« Febrero 2004 | Main | Abril 2004 »
Marzo 21, 2004
Hmmmm....Enmerdent espece-de-salle-salopperie!
Posted by at 01:48 PM | Comments (4)
Marzo 20, 2004
Rich white people with closeted fascistic tendencies choose religious man-child over the walking punch-line of a misogynist's joke....
Is this the face of a man who has been chosen to lead the right-wing of Canadian politics or of a child who has managed to avoid "missing the bowl" for the very first time?
Posted by at 10:49 PM | Comments (3)
Emo Cuisine!
So, I've figured out what to do when you split up with someone. First of all, spend the better part of the work week ignoring any fallout from the situation and keep telling yourself that if you tell yourself that you shouldn't be upset about it then everything's brilliant. When the weekend comes, wake up early after an awful dream about being romantically linked to a public figure that you dislike. Have a shower then go and buy a really big pork chop and the Saturday Globe & Mail.
Put the pork chop in a container with a pint-or-so of water and a teaspoon of brown sugar and two teaspoons of salt then refrigerate the hell out of that shit. Read the paper (if, incidentally, the public figure you dreamed about being romantically linked to writes a column about dreaming about being romantically linked to public figures then fine, relish the fact that you now have fodder for a mediocre blog entry) and get to the crosswords and figure out that you're shamefully inept at doing crosswords by yourself.
Piss the rest of the day away. At 7-ish, throw a head of garlic wrapped in foil into a 400-degree oven (gas-mark 6? Idunno) then take some beetroot and some marjoram and some olive oil and some more garlic and some s+p and throw them in some more foil and put them next to the garlic. Wait for a bit, maybe read a terrible book that you started at work because it was free and now realize that though you dislike the book, you still want to know how it ends because you're sure that when you finish it you'll be sure that it's terrible. After an hour or so, get some beet greens and broccoli rabe and blanche them for a couple of minutes in boiling saltwater. Throw the greens in an icebath then squeeze them out in paper towel. Berate yourself for getting beet green juice all over the kitchen counter. Remember that public service announcement from Saturday mornings promoting self-esteem where the little kid berates himself in the mirror over jump-cuts.
Get the garlic out of the oven and squeeze it into a bowl with some red pepper flakes, all the while scalding your fingers on the holybitchingshit-hot garlic skins.
Get two pans ready and hot, one with too much butter in it, one without. In the one without butter, throw that pork chop in and then next to it put in a halved peach. In the one with the butter, put the greens and the pepper and garlic paste. When you're almost confident (cooking is about confidence) that everything's done (don't forget about the beets) put it on a plate. Mismatch the meal with a humdrum Ontario Riesling and then think about how much you would have preferred an audacious Burgundy or a macho Chianti or a flippant Côtes-du-Rhône.
Finish your meal too quickly and then realize that with wine sometimes quantity trumps quality. Do the dishes accompanied by miserablist Scottish pop music.
Feel terrifically sorry for yourself.
Wait for Monday.
Posted by at 10:27 PM | Comments (1)
Leah McLaren is still still full of shit but apparently I'm also in love with her. Or myself.
A second installment in an ongoing series which harrowingly suggests that the Weekend edition of the Globe & Mail, specifically the seventy-two square inches devoted to a pneumatic navel-gazing bitchy blonde columnist, is the crux of my entire life. So, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I saw Leah McLaren hoovering up duMauriers in a bar only to find her column the next morning to be about how she'd quit smoking. The nerve, the nerve etc. etc. So later that week I told Frank magazine. Apparently they weren't interested because there was nothing about it in the current issue. The Frank magazine snub was still on my mind, I guess, as I fell asleep last night because I had a dream about getting a job at the Globe & Mail (the offices of which took the form of a trying-too-hard middle-to-upper scale Italian restaurant where everybody was falldown drunk), only to find Leah McLaren hanging off my arm, unwilling to let go. Everywhere we went she kept running into people she knew (notably a woman named "Collie" and a woman named "Sully") and they were all visibly and audibly disgusted with her. She didn't seem to notice and kept chirruping and grinning at them. Despite all these people, including myself initially, looking at her as though she were a turd hovering under their noses, she was always warm and affectionate. It was really sad. Then I woke up.
Here is today's L-Mac column.
It was terrifying; I obviously have some kind of hard-wired psychic link with Leah McLaren. Leah McLaren and I clearly share something special. I think in my Leah McLaren dream, I was recognizing this thing that we share and acknowledging my own inner Leah McLaren. These suspicions were confirmed upon reading the Leah McLaren column. No longer will I snipe at Leah McLaren; from now on I will hold a special Leah McLaren torch, held aloft vigilantly for Leah McLaren. Where I here people saying nasty things about Leah McLaren I will interject with pro-Leah McLaren arguments and slogans. Leah McLaren, I salute you. Leah McLaren, I love you.
Posted by at 01:45 PM | Comments (8)
Everyone is Chanting U.S.A. on TV right now
Bush is giving a speech defending his administration. He is a really good public speaker. He just promised as I was writing this that they will win the War on Terror. He also said that the lesson of September 11th is to stop threats BEFORE they materialize, which should be challenging. Can you really even stop a threat? I mean you can stop what's threatening you maybe but not necessarily the threat itself. He said that America gave the Taliban an ultimatum that they ignored. Now they are no more. America "and it's allies" gave Iraq a chance to come clean and they didn't -- and faced with either "defending America" or trusting a madman, he'll choose defending America any day thank you very much. I think that's what got the U-S-A! chant going, or somewhere around there. Everyone in the audience is screaming like they still want more revenge for September 11th. Bush is telling a story about when he stood in the ashes of the World Trade Center on September 14th and a construction worker pointed at him and said: "Don't let me down". Great, so Bush is living out the personal revenge fantasy of that construction worker, what the fuck is that? Maybe that guy just didn't want to clean up that site. I find it hard to believe anyway that somebody pointed at Bush at close range and actually said that "Don't let me down". I mean, I guess I can see a context where that exchange could take place, but that's even colder I think. Bush just said he took September 11th personally too. Oh man, here we go. Seven months of more bullshit about terror and smoking out the rats and hunting down the guilty and defending freedom for a new era I just can't deal with it anymore. It's all a bunch of complete and utter bullshit and everyone involved knows it is, the way you know your job is killing you but you do it anyway.
Posted by King at 01:10 PM | Comments (0)
Marzo 17, 2004
Who the Shit is Wanda Tinasky?
Do you know who she is? Is she a "polyglot polymath" pottymouth? A bag-lady who talks about duck farts? Is she Thomas Pynchon? Is she William Gaddis? Is William Gaddis Thomas Pynchon? While we're on it, who's jack green? Is Gaddis green? What about TR Factor? Does TR stand for Thomas Ruggles? Did anybody actually read Gravity's Rainbow? Like REALLY read it? Everysinglelastwordofit?
isn't this all sort of interesting?
Posted by at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)
Marzo 16, 2004
Discovery! Early Teen Magazine
Posted by King at 12:26 AM | Comments (7)
Marzo 12, 2004
Shit don't stick to Bob Evans...
The other night, on King's advice, I watched "The Kid Stays in the Picture". I've never gone in for all that Raging Bulls and Easy Riders (or whateverthefuck) hero worship of megalomaniacal 1970's American directors or producers or actors but good godlessness I could listen to Evans talk shit for hours without getting bored. I could watch buddy iron his shirts so long as he kept asking rhetorical questions and then answering them. He's like Heston vs. Ellroy or something. I love how he calls Polanski "his little Pollack" and Jack Nicholson "Irish". I love how he says he started snorting blow to relieve back pain and you actually believe him. I love violet-tinted megaframe glasses.
Posted by at 12:11 PM | Comments (1)
Marzo 06, 2004
Theory is bullshit and Leah McLaren is still a liar.
Today in the Globe, two things:
1)This article which relates vaguely to that ill-conceived though brilliantly titled blog entry that precedes this one.
My feelings on cultural and critical theory, should you care to read them, are mixed up and frustrated; a great deal of it is clearly a corrupt, self-serving bullshit industry, fuelled by spineless sterile egg-heads rabid and desperate for tenure and publishing deals. Nvrthlss, I side with Bhaba and Butler as far as use of difficult language is concerned- academics are entitled to mandarin airs and esoteric terminology because they have to work hard at it. Judith Butler is still entirely inaccessible, unintelligible and absurdly clinical to a reader who hasn't got incredible patience, an up-to-the-minute academic terminological vocabulary and several feet of cultural, critical, and gender theory under their belts, as I learned the very hard way (sample passage verging on inanity: "If one follows Herculine's narrative self-exposition, itself a kind of confessional production of the self, it seems that h/er sexual disposition is one of ambivalence from the outset, that h/er sexuality recapitulates the ambivalent structure of its production, construed in part as the institutional injunction to pursue thzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz...." -from the "Subversive Bodily Acts" segment of "Gender Trouble"). I feel as though I've been defeated by theory in a lot of ways, and that its language, with its aggressive difficulty, thwarted my striving to figure it the fuck out. So anyway, arguments like this appeal to me because they belittle the blind devotion of the legions of cult stud adherents who are so excellent at parroting and ape-ing these ideas and who deep down I find, in spite of my rigourous sneering and hubristic derision, terrifically threatening and intimidating. So anyways,
2) I was at one of my favourite bars last night, which I guess happens to be everyone else's favourite bar, and who did I find sitting right by the doorway but the vivacious and vacant columnist that everybody loves to hate. At the time, seeing L-Mac slumming it with a bottle of domestic beer (held very primly; I think I may have seen an errant pinkie finger at one point) prompted a quick snigger and the odd glance across the room. She was still at it when we left, sipping and smoking an awful lot with a bunch of guys who looked like they'd spent lots of money to look really cheap. So big deal, right?
Well, sure, until I snuck a look at this fucking outrageous, self-congratulatory piece of shit-ridden "prose" in this morning's paper. Not only is she setting new standards for stultifying and self-indulgent journalism, but she's a big fat liar! How audacious is it to take credit for quitting smoking (COLD TURKEY at that) and devoting a whole column to patting yourself on your back for it, only to be out smoking like a bluddy teamster only 4 days after you said you'd quit and the night before you big fat fucking self-lauding column hits the motherbitching streets!!!???? HOW ENTIRELY SHAMELESS IS THAT!!!???!!! I'd call FRANK magazine if it weren't such a totally boring thing for anyone to write about.
Oh.
Bugger....
Posted by at 01:25 PM | Comments (17)
Marzo 02, 2004
Adorno much... But I know I love you.
Right, so I've been neglecting the urge to contribute anything to this bluddy thing but not for lack of anything to say. Rather, I've been busybusybusy with the start of an entirely excellent new job coinciding with the fag-end of a dull and drab and dreary old job. The outcome was three weeks of solid bookselling and literally not a single unaccounted-for minute for nearly a month. The new job finds TheDiscourse at Toronto's finest bookstore, doing shipping/receiving sorts of things. The new job is head and shoulders and abdomen above the old job.
I was thinking today about how booksellers have an absolute advantage over academics as far as the fashionability of literature, criticism and analysis is concerned; the academy (at least the litewawy and culture wonk end of it) is predicated on accounting for the vanguard of ideas and creative artifacts but ultimately publishers, and by extension booksellers, are responsible for allowing these things to be accounted for. As a result I have a much better notion of what is au courant now than any chatty cathy cult stud senior ever could simply because I see what's coming and going bookwise. The resulting sense of superiority and complacency is terrific. It makes me feel better about dropping out of university.
Posted by at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)