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Showing posts from June, 2009

what we need, when we need it

An amusing little book (my favourite kind) about a writer who tumbles into hard times and low-end forgery. The trajectory goes successful biographer rushed book which fails too much time off neither the skills nor the disposition to do anything else suddenly an older woman living alone with her cat looming homelessness desperate, tentative first acts of literary forgery full-time fraud detection and capture Really, the whole affair was just another form of unauthorized biography, only with more inhabiting of character. And the book has the prank-ish tone of someone who touched bottom, behaved badly but came out in the sun in the end. * * * * * The Michael Jackson nonsense is dying down more quickly than I expected. Honestly, when I came home from work that day and C told me, my first reaction was that it was probably one of the better outcomes he could hope for, as opposed to having his face fall off a couple years from now. If fame has an arc then Michael was a meteor. * * * *

Captain Rascal

This is what C looks like when she's with one of her kitty cats. The wet grin, the shining eyes -- you might as well give a bottomless slushee to a retarded fifth-grader. Every once in awhile I write a cat part into one of my stories, simply as something to amuse her during our writing group (otherwise she just heckles and belches whenever it's my turn to read). The other night I read I story about two confused but ambitious little girls, and one of those girls had a cat named Captain Rascal. When we got home, C immediately ran upstairs to the shoebox where Ernie sleeps (don't ask) to write CAPTAIN RASCAL SLEEPS HERE on the side. Meanwhile? My drinking increases.

poor Frankie

Much screaming and oh-my-God-I'm-not-looking this morning when C found a dead mouse beside our bed. This explained the unusually high level of activity/stupidity from the Moron Brigade last night, which included growling/chasing (read: torturing) from the Fat One and plaintive crying from the Scared One. I named the mouse Frankie. C thought it was a good unisex choice. Frankie led a small and ultimately stiff life, and he/she never really had a chance to get out there and sow the world with poop. He/she will not be missed. All donations go to me. It all got me thinking about how we begin, how we end. The above images make up my Grade One report card. The verdict on the final page is still pretty bang-on today.

Tuesday

Tuesday. C's car is chugging, failing to accelerate, threatening to stall at lights. Appointment with garage. Other necessary conversations, then stuff to get in the mail. Writing group tonight. C and I have the key . Perhaps we'll walk ... suddenly, summer is here. Hot in the day, mosquitoes after dinner. Thanks to all our rain. Two weeks 'til cottage.

baby shower

Catherine and I (70% Catherine) threw a surprise baby shower for Christina yesterday. The theme was ducks (100% Catherine). * * * * * We got a nice little crowd for a rainy day. My job was to keep Her Highness out and about while the joint got decorated and the guests arrived, which wasn't hard when I expressed a willingness to buy brunch and stand patiently in shops with names that sounded like Betty Boop characters or trees that have to be planted in moonlight. * * * * * * * * * * I like this picture because it looks like C got trashed. Which she did. Like, seven bottles. Of whiskey. Just awful. So much for that kid going to college. (The highchair is from Catherine and Nick, many thanks.) * * * * *

last night's game

Thanks to Andrew for hosting, but not for re-raising every time I wanted to fly a kite.

eighties

I looked up yesterday and it was 1985. I was carrying groceries home from work, walking away from the downtown, when I found myself following a guy who looked like he went to sleep in 1985 and just woke up that afternoon. And then immediately decided to go shopping for music. He was carrying one of those little cd bags that no one carries anymore -- because no one goes into those stores anymore, unless they want to buy some figurine of Darth Vader or the rabbit from Life in Hell -- and wearing the kind of carefully-weathered sneakers that reminded me of a guy who used to beat his jeans with a coat hanger. Of course his laces were undone. He had a black t-shirt with an Absolut Vodka ad on it. Studded belt, black jeans. Yet add to this the incongruity of being somewhere in his fifties, with a haircut like crushed grass. And here I am (above), with the eighties just over, looking like the future would never come.

black jacket no.2

black jacket no.2 , mixed media on wood panel, 12 x 12 inches, the string series continues. An interesting thing happens when you do two paintings side by side, working from the same source image -- they turn out like brothers. I hope these gentlemen would at least sit together at the same banquet table, although no.2 has a certain conspiratorial look about him.

black jacket

black jacket no.1 , mixed media on canvas, 12 x 12 inches, the string series . First in a series. And then check this out.

my weekend venn

My weekend. A handy study guide for that life class called Why Husbands Go Crazy 110.6 .

ambition 1, obstacles 0

After a weekend of childbirth classes (!) we went to Toronto for three days to celebrate C's graduation from Ryerson's publishing program . The convocation was a very nice affair, and C looked lovely in her blue gown, and of course the battery went dead in my camera, and of course they promised to sell disposables at the doors and they didn't, so you'll have to settle for this drawing. We also went to see a play at Soulpepper Theatre in the Distillery District, which C says is like Disneyland for hipsters. The play was called Awake and Sing! . It was about a Jewish family in 1930's New York. It was also about parents conning their children, an old man who kills himself because everyone is sick of his bullshit, and a wife who abandons her husband and baby (!) to run off with another man with a wooden leg. Soulpepper is a very swanky little theatre, and they make great posters, my favourite of which (for this season) being for Glengarry Glen Ross .

US Postal Service ... worst in the world?

I mean, maybe the Congo is worse. Or Tajikistan. Maybe it's hard to mail a birthday card when there's dictators and warlords and death squads out to mess with you. And maybe there's some kind of postal hell where all you do all day long is carefully box and wrap and put sparkles on things that are precious to you and then negotiate with clerks who behave like menopausal nuns running a reform school for retarded werewolves and then you go home only to find these packages have come back to your mailbox as mangled, diseased and burning pieces of shit. But until I die and go to this place (yes, I know it's coming), the US Postal System will just have to do. I once had a friend mail me a sweater. The clerk handed it to me in a plastic bag, like it was evidence of a crime. The original wrapping -- now shreds -- rustled around at the bottom of the bag. The sweater had tire tracks on it. How the fuck does that happen? I mean, my friend didn't mail it from the planet of the

the sea

The idea of an airplane breaking up in mid-flight, its pieces falling into the middle of the ocean. At night. This is Air France flight 447, the story that has sat at the periphery of the news cycle all week, like some dirty edge on the lens. You hear updates on the radio, make a face and then walk out of the room. For all our supposed love of nature, there is something heartless about our idea of the ocean. I was trying to watch the end of Open Water the other night and C kept coming back and forth into the room asking Are you still watching this? . After about half an hour I gave up.

really?

Are there really ten billion photos on Facebook? Does Blockbuster really continue to exist as a viable business entity? Did two McFlurries really cost me $7 and change last night? Is C's blood type really listed as "Double Chocolate"? Was that really Truman Capote I saw last night in Murder by Death ? Did Magnentius really lose the Battle of Mursa Major? Really?

Pobby and Dingan

Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice: read on the weekend, a novella about the power of friends, real and imagined. The narrator makes a spiritual about-face from skepticism and subversion to desperate, grasping belief ... and he's just some kid from the opal fields of Australia. A lovely little book, found almost by chance by way of the list section of the Guardian. And now, just for C, an article about why U2 should just go away already.

awful

Good movies unfold, bad movies unravel. With both, at least, you get to figure it out for yourself. Some movies don't reveal themselves as bad until years later (how many movies have been falsely colourized by youth or the forced mood of a date, I wonder). For example, when you come across The Usual Suspects on a Sunday afternoon, do you put down the clicker so you can wade through that foolishness all over again? I didn't think so (mind you, Benicio del Toro's profanity-laced mumble-jumble act is worth a few laughs). Miracle at St. Anna plays no such games. It is caustically obvious in its awfulness. It announces itself by laying on the horn and then barges through the front door anyway, knocking over lamps, slurring stories that don't make any sense, accusing you of being a bad host while sliding change off the coffee table, lurching around, leering and ugly. It is insistently bad. Imagine The Green Mile meets Saving Private Ryan and then insert as many stereotyp