Paths to Resilience

Back when my work days were rated X, I used to try and start every one of them in a state of pitched over-excitement. It was fake, of course. But I figured that if I went in at 9am as if I was high on life and/or cocaine, I could leave at 5pm feeling only mildly disgusted with the human condition. Lately, though, it seems like I've lost that ability. I wake up feeling cursed. Not cursed like I'll turn into a werewolf when the moon is full, or cursed like a streetcar is going to run over my leg before noon. But I am becoming increasingly worried that nothing will work out right that day (or ever.) So I have moved on to stage two of dealing with this. And that, by the way, is repeating Albert Camus' quote that "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." Unfortunately, the best I could muster today was muttering "Invincible summer! Invincible summer! INVINCIBLE SUMMER!!" as the wind strafed my face with ice pellets. At least there's always stage three: baking a marmelade cake.

Domestic Monday: Striped Socks and a Spring Bock

Well, looks like you guys will get a two-fer (but not a two-four) of these domestic posts this week. The lateness of this one comes from the bad case of knitting blahs I've been battling for the past few weeks. I thought it was just post-holiday malaise, but I think I've discovered the true root: TOO MANY DAMN SOCKS.

I discovered my half-finished Broadripples after one completed sock and its matching ball of yarn spent no less than FIVE YEARS buried under my stash. I thought I would be able to finish these in days. They're knit at a relatively large gauge for socks, the pattern is more exciting than plain stockinette, and my shame would drive me forward. But not so much. Two weeks later, they're finally finished. I did start the second sock from the wrong end of the ball, so the colours don't match up. Oh well. After five years, asking for perfection would be asking for a little much. But finishing this long-abandoned pair has made me realize that I'm bored with socks. I've knit too many of them, and not enough sweaters. And that is why I came back from Guelph with a suitcase full of yarn.

I haven't had any trouble finding good beer though, and this week I'm here to tell you about Amsterdam's Spring Bock. Bocks are malty, lightly hopped lagers that are usually dark in colour and high in alcohol. Amsterdam releases this one every spring, and you can cellar your bottle for another year, or just drink it right now. It goes down smoothly and ends by tasting a little like burnt marshmallow, so watch out - or else that 7% ABV will get you.

Whit Stillman's Back!: Damsels in Distress

Glad tidings from the trailer front, for once - it appears Whit Stillman has made another movie. If you haven't seen a Stillman film yet, describing them would probably not encourage you to do so. He mostly shoots wealthy folks who have the emotional maturity of pre-teens, but the vocabularies of tenured English professors. And yet - Stillman doesn't let his fondness for these hapless youths stop him from recording their antics with all the dedication of an anthropologist. You can check out Metropolitan or The Last Days of Disco. Disco is particularly recommended, for the stellar duds the costumer designer found for Kate Beckinsale.

The trailer for Damsels in Distress isn't that promising, but Stillman's meandering tone would always be a difficult fit for a two-minute format. I'm willing to wait until April 6th to give my final judgment. I'll be there in theatres, with my tap shoes on.

How to Be a Sophisticate: Or, Lessons Learned from City Living

On the right, a sophistcated female. On the left, me. Note the difference.

I have been a busy student since moving to Toronto. And this time I'm not talking about my stats class, I'm talking about style. I wanted to know what separated me from the other girls here. Were we not both human? Do we not both bleed red? Well, we probably do, but I'm sure the other girls look much better doing so. My problem is that I'm not sophisticated, just endearing. But that hasn't stopped me from learning why I'm not, so I could share my observations with you. Who knows - you may have to go Toronto someday, and you'll want to blend in with the ruling cultural class. My first lesson in sophistication was a swift one. And it is that a small head is a necessary condition. Small heads can bear more hair and make every neck look long. The problem is that my head is large. Massive. Unnatural, even. So, as other girls gracefully stride down Queen West, I waddle forward, a honeydew melon atop a pea coat.

Being forever banned from stylishness hasn't stopped me from learning other lessons, however. Even those with gigantic heads can benefit from the second lesson I've learned, which is that sophistication comes in only one colour, and that colour is black. Entire sections of Queen and King look like funeral processions when work lets out, as fleets of young professionals in black Canada Goose jackets, black duffel coats, black leggings and black boots stream out of work. I come here not to bury the look, but to identify it. It makes sense though. Black is slimming, clashes with nothing, and lets you go stealth at night.

The final lesson in sophistication, if you already have a big head and nothing black but a pair of polyester pants, is that you can always blow your hair out. Shiny hair that hovers in that liminal state between straight and wavy can make anyone look "right." Of course, sophisticated doesn't mean chic. I have seen some looks on the street that have made me stare out of the streetcar window and take notice, like the man with the mile-high top fade and puffy purple coat, and few of them have involved black.  But that sense of style is a rare thing, and sophisticated is a close-enough simulacrum, if you can afford a hair dryer.

Domestic Failday: Crappy Cooking and Trafalgar's Irish Ale

Instead of my default domestic activity, I was going to do something different. I was going to photograph my cooking. Then I would talk about how I lost my cooking mojo, but now I wanted to experience the joys of cooking for myself again, etc. etc. Cooking brings us together. Cooking will save the world. Unfortunately, it's hard to get all poetic about food when you've just produced a big pile of blah. Or, rather, a puddle of blah, as my attempt at making the Mushroom Curry from the original Moosewood Cookbook resulted in a big pot of spicy-flavoured water. Every so often, though, a mushroom floats by at its leisure.

Frankly, I blame those hippies at Moosewood. I'm not in Victoria anymore, so I can go back blaming hippies for everything. (Though to be fair to our hemp-wearing, kombucha-raising brethren, it was my fault for adding too much water.)

At least there's beer to dull the pain! I pulled this out of the fridge, telling my roommate that "this will make things allllll better." He seemed confused. "So, you're going to add more liquid to something that's already too liquidy?" "No," I replied, "I'm going to add more liquid to me." And indeed I did. Now, I know that's not the perfect glass to be serving a brown ale like this in, but post-dinner disaster, I didn't much care. Oh, the mushrooms I had sliced and the onions I had diced. After all that, my Irish Ale from Oakville's Trafalgar Ales and Meads (who also brewed this Smoked Oatmeal Stout) was going into the nearest glass. Let's all be glad it wasn't a sippy cup. It's a nice beer, not aggressive at all, and with a flavour that's more sweet than bitter. It also seems to sometimes appear under the name Celtic Pure Irish Ale, but I prefer the simpler name. It reminds me less of Michael Flatley.

Book Pile for February 16

1. Sure to be Depressing Novel: Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler
2. Mitford Fest Vol. 2: Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
3. Mitford Fest Vol. 1: The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford
4. Pretty Much Close Captioned This American Life Reading: Take the Cannoli, Sarah Vowell
5. The “Dipping My Toe into SciFi” Novel: The Chrysalids, John Wyndham
6. For My Ill-Advised Homesteading Dreams: Homegrown & Handmade, Deborah Niemann

Solving Racism, One Six Pack At a Time

A few weeks ago, I read a little item on The Onion's AV Club about 2 Broke Girls. After being accused of racism due to the half-dimensionality of the girls' Korean boss, 2 Broke Girls would add a "hot Asian guy" to make everything better. Since then, the idea of solving all problems of racism, power and privilege with a liberal application of Preparation S(exy) has made me think. What if other famous examples of racism could be hot-washed this way?

For example, in Gone with the Wind, hire Zoe Saldana to shoot some extra scenes, where she gets in a sexy catfight with Scarlett O'Hara. Petticoats will be torn!!! George Lucas can bring the same technology he used to add scenes to the Star Wars trilogy for those special editions, except this time he'll be using it for marginally less pointless reasons.

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, all scenes featuring Mickey Rooney's yellowface could be re-edited, with the video replaced by an intern shaking a picture of Takeshi Kaneshiro, freshly torn from a Japanese fashion magazine, at the camera.

Disney's Song of the South: Digitally insert a shirtless Shemar Moore into every scene.

Maybe now Disney will let this one out of the vault!

In 300, you could find some sexy Persian and... really, 300 has reached ab saturation, and any attempt to add more attractive men would not only leave the movie as anti-Iranian as ever, but also cause some kind of rift in the space-time continuum, creating a wormhole which smells strongly of body oil.

Paperback Hater: My Reply to Emily Keeler

Have book covers become too pretty? Look at books like The Eat-Clean Diet: Fast Fat-loss That Lasts Forever! and you might say no, but that doesn't stop Emily Keeler from saying yes in a recent article for the Toronto Standard. Two series in particular are too sexy for her bookshelf: Jillian Tamaki's Threads collection, and Coralie Bickford-Smith's redesigned Fitzgeralds, both produced for Penguin. I read the article reluctantly, ready to be offended. If you're a longtime reader of my blog (I think there may be six of you by now!) you probably know that I like book covers. I like them a lot. I'll point out ones I think are particularly pretty on a semi-regular basis, and Bickford-Smith's work has appeared twice. So I tried to strain the petty bitterness out of any meaningful critique I could offer on Keeler's piece, but by the end my most coherent thought was still "GIRL, PLEASE." Time has cooled my ire, though, and allowed me to expand on that emotion.

My first issue is Keeler's apparent belief that the book as design object, or even a marker of taste, dates to Penguin hiring Tamaki. But the book as fetish object has a longer history than the book as utilitarian good. The latter needed several factors to appear and collide for it to become a phenomenon. Mass production, greater literacy and more disposable income, among others. Before, people who learned to read, then found time to do so regularly were generally either religious or rather rich. Sometimes, they even farmed out the pages to professional bookbinders, who returned beautifully tooled and gilded pieces of art. This process persisted even past the automation of bookbinding. If Keeler believes The Last Tycoon is overdesigned, she may want to avert her eyes from this pyrotechnic book cover, circa 1900. And when it comes to taste, as Bourdieu said, "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier." He also said this in 1984, 27 years before the "beautiful books" which Keeler sees as becoming "consumable objects that describe the taste of the reader who proudly, tastefully, displays them" were getting laid out in InDesign.

I'm also not sure that "The lush redesigns fetishize these books, render them décor rather than literature." Do they? Really? Are publishers the new authors, back when it was assumed that the author packed meaning into the text, which readers then decoded to find the One True Interpretation? A company may say a book's collectible in the copy, but that doesn't guarantee that it will never be read. Books are multi-functional that way. They'll always be "literature" if they can be opened, contain words, and if you're not using the highest-browed meaning of the term. The only guaranteed way of turning books from literature to décor is to strip the covers and sew the pages together in a stack, which is exactly what Restoration Hardware did in 2010, but isn't what Penguin did here. Michael Maranda might know a little something about décor though. Keeler likes his work on Selected Business Correspondence, where a "whole sheaf of letters is bound and placed in an embossed manilla folder." That sounds like an object guaranteed to become décor, if only because once you've spent $40 on it, you'll want to limit your chances of bending the letters or tearing the envelope as you stuff them back in. Perhaps it's better just to click through the free PDF online.

For the record, each of the Fitzgerald redesigns costs less than $30, and all of them will survive a few readings out here in the physical world.

RIP Whitney Houston

As I'm sure Twitter/Facebook/news crawls have informed you, Whitney Houston died today. And so I'm drinking while watching her sing "I Have Nothing" over and over again. Why the sadness? Whitney was a joke for most of my life. The infamous Barbara Walters interview aired when I was 15, and I was raised to despise oversung, overproduced R and B. But when I heard Whitney's songs, they cut through all of my pretension, and even through her own melodramatic production. That voice had a direct line to my soul. Maybe not the best parts of me, but at least to every cell that cried too much, or fell in love with the wrong guy, or wanted to dance with somebody (when the loneliness calls.) It's powerful and sad, running almost to excess. That's not a criticism. That's the whole point.

Domestic Lateday: Mustard Hat, Rousse Beer

Yes, many days have passed since my last post, and it's only now that I've managed to get the crochet hook out and finish putting on my Thorpe's border. I have no excuse. Oh wait, I gave blood, which would only really explain about an hour and a half of yesterday's procrastination, but never mind. I'm going to ride that excuse for months. "Oh, you're mad that I'm late? Well, I was too busy saving people with the GIFT OF LIFE." And then that person will probably be a paramedic, and I will feel like an asshole. The hat keeps my head warm, but it also makes my face look particularly moony. As with my Habs toque, I have to make sure to have a curl of my hair out for show, so that everybody knows I'm a lady. It's the tonsorial equivalent of putting a bow on the head of a girl baby.

This week's beer came down from Baysville, ON - cottage country - to spend its last days in the far-less scenic Toronto country of my fridge. It's Lake of Bays Brewing's Rousse Red Ale. I had a vague recollection of drinking Boréale Rousse by the pitcher at McGill, but at those quantities, I could have been drinking Colt .45 and still only remembered that it tasted like drunk. So I'm not entirely sure how this compares to the so-called "Québec classic" rousse. As far as I can gather, anyway, that's a style based more or less on an Irish red ale, perhaps even popularized by that same Boréale which caused me so many regrets throughout my undergrad. This one is a fine outing in its class, I suppose, a good choice to buy for any friends you're trying to wean off their 50. Kind of malty, a little spicy, but less hoppy than the packaging had lead me to expect. I hate to sound so equivocal about this beer, but maybe I'm spoiled for subtler flavours. Or perhaps I'm just disappointed because I liked their Mocha Porter so very much.