The Scene and Herd

I guess it takes The New York Times to shamelessly profile the old money coursing through Iggy’s veins in a positive light. Ha. I know nobody over here is ever going to do it. We like to keep quiet about all that, unless we’re crafting an attack ad.

Seriously, what is the problem everybody in Canada seems to have with wealth and Harvard? These are good things, no?

The ensuing response (the comment section – don’t miss the comment section) is hilarious. 

I’m not all that sure that the article is condescending, but even if it is, um, so? It’s The New York Times. It’s a really condescending newspaper. And yeah, I am happy that they’re talking about my favourite politician. Does that make me needy and pathetic? Or just honest with myself!

It’s more fun to be me than to be you, I swear.

Wouldn’t anybody be pleased about a write-up in The New York Times? Um, a New Yorker even? (wink)

We need to get over ourselves. I like Canada’s little, weirdo insignificant role in the world. Just makes it easier to sneak up into world cultural domination. BAM! No one sees it coming.

There is nothing impressive about this music video. It’s just a succession of randoms. But again, check out the crowds! Haha. Look at the shots of people streaming into the venue at the beginning. Everyone looks so serious. It looks like they’re psyching themselves out for a job interview.

[youtube=http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzpynvxr7tA]

Morrissey’s more recent solo work tends, for me, to go from danceable/melodic tune to unbearably insightful masterpiece in a second! I’ll be listening to a song I like and hear, really hear a lyric for the first time and suddenly, I love the song.

It’s kind of like a miracle.

You have never been in love, until you’ve seen the sunlight thrown over smashed human bones. This did it for me this time. No one else in the world is so boldly melodramatic. Morrissey knows he’s going down to the grave in melodrama. And that must be stressful.

Thing is, maybe I looked pretty serious last night when I was heading over to Morrissey night. It feels serious. It only happens once a year and I get something there that I can’t get anywhere else; a remarkable solidarity. Like I told “John” last night, we grew up together. I like these familiar faces, most of them nameless, that sing obscure lyrics with me, annually. I like that old guy that showed up alone, but wasn’t alone because he had everyone in the room. I like the young’un that kept pretty much to himself, sang every song like serious business and then offered this sombre half wave/half salute on his way out the door at the end of the night (which I returned…I like that too).

On the way home, I told Dar that this is the sort of solidarity that seems so out of grasp at my church. There is a greater acceptance and general ease at Morrissey night than there is a Knox. Everyone seems happier to see everyone else, to be together and love something together. 

But then, I haven’t really slept in ’bout thirty hours. The Australia open final kept me up all night, and I’m mighty tired. I might just be actin’ melodramatic.

In honour of the fiftieth anniversary of “The day the Music Died,” have a look at this version of La Bamba that I… stumbled upon. It’s amazing! And it’s hilarious. (Shout-outs to Johnnie, ’cause I know you love The Gipsy Kings.)

You can tell that the audience is overwhelmed and feeling out of place, desperate to match the wild energy on stage. Everyone is CLAPPING, like OVER CLAPPING but you can see on their faces that it’s NOT ENOUGH!! These people need to break into dance, maniac styles, cause they’re doomed to remember this event as this totally awesome thing they could see and hear but could not TOUCH! I’m glad  I wasn’t there because I get the feeling I’d be so energized by the performance I’d probably get the urge to shoot into the crowd or bite somebody that I didn’t know.

[youtube=http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=T4f75F1YbJ8]

This too much.

I can’t decide if I’m just jealous or truly annoyed. But I do know, you can’t make a Tom Waits cover album and then just go around saying anything you want. After a project like that, you should probably keep quiet for a few years (say, ten years or so?) so as not to disgrace yourself in comparison. 

Especially when it comes to saying things that might sound self-actualized.

My friend Sona says, “you have to be ready. You could change at any moment.”

I like this idea; change as a sudden assault. I like to think that change will just happen, just spring itself on me and all I have to do is be ready. Because I hate change. I will not encourage change and I will not seek it out.  I need change to… incite itself. And the quicker the better.

I like, as well, to think of this in the context of America at the moment. I like change personified as Barack Obama…right? It does make things simple. The lovers love change and the haters, like me, hate change (although I relish in political change n’ I like Obama). I feel good about this tidy idea. We all do.

Yeah, but in addition, I like to think of Obama as a sudden assault on the American people, a force you can’t stop.

Past love affairs have been on my mind. I’m revisiting for the sake of…a project, I guess. I’m consistently fascinated by how my feelings have changed for these lads that had me devastated once (the broken heart is almost pathetic for this fickleness). Towards most of them I feel a vague and pleasant well-wishing. But then, this is no rare thing. Many desperate loves morph into indifference.

There is an episode of 30 Rock where Lemon has to go to her high school reunion. She does NOT want to go for all the typical reasons. She was a nerd in high school, picked on for being smart and not pretty etc. But everyone, typically, urges her to go and flaunt her success. So she decides to go. But pretty soon after her arrival, one of the cool kids approaches. Lemon gears up to flaunt, but the cool kid immediately bursts into tears at the sight of her.

Okay, it turns out that Lemon was a bully in high school. She thought the cool kids were mean and hated her, so she made comments under her breath about their alcoholic parents and eating disorders to protect herself and all others like her. But her perception was all off. The cool kids were never out to get her, were humiliated by her comments and constantly trying to make peace with her so she would leave them alone. 

So suddenly, at the reunion, she has to deal with this new reality. She has done nothing different but now, suddenly, everything is different. She’s different.

You have to be ready.

I like to think of a passive America. I mean, I like to think that America did not change, but change arrived. All this time their perception was just…off. 

Like you when you thought you were in love. Like Liz Lemon in high school.

If he can sell a paper with his views on exercise and sandwiches, then maybe he can be our new Trudeau…or at least our Obama (you heard me right). Optimistic? Yes! A bit of a stretch? I’ll say yes, but only to calm you people down. You know I love the man, and it looks from the end like this is going to be a weekly foray. So Monday mornings just got better.

My question is, what happened to the two screenplays? Shouldn’t someone be on that?

I leave the house so infrequently that when I do, it makes me nervous. Today Alyssa says to me, still in her pajamas at 1pm, “we are making a social anxiety for ourselves.”

I reach some sort of breaking point this afternoon, so I set out across Dupont St. with my laptop. I gots the loonies my dad gave me, God bless ‘m. I thought I’d go get a coffee somewhere and half way there, I swear to ya, I notice my hands are a bit shaky. It’s the thought of going into some place and ordering a coffee alone. 

I was going to go to Madeleines, but change my mind at the last second, I think, to be honest, because I had a vivid dream that I worked there and now the sight of it is off putting. 

There is a diner right beside Madeleines so I go in there and order a coffee from an old guy watching Tennis. And I sit down in there and I think to myself, “I like diners. They’re, you know, what’s the word, nostalgic.”

I kid you not. I thought this thing to myself. Peacefully, I thought it. As though everyone I know has not thought this thing fifty thousand times (especially between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, when you love 24-hour diners because you think of them as sort of, ah, subversive or something, literary).

I am totally freaked out by this weird regression. And I am FREAKED OUT!

By the tone of this blog entry. I’ve been stuck in the house reading second-rate Canadian creative non-fiction.

I wish i had a subscription to The Hill Times. All I can get is this teaser and it’s making me CRAZY! (not enough to shell out, though) 
What was said?! What was done?! Was Ignatieff serious or was he trying to make Harper mad? Was he…teasing him? 

Can’t say I blame Harper for not acknowledging. If he moved into Ignatieff’s house he would have to change the way he ran the country. He would have to change himself, get vulnerable and indebted to the leader of the opposition. Damn, Ignatieff, way to take the high road and shake things up. I love you.

I also love the way this highlights how rich Ignatieff is inside his soul. This is the kind of thing people do when they are old money. “You’re the prime minister and you’re kind of down and out so…take one of my houses. I don’t need it right now.” 

MI knows how to be completely rich and completely generous at the same time. He’s so smart and sneaky. It’s kind of Christ-like.

When I was little, I read an Archie comic where Betty, Veronica and Archie are climbing a mountain and there is an avalanche. Archie gets buried and the girls think he’s dead. They cry and cry. I can’t remember how this turned comical, though I trust it did somehow (death avalanche mix-up haha). I cut out the page, with Betty and Veronica in tears, because it freaked me out so much. It wasn’t appropriate. It went against the whole nature of the Archie comic (where no one dies or ages, but many are poor and picked on) and felt very unreal. I hated it, to be honest.

Recently Alyssa stuck an Archie comic in the bathroom. The whole issue is about the gang at the carnival, usual highjinks; Jughead is packing it in, Arch is trying to get Veronica into the tunnel of love but loses out to Reggie, Betty is forgiving when treated poorly and everything is going the way you expect when BAM! Jesus is on the scene. Well, not Jesus himself, but his message.

This particular Archie comic is made by a man name Al Hartley, an artist who became a born again when he was “sterile, numb and filled with fear” at drawing nudie comics for Marvel in the sixties. He got the Archie characters licensed to him by the religious Archie president and launched a whole Christian comic book series. And they are totally weird.

Is Jesus in Riverdale? Is there any religion whatsoever there? Oddly enough, I think it more likely there is a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, Buddhist or Sikh than even a nominal Protestant in Riverdale (There are, however, absolutely no Catholics, I think we can agree). The Jew would be objectified, yes. But the mere mention of Jesus Christ is spooky. In the live action version in my head, Betty says “Jesus” and everything shuts down, freezes forever on that first religious frame.

What the hell is going on here? What, exactly, did Al Hartley unearth when he brought the gospel into Riverdale? I hate it, to be honest. Jesus talk in an Archie comic is as disturbing as the all American teenager being buried in an avalanche.