Love on the Killing Floor

Love on the Killing Floor is a rat's eye view of Toronto in the early nineties.  In our story the city has just been dragged into the cosmopolitan tempo it would beat its chest to a decade later, kicking and screaming.   The novel opens in the shadow of Paul Bernardo's Scarborough horrorfest and the race riots of '92.   Our protagonist is a bottom rung photographer for a small studio; a divorcee moving from party to party and woman to woman, a smug nihilist smack in his element.  With his narrator's voice he turns his observations towards the ethnicities he see's as flooding his Toronto, and rehashes arguments and gripes against the inevitable you're likely to have heard yourself from malcontents of every stripe.  The racial disharmony is easily the most prominent theme in the book, but one of the more interesting off-shoots of our narrator's wailing is his opposition to the Homer Simpsonization of white masculinity.

He sees media reflecting a flabby, bumbling, inelegant coward in his image while the "plight" of the "Other" is romanticized.  It's bitterness, but it's bitterness that makes those enlightened souls we swallow a little harder.  Trevor Clark very cleverly paints his narrator into a corner, quickly running out of faces and people he can stomach, and allows for his escape by way of Yolanda.  Yolanda is a black go-getter who thanks to our narrator's formidable boldness is seduced and enters into a relationship that finally lets him take his foot off the passive aggressive pedal.  She nips the sharper points of his swelling bigotry and acts as the part-catalyst for his getting his life together; getting a proper job and systematically dropping all of his old suspect acquaintances.

Love on the Killing Floor holds within its expertly bound pages about as many sex scenes as you could shake a prosthetic leg at, none of them exactly laden with allegory but entertaining enough and a very compelling blend of machismo and sensitivity.

The book is bound to make you a bit uncomfortable, it pushes a few buttons that don't usually get pushed anymore and any Toronto Readers will love hearing short stories about people who could live on low wages and still afford beer in bars and studio apartments.  You missed one hell of a recession son.

Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine

Can'tLit is prefaced with a "Not your parent's short stories" rant about how Margaret Atwood is ruining Canadian Literature for everyone else.  The editor promises the grotesque, the avant guarde, the So-Hip-It'll-Make-your-Ears-Bleed sentimentality.  Work that finds its way onto Broken Pencil and by extension this book are meant to reside on the edge, where the cutting happens, and fuck you if you don't like it Gramps.

"Whoa" says I.

So I open it up in the middle as I am wont to do with Short story books with that tingling sensation that makes me feel like I should be wearing a seatbelt.  What does Can'tlit deliver me?

Nice stories, sad stories, stories about sex, stories about sad or even violent sex, but this hardened soul did no blushing.  You get the feeling that some of these writers are carrying some serious baggage, but never once do you think they are anything worse than the kind of hipsters who'd help you shovel your driveway if you looked at all fatigued.  I didn't feel grossed out and I didn't feel disturbed.  I felt welcomed, I felt witty, I felt good.

Dear Broken Pencil,

When I was 18 I read Naked Lunch by Burroughs, when I was twenty I read American Dream by Mailer, my grandparents have a copy of the Satyricon next to their Asterisk comics.  If you want to shock me with sex you had better dig real real deep into the tickle trunk because I have to believe when you've read about a guy strangling his wife, sodomizing his maid and then clunking up the stairs to chuck his wife's body out a window, there's no mountain of shock left to climb.

What we've got here is a failure to communicate.  Can'tlit is not a book that's clankering for a censorship debate, it's a collection of very good writers writing very good stories.  It was a pleasure to read and I really liked it.  It dug into some pretty unorthodox sexual dissertations, but always with one foot on the ground and usually tempered with a playful tongue in cheek.

In one story a flat chested preteen falls for a boy with moobs, in another Jesus buys hookers so he can have somebody to talk to, in yet another a gal tours around town in a car painted to resemble her lady bits (or somebody's lady bits).  These stories are too hip and too thoughtful to be shocking, and never does any writer do any shocking for shock's sake.

Therein lies the trick I guess.  I could probably describe some of the stories in such a way so as to make them seem grotesque, but the writers with no exceptions paint a good story behind even the worst descriptions and make the final product...palatable.

I read Can'tlit at a cottage and the lovely summer weather on the lake didn't hurt the ambiance one bit, so If you're making a late run North to enjoy the last bit of August, pick this one up.  May you have as good a time as I did.

Barney's Version

*I've been remiss in posting and I have the happy excuse of being very busy, nevertheless...


I ran into a copy of Barney's version as one of two dozen paperbacks I grabbed from the Canadian Federation of University Women's Georgetown chapter Book sale a year ago.  If there ever was an unbelievable mound of literature ripe for the picking this is it.  I grabbed the aforementioned novels, an armload of biographies and a good grocery bag full of kids books.  The sale is notoriously good and I'm staring down a thick Hemingway Biography my wife got me this year that I'm tackling this summer.

Richler follows his Narrator Barney Panofsky down his slow destruction at the hands of Alzheimer's, of love and love lost, the grandeur of the squalid West Bank in Paris and the sterility of Montreal during the referendum of '95.  All the while he gives a fantastic presentation and stanch defence of the sort of modern Judiasm that colours and frames his perception and makes you want to flush anything you've ever read of Saul Bellow.  It makes for a great read, an interesting and complicated love story, a mystery resolved, a snap shot of two disparate times and places and the best fiction on mental illness this side of The Sound and The Fury.

I've heard it said that if Richler is at times a misanthrope, he is a misanthrope for entirely the right reasons.  Barney has the added benefit of being hilarious in his flaying of friend and foe alike, and most importantly, his barbs are always deserved, or at least defensible.  I enjoyed every page of the book, and have every reason to believe you would to.  It's that rare marriage of patient allegory and palatable storytelling that sets the book and the author on the pedestal their ghosts enjoy now as much as they did in life.

Beatrice and Virgil: Horror by any other name

Yann Martel.  Yann Yann Yann.  I read Life of Pi.  In fact my entire family read it.  It was a mass Christmas gift from my Grandmother to each and every member of the family, which all in all constitutes a good third of the copies sold worldwide.  On behalf of the Beals, you're welcome.

Life of Pi was by most measures a very good book.  The prose was nice and the story was phenomenal, but enough has been said.  No matter any allegiance to the Can-Con gods or touchy feely all-the-children-of -the-world nonsense, his book smacked of pandering.  I'll happily let it slide because it got me thinking differently and I liked reading it.

So I pick up his letters to Stephen Harper and I scratch my head till it bleeds.  He takes a hand preaching to the choir and bangs a drum about the PM not giving him the time of day after he took the trouble to send him a book every week or so for a year.  Answering the letters of an activist (dare I say at this point narcissist) writer is a lose/lose proposition, Martel even admits as much, but he still made a cool fortune pestering him about PMO's penchant for form letters.  Again, Martel pours fuel on the impotent left's campfire and they swipe debit cards en mass in return.

So, some nine years and a requisite visit to the death camp museums after his last novel he unveils his artistic rendering of the Holocaust.  A story told through a selfsame narrator about his relationship with a collaborator and the latter's fragmented post modern play.  The play is about a donkey and a howler monkey (the title characters respectively) who have lived through "The horror" and spend the play trying to establish a context for talking about their torture.  If you're looking to feel sick to your stomach about the human capacity for meanness, this book twists the reader's guts as well as any other on the subject.  In this regard his misstep was drawing on the descriptions of physical torture and a series of horrible "Games for Gustave" questions that navigate ethical and spiritual minefields.  Nine tenths of the book is spent suggesting at the subject of the horrors, in the play and in the Old taxidermist playwright the narrator is so fascinated with. The last tenth is as gruesome a prose as you're likely to come across.  He trades his Beckett cap for a Freddy Kruger mask and the result, though heart-wrenching, abandons any possibility of covering new emotional ground on the matter.  His slip into the literal, both the shocking and the disgusting, and consciously abandons the context he set out to establish.  He either didn't have the forbearance to take it all the way home or was afraid of what following his thesis to a conclusion would mean.  

In the great tradition of CanLit condescension Martel walks us gently through his thesis, holding our hands and pointing out the attractions of the ride.  "This beast is called an elephant.  Yes, he does take up the entire room." Here's the biggest problem:  He purports to try something new in terms of writing about the holocaust.  That might have been a bold endeavour but he cuts his own efforts off at the knees by walking on egg shells the entire time.  The beginning of the novel is an explanation of the allegoric dance that is to follow.  Why does he telegraph his punches?  He wants to set up a pressure release valve.  He builds in a defence against the critic who will rightly ask what the fuck he knows about the Holocaust.  Every sentence is an apology to any B'nai Brith donor who happens to turn the book to a random page.  "I'm not even Jewish!" his protagonist proclaims after being kicked around by his publisher and right before giving up his original essay/artistic interpretation of the Holocaust.  No, he and his creator may not be, but if you want to talk about the Holocaust as a blight on humanity, how it needs to be looked at through different lenses, and about you're position as a gentile artist tackling the subject, you don't start by tripping over a disclaimer.  Asking pardon for drawing breath demeans your efforts and patronizes the reader, jewish or otherwise.  Nothing good came from it.

Men are from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Women are from Venus

The Conversation went like this.

"Say Honey, What would you do if you had Telekinesis?"

"You mean moving things with your mind?"

(Beaming) "Yeah!"

"Dishes"

"Dishes?  You have the most powerful weapon ever, and you're going to Bibbity Bobbity Boo?"

"Hmm."

"No wonder there aren't more women in politics.  I'd rob a bank in the first 20 minutes.  Then I'd tear the livers out of anybody who had a problem with it."

But now that I think about it, it's kind of nice.  My wife is nice.  A superhero comic about my wife would be about heroes solving infrastructure problems and conquering the meddlesome inefficiencies in review processes.  Being married to somebody who's not mad with hypothetical power is swell indeed.    

(Plus that means I wear the world conquering pants in this family, huzzah)

The Jade Peony: Canada has Read!

Another years worth of Canada Reads in the bag.  The Jade Peony is about a Chinese family in Vancouver during the dirty thirties and forties.

It breaks down into three stories seen through the eyes of the younger siblings of a less than nuclear family.  Each story has an ending that's sort of heartbreaking, you get to watch people get squeezed pretty tight by the community, and though the reader is left with a certain fondness for the overall Chinatown of the author's imagination, the pressure points get rubbed raw.  

I guess there's something to be said for universality, but I thought two of the three crisis were tired.  I won't spoil it, but in terms of plot it's about as close to an episode of Chinese Picket Fences as I've ever wanted to be.  The plot is really just a vehicle for the author to paint a picture of the community and the history of the place.  That doesn't mean there isn't some great characters peopling this book, and lovely descriptions of the time and the place.  I didn't know the first thing about Chinatown, and now I am led to believe I do, such is the veneer of authenticity on these stories.

If I was a betting man, I'd put this book making it deep into the playoffs.  It's not the worst of this year's crop of novels, but it's not really anything special either.

  

The Long Slide by James Grainger

In Two Naught Naught Four *ECW published a selection of short stories by James Grainger. The Long Slide.

The year is 2010.  I'm looking for something I can't find in Chapters... but can still find on Chapters.Ca (that's here for anyone feeling thoughtful).  You know, really digging.  

That means the last of my gift card scratch went straight to Grainger's pocket and in four to six weeks the package arrived.

In a half dozen stories you can lick in a sitting each, Grainger took a bite out of his twenties, chewed it over good and used his readers as a spittoon.  Equal parts self-loathing and arrogant.  I liked it.   

It's pieces of love through different spectrums of neurosis.  Filial, romantic and other.   Maybe all his characters sit in the director chair beside you and give the "Get a load of these guys" nudge, but you get a naked shot of some real neutral human beings. 

His first story, the title track, is pure Salinger minus all that classy stuff.  If you've ever spent a summer day that turned into night hanging out North of Bloor you're bound to be able feel your way around his character, you'll know his swagger even if you don't like it.    

The Government of Spiders is a love affair gone bananas.  It's about the mental illness and the straws that break backs.  It plays as the most bizarre allegory for procrastination I've come across.

A Confusion of Islands should be read aloud to anybody who can't get After the Goldrush out of their heads.  A road trip to put road trips to rest.  

The book is arranged in ascending order of the responsibilities of the protagonist, from tongue-in-cheek hedonism (picture cruel intentions in the College St. Set.) right up to single-parent widowhood. All of his characters are done the first leg of the race, and they aren't moving until somebody tells them their score.  The sort of Spiritual fermentation that grows furious buried under student debt.  This is the book I'm going to push on my friends when I see them.  

*ECW is the subpop of Toronto Lit, or so a handful of black-rimmed Devil-may-care head shots would have me believe.  

The Wire: WHOA

Good people told me it was terrific.  I dismissed them.  I thought "you've seen fifty cop dramas, you've seen them all".  I was wrong.

I am the better part of two seasons into The Wire, and I just got it.   I don't mean to tickle you, I didn't mean I just figured out that it was worth watching;  I've been glued to my TV since my first hit.  I knew it was good, but I spent a good three weeks trying to think of a cognoscente way of nailing down why it's so special.

I got my answer tonight.

While one Mr. Cash and his bag-of-sex-and-nails voice walked the line,  the humble audience is treated to machinations of good honest-to-Christ detective work in action.  They bug, they snap, they follow and they track bad guys who are every bit as smart as they are in an opening act montage that belongs on the Mount Olympus of Television moments.  It's gritty, it's mean, it's funny and if it's missing anything in terms of realism, it makes up for it with believability.  Every character in this show is patiently thought out, interesting and believable.    The show can embrace such an amazing scope, an cast of journeymen and amateurs alike playing "real" people in so many different stages of "the Game" and never once make me feel like they're skimping, on a story line or a character.  There are certain personality traits (McNaulty's libido and Rawls' angry) and even some characters (Omar, Ziggy and Brother Mouzone) that are over-the-top, but the urge to roll my eyes is mercifully absent.   

They just show love for every character on the screen.  It is badass to be good at what you do, and on every level from criminal to copper to politician, every character on this show is firing on all cylinders.  Even the junkies and baby mommas are playing the game.

The natural reflex I and everyone I've run through this with is to compare The Wire with The Sopranos.  I think that's fair, but only because both shows took a formula buried with examples of mediocrity and made it enthralling on all levels, but that's where fair comparisons have to end.  Where Sopranos was operatic in everything it did, from violence, to story, to comedy to the absurd, the Wire can be understated and still pull off the same greatness.  The Sopranos is about Tony, and because of that they got away with a stable of one dimensional characters filling up the cracks.  The Wire is about Baltimore, and that's where it's special.  Any character could get shot and the show could go on without a snag, because it's a big city and for all the work, and the violence, the net result of whoever wins or loses is inconsequential in the end.

So, since I'm only 2 seasons into it, and since Tony and Malfi have come to occupy the same place in my mind as Lucy and Charlie Brown playing football (thus rendering it sacred), I cannot and need not pick a favourite.

All I can say is, there is no Janice in The Wire.

Spring Tides: Read with Warm Feet

This could very well be the first book review I've done where you've probably never heard of the book in question.  I got it on the recommendation of the proprietor of Different Drummer Books in Burlington.  It is my favourite book store by a long shot and I've been meaning to blog about it for some time.  I digress.  This book is a translation from the original French and the translation is published by Archipelago Books in the States.  The copy I got was oddly shaped and had the most pleasing textured cover you've ever seen.  It might be a bold thing to produced a book differently, but I don't think it's gimmicky, and it's is in perfect keeping with the insides.  This is one of those books with both feet in the Allegory river, with the absurd always peeking in through the windows, testing the locks from time to time and stealing food left unattended.  I shall make every effort to describe the book without revealing spoilers, in spite, or because it's really not the sort of book you could spoil that way.

The point is, that's not the point.

Our main character is a partially infirm translator of comic strips (word play is a distraction in some chapters, entertaining and all the more commendably so because its an English translation of a French novel about translating English Comics into French) who at the bequest of his well-meaning patron lives alone on an island on the St. Lawrence with a cat and a Tennis Machine named "The Prince".  Because the millionaire owner understands his employee to be unhappy he sends a number of people, each one more archetypical and disruptive than the last, to cheer him up.

Equal parts Kafka and Wes Anderson, but pleasant at all times even when it comes to breaking a few eggs in the name of progress.  The imagery is layered and at times accusatory, but playfully so, the way you picture an funny uncle poking a snotty niece until she giggles.

I've mentioned it before, but I am going to great lengths to read indy lit this year (Canada reads notwithstanding) and if this is any indication of the stuff I've been missing, I'm obliged to burn down nearest Indigo (perhaps I'll start a facebook group, perhaps not).  So I cannot recommend this book highly enough, it's a warm blanket that's sad and comfortable and lovely.  I'm quite sure I'm a better person for having read this book, though the improvement is certainly an immeasurable and trivial quality.

Good To a Fault

The last temptation is the greatest treason
    To do the right deed for the wrong reason.


T.S. Elliot Murder in the Cathedral


So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.


Matthew 6:2-4

Number 4 of 5 in Canada Reads 2010 is Marina Endicott's offering.  

This book was sold on the nature of good deeds and of selflessness.  The theme is pasted as big as the title inside and outside the cover.  It's a huge challenge to write about and one of the central themes of sin, but in the text there isn't really any conflict of the sort.  The main character is completely sympathetic, she takes in a family of three children, partly because she feels responsible and partly because having a newfound family is profoundly life affirming for a very lonely woman.  When the children's mother recovers from a near-fatal bout of the Big C, Clary feels horribly as the children she has grown to love over several months instantly disappear from her life forever, and harbors mean feelings towards their actual parents for all of 5 minutes.  

Very early in her story, a mean church lady tells Clary her good deed doesn't count because she's just grandstanding.  Although this eats at the protagonist the whole novel, from the reader's perspective it's never the case and therein lies where the book is lacking.  This gal doesn't have a malicious bone in her body.  She is doing the right things for the right reasons and suffers heartbreak when her job is made redundant.  On top of it all, one of the children, the baby, has spent so much time with her that they've bonded the way babies and mothers do, so the reader instantly forgives Clary's moment of weakness even when she doesn't, because every parent knows exactly how horrible a feeling that must be.  The story is very pretty and pretty sad, particularly when told through the eldest daughter's perspective, but the characters never really move out of the first dimension.  It reads like Club Soda tastes.  I liked it, but it took me longer than I figured to finish it.

Un-Comment

This is me not blogging on a certain author's passing.

The End of Violence: A Lament

As First Published at www.Hockeyinsight.com

There is no nice way to put it. The National Hockey League is sharing a room with an elephant the size of Gibraltar and even if there were clear solutions neither the owners nor the PA have anyone in the driver’s seat with the fortitude to make tough decisions. It’s a case of a thousand cuts and if it doesn’t mean death it means a right proper castration at the alter of player safety.

Over the course of our favorite sport’s modern history, you might have been forgiven if you thought it mismanaged, bizarre, even a touch self-hating in parts, but you could never call it sterile. If fancy passing, iconic goals and Lady Byng-ing it up with the less fortunate are the head and heart of the league, then Sherwood dentistry, blood spitting fisticuffs and dirty checks are most certainly it’s guts. The Stan Mikita, Claude Lemieux and Gordie Howe legacies might not shine as brightly as Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and … Gordie Howe, but they’re there nonetheless and history would be sorely lacking without them.

Fighting, for starters, is on the way out, beginning with the CHL (more a weather vane for hockey’s big league than any other feeder system for any pro sport). David Branch has said as much when pressed, and it stands to reason that if the kids aren’t allowed to fight, then the services of enforcers won’t be required in the minors. That all but evaporates the pool of tough guys for the league to draft, unless they want to go nosing around the octagon to see if Keith Jardine knows how to skate.

That’s ok, because on the one hand, most fans consider fights to be an amusing but ridiculous sideshow, but on the other hand, watching Iginla trade knuckles with Lecavalier after two and a half periods of agitation, that’s something you tell your grandkids about. Now fighting has taken a convenient backseat to the newest bugaboo, head shots. Talks of banning or even curbing fights have been pushed back for a while, but it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. Head shots cause career ending concussions, brain spasms, and are in all ways a thing to be avoided. But players duck, players put their heads down, and in a league that lets mutants like Chara play against regular sized people, head shots are going to happen unless body contact is ruled out altogether.

The same forces that rally against demolition derbies, smoking in the workplace and unprotected sex are now lined against violence in hockey. No, not violence, just fighting, head shots, interference, charging, elbowing, hitting from behind, and a nice fat caveat reserved for whatever causes the next big injury.

So when Charlie Tator, the doctor with a man-sized hunger for his fifteen minutes, calls out Don Cherry for promoting an aggressive game, he does so with crippling, flat, sterile reason in his corner. Don can give him the one-fingered Kingston Salute, but he can’t sit down and argue because all the good doctor has to point to is Don Sanderson, or Steve Moore, or Mikael Tam or the dopey stream of players past and present coming out of the concussion closet. These are tragedies all, and products of violence in hockey. There is no more compelling motive than these examples, and no reasonable objections can be made against taking all measures to prevent them. Hockey is just a game, and a game is not worth more than life. End of story. Grapes will argue and preach for self-governance amongst the players, a policy he knows is doomed to fail, all the while loving the kids on the ice and the game itself the way guys like Tator can’t understand. The way Don sees it, hockey is one or two new rules away from cashing in the very spirit that makes the game great in the name of safety and reason.

Hockey is dangerous. These boys get paid to go real real fast, to throw their bodies around, to drop the gloves and to hurt each other on purpose. They do it because there is a desire for violence amid the glory, a need for the unsanitary that puts asses in the stands at Joe Louis Arena the same way it did at the Coliseum. You don’t get the frenzied electricity that makes hockey fans hockey fans without the threat of fists, sticks, shoulders and elbows bubbling in the pot. They go hand in hand and it’s what makes our sport better than anything else out there. No one would ever suggest that the game can’t change with the times, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. At some point, when someone gets hurt, the NHL, it’s players and it’s fans have to say “So it goes” or abandon it altogether.

Hockey is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be played tomorrow in such a way that would negate all but the most basic risks. Players could skate across center ice with their heads down, wingers could screen goalies with no thought of reprisals, and the weakest of men could taunt the strongest with as many barbs as they could imagine. We can have a kinder, gentler NHL and there is sickly, constant pressure to move in that direction.

The NHL’s debate about violence is really a debate about identity. Hockey is a sport like no other and the rough stuff is a big piece of what sets it apart. Without the mean body checks, the fighting, the missing teeth and the violence, how close does hockey really get to soccer on ice?

Fall on Your Knees: Bummer

What the hell do authors have against Cape Breton?  If you only read CanLit and never visited you would think the whole island is a festering pool of hateful priest rape, incest, polio, crippling poverty, depression, drownings, murder, am I missing anything?  This Bird, Marie Anne-MacDonald, follows a long line of hack Feminist authors and writes the most depressing tripe, full of evil weak-spined men and strong but bat shit insane women hacking their way through horrible lives.

Balls.

I'd like to think, and I suspect, that our author has gone through some horrible experience, and that this sort of sewage is her therapy rather than a product of manic depression for manic depression's sake.  The story is revolting and desensitizing for no good reason other than to shock.  Not shock us out of apathy, or into action, only to make us feel sick.  

I've been to Cape Breton, if it's poor but by god you couldn't want a more beautiful spot filled with the nicest people one could hope to meet.  So I spent the better part of the book irritated.

The text is minimalist in all the wrong ways, and the cadence makes you sea sick before you even realize that you're reading rape scene after rape scene.

Perdita Felicien presented this novel after consulting her "Literary friend".  If losing at your sport doesn't qualify you for CBC darling status, then not reading regularly will.

I am super glad this book is in the Circle of Winfrey, I was getting blue just thinking about the books I like that she has endorsed.  Steer Clear of Fall on your Knees  

Avatar: Good

Before I talk about Avatar, I want to talk about Transformers II.

This photo is not from Transformers II you say.  No, but I think it illustrates a point.

Transformers two was ridiculous and anyone who doesn't think so is foolish or a bean counter.  But Transformers had something going for it, not plot, not acting, not je ne sais quoi.  Transformers had Wicked awesome robots tearing each other apart for a good chunk of the movie.  Robots fighting Robots is very cool, so I liked Transformers, much to the chagrin of my more snobbish associations.  That said I had to like it despite what seemed like a great deal of effort on the part of the filmmakers to evoke a contrary Response.  My love for Optimus Prime can move mountains.
Avatar is not Transformers.  Avatar is passably acted, by that I mean it isn't revolting at any point.  There are no Jar Jar moments and there is no Shia Lebeouf.  The plot has been compared to Dances with Wolves, but I think gets closer to Braveheart.  Insofar as the plot is a vehicle for the visuals, fine.  They went to amazing lengths, considering the fantastic scope of the story, to avoid insulting my intelligence.  Avatar is a fucking great movie!  It's butter on whole grain popcorn.   The 3D is great without being ridiculous, the story is exciting and hits all the action high notes that make the 10 year old in me squeal.

There is a scene in this film where a Mech fights a Warrior Princess riding a Lizard Panther that lasts a good 5 minutes.  For all of you who know what I'm talking about, just rest your eyes for five seconds and think about that.

vs

The Film is PG but it didn't feel like that hampered it, you can get good action movies without chopping heads off it seems and I'd be pleased as punch to take my kids to see it for an excuse to don the Buddy Hollies again.

Calls of Racism, of Neo-Colonialism, of Blasphemy, of deep fried leftist propaganda, etc etc have been, um, called.  Maybe, but lighten up already.  It's a goddamn movie.

I had a coupon for a free movie, but the talking acne colony at the concession/ticket stand told me my coupon was only good for 2D movies, and Avatar was a 3D movie.  That extra D cost me a mortgage payment.  Imagine my surprise.  I was pretty uptight when I sat down, and because I had heard a handful of reviews that said it was garbage I was ready to ruin the movie for everyone, but it was not Garbage.  It was good.  The McDonald's Avatar toys that came with happy meals, they were garbage.   

This movie made more money than you could spend.  It is not the greatest movie ever made.  It is just awesome.

Nikolski: Multicultural Montreal Makes Me Merry

Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski is the reason "Canada Reads" is awesome.  I shouldn't think I'd ever have occasion to read this book otherwise, and I really liked it.  It was a charming, light and funny read and absolutely unlike anything I've read since Fruit last year.  That it won a GG for translation probably means it captures most of that which is usually lost in translation, so I do feel comfortable saying Dickner maybe swung for the fences a little bit more than he needed to, but the result still feels like a comfy small town story that spans the country and the Americas.

      The picture he paints of Montreal is really cool.  I'm so soaked with Toronto-centric media that having a go at the multicultural hodge podge of big cities through a different lens is refreshing to the point of giddiness.  The characters are troubled without being tragic, and the overall arc of the whole shebang is happy.  It's a quick read and it makes you smile.  I should be frequenting that city a lot more than I do. 

Generation X: Death to Hipsters

The world is going to end in a great ball of nuclear fission, and all the Pepsi bottles from all the landfills in Michigan and the great plastic garbage bag continent floating in the North Atlantic will be vaporized and instantly kicked up into a whirlwind the size of Australia. The prevailing winds from the fallout are going to rain down liquid polymers all across the eastern seaboard and well into Manitoba, instantly fossilizing anyone caught by surprise, fusing charred flesh with bits of snow fence and dismembered GI Joe arms and legs.  And when a society arises from the ashes, half-cockroach half-Nebraska field hands who's ancestors happened to be exploring Cold war bomb shelters at just the right time, they'll stare in awe at the Tableau of bipedal Titans frozen in time, wearing big bead necklaces and kaki shorts standing in line for chances to win six months of free text messaging.

Thanks to Canada Reads 2010 and Douglas Coupland, I've had to re-evaluate my stance on reading in public, kinder eggs and hygiene for hygiene's sake.

Verdict:  I cannot say I am very fond of Generation X.

 The heros of this novel clumsily hate all things plastic, workaday and futile.   Drinking themselves numb in the desert at what they suspect and hope is the end of the world, they tell beautiful little stories, true or otherwise, and seek out small measures of epiphany all the while minding their waistlines and abandoning all but the purely masochistic sexual relationships.  Dropping completely the ambition and money lust that characterized the eighties so appropriately for middle class America (Alex P. Keaton be Damned).  














Wikipedia declares that I belong to this navel grazing subcategory, and insofar as it means I am angst ridden, I suppose they have an argument.  So houses are too expensive, job security is a thing of the past (hehe) and the world is free falling to disaster whether I tell it to stop or not.  But I came of age in the tech boom and bust, where kids with vague ideas were driving cars normally reserved for first round draft picks, all on the tabs of Boomers and their mutual funds who had sensibly weathered a handful of nifty recessions and figured it all was fine  and dandy. There really is one born every minute and since we're not running out of bubbles any time soon all these fatalists could have had their three-car garages  if they had slugged it out for another 5 years.

Cynical is not the same as intelligent, but Coupland declares everyone should stare at his protagonists as if they were dilettante sages in a world gone stupid.  They can only feel in ironies; imagine achieving enlightenment by rolling your eyes for seven years.    

Maybe if I was born five years earlier, and in an AMC Javelin on it's third clutch, and tended bar across the street from a boarding house where William Burroughs once got arrested, maybe then I would "Get" Generation X, and then Ms. Ryder would be asking for MY number.



The saving grace of this book is the ending, a moment of beauty that has to be read to be believed and is really quite something.

I Can't Get a Decent Haircut in This Town

There is an element of alchemy to haircutting that I do not understand.  I would never suggest the trade is an unskilled one, on the contrary it is an art upon which a great deal depends when it comes to a professional's clientele.  No matter your station in life, a bad haircut is worn at your spirit's peril and on the other hand a terrific hair cut can open doors and glide the rest of you through them.  I have extensive experience with both these scenarios.

I do not consider myself a particularly difficult client when it comes to hair cuts.  My hair is extremely thick and that very fact has been a consistent if one-sided topic with every haircutter I have ever encountered, from the hyper-permed Thunderdome refugee who saved me from my mullet, to the vicious electric razor-wielding OAC football captain bent on my ritual humiliation.  It may be thick, but all I ever wanted for the last two decades was a number two on the sides and back, and short on top.

There are no shortage of Barbers in Georgetown.  In the radius of a short walk I have half a dozen options when in comes to trimming down an imperceptibly greying blessedly thick head of hair.  The generic cheapskate unisex option is open, but the one next to me is lousy with that particular militant single mom vibe, they remember you and your specific opinions on a wide range of subjects and their quality of work runs in direct correlation to your political compatibility. Not good.



There is a wonderful man across the street who runs a spartan outfit wedged between a diner, and a vacuum repair shop.  A giant poster of a peasant girl from the old country picking grapes with cleavage that could launch a thousand ships at least dresses the far wall along with hot rod calenders that cover most of the chips out of decades old paint and plaster.  The fellow smiles, makes a few off colour but appropriate comments about the weather in the beautifully broken english no one can pull off as charmingly as old Italian men and sets to work humming bits of music that probably comes from Operas.  This would be the most perfect hair cutting place in the entire world, were it not for the fact that the haircuts are horrible.  I find clumps of two inch too long hair for days afterwards and end up doing my own sad hack job that makes me look like an malnourished Okie up for the picking season.  I could even let that slide, but for this gentleman rubs his crotch against my shoulder for the entire duration of my haircut.  I've been to him twice, and I've been subtly molested twice.  His place doesn't look very prosperous, and I sort of feel bad about dodging it, but where I come from, unsolicited sexual man-healing is a deal breaker.

There is a place in our mall staffed by half a dozen retired gentleman who have been rehashing the same argument in some Eastern Block tongue for as long as I've been living here.  You come out of their place looking like a bad Sopranos extra, but after a wash it ends up being a pretty good haircut.  Unfortunately I've been effectively blacklisted, as my son was momentarily possessed by a shrieking demon earlier this year during my hair cut that very quickly cleared the place out.  I can't speak their language, but I know fear when I see it, these guys pegged my one year old as something diabolical, and cross themselves whenever I get within twenty feet of their shop.  Bummer.

My fall back has been this proper little quintessential barber shop in town.  The haircuts are somewhere between good and very good, but never very good.  The atmosphere is good, relaxed, busy, old posters and photos concerning the town, hockey, the longevity of the business cover the walls and evoke a simpler time.  The Barber is something of a celebrity in his own right, being forever voted the town's favourite and counting such luminaries as Mike Holmes and ... Mike Holmes as customers.  He greets everyone as "Neighbor" and works contentedly and appropriately.

but...

His politics are just wonky.  He opens every haircut with a loaded comment about our boys overseas, the untrustworthy nature of the Persian, and the unstoppable wave of crime throughout the GTA thanks to decades old conspiracy laden immigration policies.  He gages your response and will weave the conversation from there between hockey, local issues, personal anecdotes and back to charged nationalist-minded diatribes that back you into a with us or against us corner all the while with a razor blade centimeters from your jugular.  I don't mind politics, and I love jawing with hard liners of any persuasion, but in the prone position I'm never 100% certain I'm safe with this fellow, and there are too many places around here to dump a body with half a haircut where no one would ever find it.

I'm thinking of growing my hair out, but I always look like such an idiot...