Month: August 2009

My memory is muddy

When I was living in Montréal with Paul and the kids, I used to watch Homicide.  I found it a quite remarkable show.

I’m watching it again, with Jeff, and if anything it’s even better than the first time around, as I think I am a more observant and trenchant critic.  But it’s sure got me thinking.

One of the episodes was even more powerful than usual, and I had two very strong memories of it.  One is of a scene where the mother of the shooter and the mother of the dead boy end up in the same waiting room.  I remembered a couple of pieces of that conversation accurately.

At the end of the show, I remember Yaphet Kotto as Giardello giving advice to the shooter, who’s about to spend the rest of his life in jail.  I remember them being outside, against a grey building.

It wasn’t Yaphet Kotto – it was Andre Braugher.  They weren’t outside, they were inside.

What I remembered was the emotional intensity.  I remembered a lot of what was said.  I just didn’t remember it accurately.

The older I get, the harder it is to be positive about anything.  I’ve straightened out that little bit of inaccuracy, but now all I can think of is Patricia saying, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

Partay

My dinner partay started off, amusingly, with me calling Mike around 5 and reminding him that we were set for dinner tonight.

After a very long pause (during which I began to worry about him), he sheepishly admitted that he was hanging out with his new squeeze.  I assured him that it was okay and got off the phone shaking my head and laughing.

Suzanne, Paul, Jeff, Keith and I ate, talked, ate some more, watched Bubba-Hotep (Suzanne hadn’t seen it) and played lots of pinball.  Supper consisted of (why, do you ask, do you always put the food in? because my mother eats extremely boring food so this is kinda food schadenfreude) pork chomps and chicken breasts and corn on the barbecue, plus I bought Portuguese buns and made three-cheese buns on the cue.  Recipe follows.  Suzanne brought puréed squash with cinnamon, squash gems (bacon and squash rolled in corn flakes) AND home made carrot cake with scratch made cream cheese icing.  I made a macédoine of vegetables (zucchini, broccoli, lima beans, green beens, carrots and onions, all fresh except the lima beans).

Cheese melts. I took the left over feta, which I had soaked in water rather than brine so it was much less salty, medium cheedar and parmesan, and mixed that all up, then added pepper, basil, parsley and garlic powder, then stuffed the buns, then wrapped each individually and tossed them on the cue.  Keith turned up when there were two left and then devoured them with an eagerness that was truly remarkable.  I know I made the damned things to be eaten; I wasn’t expecting to watch them disappear like soap bubbles.

Speaking of truly remarkable: KEITH DIDN’T GO HOME.  He appeared at my bedroom door, remarked that he had just put down the game controller for Arkham Asylum, and that he’d like breakfast. I told him to help himself to the leftover waffles. (I make waffles pretty much every Saturday morning with the waffle iron Jeff inherited from Granny.)  So he didn’t sleep over, but he didn’t go home.

Anyway, Paul brought the corn, which was yummy, and two pies which we didn’t even touch because the carrot cake was SO amazing (superlative, actually, maybe best ever) so I feel like I hardly had to cook at all. We had much enjoyment of each other – everybody very mellow and low key and comfy.  Suzanne drinks very sparingly, but I thought I would tempt her by picking up some Baja Rosa yesterday, and she had one small glass on the rocks, on the back deck while perusing Jeff’s copy of the Joy of Cooking for yet more squash recipes (her friends keep giving them to her).

From all this is should be obvious that I had a good time.  I think everybody else did too.

apropos of nothing

Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s acoustic version of Blue on Black.

I was sitting in the driveway of a friend’s house rolling the dial up and down when I caught the first few bars of the guitar, and then sat mesmerized while I listened.  It took me almost ten years to figure out who it was singing it; the song’s been out since 1997.  It’s on a kick ass rock and blues album called Trouble Is…

BCCLA update

The BC Civil Liberties Association, which, Darwin aid me, I gave money to last year, has requested through Freedom of Information to have the street closures for the Olympics publicly available.  They’ve requested three times and the Integrated Security Unit has told them to suck wind.

I AM FLEEING THE CITY FOR THE OLYMPICS.  Jeff, you can stay here if you want to, but this is boned.

Rounding up some unusual suspects

Really thought provoking article about the ‘institution’ of marriage by a gay writer in Seattle.

An 8 minute video about Medicare. For Americans, by Canadians.  Rational, good tempered and funny in spots.

Adolf Hitler doesn’t like Avatar.  The last line slew me. Three minutes or so long.

How come and for why hasn’t this extra solar planet burnt up? I suspect that they aren’t actually seeing what they are looking at properly.

How many dimensions did you say? Assistance in visualizing multiple dimensions.  Brain so hurts.

Do the wave…. the gravity wave.

Human ingredients Tshirt.

It’s unbelievable what people will get messed up over. Personal comment: It may reveal me to be a philistine, but I like Verdana.  I don’t understand the issue.  I just don’t.

Chrissie Hynde told meat eaters in her audience to fuck themselves.  Mike and Jeff and I sat there with hot dogs in our tummies and just looked at each other.  On the other hand, just to prove I’m at least TRYING to see the other person’s point of view, here’s a PETA press release about some of her animal activism.  Hint:  she doesn’t like McDonalds.

The New Miss Universe.  Beautiful, and without a hint of distinction.

The Milky Way has rarely looked so beautiful.

That’s just MEAN. So why did I snicker?

Do it yourself Horrrrorrrr F/X.  Shows Peter Jackson filming Bad Taste.

The difference between a man and a boy is that a man takes pictures of his toys.

“I’m an atheist because I’m efficient.”  Or so you can infer from Bill Gates’ interview excerpts…

Finally, a quiz where it’s easy to get 100%.

Beautiful day

It’s difficult, when you’re not an art historian or otherwise an art geek, to assess the value of seeing a real Vermeer or a real Rembrandt.  But it is supposed to be good for one, so I accompanied daughter Katie to the current exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery and was happy to be thrust 350 years into the past, when the current ideas about what constitutes the middle class were putting down sturdy roots. I looked into portraits whose faces bore the stamp of This is my Relation; I was struck, over and over again, by the beauty of details, clouds, ships, insects, trees; by the shine of the silver, the connections to the Dunnett books, and the pushing of art into places where it had never gone.  Why draw a dead and a dying horse side by side?  Why depict the interior of a synagogue (showing the mothers attempting to ride herd on their kids at the back of the shul)? Why elaborate on a new fashion of depicting happily married couples in a fantastic amalgam of backgrounds – he set amid his globe and his expensively bound volumes, she sweetly tugging at him to go into the garden for a moment?

It was the Art of Middle and Upper Class White Folks, writ large and small and in brilliant detail.  As a result, it is comfortable art.  Not challenging, not disturbing, not heartbreaking.  English contemporaries commented on the Dutch mania for everybody, from the greatest to the meanest, having pictures on their walls.  It’s pretty standard now, that your house isn’t a home until the pictures go up, and now I have a solid sense of where that notion came from.

Katie really enjoyed it.  She particularly enjoyed the paintings with trees, the detail and substance of them. We also agreed that the paintings on copper were the most beautiful, texturally.

I only played Art Troll once, forcing her to stand in front of the Vermeer, telling her that it was the first time in 50 years that a Vermeer had come to Canada and that she bloody well better look at it.

Then we wandered up and down Granville looking at the trendy shoes and clothes, I stepped into Tom Lee for a couple of packs of strings, we had a beer and cocktail (Sex on Wreck Beach, fancy that) respectively at Speakeasy, and headed out for Metrotown where she bought hair gunk and I heard the siren song of new smallclothes.  We parted at Edmonds Station.

Then I went to Planet Bachelor to hang out with Keith and Paul (Keith bailed on karate) and sing and play for a while.  Watched the 1929 documentary about the Peking (4 masted barque) again; I never get tired of watching that. I was very out of kilter and didn’t do anything very well; couldn’t remember lyrics etc.

Katie and I had a very good day, and I get some more Katie, greedy me, when she comes back today and I get my hairs cut.

Then she’s off to the PNE and I’m going to cut grass and tidy the kitchen and put away my laundry (finally) and start figuring out how to transfer the John tape onto another tape so that Phyllis can hear her son singing, and get ready for the small dinner party tomorrow night, which will consist of me, Jeff, Keith, Suzanne, Mike and Paul.

John’s interment in London is tomorrow.  Ruth and John and the kids will be going; I don’t know if any other relatives will be there.