February 6th, 2008

Demands

I have nothing of import to say today, but my friends have questions for you. Over at A Place, Ferd wants to know your Oscar picks for the annual Oscar Derby. I often win, and this year I’ve actually seen several of the movies, so throw your hat into the ring! It’s very entertaining!

Also, my friend Corinna’s writing another article is writing another survey article for CanadianLiving.com, and has queries for you below. If you respond in the comments section here, or send me an email, I’ll pass it on (be sure to include the name you want used!)

I’d like to know what is the best, most unusual (in a good way) or
unexpeted compliment you’ve ever received? I’m not looking for
comments on nice eyes or pretty hair; I’d like to go beyond that and
hear about the complements that brightened your day or really meant
something to you. For example, I was once told I have a great walk!
Unexpected and strange. Perhaps your arch nemesis at work complimented
you on a job well done, or a stranger praised you for how well you
handled your temper-tantrum-throwing two-year-old.

Let me know what the compliment was, and if relevant, what the
circumstances were, who said it, and why it surprised you/meant
something to you. Make sure to include your name (first name only or
pseudonym ok), age and city.

Please get back to me by Wed. Feb. 20th. And pass this along to anyone
who you think might be interested in contributing.

Oh you crazy moon
RR

February 4th, 2008

Name It

If you look right, you’ll note that my long-nameless forthcoming short story collection can now be known under the more efficient rubric, Once. I like this title because it captures a lot of ideas I care about: stories of as glimpses and as frames of film, ideas of time and timelessness and the impossibility of eternality, of telling something to someone, of memory and excitement. I really hope that at least some of all that can be picked up by a reader who happens to glance at that title. At least it’s short and easy to remember.

Those who have been watching this channel for a while might be moved to comment that Once was the title of this collection once before, and then for a long while I said it wasn’t. Never let it be said that I cannot admit when I am wrong, though in this case the thing I was wrong about was not realizing I was right the first time. I’m pretty sure I was.

The book is better-written than this post.

If you never ever say your name to anyone / they can never ever call you by it
RR

February 3rd, 2008

Glamour–A Time and Motion Study

7:00–Roger, Rick and Marilyn alarm-clock
7:01–Go directly to the bathroom mirror to see if grade-ten style zit has disappeared from beside nose during the night.
7:01:30–Nope.
7:02–Turn on the coffee, shower, wash hair.
7:19–Try out new perfume, which turns out to be stronger than old perfume. Become concerned that I smell like a bordello carpet.
7:20–Drink coffee and eat cereal while drying hair with more thought than usual. No electrical appliance or anything, just the air in the room and really intense hope that it won’t dry funny. Also, read New Quarterly and write in journal.
8:03–Go check Facebook, write down directions, search for map.
8:30–Turn on ABBA. Start getting dressed (did I mention was wearing Teddy-bear robe?) in weather-inappropriate clothing: black jersey dress, white cami underneath, lucky argyle tights. Move from drinking coffee to drinking pop.
8:58–P. arrives, bearing green-tea lattes and professional grade makeup brushes! Bless her.
9:00-9:04–Hop up and down.
9:05–Drink some latte. Make P. sniff me and say I do not smell like a bordello carpet. Also force her to assess zit. It’s a very tough job, being my friend.
9:10–Sit in desk chair. Be made over.
9:47–Except for utter failure to operate eyelash curler (official take: the hell?) am made over. Am stunning.
9:48-9:51–Hop.
9:52–Return to drinking coffee. Run around apartment stuffing everything I own into shoulder bag: all the makeup, hair products, water bottle, yoga pants to go over/under weather-inappropriate clothing in case of cold, coffee in portable cup.
10:03–Freak out and insist we leave. Assorted hopping.
10:09–Run into next door neighbour, who mainly sees me on laundry day. He seems perplexed by my bombshelledness (or maybe the smell), compliments my hat.
10:11–Get the bus.
10:13–Discover destination is in map gully. Enraged at expensive, useless map.
10:32–Disembark bus. Get briefly but alarmingly stuck in snowdrift (rare on foot, but not unknown). Free self and catch up with more surefooted P.
10:45–Arrive at Dave’s studio early and feel guilty, but not guilty enough to wait in the snow.
10:46–Greet Dave, remove winter things. Hop.
10:47–Get offered coffee and giddily consider accepting, before realizing that cannot stand thought of rebrushing teeth, reapplying lipstick.
10:48–Remousse hair instead. Hair will never move again. Get P. to remove smudged mascara with Q-tip for me, so that I do not gouge out own eye.
10:55–Point out zit to D., who wisely claims not to have noticed. Manage to restrain self from apologizing for scent issues. Why did I even put on perfume for a photo is a question that occurs to me only now.
11:00–D. points me towards photo area, with professional looking lights, canvas background, small swivel chair in centre. I am instructed that straddling the chair backwards will give my back the appropriate arch.
11:01–Dress, patterned tights, knee-high leather boots, straddling chair. Am harlot. Picture is from shoulders up, only, but I fear viewers will sense harlotry.
11:03–D. produces camera as big as my head and shoulders together, sits on chair approximately two feet from me, takes some pictures. I am very nervous about not showing my teeth (hate teeth today), my makeup, my immobile hair. I find it hard to smile without it looking like rigor mortis.
11:09–D. shows us pictures taken so far on the computer. According to both him and P., there are lots of nice ones and we could probably have stopped at this point, but I become Being John Malkovich-style disoriented, looking at so many me’s, and insist that we continue.
11:20 or so–D. makes appropriate friendly comments about the book for which this is all for, and I start to chill out and not smile like maniac/dead person.
11:40–All told, 148 frames of me with slightly different facial expressions are taken. Am appalled, but strangely fascinated.
11:41-12–Finished, and thus freed, finally, from demented self-consciousness, pepper D. with a million questions about photos, paparrazzi, models, etc. That I have never before encountered a real photographer that didn’t work for Jostens is painfully obvious. Am fasacinated.
12:07-1:00–Take assorted busses to meet Melinda at Winterlicious.
2:00 and on–Wait for a long time for table, but is worth it–licious, in fact.
Evening–Go home, wash off makeup, put on pjs, go back to writing, and quit acting like a diva. An incredible day, but I’m glad I don’t have to many of those. So, probably, is everyone else.

If someone told me you’d be here
RR

January 31st, 2008

The end

977. Y as a vowel
978. Re-occurring characters
979. Aspertame
980. Finishing
981. Consistency of capitalization
982. Marinara sauce for dipping
983. The bread-making process
984. Bread
985. My cube at work
986. Palindromic numbers, prime numbers, perfect squares and cubes
987. My birthday
988. Frozen coffee drinks
989. The day I got my driver’s liscence
990. Contemplating what I’ll do next
991. Focus groups
992. Greek letters
993. Typing really fast
994. Nintendo Wii
995. The New Pornographers
996. Winking
997. Peanut-butter flavoured things
998. Effusive greetings
999. Team efforts
1000. Liking things

January 30th, 2008

Walking down the street, warm and misty out

Me (coughing): I’m a little sick.
B: You are.
Me (coughing)
B: You are a little ho(a)rse.
Me: Heh.
B: You remember that, that joke? Horse-hoarse?
Me: Yeah, heh. Baaaah.
B: …
Me: Neeeigh.
B: You’re a little strange.
Me: Heh.
B: Heh.
Me: Was that part of it?
B: Part of…?
Me: Was that a joke? Part of the joke?
B: Well, yeah. Because I said you were a little horse and you said “baaah” and then you said “neigh,” so I said you were a little strange for doing that.
Me: Oh, ok, that’s funny.
B: Yeah, you just needed some context.
Me: Yeah.
B: Only, you actually had context to start with, since you were there.
Me: Yeah.
B: Huh.
Me: It wasn’t like I was just working my way around the barnyard, though.
B: ???
Me: Like, I made a mistake, making the sheep noise, but then I corrected myself and made the horse noise. I wasn’t just doing all the animals, I wasn’t going to say moo next.
B: Ah.
Me: It wasn’t “baah comma neigh,” it was “baah cut off with dash neigh.”
B: I retract my earlier comment.
Me: The stenographer that we pull along behind us in a little red wagon will strike it from the record.
B: You aren’t strange at all.
Me: Duly noted.

Always one full on the ground
RR

January 29th, 2008

Free Associative

So I have a cold, which is making me insane! It’s a pretty minor cold, as these things go, I’m sure, but since I’m rarely ill, I have poor coping skills. My eyes have been itchy, even in my sleep. The other night, I dreamed I went to the bathroom mirror to see if I had an eyelash or something in there. In the dream, the pink bit of the corner of my eye had tiny plastic snowflakes in it, and I couldn’t get them out. It was weird, and icky, and then I woke up.

Yesterday, in real-life (I think), I was leaving work when a very sleepy fat raccoon lumbered out of the bushes. Its tail had been mainly lopped off somehow, and it was very very puffy and fat–it looked like an animate dust-bunny. It was headed drunkenly for the road (aren’t raccoons supposed to be hibernating in winter?) I am scared of raccoons, ever since one tried to crawl up my skirt while I was eating on the rooftop patio at Hemingway’s, but I didn’t want to see this one squished by a car. I yelled, “Bad raccoon!” to no avail. Even though it was like 5:04 right outside my office, I was mysteriously alone outside.

“Bad raccoon! No road!” I yelled, and then I found a stick on the ground and tried to chase the raccoon away. Only, the raccoon would not be chased and *ran towards me*. I panicked, and threw the stick at the raccoon, who very wearily, like a teenaged babysitter consenting to a game of Boggle, turned and went back into the bushes. “Yeah! And stay there!” I told it, and the greyish snowy dark beside the road.

I think I have a low-grade fever.

The eventual downfall / is just the bill from the restaurant
RR

January 28th, 2008

No particular war

So last night I saw Charlie Wilson’s War and liked it very much. This was not a surprise, as it was written by Aaron Sorkin the writer of my most-loved tv shows. And indeed, the film did contain Sorkin’s much-beloved banter, walk’n’talks, long-shots and high-flown political wonkery. And, as with much of Sorkin’s work, he faltered on the ladies, who were condescendingly drawn on occasion, and also saddled with awkward religious hypocrisy, as if that were just the lot of he fairer sex.

But Julia Roberts fares better than most of Sorkin’s recent lady-stars, in part because he downplays his personal issues to give her some of the best lines in the flick, and in part because she’s Julia Roberts and, dammit, she can make the best of anything, even having her gorgeous hair bleached and sprayed in a seemingly desperate attempt to make it look like a wig. And she’s opposite Tom Hanks, which is such a wonderful pairing of easy charm that I don’t know why no one thought of it before. And how great, too, that a movie that concerns events of the twenty years ago would star people so seminal at that time. Big came out in 1988, one of the first films I saw in theatres, and it filled me with joy to see that maturity and the ability to feed and clothe oneself didn’t matter one whit if you had honesty and enthusiasm. There was hope for me, apparently, to take on the world, as soon as I could get myself to Manhattan.

Julia’s big break, in Pretty Woman didn’t come until a few years later, which is just as well, since even my oblivious parents noticed taglines like, “Who knew it was so much fun to be a hooker?” I did eventually see it, and love it. Even then, I knew there was something wrong with the conceit that the way to a man’s heart was to sell him your body and hope he noticed your soul, and something wrong with a country where a girl could really find herself forced by financial circumstances to do so. Still, even now, if you were to somehow break into the feminist enclave that is my apartment, fix the DVD player and put on *Pretty Woman*, I’d sit down and watch, and swoon. I’d feel dirty about it at first, but then I’d block out the real circumstances presented and just enjoy the banter.

As I did in *Charlie Wilson’s War.* With the office hijinx and even fairly serious arguments, the movie could’ve been about almost anything, because the conversations focused on strategic alliances, media, and money–the necessities of war, of course, but also the necessities of anything. Perhaps because of Sorkin’s history on the small-screen, coupled director Mike Nichols’ reputation as a “poet of the living room (I read that somewhere, possibly The New Yorker), they seemed to want to prove something with the battle scenes. I think they could’ve done the whole thing with radar-screen blips and intense conversations, as Sorkin did on West Wing, as I’ve seen in several deeply unsettling low-budget *Hamlet*s, but they had to show the guns, and that was pretty wretched, half video game, half propaganda film.

It was one thing to show refugee camps, and mangled children’s bodies–eliciting pity, showing the evil that must be stopped (who were those child actors, I wonder). But it could’ve been almost any war, or an informercial with Sally Struthers: the only political message of those scenes was: children good, people who hurt children bad. Then there was a scene, and I still don’t know what I was meant to feel during it, that showed young Russian soldiers piloting planes and strafing villages, killing women and children while talking in Russian over their walkie-talkies about their girlfriends. This is late in the movie, when the Afghan villagers had finally been given shoulder-mounted missile launchers. They are able to destroy the planes before they can do as much damage as they meant to. We get to see the panic on the Russian soldiers’ faces before they are engulfed in flames.

Of course, the villagers had no choice, if in fact it happened that way. I wasn’t rooting for the kids on the ground to die, but I wasn’t particularly rooting for the kids in the air to die, either. Is that a happy moment? Nichols and Sorkin play it as wild celebration for all the good guys.

The only militaristic footage that looked real was actually real–taken from news reports of the time period. And here’s where we get the third star of the period, and the first one of my youth. Before Julia, before Tom, pretty much concurrent with The Muppets, I loved Dan Rather and the CBS Evening News. Every evening at 6:30, since long before I was born, my parents watched “Rather”, and then they had dinner and talked about what they had seen. When I was small, and eagerly awaiting my spaghetti, I watched too, or at least sat around and listened to words I didn’t understand. Years later than excusable, I actually thought Dan Rather was President of the United States, and that every evening they wheeled the cameras into the Oval Office so he could bring anyone who was interested up to date.

Dan’s is one of the first faces we see in this film, and it set me right at ease. I probably haven’t heard his voice since I moved out of my folks’ place, and it was tremendously soothing. I probably actually sat through some of the news reports from the film, though I remembered nothing. And the movie didn’t explain much–the news was for exposition, but precious little of it. I had to come home and google to find out what was going on with the Russians in Afghanistan. Sorkin wasn’t going to explain, make the war weird and particular and complicated, and not just a generic Good v. Evil, with all that stuff. Not that the Russians were so far off the mark of evil in that war, as far as I can tell, but they had some motives, they weren’t just psycotic baby-bombers. For the purposes of the picture though, they could’ve been just any bad dudes in history, or James Bond films.

And it’s funny, because for a movie that so ignores and generalizes the history here, at the end there is an alarming about-face, as the final scenes set the movie up as the history of our present tense, showing the Americans as over-confident in victory and setting in motion the terrible events that are even now occuring in Afghanistan. This takes place a while after the worst of the battle scenes, after a lot more joyful triumph and Roberts-Hanks banter and silly smooches. I was enjoying myself again, I’d been lulled by the semi-facts, that good things had happened in some war somewhere, and that everything was now fine. The end of the film was astounding in that it pointed out the lie of it’s own Hollywood-ishness, and yet I wasn’t sure as I left the theatre that I had really wanted that. I was sort of happy, for a while, to go back to the days when the News wasn’t news of any particular war, it was just the noise in the background before you sat down to supper with the people you loved best.

The body says no
RR

January 24th, 2008

Department of Stationery

976. Writing in pencil

I’ve been doing it all morning and it’s delightful–feels so much gentler, less indeliable than pen. Why don’t I always? (because pencil smudges, of course, and isn’t legally binding. Still, for certain projects, it’s the right choice, and lovely.

Clearly, not much is up!

They’ve shown this on both screens
RR

EDIT: Sorry for the misnumbering, Ferd!! I love compressed air and Sacred Chickens too!!

Found Poem

When people write to me about art, they often put the titles in the email subject lines. These titles are beautiful in new ways divorced from their texts, and then again in yet another way in juxtaposition with each other. My inbox–a poem.

Alice/Through the Looking Glass
The Bells
Wall of Sound
Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy

Lovely, eh?

RR

January 23rd, 2008

Back to Good

931. Joshua Ferris
932. Idealism
933. Change
934. Fedoras
935. Elephants
936. My parents
937. the word “zine”
938. Being busy
939. Independence
940. Getting to tell/being told the same story again because we both love it so much
941. Cool Ranch Doritos
942. “Bob Bob Bob” ads
943. Getting into a car that’s been baking in the sun
944. Decorating work cubicles
945. Paperbag mailboxes for Valentine’s Day
946. The Paperbag Princess
947. Backstory
948. High-heeled shoes
949. Post-it Flags
950. Staples Business Depot
951. Page-a-day calandars
952. Whippets
953. Unicyles
954. Sand
955. Scarves
956. The Maritimes
957. Chapstick
958. Dogs in Hallowe’en costumes
959. When animals sneeze
960. The you’ve-got-mail chime
961. Ellen Page

RR