Not Quite Christmas, Not Quite New Years

As a contrast to my last post, let me just say that I'm back home, which is to say, back East. 'Tis the season of family togetherness, and so since Christmas Eve I have been at the homestead soaking up Smitty love, watching movies, and having food pressed upon me at every turn.

I would have blogged more, but thanks to all the stuffing, my pudgy fingers can barely reach the keyboard.

Anyway, I have to spend a few days in Toronto and Montreal starting now, so don't expect the pace of posting to pick up any. However, once I return, you can look forward to a truly terrifying trip down Memory Nightmare Alley, as I have discovered the diary of my misspent youth. And by misspent I meant whiny. Very, very whiny.

West Coast Living

When I'm at work, I work hard... at living up to the stereotype of the disgruntled Easterner. In short, I celebrate the following:

1. Smoking (although I haven't since that brief flirtation with tobacco in aught-eight)
2. Grease-laden foods
3. Toronto
4. the Montreal Canadiens
5. Concrete

While disparaging the following:

1. Camping
2. Sunflower seeds in everything
3. The Sunshine Coast
4. the Vancouver Canucks
5. Crab traps

Secretly, however, there's a sugary nougat centre beneath my prickly exterior. I like Victoria. I like taking the ferry back when it's not dark and raining, so I can watch from the deck as the postcard-pretty islands pass by. There are purple starfish, used bookstores and Eccles cakes as far as the eye can see.

Or at least until your eyes get to Saaanich, at which point things get pretty residential and unexciting, but still. Lots of fun to see before then.

These are all lovely little comforts, but I'm also fond of making rent and keeping things in the pantry besides lentils. I'll need to find a job after my internship is over, and the word on Fort an Douglas streets is that's not the simplest of tasks. So I'm cruel to Victoria and it's many delights because I don't want to fall in love with the city, and then regret moving back to Toronto.

However, every mean word about the sunflower thing was in earnest. That's just whack.

Burlesque: Approach With Caution, Glitter

This still is more exciting than 99.999999% of the movie.

I love Cher. I would follow that crazy dancing, singing, walking, talking Real Doll to the ends of the Earth and beyond. She's half-Armenian, half-Sleestak and all love.

And I'm opening on this note of Cherophilia because I feel the need to justify my purchase of tickets - at full price (10$) to Burlesque (a film worth 0.01$, if anything.)

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Singing, dancing, costumes, Alan Cumming, Cher, Cher, Cher - but I was cruelly mistaken. I forgot to reckon on the presence of Christina Aguilera, Aguilera, Aguilera.

There's no denying the girl can sing, except that like Celine Dion, she uses her great power for great evil. Aguilera seems to have never met a note she wouldn't turn into an octave, complete with growling "uh-hrrrrrrrrr" intro. The only raft in the ocean of terrifying yell-singing was a Cher ballad. Seriously, Cher isn't the most dramatic thing on screen. The Pro Tooled notes soothed my frayed nerves for a few minutes, but then it was time for Aguilera to slather on the melisma again. And for me to slouch further down in my seat.

Have you ever seen Coyote Ugly? Well, make the acting even worse and you'll have this movie. Listen to Aguilera speak the line "I'm only taking what's owed me, not a penny more" and hear someone who might have learned her lines phonetically. However, even the real actors don't get much in the way of assistance from the script. Poor, pretty, perpetually shirtless Cam Gigandet gets the worst of it. In a wedding scene, he gets in a phone argument with his fiancée and has to say "Yeah, we should talk about our future. In fact, I think I'm looking at my future right now."

Now, by rights, he should have been staring meaningfully at the buffet table while saying this. Instead, of course, he's got to gaze longingly at Christina Aguilera. I don't want to slut shame anyone, but I remember her "Dirrty/Xtina" period. That's a future full of new and exciting STI's Gigandet is staring down, my friends.

Any movie reflections should end with at least one positive comment, and here's one for Burlesque: It kept the sequin stitchers of America employed during this trying economic downturn.

Don't see it, no matter how much you've had to drink.

Ballad of the Beardies

I have never pretended to be the luckiest girl in the world when it comes to the menfolk. The reasons for my lack of success are legion (complete lack of personal charms, still trying to find that elusive combination of unibrow and accordion-playing ability, etc.)

So, today's tale will be another tale of woe, but this time one of woeful amusement instead of woeful horror.

There's an adorable café near my house, seemingly populated at all hours by an endless array of healthy BC folks wearing scarves, Cowichan sweaters and typing on the Macs. (Full disclosure: I write this in that self-same café on a Mac, but am wearing a striped hoodie.)

A few weeks ago, I had what I thought was a torrid smile affair with a charmingly bearded chap sitting next to me on the couch. He smiled at me, I smiled at him, then briefly considered asking him about the article he was reading in the Times-Colonist.

Of course, I didn't, but I held high hopes that Beardy would reappear in the café eventually. Would we move on to complete sentences at some point? Why, no, I have my reputation to consider, after all. But he didn't! Oh, there were other beards, but they didn't belong to my Beardy.

Oh so I thought.

Eventually I realized that nearly every patron, save the mustachioed hippie with the bubble wand, is a tall, handsome white dude with some kind of fuzzy facial outgrowth. I could have seen my Beardy a thousand times AND NEVER EVEN KNOWN. And maybe I did. So, I wrote Beardy off and decided to pursue my next dream: becoming Mrs. Comic Book Store.

And then I found out that Mr. Comic Book Store is married and has a child. Stay tuned next week for another episode of "Ill-Advised Days of our Lives."

In Defence of the Pet Shop Boys

It has recently come to my attention that some people are not as respectful of The Pet Shop Boy as they ought to be.



To which I say: SHAME. I love the boys for two reasons. The first is that the only friendly employee at the Montreal VIA station once sang part of "Opportunities" to me, completely poker-faced, as various and generally irate people milled about.



The second is that they're a legitimately good act. Don't be fooled by the high production values and superficial lyrics. The Pet Shop Boys know they're singing to the dark, empty - but most of all lonely - heart of the city.

The Plastic and the Glory of Seth

Seth is an interesting case. Sometimes I feel like I love his book covers more so than his actual books. His art is so pristine, so gracefully curvaceous, that I sometimes want to crumple it up, just so it can be a little bit messier and a lot more real.

Take, for example, this Dorothy Parker cover for Penguin. It's the perfect match, really. Surface sophistication with a bitter little centre (did Seth make her a little bit drunk? I think so.) Like all good covers, it economically sums up both the content of a book and the worldview of its author.

Now, compare with Wimbledon Green. Wimbledown is a beautifully-designed book in all ways. The foil on the cloth cover, the comfortable weight in your hands, you really couldn't ask for a more beautiful object to look at and to hold. But to read? As much as I like Seth, I sometimes feel as if his art is too perfect. Something a little more raggedy gives you space to fill in what's happening in between panels, whereas Seth's art is so pristine that each panel ends up frozen.

Then again, there are worse things than ending up in a stasis that's so damn pretty. And I think Seth does well when he works from a topic that is closer to his heart, like illustrating his father's stories in Bannock and Black Beans, or, uh, writing in shades of acute depression, as he does in Clyde Fans. It's when he follows the path of his cartooning idols, with elaborate plots and Chris Ware-style formatting, a little too closely that things begin to feel overly mannered.

Normally, I wouldn't be writing semi-critically about Seth. He lives in my hometown and I feel a certain amount of Guelph solidarity with him. However, my mild concerns with his work are becoming more acute ones I hold for art comics as a whole. Just as comics are breaking into popular and academic respectability, the stories many of their creators tell are becoming more artificial. Without a strong interest in the work of Doug Wright or a strong stomach for autobiographical blather (the black and white books I think of as the "Straight White Guys Buying Milk" genre), I'm not sure how much interest the Drawn and Quarterly catalogue will hold. And with the choice of vision seemingly split between looking at the past (Seth), or at one's own navel (Jeffrey Brown), I wonder who in comics is looking towards the future.

I started this post after reading a post at the excellent Comics Comics. I may not agree with all of their evaluations, but they're always convincingly phrased and educational. Jeet Heer, who wrote about Seth for that blog, also has an excellent piece in this month's Walrus about Stuart McLean. So good that it almost made me re-evaluate my intense, flaming hatred for The Vinyl Café. Almost.

Back In Pulp

One of the nice things about having gainful employment - besides not being able to watch back to back episodes of Sue Thomas F.B.Eye and Oprah, which means not having to justify doing so - is having ready money. No more lentils every day for a week. No more hoping your hair looks charmingly tousled instead of desperately in need of a cut.

And one of the nicest things is being able to buy comic books. When you're unemployed, spending four to six dollars on twenty-page bundles of paper does not seem the wisest investment one could make. At least, it didn't to me, which meant I stopped buying comics. And like missing one day's worth of soap operas, missing a month or more of comics is a bad idea.

Why? 'Cause, all of a sudden, you'll find yourself in the middle of the comic book store, wondering since when was Wolfsbane knocked up. And you'll be more judgmental of yourself for not knowing the answer to that question, than you are for knowing who the hell Wolfsbane is in the first place.

I've been trying to get caught up on some of the series I was following before the Great Poorening, and so far I'm almost up to speed on Berlin (since when did that start publishing again? I feel like it was on hiatus forever), The Unwritten and Sweet Tooth.

And honestly, if you're not reading Sweet Tooth yet, you should be. I know I've become kind of an annoying proselytizer for this book, but I don't feel guilty. It has an unrelentingly grim post-apocalyptic world, but still finds room for isolated notes of human (and mutant) warmth. And thus it deserves all the flogging it can handle. READ IT!

The Green Hornet Trailer Will Make You Cranky And Confused

Question: Does the Green Hornet movie even know what it wants to be? I think it's aiming for the cocky comic action that brought Iron Man many sacks heavily laden with money. Instead, it only feels like the demented, oozing offspring of Daredevil and a Judd Apatow movie.

Also, I am concerned about Jay Chou's aka Kato's hair. What are the bangs hiding? WHAT?

Sometimes, I just want movies to have the conviction to stay in one genre. You don't have to be a self-aware comedy, a big budget action movie and a make-work project for Edward James Olmos at the same time. Pick one thing and be good at it, instead of hoping Cameron Diaz will somehow save your movie. It's not 1997 anymore. She won't.

The strangest thing about this monstrosity is that it's directed by Michel Gondry. Now, perhaps the trailer monkeys got a little too weirded out by his original footage and spliced in more explosions and hunger dunger dang music, so the trailer looks like what a superhero movie trailer should look like. But unless the actual movie has the Green Hornet riding in a crocheted supercar that unspools yarn as cotton batting clouds pass by, I'll be concerned that Gondry has given up on being twee. And he did it so well.

Still, at least it's better than the trailer for Skyline, but that's a whole 'nother rant.

Food For Forest Critters

I hope the defining aspect of my generation is not its dedication to theme parties, but it's beginning to look that way. And so here is my theoretical contribution to the age's great body of work:

A Dinner Party Featuring Food A Hedgehog Would Make If A Hedgehog Could Make Food.

Drinks would be Forever Nuts tea from Davids Tea, and dessert would be this, a Scandinavian Dried Fruit Soup. God, doesn't the name alone make you think you're living in a burrow? And that's not whipped cream on top. Oh no, there are no whipped cream cartons in the forest. Only yogurt for this one (although I'm not sure why I've decided there are plastic yogurt tubs in the wood either, but I'm the hostess of this theme party, and so my word is law.)

It's from the Moosewood Daily Special Cookbook, and although I was expecting something that tasted like dates floating in spruce beer (don't ask,) it's rather sweet thanks to the four cups of peach juice you pour into this. Those hedgehogs might be on to something yet.

Book Covers I Have Loved: What To Cook And How To Cook It

Thanks to my new job, I've learned that designing a cookbook is hard. Each page has a dozen bits of information, from ingredients to cooking times, that must be communicated clearly to a reader who is similarly doing a dozen things at once trying to make that page into a meal.

However, I don't much care whether the inside of What To Cook and How To Cook It is easy to use, because the outside is certainly nice to look at. There's no creepy, branded photo of a celebrity chef with their signature scrawled across their own face, like you would get with your David Ramsays. Or a bunch of boring text that marks kitchen classics like The Joy of Cooking and How To Cook Everything.

There's just a few illustrations, including a fish who is so cute, I could eat him up. Literally. Like, with tartar sauce.