Dammit, everyone seems to be having Crispin Hellion Glover sightings lately, including one of the directors at the animation studio who came eye to creepy eye with him this weekend. Alas, being north of the 49th, I stand a better chance of bumping into him in person than seeing his genius in Bartleby.
If you’re one of the three daily visitors to Things Fall Apart, you may have already had my Saturday night recapped to you in an email, or experienced it first hand. But I’m going to drag it out again because I just want to make sense of a few things. To begin with, I was wearing a black wig for no particular reason other than it’s longer than my current shag, and other reasons related to current shagging or lack thereof. I had also taken along a mixed CD, mostly stuff off epitonic, but also other items culled from my collection. It’s my new approach – drop someone a CD and that cuts through the bullshit. Rather than giving details about jobs and childhood injuries, I think the music says it all. Like what I like=like me.
If you’ve ever googled your own name, you’re well aware of the crap that floats to the surface. I found, when googling my name, that I share the moniker with a wrestler, a maltese, and a role-playing character, amongst others. So when, between Belmonts (why was I smoking!!?!?!), I called over a seemingly coolgeek Jewish almost-lawyer, informed him of my name, and received back the question "are you into role-playing?", I wasn’t sure if he meant the nerd version because of my name, or the perv version because of my wig. I didn’t pursue the line of questioning. But I did drop the CD on him, and received an email at 5 in the morning with kudos on the mix.
Which leads me to the conclusion that I should drop more CDs on the world. A $1 investment is well worth the email. I’ll keep you posted on the role-playing.
Ted Dave and I used to work together at the Georgia Straight, where he told me stories of a guy with whom he shared a hospital room -- the guy had an eating disorder called pica*. He'd eat anything. ANYTHING. To the extent that he had to have a nurse escort him into the bathroom. Ted Dave is responsible for Buy Nothing Day. Ted Dave has a website, where you'll find much humour, like this:
* My dog also has this disorder, but limits his eating problem to staples, thumbtacks, small pebbles, zippers, the buttons off my pyjamas, and the clasps from my bras.
Many people conclude that the sign of Gemini itself is neither physical nor passionate. Those born under it are supposed to be cerebral – disinterested in exploiting their sexuality. Which explains Marilyn Monroe. Joan Collins. Tom Jones. And you! On current cosmic form it looks as if you are about to turn a lot of heads and inflame a lot of hearts.
Pardon me while I take a cerebral moment: I think he could have found a less connotative word than "inflame". Makes me think my weekend is going to be filled with hemorrhoid-laden boys.
Nicky: so you have a yahoo mail account? Is it any good?
Me: sure.
Nicky: that’s your pop3tart account? What’s with the name?
Me: it’s geeky. It’s a pop3 account, poptart, pop3tart…
Nicky: so it’s not like you were going for poptart and someone else had it?
Me: no, I was going for pop3tart all along. It’s bad computer humour?
Nicky: holy shit, that’s geeky
Me: yah, so when you were giving me a hard time about flirting with coolgeeks, and the pecking order and all of that, I’d just like to point out that I’m the real geek.
When I was at Luna in New York last month, a comic paid me a dollar to kiss another comic for a dollar. It was a win-win scenario for everyone, except maybe the one who doled out the dead president. (See, I can say that, because it was American money -- dead prime minister doesn't have the same gritty ring to it.) You can find the comic who gave me a dollar here.
By following his links (seeing if I could find the first comic who was up that night with the bit about "you do the math"), I stumbled into here, a site which deserves your undivided attention.
At what point did advertising lose its scruples? Let me rephrase that. At what point did it become acceptable to push the remedies and aids for faulty bodily functions? Fine, fine, there have always been diaper ads, and for the last twenty years we've been subjected to tampon ads. Like full frontal nudity, women received clearance first. But it's gotten to the point now where every loose bladder and colorectal ailment is pitch fodder. My two favourites: 1. the maxipad commercial that features a woman in white pants "liberated" enough to receive a piggy-back ride from her honey. Does this bother you as much as it bothers me? I mean, if he was truly brave, he'd offer a shoulder ride. 2. the incontinence pill commercial with floating suggestions like "just to sleep, just to laugh...". What about "just to sneeze". Not quite strong enough for sneezing? The one that perplexes though is "just to marvel". Marvel about what? The fact that their pants are dry? Nicely thought out, Madison Ave.
For no particular reason other than it made me giggle when I reread this scene today:
INT. NOVOTNY LIVING ROOM
Dave stands up from his squat at the STEREO, and the sexy sounds of
Sade set the mood.
Tracy is seated awkwardly at one end of the sofa, a Diet Dr. Pepper in
one hand. Dave walks slowly toward her, a sexy, knowing look in his
eye. The music is sexy. Tracy is sexy. He's sexy. Keeping his eyes
locked on Tracy's, he takes the pop can from her hand and takes a sip
himself. Sexy.
INT. NOVOTNY STAIRCASE DAY
Dave and Tracy walk up the stairs and down the hall. Dave enters the
bedroom first, while Tracy pauses in the hall. His arm reaches out and
pulls her inside.
INT. NOVOTNY BEDROOM DAY
IN QUICK TIGHT CUTS we see Dave and Tracy DISROBING
Tracy's head and naked shoulders lay themselves on Dave's pillow. She
looks toward the foot of the bed at -- DAVE, unable to believe his
eyes. He looks at naked Tracy up and down, up and down, his breath
quickening. Sade wafts up the stairs.
DAVE
Look at you.
He descends out of frame.
TRACY (VO)
When I think back on my relationship
with Mr. Novotny, what I miss most is
our talks.
At the house of animation, our coffee comes from a compressor apparatus in the 6th floor kitchen. Time was, you could "watch your beverage being prepared" as printed on the machine, bringing back the nostalgia of hockey rinks and watery hot chocolate. But our machine was recently spiffified, and the watching is no longer an option. Over at Blork, Ed laments the annexing of coffee culture by Starbucks, which is a travesty. A cafe au lait should be served in a glass, with a toss of water on the side. Full fat, thanks. Before Starbucks encroached, though, there was a Van Houtte on every third corner. Of all the things, I regret not being a coffee drinker while I lived in Montreal. I'm making up for that now with each visit back to the city -- this does not include either Starbucks or Van Houtte. I digress -- back to our machine at work:
Complaint #1 -- the main choice for coffee is Kenya Kilimandjaro, which means that every morning until I can get onto ITunes and get something else in my head, I have Toto's Africa stuck on the brain.
Complaint #2 -- the Van Houtte corporate slogan is "A taste of EUROPE in your cup." That doesn't exactly whet the palate.
It’s not often that I slump into depression, okay, maybe it is often, but I don’t make it a public event. It’s not to the point where I’m medicated or eating whole Sara Lee frozen cakes out of the aluminum tins, but it’s not far off. Yesterday, I unplugged my phone. To the outside world, this wouldn’t register as I never actually answer my phone, existing solely on call display. But yesterday, I took it one step further and just unplugged.
This all started on Friday night, which was a fine night of Mark’s birthery celebration. It quickly took a header when (a) I could not manage to actually interact with the coolgeek with whom I was exchanging flirtatious glances and (b) I ran into a former. I’m not quite sure how to label him, only because sometimes people in my family read this. You get the picture, and now they do too. He’s married with a child, or rather, he’s married because there’s a child.
I hate this sense of downedness over the situation, but it’s one of those weeks when I’m tired of being single. Yet, I do nothing about getting myself unsingle. And I realize that being unsingle isn’t going to be the miracle whip in my sandwich. It’s like this friend of a friend who’s depressed because she’s a bit heavy, and she thinks that losing the weight will alleviate the depression, but it won’t. The weight issue just gets supplanted by other issues.
Stupid thing is this: I have an amazing job. I have a great apartment with upstanding neighbors. My friends rule, as does my dog. This year will see the end of my student loan, so I could start amassing some REAL debt. Everything’s on track, right? Shrug.
Since the scandal broke on Abercrombie & Fitch's racist t-shirts, which were probably originally retailing for US$30, the price has now shot to US $10,100 on Ebay. My plan is to release a similar line of t-shirts featuring completely racist and cultural stereotypes, like two Native Americans standing amongst a bunch of cars. The caption: "This is no parking lot, eh, it's my front yard". Or how about two Scots fighting over a penny on the road: "Feck you, that's as much as I make on the dole." Or two white marketing executives bandying about a new campaign for t-shirts: "Right arm, Tad, that reminds me of our caretaker at Psi Beta Omega. Good times."
1. Most days you sing an annoying song to your immediate coworkers, which they later complain is still on heavy rotation in their heads. Today’s song was?
Neil Diamond’s "Coming to America".
2. Vancouver:Montreal::pebbles:
Craisins!
3. What was it like to make-out with a hockey player?
Like those demonstrations of giving children CPR in which you have to cover both their mouth and nose with your mouth.
4. You’re trapped in an elevator with Lemmy, the Pope and Captain Pike…
Wait a second, who’s been reading my secret journal again?
5. How do you plan to spend your weekend?
Two words: gin’n’juice. Or does that count as three words?
We get satellite television here at work, which means from time to time, the first person to click on the television in the morning will find the channel still on the previous night’s post-hockey porn station. It’s one of the many perks of working here. Seriously.
There’s a small monitor in the supply room and just now, as I was pulling out a handful of legal size file folders, there was a James Wood film on. Hm, I thought, I haven’t seen this one, so I continued to watch in the hopes it was Another Day in Paradise, as I’d just rented (and rather liked) Bully on the weekend. Why can’t we allow for cloning experiments so I can have my very own Nick Stahl?
Focus, focus. So, James Woods, dressed like a Catholic priest, bombarded by flies, yells out something along the lines of "God, get this demon out of me!" Pan back to reveal he’s on the toilet. My file folders and I have better things to do than to watch James Wood flush his career.
I can’t remember the things that fueled me when I was a kid anymore, and I’m not talking about Cuban Lunches. I mean the sentiments, the traumas, the embarrassments. I’ve taken to reading the message boards at Nickelodeon, but the majority of the subject lines are "OMG, how can I get this guy to like me?" (Answer: a few rye & coke ought to do the trick, sweetie.)
This is research, trust me, I’m not just lurking for hot gossip about what went down by the lockers. Okay, yes I am, but that’s considered "research" in my circles. I think I’ve figured out that BFF means "best friend forever", as opposed to BF aka "boy friend", or maybe we’re just raising a new generation of acronym-crazed, sexually-liberated tweens.
There are issues that are universal and ageless, like "OMG, how can I get this guy to like me?", or the cleanliness of school bathrooms. And then, there are issues specific to this current generation, like whether or not kids should have ID registered micro-chips, or, along the same lines, who has had the birth-control patch.
One constant: kids still tape themselves singing to their favourite pop songs, then record important social studies projects on the other side, then die of embarrassment when the teacher prompts the tape on the wrong side. Or did that only happen to me?
As the courthouse is within Moltov cocktail’s distance of the animation studio, the streets are littered with free legal services. While peeing my dog, I found a flyer from the Legal Resource Centre, with this handy advice for perps hand-written on the back:
• out of the country
• run for the border
• blow the country
• shift – my home
• my assets
• my finances
• my business
• no plausible reason causes computer sattlelight
In the film world, a "burnt" location is pre-existing place that can’t be used anymore. Either a gaffer shat in the corner, or a PA set fire to a forest, or the grips knocked up the girls’ choir. Banff is a burnt location, literally (see above PA example). I was thinking about this concept this morning, but with respect to names, and how history and writers burn names. When you hear the name James Garfield, do you picture the former president or a fat orange cat or perhaps a fat orange cat dressed in a man’s suit circa 1870 with a high Don Cherry collar? Will Osama now rival Adolph as the least desirable name for your newborn son?
If there are burnt names, certainly there are names that are not being exploited to their full potential; for example, why aren’t more people legally changing their name to FUBAR?
As a child, I envisioned myself a triple-threat, an impresario. This dream was cut short on the week after my first all-star review, staged in the living room of our house in North Vancouver. The audience consisted solely of my mom and step-dad, and as my cast, I had hired a golden retriever, a cockateil, a Maltese with a severe case of dingleberries, and my ritalin-addled step-brother. This was a kid who started smoking peppermint tea leaves in Grade 4.
I remember little about the performance except that it was a musical number entirely comprised from the collected hits of Neil Diamond. My step-brother’s role was that of musical co-ordinator: I had carefully written out the track list and it was his job to flip the LPs and cue up the next number. "You Don’t Bring Me Flowers" was, to use script lingo, the inciting incident, with "Red, Red Wine" as the point of no return.
The performance was met with rave reviews and was heralded as far away as the first floor bathroom. We decided to make it a weekly event, Theatre of the Living Room, and my other step-brother offered to direct the following week’s fare. This step-brother was far beyond smoking peppermint tea – by Grade 8, he had already mastered the fine art of passing crushed aspirin off as weak cocaine.
This step-brother was fascinated by four things, and four things alone:
1. Hockey. You could name any player, from any era, and he would rail off the stats. He could tell you how often Lannie McDonald cut his toenails. Yet, he could not tell you the names of the Canadian provinces.
2. Freaks. Yup, freaks. I remember this one book that he had; moreover, I remember the photo section in this one book that he had. There were the standards: Chang and Eng, midgets, pinheads, the guy who seemingly ended at the bottom of his ribcage. But there were two photos that still give me the shivers, both of twins-gone-wrong. In the first, the bottom half of the twin sister protrudes from the stomach of the twin brother. She can kick, and twitched when tickled. In the second, the lesser twin’s face grew like a third eye from the forehead of the greater twin. When the greater was sad, the lesser cried. I’m shivering even now.
3. McDonald’s. Not the food, but the history of the chain of restaurants. Go figure.
4. JFK.
This fourth area of interest became both the subject matter for and the downfall of our Theatre of the Living Room, for my elder step-brother had chosen to re-enact JFK’s assassination. The fireplace became the book depository, the piano bench -- the grassy knoll. I was Jackie. The golden retriever played JFK. Though it pains me to say, the dog could play dead more convincingly than my step-brothers, and so the casting choice was a lock. My two step-brothers were secret service agents.
The drama was cut short when my step-dad jumped to his feet to declare that this was "the sickest thing I’ve ever seen". He stubbed out his cigarette, stepped over the coffee tables in front of the couch, and strode out of the living room. My mother sat still, one hand over her mouth. She slugged back her wine, and quietly left us behind to unload the dishwasher. My step-brothers shrugged: one went back to crushing aspirin, the other rolled a fine joint of Earl Grey. I surveyed the fireplace, the piano bench – the fallen remains of my performing arts hall. I hadn’t even been able to carry it into Summer Stock in the backyard, where certainly the neighbours would have recognized the brilliance of my restaged "Grease". Damn, the golden retriever would have made a fine Danny Zuko.
This in from Kimberly at Squoogy: I was just typing along, minding my own business, checking my referral logs when I found your site saying that you received an e-mail from me about Asian Girls and Playboys blah blah blah. I remember getting that same e-mail in my inbox and then quickly deleting it because everyone knows I don't like Asian girls especially when they're fighting Playboys. Anyway, I don't know why I'm even writing you, but I honestly didn't send that to you and wouldn't as spam is the bane of my existence--I'm not sure what happened. It made me shriek, "SON OF DE BEETCH!!" really loud at work even. And also, MmMm shrimp poppers ...
This was meant to be a much longer and much funnier post, but that will have to wait because, after checking my email, I felt the need to mention the contents of my inbox. A few emails from the near &/or dear, and two others, neither containing anything beyond a subject line. The first, from a mailcity.com address, subjected merely "how are you?". Fine, thanks, but now checking for hidden mics in my apartment. The second, from squoogy, proposed the promising "Hello, Japanese girl vs. Playboy", but alas, did not follow through with anything else. Who are these non-content-providers? Why not step forward, and we can meet up at TGIFriday's for shrimp poppers?
Either the driver on the 8:35 am Cambie St. bus was insane, or we were in one of those annoying Dairy Association "candid camera" cheese commercials this morning.
In any event, 8:35 am is far too early to be discussing one's preferred type of cheese, or any dairy product for that matter. I should have waited for the 8:37 lactose-intolerant express bus instead.
