Thursday, December 29, 2016

Dog. Drum. Duet.

Up at Metro Tobalaba, where the Tip y Tap beer garden fills the plaza in front of the entrance to the metro, a couple of musicians had set up shop. One had a guitar, another a drum kit, and they were good - I mean, really good, or at least they almost certainly would have been, but when I came into the plaza, the guitarist was putting away his guitar with a face like a sucked lemon, and the drummer was going at it on his own.
            The dog thought he was fabulous.  He was a big black dog - mostly labrador, with a bit of mastiff about the shoulders, and he had parked himself nose to brass with a cymbal, and every time the drummer hit a drum the dog barked a great big whoouff.
            The drummer hit a drum.  The dog barked. The drummer hit another drum. The dog barked bigger. The drummer drummed faster.  He reckoned he could out-bark the dog. Pretty soon he was going about a hundred and fifty beats a minute, but the dog's tail was going about double that -
            As far as that dog was concerned it was an ecstatic, practically hallucinogenic, full-on meeting of souls and minds. It barked and it barked and it barked.
            The drummer was beginning to look a wee bit lemonish himself. He and his guitarist had counted on a beer-generous Tip y Tap audience, and what they had was about fifty people laughing their heads off and holding up their cell-phone cameras - not even pointing at him. They were all aiming at the dog.
            I would have love to have stayed, but I was late for an appointment, and slipped past them into the metro station.  A machine-gun whoouf-and-drum-kit duet followed me all the way down the stairs.

It was a GOOD day.

Friday, December 23, 2016



Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Why Architects Really End Up Talking Like That

It's November, and it's getting hot. Yesterday I went down to our bodega (storeroom) to put away my winter sweaters and pirate hats and I came across a box of drawings from back in my first year of grad school.
            The drawing on top was a sort of vector diagram - done in footprints. Memories came rolling back. It had been a "assignment now - final product tomorrow!" all-nighter sort of project - in which we neophyte architects had been asked to go someplace where a lot of people came through and map the traffic patterns - putting all the four-dimensional traffic down on two-dimensional paper in an exciting and really neoteric fashion. (Neoteric: architecture-speak for 'an artistic vanguard that you imagined up right now all by yourself."
            And then we had to write about it. Obviously, the drawing would speak for itself, but in practical terms, a short museum-style blurb wouldn't go amiss.  (A good professor is way ahead of student neoterism as a matter of course.)
            The problem with being asked to describe a drawing project in a paragraph or two on short sleep and shorter notice is that you end up turning out some purely awful drivel.
            Because you weren’t thinking clearly. You weren't thinking at all - you were snoring between your words. And you were surrounded by people who'd gotten even less sleep that you had, and while you were confident that your own ideas were pretty darned great, to your sleep-deprived ears theirs approached towers of literary genius.
            There’s no color of jealously like sleepless green.

And I remembered that I'd written about it, afterwards, when I'd woken up. And pasted it to the back of my neoteric masterpiece so I wouldn't forget:

            One fellow held a degree in ancient literature.  He had mapped the smokers on their nicotine breaks in Dundas Square.
            “Since the Dawn of Time” he said solemnly, “Ancestral Man has been Drawn to Flame.”
            “That’s probably true” I agreed, grinding my teeth, and went off to ask editorial opinions on “The pulse, the tide, the ebb and flow of harried, feverish commuters at the Bloor-Yonge Subway station” from two students lying on the floor behind me and looking, respectively, vacuous and pained.
            One of them winced.
            "Isn't that a little…damp?"
            On cue, Mr. Ancient Literature walked past declaiming “And Now, a Tattered Subculture of Social Pariahs Clusters Around the Vestigial Memory of the Ancient Hearth Fire!”
            I, who belong to the extremely tattered Subculture that feels stoned rather than euphoric when we don’t sleep, turned back to my laptop, typed out ‘In my map I marked out a sour by fix goot frid” and ran spell-check twice.

Down in the bodega, I shut the box and sealed it up with tape, but I won't forget. I think I need a little ceremony.

            I'll unfurl the map.  I'll enter the pulsing commuter tide that hustle down my street at rush hour every evening. When the ebb and flow of shoulders and elbows have crumpled it beyond the reach of even the most accommodating professor, I will go home and make it an offering on the fires of my BBQ on my balcony.  Neoterically.

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Summer Kitchen PSA

Advice for when you drop a cherry pitter:

Don't.  The splatter radius is indescribable.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

The Jacaranda trees are in blossom, and the wisteria is blooming on the fences.  In the park, a young man and woman climbed a tree to sit in the canopy and kiss up there. It's a nice day.

Thursday, November 24, 2016

Doctor Strange

I've just seen Doctor Strange - the new Marvel movie starring the very British Screen God Benedict Cumberbatch. It was mildly jarring to watch a film about holy men studying the eternal verities so that they could learn how to kick someone's nose out through their earholes, but then things went boooom and i remembered that this was a Marvel movie - these fellows weren't holy men, they were doorkeepers!  And the fellows knocking on the door burned with manifest destiny and carried nuclear weapons. With the safety off.

            (I wonder if any of the 21st century Americans involved in the project picked up on the irony of that?)
            Mr Cumberbatch plays a bossy white guy who thought he knew everything, and then found out he didn't, and then he did, and then he saved the world.
            And there are three whole women in the cast! Really! And two of them even have speaking roles! One of them is a very nice white lady who was the Supreme Sorcerer, and she gets to say lots and lots of portentous wisdom things that clearly looked better on the cue cards than they sound being wrestled around a set of actual tonsils (portentous wisdoms are all right in their own time and place, but two or more characters standing gravely in a mostly-Tibetan-temple taking it in turns to drop fortune-cookie truth-bombs does not cinematographic conversation make) and the other is the love interest!
            She gets to say things too, whenever Doctor Strange needs an emotional reaction beat. She also gets to sigh, and be sad, and look worried, and look determined. She even gets to tear up!!
            The very best bit was learning just how the studio rationalized turning the Very Tibetan character of the Supreme Sorcerer into a white lady:
            "Well, the character is traditionally a Tibetan male, but Tibet won't play well in China, and we didn't want to make the Supreme Sorcerer a "26-year-old leather-clad fanboy dream girl" because we wanted diversity."
            True story.
            That somebody gave decision-makers of this caliber a whole movie's worth of budget to play with tells me a lot more about the pharmaceutical industry in Los Angeles than I ever wanted to know.

The wonderful Benedict Wong was stuck as the Ur-librarian with the original humorless biblio-funk, but Chiwetel Ejiofor did his very best Royal Shakespeare, and he and Cumberbatch between them have more charisma in their little toes than a whole summer's worth of blockbusters.

            It was boom-boom, popcorn, a little snark, with action sequences so deliriously kaleidoscopic that they must have needed heavy medication to even visualize - as for story-boarding them, possibly migraines and a rest-cure.
            It was pretty.  It was fun. And the climax of the whole fun-house upside-down mirror-ride was a privileged, 1-percent white guy flying into the heart of absolute evil, and standing nose to nose with the face of scorched-earth selfishness and telling it to GO AWAY.
            He died for it, of course. And then he got up to die again. He went down over and over and over, dying in a million terrible, painful ways, and every single time he got back up - doggedly, tirelessly, willingly-
            Until he wore down even the embodiment of ego and "I want," and then Doctor Strange took back the world. All of it.
            I'm almost certainly reading too much into this, but right now it's an image I need right now. I'll take it and I'll keep it. It was a good movie.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016