in a hotel room in Sault Ste. Marie, having driven all day yesterday with Alison's dad and brother from Toronto. We're on our way to Saskatoon to see her grandfather, who is turning 100. We made this plan long ago and now it's starting to seem kind of crazy, but it's also pretty fun so far. I've got a paper cup full of horrible coffee beside me, Alison's in the shower, and her dad and brother are busy pacing around and repacking. There's a Dairy Queen across the street and a bowling alley connected to the hotel. Andrew (Alison's brother [confusing, I know]) and I considered doing a little bowling last night after dinner, but in the end we all just went to bed early, completely exhausted.




We were in Toronto for a full day before setting out on the drive, and we got to see our friends Jeff and Tim playing some softball in a nice little park off Christie.



It was very relaxed and pleasant. Almost made TO seem like a possible place to live. Then we got back to Alison's parents' for dinner and there was a homeless guy asleep on the lawn of the person across the street. Someone called 911, and they sent a fire engine and an ambulance. Two firemen went up to the guy and told him he can't sleep there. Then the ambulance driver used his public address system to bellow, "YOU CAN"T SLEEP THERE!" Then they turned their sirens back on and left, having earned their government salary for the day. The homeless guy looked slightly stunned and/or bemused before he fell asleep again.

Today we drive to Thunder Bay. Then Winnipeg tomorrow, and on to Saskatoon the next day. I'm reading David Foster Wallace's history and analysis of mathematical infinity. It's unsurprisingly fascinating. Assuming internet connections continue to appear as we head farther into the wilderness, I'll keep you posted.

Happy Birthday, Dana!

I betcha gettin' big.

RIP, MJ (& FF)

I kind of can't believe Michael Jackson has died, even though it felt a little like he'd died a long time ago. That poor miserable guy. I hope he found some kind of peace with himself before the end. Not to be morbid or cynical, but in addition to feeling bad I also wonder what will happen to the publishing rights to all those Lennon-McCartney songs. Will they just be turned over to Sony in toto?

Meanwhile, unrelated icon of my youth Farrah Fawcett gets completely upstaged. As I didn't know either of these people personally and didn't have any strong emotional connection to their work, neither of their deaths should really affect me any more than any anonymous death I might hear about in the news. But of course they do, because they both figure largely in the shared, ridiculous history of my generation. Condolences to their families, friends, and fans.

Gobo's First Long Road Trip

We also went to PEI one weekend. Did I already tell you that? Probably not.

It was for Alison's birthday. We went to visit our friends Joan and Jason, who are expecting a baby any day. Joan's actually pregnant, so the expectation is not completely groundless.

We left on Saturday morning. Alison drove Gobo. Instead of the main highway which takes you pretty much all the way east back into Halifax before backtracking northwest up toward New Brunswick (figure a), we took a more scenic route (figure b) which is fewer miles but takes a little more time due to lower speed limits. It was worth it because that road was beeyooteeful, with cows and brooks and meadows and willow trees all up and down its windy length.


Ali needed to take a break once we got across the bridge.


Eventually, we got to J&J's house, which is in a nice little neighbourhood not far from downtown Cha'town. They put us up and fed us and showed us the sights and generally played the perfect hosts. We had some fantastic curry and chips in a British pub that night and played some Yahtzee before bed. The next day was spent wandering around. First we went to a park on the waterfront.



Then Alison and I walked around and got lost downtown, trying not to look like tourists.



We probably weren't too successful. There was a really great second-hand bookstore full of beautiful books on which it was a good thing we didn't have much money to spend. Lots of Maurice Sendak stuff and Japanese art books, in particular. At least in the one section I had a chance to look in before we decided we were just torturing ourselves and got out of there. But I also found On the Road on tape, read by Matt Dillon, which I just had to buy for the trip back.

Instead of Yahtzee that night, we figured out how to play a card game called Casino that Alison had played as a child. It's kind of weird. I'm still not sure whether I like it. Alison was immediately good at it.

The following day was Monday, but I'd taken it off work so we could drive back at our leisure. Which we did, after a warm goodbye to the J's. The bridge was closed for a few hours for an international bike race, so we had to wait in that weird little "Main Street, USA" type tourist area on the PEI end of it, where we ate some truly horrible grilled cheese sandwiches fried in rancid butter and served with a mountain of freezer-burned McCain french fries.

Once we got over the bridge, though, everything was fine. The sun came out and we had a long but pleasant drive back with Matt Dillon telling us all about Dean Moriarty's romantic escapades and the truck beds full of hitchhiking farm boys. We took the scenic route again and stopped for an ice cream cone just before home. Wish I'd bought that book of Japanese prints. Maybe when we go back later this summer to visit Jenny & Tom & MacKenzie...

Happy Real Father's Day!

[See post sub.]

Have a great one, Dad!

Happy Father's Day!

This is my dad at the scenic end of a hike along Cape Split we took at Thanksgiving last year. Coincidentally, Ali and I are going to hike Cape Split today with some friends. Hope you've got something nice planned too, Dad.

[Hmm... OK, I just found out it's not Father's Day. Weird. I'm sure at least three people told me it was. Oh well, happy Father's Day in advance.]

El to the Oh to the Dee Gee Ee

OK, I'm into this one-subject-per-post idea. This one's about The Lodge. There have been a couple of shows in the past little while — one an all-ages show at the Mic Mac Canoe Club in Dartmouth and the other at the Bus Stop Theatre in Halifax for adults only. They were both pretty loud and fairly scrappy. Neither as much fun for me as the previous show we'd played at the Foggy Goggle, where the crowd was super into it and five separate people mentioned Joy Division in talking to me about my bass playing afterward. That one was the official CD release show, although it wasn't really advertised as such so we only actually sold two CDs. I heard someone accidentally bought one of the other bands' CDs, thinking it was ours — that's how disorganized our marketing was.

But now we've got a show coming up this Friday with The True Love Rules. That's the band Dave Marsh has put together to perform his own material. He's the drummer from the Joel Plaskett Emergency, and one of the drummers from the Super Friendz. His songs are fantastic. Should be a real good show, with lots of people our own age whom we actually know in attendance.

I put some The Lodge CDs in a local book store for sale today. We'll see if anyone buys any. They probably wouldn't know anything about the band out here in Wolfville, although anyone who works with me might make the connection. People also might be inclined to pick it up if they've read the latest Exclaim! magazine. Maybe I'll just randomly distribute some of those around town, lying on tables and benches open to the relevant page. Somebody's gotta give these hippy singer/songwriter/amplified-flappy-stringed-acoustic-guitar-strummers a run for their money.

A Voice from Beyond the Grave

Another thing I did recently is quit Twitter. I'd been considering it for a long time, but something or other would always drag me back in. It's weird how guilty I felt about it. I guess there were quite a few people that I don't really have much contact with otherwise, which was why it was appealing in the first place. But I just can't get into this whole computer-as-social-venue thing. I think computers are pretty bad for society in general, in that they put us in a headspace where we become almost necessarily oblivious to our surroundings — a pattern that's already way too easy for humans to fall into anyway — and keep us there with a near infinity of potential diversions. It's one thing to (over)work that way, and to be (over)entertained that way, but when we start having to relate to each other that way too, well, there's just something a little creepy and Matrix-y about it.

Plus, having my work and entertainment and friendships all overlap and interrupt each other every three minutes is just way too distracting. I was losing my powers of concentration and starting to feel totally insane whenever the design I'd stopped thinking about to find an appropriate font I'd stopped choosing to respond to an email I'd stopped reading to look up an insignificant fact got interrupted by someone in another city telling me and all their other followers that their coworkers suck and they are just about ready to gouge their own eyes out. Basically, people just probably shouldn't converse when they're on a computer, as they are in a less-than-human state.

But so it was still a really hard decision to make, and I felt bad for all my friends I was deserting. Honestly, it's probably the closest thing to committing suicide you can do without actually hurting yourself. I felt it necessary to apologize and tell everyone it wasn't their fault; I just didn't want to exist in this environment anymore. I thanked them all for their many kind words totaling fewer than 140 characters; said I hoped to see them in some other, better medium; and then I pulled the plug.

I actually left a note too, via Twitpic, the site that lets you post pictures which show up as links in a Twitter "tweet". But I didn't realize that as soon as I deleted my account the picture would be deleted too, so it actually only existed in cyberspace for a couple of seconds. Here's what it looked like:


I predict it becomes THE cultural icon of this year.

More Apple Blossom

The next day was the parade. It was really long and really great. We drove to Kentville to watch it with our friends Jen and Andy. All one and a half hours of it. With cheeseburgers and fries courtesy of the Lions Club. (Cheese on the side for some reason.) There was some rain again, but again it didn't put a damper on things. Just made them damper. Ha.

There were tons of homemade floats, Apple Blossom princesses, marching bands, Sparklettes, and of course Shriners. And pretty much everyone for miles around came out to line the sidewalks and sometimes step unceremoniously into the revelry. Sure felt like a celebration.

















P.S. NDP got in in our riding, and it's looking like Nova Scotia has an NDP majority government! Whoa.

Rock, Valley Style

Every day I mean to get on here and tell you about a million different things, and every day I don't get a chance to and the running total of things I have to tell you about increases. So here's ONE THING that happened recently. I'll tell you another one tomorrow.

Two weekends ago was the Apple Blossom Festival here in Annapolis Valley. Very big deal. Everyone comes down from the mountains to watch the parade and take part in the festivities. We have some photos of the parade, but I haven't had a chance to choose and adjust a batch yet. The night before the parade, Friday, was the fireworks. We drove out to Kentville to check them out. It was threatening to rain but they said they'd be having them anyway.

There was a big baseball field with a small truck trailer on it and a large crowd of people sitting on the shallow slope facing it. Young, old; sobre, messed up; inbred, legally conceived... it was a pretty broad spectrum of humanity. The trailer was like a container that a big rig would pull, but was completely open on one side. It was the stage for Dirty Deeds, an AC/DC cover band. We had missed Dressed 2 Kill, the KISS cover band, but it didn't matter because Dirty Deeds blew our minds.

Maybe I'm just starving for rock out here in the land of two-strummed-acoustic-guitars-and-a-hippy-playing-bongos bands, but I thought these guys put on an excellent show. Most of the songs they did were from Brian Johnson era DC, so the lead singer wore a sleeveless jean jacket and a flat cap. He maintained a passable Australian accent throughout and had Johnson's shriek/rasp down to a T. Later in the show there wasn't much in the way of pitch left in his voice, but that didn't exactly spoil the illusion. He did an all right Bon Scott too. "Angus Young" played every solo note for note on an unlit platform in front of the trailer and got the head-bob and duckwalk just right. The other three guys were just fine.

There was a very crummy light show which looked even crummier on the back wall of the "rockquarium," but went well with the french fries and rain. Yes, it did eventually rain, sending us home before the fireworks began. But we stayed for all of Dirty Deeds's set. The people on the hill seemed oblivious to the fact that there was even a band playing, despite the deafening tinniness of the sound at that distance. Probably a good thing, considering the large number of children and the complete inappropriateness of most of the lyrical matter, not to even mention the in-between banter. But those down in front around the bleachers were pretty into it, so we went down and head-banged with them. Towards the end they did "TNT," which made me very happy. The young ones seemed to really enjoy "Whole Lotta Rosie," disturbingly enough.

The fireworks wouldn't have lived up to the excitement of that scrappy show, so we booted it back to our car at the edge of town as soon as the last song was over. But we could hear them popping and see the tops of them behind us as we walked and sang in the rain, and that made it just a perfect night.

So much going on...

We've had a really busy week! I was back and forth 3 times to Halifax this week, plus there were a few trips to Kentville, an AC/DC tribute band, fireworks, a parade, an Apple Blossom Queen (and many, many princesses), and even a Lodge show thrown in there. And we went on a little exploration trying to find Lumsden Dam, where apparently the swimming is good. Here's a glimpse of the serenity we felt while looking.

More to come...

- Ali

Two Reasons to Move Here

1.

2.

Tennis!

I just had this terrible nightmare I have to tell you about, because I can't sleep and I'm keeping Alison up thinking about it. The premise of the dream was, in retrospect, very similar to the main premise of Infinite Jest: there is a joke that, once you've heard it, causes you to become deathly afraid of yourself, to the extent that you can't do anything. I guess it's also like the killing joke in Monty Python, except that you don't die from laughing, but instead enter an irrepressible state of profound dread which has no other object than your own soul.

In the dream, I'd heard about this affliction, and had seen cases of it on the news. Then I found out that a girl with whom I work, Gill, had had the affliction herself for several years. She'd gotten over it through lengthy and gruelling therapy, but could never be sure that it wouldn't return. She spoke to me of a three-year period in her life that was a complete blank because the extreme fear had made it impossible for her to do anything. Now she just spent her life trying not to think about The Joke.

Of course, anyone who had heard The Joke, gone through the paralyzing fear, and gotten over it was now somewhat of a danger to society because they could tell it to someone else at any time. But the courts had ruled that they couldn't be put away for this threat, as any of us is able to behave threateningly at any time, and we as a society just have to trust individuals to make the right choice. So sometimes the joke would be propagated when people could no longer fight or accept the obsessive secret with which they were forced to live.

Later (and probably immediately next in the dream, but as if with a cartoon narrative rectangle in the upper left corner saying "Later..."), I was sitting outside at a café when I saw a man with a strange look walk up to the man at the table next to me and hold out a gloved hand. He said, "There was a man who put a quarter in his hand and put a glove on over it." The face of the man sitting down took on a look of recognition that's hard to describe. It was like he was somewhat afraid of what he knew was coming, but was trying to overcome the fear with a bemused detachment, but the bemusement was crossing the line into gladness because he was actually relieved to be facing the thing that was scaring him, which fact made him all the more afraid. I realized that both men already knew The Joke, and that I was about to witness it.

The first man continued, "He held out his hand and asked a passing stranger, 'Do you have a quarter?'" At this point the seated man slowly removed the first man's glove and said in a zombie-like monotone, "The stranger said, 'No, but you do.'" Of course there was a quarter in the first man's hand.

I woke up from this dream in a state of absolute terror. My face was frozen into a mask of fear, and I was breathing heavily through my mouth. I couldn't move. I was also covered in sweat, probably because today was the first really warm day of the year and Alison and I took advantage of it by playing some tennis after work and then riding our bikes around. But the fact of my own sweatiness just made me more afraid of my own ability to scare myself so badly. I realized that it had only been a dream, but that didn't make me any less afraid. I was lying on my back, a position which has historically given me nightmares, and I knew that shifting positions would probably make me less afraid, but I was scared to move a muscle. It's hard to describe such an objectless fear. It seemed that I was afraid of my own unpredictable nature, and so I couldn't allow myself to will anything at all, lest I end up scaring myself more.

I had to go to the bathroom and I eventually calmed myself down enough to get out of bed. But coming back I had to walk a few feet through the dark, and that made me scared enough again that I had to call out to Alison to wake her up. I told her a little about the dream I'd had, but it started creeping her out and she asked me to stop so she could get back to sleep. Now I'm feeling a little better, having written it down, but I still can't help being haunted by this thought: if you know you are capable of making yourself paralyzingly afraid of yourself because you have actually felt this paralyzing fear, how can that knowledge help but actually make you paralyzingly afraid of yourself?

Two Reasons Not to Move Here

1. People around here pronounce words the way Americans think all Canadians pronounce words. "Canadian rounding" is an actual phenomenon, but it just means that we make a distinction between the vowel sounds in the words 'lousy' and 'mousy', whereas Americans generally pronounce them the same. But in Nova Scotia (and especially in the Valley) the rounded 'ou' goes beyond a slight rounding and over the edge into long 'o' territory. For instance, they really say "oat and a boat". Some other actual examples:

"Are you looking for a punch in the moath?"

"Don't be such a doting Thomas."

"Get off the coach and get some excercise."

and my favourite, from when Alison worked for a call answering service,

"Send a doctor — I've got the goat!"

2. Halifax has a large park right in its middle, called the Halifax Commons. As the name suggests, it is a piece of common land, paid for by taxes and available for general recreational use. It is covered in grass and baseball diamonds, the latter of which are occupied, according to a schedule worked out with the city, every Sunday over the summer by my softball league. Many other leagues use them at other times, and any Haligonian schmoe who feels like starting up a game when they are not in prescheduled use is welcome to.

However, in the past couple of years, the municipal government of Halifax has figured out that this park is a great area for putting on large rock concerts. They book a huge name act (usually well past its prime), fence off the entire park, and charge an astronomical admission fee, thereby making not a modest profit. The Commons, having been thoroughly ruined, is then unusable for sporting events for the rest of the season.

Because this strategy has met with such success, this year Paul McCartney is coming in early July, followed by KISS on the 18th. That means for two months of our very short summer, eight very frustrated teams will be scrambling around the city, trying to find places to play out the softball season we've scheduled with the city. And I'm not even counting the Ultimate Frisbee people.

Worse still, it means that on July 18th all residents of Halifax and many of the surrounding area will be crammed together on one large field of mud and garbage, pumping their fists in the air and yelling, "Shoat it! Shoat it! Shoat it oat load!"

Seriously, stay home.

Time Keeps on Slipping (Slipping, Slipping)...

... into the future. Only it really slips into the past, doesn't it? We move forward through time, therefore time moves in a future-to-past direction relative to us. Right? That's something that's always bothered me about that song. But the slipping part, yes, I can get behind that. Or am I in front of it?

Anyway, it looks like maybe having a car means no longer having time to stop and tell folks what your up to. Or maybe it's the fault of Twitter. Or it could just be the beautiful spring weather we've been getting in the valley limiting our time indoors. As a matter of fact, I'm outside this very minute, sitting in the sun and watching Buster hesitantly explore our backyard as I type. I can't actually see the computer screen very well out here, so advance apologies for any typos.

There've been quite a few trips into Halifax and back in Bert, many of them around The Lodge happenings. Two weekends ago was our official CD release show, although it wasn't heavily advertised as such and we'd already sold the CD at two other shows, so it just felt like a regular old show. But it was a really good one. Lots of people showed up who'd never seen the band before and we gave them some of our best stuff. The record's been continuing to gather mostly good reviews, although a lot of people cite "obvious" influences I've never heard of, or else relate everything to the various bands we were in in the '90's, none of which we really sound like. Here's a couple of interviews from when Vish Khanna made the album his weekly pick on CBC 3.

That same weekend we heard a Pema Chödrön lecture, attended a stellar Dog Day/The Got to Get Got/The Memories Attack gig, and went to the now annual craft fair at Halifax's North Street church. Lots of arty artisans, mostly kids, sell their wares in a giant room. It's overwhelming but really fun. There was one guy selling mix tapes he had made — actual tapes; not CDs pretending retro-self-consciously to be tapes. I had to buy one, as Bert's stereo comprises just a radio and a tape deck. He (the tape guy) had so many great-looking mixes it was hard to select just one, but I eventually did and handed over my five dollars. We listened to it as we drove back to Wolfville, and it was so great that when we got home and it wasn't over yet we decided to keep on driving in order to hear the rest of it. The song selection was a perfect balance of the somewhat familiar and the totally obscure. Each song emerged naturally and organically from the previous, but took your head in a slightly different direction. And the kid had written a photocopied booklet of really great liner notes, informative but personal and emotional, and I began realizing that, as it takes just as much time to make even a copy of a tape as it does to listen to one, never mind the work of picking out the songs and sequencing them and getting all the levels just right and then buying cassettes (where can you even get them anymore?) and writing, designing, photocopying, cutting, collating, folding, and stapling a 12-page booklet with drawings, well there's just no way in hell he was making any money from selling these things for five bucks apiece. Why didn't I buy one of each of them? There's no contact information anywhere on the tape, so I don't know how I'm going to track this guy down. But I will.

There've also been trips to buy ice cream, trips to buy books, and trips to nice areas for walking around. Here's a picture Ali took of me last weekend on the dyke that runs along the Gaspereau river. We got back to Bert just as the giant raindrops began splatting down on his roof and our heads.

What else? Johanna came out to visit us last Friday night and we all went to see Star Trek. It was quite a fun romp, I have to say. Corny as hell, but I guess it's pretty hard to set up science fiction scenarios for the exploring without coming across heavy-handed in the explanation of their details. My only complaint was that we had to wait until the end credits to hear any of the original music. Couldn't they have updated some of that awesomely cheeseball fight music instead of writing a whole new score?

Tonight we're going to drive to Berwick for dinner with our friends Cliff and Angie and Angie's mom. There's a drive-in somewhere in that direction, where it'd be nice to take in a stupid movie or two, but that might have to wait for another weekend. Tomorrow night The Lodge play an all-ages show in Dartmouth, and Monday looks like a good day for some more Bert-assisted exploring. Hope everyone else's "May Two-Four" is as nice as ours is shaping up to be.

It's True, We Have a Car Now!

Well, I got the car dropped off to me on Thursday in Halifax. Took it for a little test spin and it seemed great! Friday afternoon I had the registration switched over and got a new license plate. I had to wait about an hour and a half, since every person in the city decided to register their motorcycles and campers on the same day. It was the Friday before what everyone was hoping would be the nicest weekend of the year so far. (Which it was, by the way!)

Andrew was nice enough to take the bus to Halifax after work so I would have company for my first trip home in the car. And I'm so glad he did that, because the drive was actually more nerve-wracking than I had anticipated. It was DARK on that highway, and to be honest I was never much of a highway driver. I did drive for 5 solid years back in the eighties, but even then it was mostly city driving. But we made it home in one piece. And then I had a beer.

On the weekend, we got the summer tires put on, and did a little exploring of the area. We went to Evangeline Beach which is in Grand Pré. Here are some pictures from that part of the day. The camera batteries died after that. Too bad! So beautiful!





The more I drive, the more I feel comfortable with it. But every time I look outside and see the car in the driveway, I think we have visitors!
BIG THANKS to Granny Gwen, Papa, and Rick for helping us make this happen!

-Ali

P.S. Here's a little number that was a hit around the first time I had my license! Seems to apply. Whoa.

Wir Fahren, Fahren, Fahren

Well, not quite yet wir don't, but very, very soon! We've been looking seriously for a used car for awhile, and found one on Kijiji that sounded pretty good: a '96 Toyota Tercel 2-door sedan. It looks like the one in this picture. The mileage on it was low, it had been undercoated almost every year, it came with summer and winter tires, and it had only had one owner, who kept all the receipts from everything that had ever been done to it. We made an appointment to check it out in Bedford on Friday afternoon, but then Alison ended up having to work. Luckily my "Uncle" Rick, who knows lots about cars, came to the rescue by driving me out to see it and test drive it with me, since I don't have a license. The poor guy had just arrived back into town from Montreal; he came straight from the airport! Thanks a million, Uncle Rick.

The car was in really good shape — no rust on the body and a lot of new parts. The only thing Rick and I could find wrong was that the brakes acted shaky. We talked to the guy selling it and he agreed to have them fixed and the car inspected at no extra cost. Seemed too good to be true, so I gave him and the woman who actually owns it a deposit. We should be able to pick it up and pay the rest in the next day or two!

It's going to make such a huge difference in our lives, having a car, that I'm getting quite excited. I've never had a driver's license, but this will be a great incentive to get it. Last night I dreamed we were on a long road trip and didn't even know where we were going, but we didn't care. It was a nice dream, and even though we were on motorcycles, I'm sure it's still a good omen. The car (haven't given it a name yet; that will have to happen soon — Marcel?) has no CD player; just a cassette deck. I'm really glad I was so skeptical about CDs when they came out, and stubbornly continued to buy tapes for the next 15 years, because I've still got a decent collection. Now it's finally revealed why I've never replaced my copy of Autobahn that Loran Davis taped for me from vinyl (b/w Tangerine Dream's Le Parc) in 1987: soundtrack for the maiden voyage!

Other items:

I went to see John Ralston Saul speak about A Fair Country at King's College on Thursday night (which was how I happened to be in Halifax on Friday to check out the car) with our friend Mimi. He was somewhat flippant and scattershot in his arguments, and it forced me to realize there are certain unscholarly similarities in his writing style that bother me. I'm rethinking the theses of the book now. I guess it didn't help that he was also quite self-aggrandizing, telling many stories that were ostensibly evidence that his book has tapped into a collective unconscious, but whose point was always that people like him and think he's quite clever. One was even about him receiving a standing ovation at a previous speaking engagement, which story may weirdly have preëmpted a standing 'o' (usually Halifax's equivalent of polite applause) at the end of this night.

The Lodge played an in-store show at CD Plus on Saturday afternoon — International Record Store Day. It was fun, but Mike and I had both come down with terrible colds, so it was also kind of hard work. Plenty of people turned out, though, and we even sold some CDs. No thanks to this guy. But maybe some thanks to these guys.

Bonus rhyming update: I've written a new song. First one in I don't even want to think how long. Might be for The Lodge, or might be for me. We'll see.

- Andrew

Never Go Full Retard

We watched Milk last night. Another Academy Award winner. This one I wasn't so excited over. Too long, for one thing. I was glad to find out the whole interesting and outrageous story, and to be reminded how far we've come in so short a time, but there's just something weird about these Hollywood re-enactments of history. I got the same feeling from Frost/Nixon. It's a little too easy to play up the plot points and emotions that will lead to a clean, satisfying conclusion, and the whole thing ends up seeming kind of cheesy. I'd rather see a documentary, I guess.

The other thing that's been bothering me all day about it is this heterosexual-actors-playing-homosexuals phenomenon. At first it seems like a really noble thing, and it makes you feel good to know that these actors are secure enough in themselves to portray a character from a maligned minority so that society might benefit by seeing itself a little better in that minority. But then, the more you think about it, the more condescending an attitude that seems — and condescending to the very minority supposedly being held up for empathy. Are we really as OK with these other people as we claim if we find the portrayal of one of them by one of us "brave"? Why exactly does it make it more poignant to have Sean Penn or Heath Ledger or Jake Gyllenhaal throw himself into the role of a struggling gay man, rather than to hire an actually gay actor?

Alison raises the point that the director and producers want to make a blockbuster movie that will reach lots of people, and that means they need a big-name actor, and there are (allegedly, Tom Cruise having still never officially come out) no gay big-name actors. But if that's a real Hollywood problem, aren't they just perpetuating it? Wouldn't it be better to hire someone who IS openly gay and make him into a big-name actor with their big film, thereby really doing some good for the cause they purport to be endorsing?

Imagine if someone tried to make a film about the civil rights movement in the sixties, with all the black characters played by white actors. That would be pretty questionable, right? Especially if they defended their choice by saying, "We wanted people to relate to the blacks as if they were actual people, and to give these white actors a chance to show just how bravely they support the African Americans' struggle. Plus, the film needed to make a lot of money, and black actors just don't draw the crowds."

Or imagine a film by Spike Lee about the plight of Jews throughout history, starring all black actors, in order to show the well-roundedness of his equal rights concerns. Or a biopic of Gloria Steinem with Vince Vaughn in the lead. Actually, both of those would probably be pretty interesting.

I guess there's a similar phenomenon with mentally challenged characters. And here one must invoke Tom Cruise again. These roles usually, as in Rain Man, get filled by actors with fully functioning brains, at least by the standards of popular culture. Yes, I know Tom Cruise was not the autistic one. And neither has he played a gay character yet. Now that WILL be interesting — it'll probably coincide with his divorce from Katie Holmes and immediately subsequent marriage to a Mesopotamian fertility goddess statue.

But back to retard roles. There's a very funny scene in Tropic Thunder where Robert Downey, Jr.'s character (who is, strangely enough, a celebrated white actor playing a black character in the film-within-a-film) tells Ben Stiller's character — a lesser actor who has been trying to break out of his action hero typecasting — why the latter's brave portrayal of a retarded boy in his last film did not win him the accolades he'd hoped for. It turns out there is an unwritten but universally known law in Hollywood that an actor must never play a mentally challenged part realistically enough that audience sympathy is lost. Something must always be held back, so that the character remains pathetic, but not alien. Stiller's character's big fault was that he "went full retard." And maybe casting a gay man as another gay man would be the same fatal mistake.

By the way, Tom Cruise is also in Tropic Thunder, and he's very funny, although neither retarded nor gay. His character, I mean.

Anyway, I just wanted to rant a little about that seeming injustice. Been kind of bugging me all day. And I'm not even gay, so that makes my concern extra valid!

- Andrew

Looking for a really great documentary?

Man on Wire. I think it won an Academy Award. Deserves to have, if not. I remember this story being on the front page of the newspaper and it capturing my imagination at the time (1974), but then I don't think I've thought about it again since. Incredible footage and an expertly told story. It's beautiful and terrifying. Plus, the guy looks like Malcolm McDowell ca. O Lucky Man! Be careful, though: the added poignancy due to the fact that these buildings no longer exist may be just enough to make you a little weepy. Just a little.

- Andrew