Foxbase Alpha

fender telecaster

2010-03-08T23:01:00.005-08:00

+ if the condo in whistler was my camp david, and port alberni became my western white house, what was portland, oregon to me in 2009? sian said, at one point, "i dunno... i'm kinda tired of portland,' and i understood but still felt it, the moment passing. my bookshelves as living souvenirs. the chronicle and memoir in-and-of themselves. and my solution to various situations has, increasingly, been larger and less organized piles of books.

+ the narrative force, day to day and week to week and month to month. i hated high fidelity, i really did, maybe my least favourite book of 2009, but i'll ape the stupid line anyway: am i where i am because i read novels or do i read novels because of where i am? the simple math of it says that i read more novels now than i once did. but this is the frog in boiling water.

novels as treats, parceled and hidden. six in a row is some sort of narrative binge, too much to handle. but i am still learning how to read. travel writing is memoir and history, and memoir is just history anyway.

+ in tofino, channel 48 on our hotel tv was a fixed image of something, maybe outdoors, a security camera? completely static, no movement. and cancon hits - when we first found it they were playing rush, 'time stand still.' olympic curling on the tv while i played rush, 'time stand still' over and over on youtube. my laptop on a wireless connection.

on our last day we drove into town for a sandwich and coffee before driving back out across the island and we saw it, the scene by daylight, a dock on the sound.

tofino was a fishing town, a logging town, and that's still there. radar hill was part of the distant early warning system, the pinetree line, the last line of defense. a military outpost. the park signs are still brown and yellow - a lonely national park sign on our beach, cox bay, brown and yellow, bilingual. a hike on a boardwalk through the rainforest to the beach.

+ before the olympics, in january, the newspaper ran a page on the security plans, the escalating zones of coverage. colour-coded yellow-orange-red. concentric circles of destruction, how many dead instantly, how many dead in days from radiation, how many dead over months and years from contaminated everything and them how many more dead over decades. concentric circles of fallout.

the same situation

2009-09-07T16:43:00.003-07:00

+ i think i knew that joan didion was specifically referenced in court and spark - the book, about court and spark - the album. but i didn't consider that when i started to think about joan didion while listening to joni mitchell, when i listened to the hissing of summer lawns while washing dishes. joan didion comes up with trouble child, well, of course - 'breaking like the waves at malibu.'

it is now impossible for me to read anything of joan didion's without using the year of magical thinking as a lens, as a final rejoinder to being dismissed as distant or removed. she wrote herself into all of it, in and out of her subjects and i use the year of magical thinking to focus. but i use it on more than that - i use it as a frame, the point you will arrive at and the place that i need to keep in mind.

i only pose ann patchett's truth and beauty against joni mitchell, court and spark, joan didion, and california because i happened to read it in sequence. and not even by design, but because i happened to listen to the hissing of summer lawns while washing dishes. but truth and beauty does not even go to california - it moves from iowa to tennessee to boston and to new york again and again. (and joan didion goes between new york and california.) but more than anything else i read truth and beauty as a book about writing. and, on writing, as a counterpoint to the smug winking shit of bookmark now, unfortunately subtitled writing in unreaderly times. it is the boho dance again, "the virtue of your style inscribed on your contempt for mine." just a series of distancing devices - "artists in noble poverty / a little lace along the seams." bookmark now made me want to stop writing but truth and beauty changed that. i guess joan didion changed that too.

but the year of magical thinking and truth and beauty are both about grief - they both start with a death. joan didion works away from the moment while ann patchett works towards it.

i read court and spark while listening to court and spark and thinking about joan didion, but people's parties puts me right back into truth and beauty. subtitled 'a friendship,' and it is that but also more. "going to people's parties, fumbling deaf dumb and blind."

i've posed california and bob dylan as things i would never understand, parts of the world that my life was complete without tackling. but i re-situate court and spark, an album i've been listening to since i was twelve and have heard since i was born, in california, and in joan didion, and between mcgovern's defeat and the resignation of richard nixon. after the carpenters sang at nixon's inauguration, it all fell apart. on the morning after the sixties.

olympic village

2009-08-21T18:55:00.004-07:00

+ two things happened this week. the canada line, the new skytrain line opened and tamara taggart co-hosted 'live with regis' in new york city.

on wednesday i took the canada line, the R-A-V line, the new skytrain line. i took it from waterfront to YVR-airport to broadway-city hall, from olympic village to vancouver-city centre. i walked out of waterfront station and through the looking glass. i had to take the canada line, the new skytrain line, to believe that it was there.

my parents had a house in richmond, a house where they lived before i was born. 'the house on 4 road.' richmond, a city that existed before me but has never existed since. i don't even know what richmond is but i know that richmond is where my dad went to high school.

in 2001 or 2002 i stood behind tamara taggart in line at calendar club. calendar club opened up in pacific centre every year from october to january. i was buying canadian art calendars at %75 off and tamara taggart was trying to return a board game without a receipt.

vancouver is a world-class city, the polls are consistent and insistent, the most livable city in the world. the best city in which to work. 85,000 people took the canada line, the new skytrain line, for free on opening day. the wait was 2 1/2 hours at waterfront station. 150 minutes. i live in the world's most livable city.

i had dinner and got back on to the canada line at olympic village station. there was nobody there, no one in the station, no one on the street outside the station. cars driving past on 2nd avenue.

tamara taggart lives in yaletown. tamara taggart lives in "kits." tamara taggart has parents that live in coal harbour.

vancouver is the only city in canada with a direct rapid-transit link to the airport.

tamara taggart has friends that compare their times on the grouse grind. she went to new york for 'live with regis' because she won a contest.

we hate the expo line, the old skytrain, the first skytrain, the only skytrain. it goes to surrey from downtown vancouver and, unfortunately, back the other way again. kids smoking pot on a packed train coming back from the fireworks, between columbia and scott road stations.

my sister and i would ride our bikes to surrey place mall, where i would buy cds at a&b sound. before surrey central station, before sfu.

on monday, the canada line was on the cover of the 24. on friday, tamara taggart was on the cover of the 24. three weeks ago i was on the cover of the 24, holding a sign that said "they lied."

one other thing happened this week. coors light was forced to take down billboards that mocked toronto. "colder than a person from toronto." toronto wanted to host the 2008 olympic games, but lost. we won.

the first time tamara taggart went to new york was this week, to co-host 'live with regis.' we are the first canadian city with a direct rapid-transit link to the airport. not even toronto has a direct rapid transit link to the airport.

panamax

2009-08-01T18:26:00.006-07:00

+ they built a new fence and the smell of the wood in the rain.

+ and i go to a restaurant down the street, i order lunch and a beer. i eat, then order another beer, then see the board in front - someone i knew is listed on the bill, there is an event. someone i knew when i was much younger, another person. i had plans to have a third beer, finish my book, but i pay the bill and go. i bring home a case of beer, and read my book, alone. i finish my book the next day.

+ the skytrain station is rebuilt, week by week, and i, week by week, forget what it was the week before. and years ago, as an outpost. the skytrain line, a spine of landmarks across the region and the only spine i know, a frame for the city.

fern taught me how to eat chinese noodles at penny restaurant. she had a secret piece of paper with secret chinese characters that she would show to the waitress, who would bring us vermicelli with beef and green onions. this is now i learned to eat chinese noodles.

and this spring i ate chinese noodles on my own, every day, most days. across the street, close to where i worked, not far from where i live, on a street i knew and still know.

fern taught me to walk through the city, how to walk across the city from pacific centre to commercial drive, from mall to mall. and they became my poles, a new city, down pender from granville, across to venables and commercial.

where i live now as just another piece, filling in the gaps of the city. between bus routes, bike routes. lists and maps.

the greatest hits of all time

2009-07-19T01:55:00.005-07:00

+ i have two draft posts, archived from may and march, barely fleshed out and not even pre-formed. i asked, earlier, years ago, who am i then, when i do not write, for months at a time.

i spent three horrible evenings archiving my day-to-day from 2000-2003. i kept an online journal through my first two years at SFU, and, fittingly, i trailed off when i ran for office in 2003. now i've made a series of backups, the complete transcription, typos uncorrected, and have taken the original document off of the internet. i read it all and, well, is this who i am? no, it is who i was, and that is ok, it is what it is.

one draft is the set up for an extended piece titled "how i learned to eat chinese noodles" and it was only today that i realised that this was an unconscious revision of an old project, a personal geography of the lower mainland as told through a guide to sushi restaurants that i have eaten at. i worked my chinese noodle piece out in my head for days on the campaign and ultimately exhausted it. the core was a note that i was now using a skytrain station that, for years, i had been unable to place, with any certainty, in a vancouver that i understood. i learned to eat chinese noodles at penny restaurant on hastings at lakewood, which is how i learned what lakewood drive was.

i have been ruminating over an extended piece on the subject of my boss as a reformed mass murderer.

+ if i do this to track changes, the shifts and perspectives, then here: i have been listening to bob dylan all week. i read nixonland, 20 pages in i needed to get inside and pulled up what i had in itunes from 1966. which was simon and garfunkel, really, in terms of american records at least. so, wikipedia, what else came out in 1966? i get records by jefferson airplane, the rolling stones, the doors, the byrds, tim hardin, the monks, buffalo springfield, jimi hendrix. and bob dylan. and i spent years not listening to dylan, the cultural weight was too much, a shell of everybody, always - you need to listen to this, this is genius, this is as good as it gets - and i can't even cope with this. give me space, let me find this if i do on my own timeline. but i can't stop playing it now. i guess i understand, at last.

+ what i did here i now do, in part, in semesterly book lists. but it's not enough.

a favourite author

2009-01-26T02:06:00.000-08:00

+ i have my own michael ignatieff story. we were leaving parliament hill, november 2007, me and james, amanda, haida, i think that was it. we were at question period, now we were leaving, back across the river to gatineau and our little conference. michael ignatieff was leaving too, big coat, handbag, no hat. we were next to the big holiday tree, hey, it's ignatieff! cool. we went out separate doors, but took the same path down towards the street, the same gate, and then walked right behind him down the road. he recognised some guy, hey, hi, they waved. we all kept walking, then he went into the chateau laurier hotel before we had a chance to really deal with the situation. but that's the story.

my dog will run to catch a duck or a seagull, and it flies away - these are the rules. she caught one, cornered it on a bench, it had a bum wing or something, and she looked at it, then left. i mean really, when do you do then? and we caught the next prime minister, wow, walking down the street. he was handsome. the eyebrows, they're real, it's not just makeup.

+ the globe and mail runs a column called 'generation ex', an advice and analysis column for divorcees. it was introduced with the new 'life' section. given the continuously high divorce rates in canada, went the pitch, surely there is a need for some conversation on this, particularly in a time when the wedding industry can sustain magazines and conferences and its own subculture - i saw a poster for an 'indie wedding fair' in town recently. so, 'generation ex,' still running. i skim it, sometime read it all.

and something a friend said, that he had, over time, felt a quiet jealousy from other friends over the fact that his parents were happily married and stable, which was rare. i remember, in elementary school, feeling as though, living as i did in a stable two-parent household, that i was missing out on a defining aspect of my generation, my peer group. the 'single-parent-household' felt like the norm, and i couldn't understand, didn't dare wonder further. i was missing out on 'generation ex.'

+ we went, four, five years ago, to port alberni for the holidays. my then-estranged parents were in ucluelet, a little lodge or townhouse i guess, for the holidays. a getaway to work things out. of course we'd join them for lunch, how wonderful, we'd drive to ucluelet, then we'd all drive to tofino for a fancy lunch, then a walk on the beach. the mist cleared and there we were, four of us, in front of a wonderful view of everything, the beach and the ocean. and then the perfectly condensed short story, the boiled down image of it all, a couple was getting married in front of us, right on the beach.

on one hand, i've finally joined my peer group, understand what it means to be us, this is the generation ex, and a lot of things make more sense then. on another hand, there you go, it's a capsule story. stable home / broken home. from one to the other. and both columns are so complex, so long and varied and full of, well, people.

the finish line

2008-11-19T00:17:00.003-08:00

+ i missed out on the fall, the leaves, longer nights. i guess it came and went and now we are finishing november. i spent the fall inside, on the phone, walking to and from, but it really is the first fall i've spent in vancouver since i left surrey, the first fall at home, the first fall on a one zone bus pass. up victoria drive, back home through the park, up broadway, keep going. i sweep my patio, leaves from the trees and pine needles.

+ and i've run from campaign to campaign, in between i drink coffee in my kitchen and read the newapaper, a novel, do the dishes every afternoon. and i've won everything i've tried my hand at this year, a string of stunning victories, everything is going in the right direction. i get out to watch a hockey game, drink less than before because i'm old now, i'm not drinking in a bar that i own, i'm meeting a friend for a beer to watch the game after work. and then i'm going home, to write, to read. at 10.30, after the game. a pub that i can walk home from, a pub down the street.

+ and i'm already forgetting my week in court, lunch at court, rain all day, on the long glass roof, raining in and around, waiting and waiting. what did i do after we won? oh, right, i went to court. it's like it was in march, it's over now, i'm just numb to the result. of course i wasn't, i wanted to be, and who really knows this time. it's a coda, the surprise epilogue to my novel. my book. you can't drink a coffee in court, so i went back to an espresso, drink it on the skytrain, hope it's enough until lunch.

+ and i'm forgetting how to read, how i used to read for a lifeline, a slice of life on the bus - please don't hassle me, please don't recognise me, just let me read for now before i have to work again, before i'm back at school - i wanted to read so much more. now i have books and i have time and i'm waiting.

+ and this spring, when i had tickets for the train. picking books out for the train, watching the weather. a train through the mountains, cities, the desert. all i needed to keep working, up the hill every day, tickets for the train.

there was a landslide in oregon, the landslide that took out the track, so i bought a plane ticket. i still brought books, but fewer. i'd be in the air for only 8 hours, small layovers, no time at all, really.

+ better government, a positive change, beer all night. where we come from and why we stay up all night, why we forget it all the day after, back to mornings and nights and "what do you do when you're not here?" - well, i'm just here, i'm never not here. divide the city into quadrants, zones, polls, lists of people voting, colours. stay in control; win.

cities in flight

2008-10-24T01:32:00.003-07:00

+ i forgot that i had a ticket to see stereolab; i was playing guitar at home and i reached for my capo and it happened to be hanging from a push-pin that was pinning up my ticket to see stereolab. i missed most of the opening act, ok, but i saw stereolab again and i'm glad that i did.

i would check concert listings every week. i would keep track, daily, of who was coming, when, what my day would be like, how i would build my day to focus on the rock show that i had to go to.

this was not really about telegraphing my identity, either, because would go to shows alone. if i went with a friend, as i did sometimes once i started at SFU, i would feel vaguely awkward. i went to rock shows but it was always a secret. enemy territory.

"i go to rock shows. i wear rock show t-shirts. but it's not who i am." this is, essentially, what i wanted to telegraph. a complex system of clicks and whistles.

+ now i read books all morning, in the kitchen. i turn on all the lights, put on a record, and drink coffee. i read the paper and then i read a book.

"the client," by john grisham

2008-08-29T22:58:00.001-07:00

+ and i happened to bring a number of books with me to reno, in april. i started a series, reading the first chapter or so, on the first legs, vancouver to seattle and seattle to reno, and i settled on "an empire wilderness" by robert kaplan, a history and analysis of the american west as told through travelogue. a road-trip book that wasn't really about the road at all.

the most important lesson is that the american west, more than any other region, owes its existence as an extension of the empire to government money, first and foremost. huge piles of federal cash, thrown into canals and aqueducts and highways and all manner of maps are all that still allow this sprawling bastion of individualism to blossom and maintain some strange thrall over our identity as a continent.

a weekend, in a hotel room, i read for several hours and then left, i left to drink beer and watch americans watching basketball and to keep reading, in the bar and on the bus.

on my boarding pass, to come back, it said *CHECK ID*, just like that, with stars. i hid, on the plane, i kept reading to hide from the two endodontists on their way to the endodonics convention.

+ i saw "the client," by john grisham, on the seat of a car in the safeway parking lot. walking to work, to the skytrain that would take me to the coffee shop next to where i work.

goodbye baseball

2008-08-24T23:51:00.003-07:00

+ i have come to treat my bookshelves as a sort of bank account. i keep a balance of available books, i spend it through reading. i buy books to keep my balance up. or maybe a bomb shelter, or pantry. i monitor my supply, keep an eye on what i have on deck, what books i have lined up in the bullpen. i warm them up, a few test pitches. read a page or two from the middle somewhere, decontextualised, is this what i'm up for at this point in time.

i pull out old books, books i've read and dated, and check them, do i remember them? sometimes i don't. sometimes i have no idea what a book was, even though i've dated it, Oct. 2004

+ four new books today.

blood meridian, or the evening redness in the west by cormac mccarthy. i have not read his books before, but for some reason jan is collecting all these books of his. i'm curious, and it was in perfect condition.

blindness, by jose saramago. i remember, very vividly, looking at this in 1999 or so in a bookstore, along with don delillo's underworld. i was looking to expand past genre fiction and the books already around me, so i looked at the 'serious' shelves in the mall bookstore, the modern fiction. through cover art and clever synopses, those two stood out. i remembered don delillo, and tracked his books down by 2001, and now i have them all. i remembered blindness too, but i never bothered to track it down, somehow. there it was, today, and only $10.

peace shall destroy many by rudy wiebe. a mennonite author from saskatchewan, writing about a mennonite community on the prairies during world war II. written in 1962.

and this book by an author named terri jentz, called strange piece of paradise: a return to the american west to investigate my attempted murder and solve the riddle of myself, which is a great title. it's why i bought the book, i saw the title somewhere on the internet and then tracked down some reviews. at the bookstore, the guy said, 'that's a great book, really fantastic.' it really is a murder investigation, this woman's memoir of being attacked by a madman in an oregon campsite 30 years ago and trying, now, to figure out what the hell happened.

+ my favourite book from the summer to date is probably alex driving south, by keith maillard. a $2 'canadian classic' paperback from the discount bin outside bibliophile books on commercial. a vicious, fantastic little book. a day, and really a lifetime, in west virginia. an absolutely fantastic book.

+ at the baseball game, a home run, and they put the words up on the little screen, goodbye baseball!!. yeah, it's outta there. but we thought there was another home run, no, the ball just bounced of the wall, painted white. it disappeared, and then the play kept going, the ball came back to the infield, the runner stopped at first.

exit signs

2008-08-20T00:28:00.003-07:00

+ i do miss what i used to do, but it's not like that. i miss what i did. not who, or where, or how, necessarily. but what i did, sure, i loved it. i'm not even clear on what i do now.

+ i am reading michael ondaatje, the english patient. it's book that i never thought i'd read. i figured, hey, so many books, that's one i'll never read. at one point, in 2000 or 2001, i figured, hey, stereolab, so many bands, that's one i'll never listen to.

+ i keep my ipod at home, it's my second stereo, the kitchen radio. and on a hot day, i stay downstairs, i read on the couch. i use the kitchen radio. i leave it on 'shuffle', and i don't skip songs anymore, i listen to what i get. upstairs, with the full stereo, the desktop computer, i listen to albums, sometimes on repeat.

+ it's raining and the wind. the pinecones come off the tree next door and hit the patio, concrete tiles. i know what it looks like in surrey, where i was in surrey, the rain in the trees and moss. ferns and small paths.

the northwest corner

2008-08-18T01:36:00.007-07:00

+ i finished don delillo's running dog and finally started to re-read george melnyk's new moon at batoche.
to note, this is the first book that i have re-read this summer.

i typed "george melnyk batoche" into google to see what would come up. i found a review from quill and quire that described it as an "intellectual autobiography," how lovely. then a lot of book selling websites. then a link to this website, something i wrote in 2006, september, about how much i wanted to read new moon at batoche again. well, august 2008, ok. but i've held on to this book for nearly four years now as one of my favourites, a book that i claim as a fundamental inspiration, a book that gave me a lens for the world. and this is always the fear, four years later, is it true, and yes, moreso than i knew. most of the tools and ideas i use to understand history are drawn from this book. the language is mine, somehow. i managed to internalise the style and pace along with the kernels and now, this is who i am.

i have waited almost as long to read sharon butala's lilac moon for the first time. that fall, 2004, the first paper i wrote that i was proud of, a comparison of george melnyk and sharon butala's views on the west, using melnyk's magpie and tortoise: regionalism in the two wests as a frame.

+ i read running dog in a day. i read a lot of it today at buntzen lake. i hiked up into the woods to hide and sat down on a log and read my book. i worry about the gluttony, i worry about 'bingeing,' as it were, on books, on favourite authors. but i find books that i'm desperate to read and i leave them waiting, sometimes for years, because i know i'll always have something waiting, something wonderful. this is the first summer that i've really indulged myself.

i read on my lunch breaks now, and i've never done that before. i take a book with me everywhere, i always did, but only now am i really making use of them.

+ i listened to yo la tengo, and then nothing turned itself inside out in 2001, 2002. walking across east van from downtown to commercial drive, walking down pender and then venables, it was something to do. and then in the fall of 2002, waiting for the bus, going home, my last semester as a student, my last semester going to class and going home.

calisthenics

2008-06-29T23:25:00.003-07:00

+ anil's ghost was very good, no need for intimidation. there are obvious connections to don delillo's the names, first in the subject matter - loosely speaking, archeology and murder - but really in the conclusions and questions of truth and history and meaning. delillo's focus on meaning and language uses archeology and the tactile stuff of history as an exercise of sorts, while i think michael ondaatje comes to archeology first, and finds within it the same issues that delillo initially sought to explore. anil's ghost is very much about history, how we record our lives not only intentionally, in script or on tape, but in our bones and paths, even after we die.

i've read several reviews that seem to take it to task for not being more expository, more willing to castigate those responsible for whatever crimes it may discuss. in essence, taking the novel to task for failing to change the world, or more precisely for abandoning its apparent didactic task. honestly, now, in that case why read a novel when we have the news? the novel tells us how to read the news. we have facts, yes, and facts about conflicts, yes, but no sense of the truths and histories informing the situation from any angle.

and to suggest that anil's ghost fails in its didactic destiny, to say nothing of intent, is to have completely missed the little jabs that the novel itself takes at liberal internationalism.

+ don delillo mentions a moment where he realised that language was not just a tool, but also a subject in his work. americana predates this moment, i believe. there is a category of delillo's novels that i find stands apart - americana, cosmopolis, and players. i'm more nervous for than intimidated by his other 1970s novels.

later, in time

2008-06-11T01:08:00.003-07:00

+ since 2001 i've been archiving mix CDs and tapes that i've made on a website made specifically for such a purpose. i forgot about it at some point, 2005? i found it again and put everything up at once and then i got a warning. only three new mixes per 24hr period or i'd be banned. sorry!

so, now i post a few every once in a while, all tidily up to date. i've got over 40 mixes posted now, which just kinda happened over the last 8 years.

i get comments from people i don't know and will never meet. "very cool. a lot of good stuff on here." says tubesock. "this looks like a great listen from top to bottom" says doowad. "I like the look of that Drop Nineteens and La's pairing." says arktical. hey, thanks man, so do i!

it's nice to track the moment where i realised that what mattered was not whether a song came out in a certain year, but whether i heard it first in that year. it's autobiography, not a chart.

+ not an unexamined life but an unrecorded life, i guess.

time is gonna wipe us out

2008-06-09T01:20:00.002-07:00

+ only one draft post from the past two months, mostly about boris johnston, who is kind of incredible. i do feel, still, that part of the 'lol boris' vote is akin to the 'golly, sam!' vote. sam lost the nomination today to peter ladner. it's great, because he was a shitty mayor.

i was genuinely happy to see sam sullivan win last time, over christy clark. i thought that he'd be the harder candidate in the fall, but that at least it made sense for him to run. christy clark was from port moody, wherever that is. they don't even have a skytrain, see. then sam won, and he turned out to be a boring, petty, really shitty mayor. i'm genuinely happy to see ladner win, mostly because i think he'll be better than sam. kinda like clinton rooting for dole to win the republican nomination in 1996. "if anything happens to my campaign," he said, "i'd rather have dole moving in here than any of those other guys. at least he could do the job." and this point was noted well by someone today - it doesn't matter that ladner and sam have had effectively equal voting records because the vote wasn't about his positions, but rather about his capacity to act in an executive role. ladner would be decidedly better, i think, and regardless of his voting record that makes me prefer him to sam. i'm glad we'll have a new mayor, either way.

+ everything's different now, and i'm reading a lot more. interestingly, i've adopted a new habit of keeping several books active at once. i've been trying to buy less books and to read more, so that i don;t keep piling up books that i have no time to read, but what if i miss a book? if the book i'm looking for was there and i walked past? no, they won't expire, it's ok, just difficult to decide on what to read next. i can easily pull out 15-20 books that i want to read next. that's in addition to the 5 books i have bookmarks in right now.

caroline adderson's a history of forgetting was really very good. the first 3rd was the strongest section, a strangely fascinating and debilitating
the resolution was worthy, nicely open after some awkward combinations through the middle. a wonderful book. it was especially refreshing to read after bring disappointed by eden robinson's blood sports, which was kinda gratuitous and obnoxious all together. both were set in vancouver, in places that i know. a history of forgetting felt natural, unforced, while blood sports was awkward and made me uncomfortable to know the streets so well.

i have three more bill gaston books waiting, too: midnight hockey, sex is red, and the cameraman. also three big intimidating books: sharon butala, the garden of eden; michael ondaatje, anil's ghost; and guy vanderhaeghe, the last crossing. scary books that i am saving for a camping trip or something special.

field study

2008-03-21T15:14:00.002-07:00

+ the polls closed, after three days and six months, and nothing really changed. nothing was different. i walked down the hallway to the ASB and started taking down posters. so did the other guys - students were walking past, as they had for the past three days, but everything was different now.

i tried to kid myself that i was so numb all over from the end of it all, the end of the year, that i couldn't feel anything anymore, either way the vote went. i told everyone to stop speculating, not to read too much into preliminary results, don't get excited. IT IS MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE FOR US TO LOSE NOW. but wait, wait... and i miss the moment, everyone else realises what happened first, but there you go.

i had a speech to lose with, but nothing for a win. we won, so i gave my losing speech anyway, and it worked because we were all so happy. there's more to say, but not really. it's outwardly the most important thing we did this year, the apex, but i think other stuff mattered more, to me, maybe. this was vindication, though.

+ i worked myself out on the weekend by listening to 'the boys of summer' over and over again. also van halen, 'why can't this be love.' i made myself a modern rock mix and listened to it over and over again. def leppard's 'animal.'

and then grace jones, the extended mixes, louder and louder. i walked home from sam's yesterday and listened to grace jones the whole way down the drive.

+ i've noticed that i read canadian fiction, mostly short stories, and american non-fiction, mostly travelogues and politics. there's something to be explored here.

margaritaville

2008-03-02T02:46:00.003-08:00

+ i remember how exciting it was in high school to realize that people thought about cities this way, wrote essays on how they worked and how they didn't, how people lived in context. people listened to radiohead records, i guess they still do, and thought about cities. i didn't know anybody personally who thought that ok computer was an important album, but i had that sense when i bought it, and even more so after i looked at the booklet. i was working at purdy's chocolates and buying records. summer 1999. when kid a came out i bought it, and enjoyed it - i didn't listen to it a lot, but i liked it. nothing else really mattered, and i didn't buy the last two records. i guess i downloaded the last one but it doesn't mean very much.

they have specialised shoes now, mall walkers. they have treads designed for the untextured tile floors of malls, expanses and soft carpets inside stores. seniors groups meet in malls to walk, around and around. it's a safe, controlled environment.
i still get lost in metrotown. i finally understood what was going on there, two different malls, joined by a bridge, when they renovated into one mall. now i'm lost again. i still remember how excited i was to visit the open-air mall north of everett last september. it was a visit to the heart of the beast.

+ the theft of copper wire fascinates me too. thieves are digging holes, finding trunk cables, pulling out the copper wire, taking it out to sell. terry fox had nothing to do with prince george but he trained there, once. so, they have a statue. he was a student at SFU, apparently, which matters quite a bit, apparently - we have a statue too. the prince george statue looks like it is made of copper, but it's really made of plastic or alloy or something, but the thieves tried to knock the head off. melt it down, sell the copper. the 'subprime mortgage crisis' has led to lots of vacant, abandoned homes across the united states. people are breaking in, thieves, stealing copper wire.

+ i've been reading lord jim for a while now. it's a relatively fast read when i sit down with it but i'm not especially interested in it anymore. the 60 pages of an unsinking ship to start were marvelous, but the patusan section is dull. i'll tough it out, but then what? i've got a lot to read.

+ taking the helijet back from victoria, we went low over richmond at twilight, the roads like arteries. i followed the highway to the massey tunnel and out the other end, lonsdale up the mountain, higher and higher and ending, turning to the left. i don't know the gulf islands but i saw them, sun off of the lonely houses, docks and boats.

tuesday

2008-02-12T23:01:00.003-08:00

three things, every day:
- well, yesterday. or sunday. taking photos again, though.
- i got enough done. not enough time but i did get it done.
- first in the office this morning, and enough time at night to file enough emails to get started again.

a new day

2008-01-22T00:22:00.000-08:00

+ i have optimism again, and no small amount of steam, which is what i was missing. it's a hump that i have to pass, when i can surmount a small task and see some light and, hopefully, keep it going in the morning. i am aiming to finish by wednesday morning, which is two days past the final deadline, but hey.

+ hockey and US politics: escapism, pure and simple. visceral, beautiful. i have no control over either, and either has a tangible effect on my life. although both do in a quality-of-life-on-this-planet-and-in-this-city, i prefer to see it all as an untouchable arena. i put my dream of working on a congressional campaign on an equal level as the childhood dream of playing hockey in the NHL. i mean, i can win an election in canada, but that's like playing shinny after school. the major leagues are the real event, real life.

+ and here's the thing. no one can do as much 'student politics' as i have and be a cynic. this job is fucking thankless. everyone's an adviser, everyone's a i doubt there's much payoff at the end, and the personal toll is insane. no one can slog it out through more than a year without finding the work, the sheer love of the representative role, a satisfying end in itself. so don't call me a cynic. i've been through too much of this crap to fall for that. if i didn't believe in this you can bet i'd have quit by now.

i don't fetishise student politics. i believe in it. i believe in public service, and the capacity to do good things for each other collectively through institutions. i believe in holding institutions to account, and i believe in being held to account myself when i hold office. i believe in good governance, especially at this level, because if not here, than where? if you can't do student politics right, with ethics and beliefs and accomplishments and honestly, then what? to forgive the lesser indignities for a greater cause is the true cynicism. it's the view that we can NEVER get it right, at any level, so we should go for broke, play a rigged game, and martyr ourselves on an altar of perpetual fight.

+ i want to write a short story, and the opening line be "dana said that this was the street where kennedy got shot." roger blenman pointed out the opening of margaret atwood's cat's eye as his favourite, and i'll never forget that. time is not a line but a dimension. cat's eye is clumsy, but wonderful too, and it's about life in a city. life over time, looking back, and knowing. who we are, in context.

+ CBC is running a show about urban life, and the focus several weeks ago was the individual city. that i have my own city, that's only mine, built through my networks and contacts and passageways and habits. who i know is my city. where i get coffee in the morning and pizza at night is my city. i believe in this model. geographical subjectivism, i guess. living with someone for four years leads to a remarkably congruous experience in a city. the same paths, the same restaurants, the same civic scope.

balance

2008-01-21T00:56:00.000-08:00

+ this is the paper i need to write in order to graduate. at least, to graduate now. i have had no intention of not writing this paper, but my assumption that i would end up writing it has led me to believe, seemingly, that it will happen. well, no. i have to write it, probably to finish it within several days. i realised in the fall that this was my last paper. 'hey, then i'm done!' and so it was: i was done. now i have this paper to write, even though i'm done. it never, ever, got easier.

+ i've been reading over the previous years, and no, upper division courses were not my wall. nothing at SFU has been a wall. what i've learned this year is that when i meet the wall, i can apply myself and do very well. this is the first year when i have had to work hard to get by, but i have worked hard, and i have done very well. this has instilled in me no small amount of optimism. i'd forgotten about the wall, in fact; i don't feel as though i'm holding myself back anymore. then again, who will i be when i don't have this paper to finish anymore?

+ recent books:

lots of canadian politics. right side up, by paul wells; iron man, by lawrence martin; and juggernaut, by susan delacourt. i read these over the break, when i was not writing my paper. i read right side up in port alberni.
kennedy and nixon, about kennedy and nixon. soon i'm going to read all the president's men
fever, by sharon butala. of course it was good.
some lousy old science fiction books. always good. i am still 2/3 through my future cops anthology.
at the moment, lord jim, by joseph conrad.

+ i've stopped writing about records. the new goldfrapp record is really affecting me, and i've listened to it a lot. it's restored my faith in records, kinda. i've finally tracked down copies of the last two pursuit of happiness albums - these would definitely have changed my life in grade 12. now they just make me happy. it's because there is love in my heart. i'm trying hard to put songs that i listen to in playlists for posterity. sometimes i can remember, sometimes i can't. spring '03 was a big deal, because i can remember everything that i was listening to at the time.

+ jan was away for a week at disneyland over news year's. rather than write my paper, i read books and fucked about. jan's brother was staying downstairs, but we didn't really interact at all. i went to bed early, then listened to records, read books, and drank scotch for hours.

+ before that, jan went to port alberni alone and i went across three days later. two days? i was the last person on the horseshoe bay bus, and stood at the front as we went across the lions gate bridge. the bus broke down at park royal, so we all got on to another one. on the way back, we were the second-to-last car on the ferry. it was an old ferry, with a picture of the queen at the front.

arriving dupont. dupont station.

2007-11-28T22:19:00.000-08:00

+ going across eastern ontario by bus. leaving ottawa at 1pm, lousy sandwich in the bus station. into toronto at 7pm. then 'going round the loop' to dupont. dupont station. arriving dupont. dupont station.

on the bus i read, watched the scenery, listened to music. i had my ipod on random, and what it chose worked, due to the day, the weather, probably the fact that i hadn't listened to anything since the plane trip over on the previous tuesday. i've saved the list from me 'recently played' list, and now listen to it as a separate playlist. 'busride.' all alone on a bus, watching, reading.

the mountain goats, cotton - sitting in the bus as it pulls out of the ottawa station.
scott walker, jackie
yo la tengo, night falls on hoboken - 17 minutes long, leaving ottawa, on the freeway and seeing buildings and strip malls and houses disappear and turning on to a country road in kanata.
fleetwood mac, gold dust woman
kristin hersh, gazebo tree
joni mitchell, people's parties
air, modular mix - the odd installation of highway equipment, here and there.
stina nordenstam, mary bell
kate bush, all the love
roger nichols and the small circle of friends, the drifter
the tragically hip, lionized - this was really great. all snow now, fields, trees and rocks. houses off the road. i have no map, and try to remember as many place names as i can, to trace the route in retrospect, later.
yo la tengo, let's save tony orlando's house
swing out sister, tainted
brian eno, another green world
christine collister, always there
the magnetic fields, candy
joni mitchell, last chance lost - i listened to this album in the backseat of the car on the way to mt baker, a cabin that friends of my parents kept. 1995, maybe 1996. my new discman. the sumas border crossing, and small country roads, dark, steeper and windier.
broadcast, accidentals
elliott smith, single file
a girl called eddy, did you see the moon tonight
rickie lee jones, traces of the western slopes
sebastian tellier, ketchup vs genocide
spanky and our gang, without rhyme or reason
bruce cockburn, the trouble with normal
bruce cockburn, bright sky - see, he wrote all his songs in ontario, apparently. bright land. snow everywhere.
saint etienne, marble lions - there is still a power and a magic to having a favourite band. i keep a card in my wallet that says that i'm a member of the saint etienne fan club.
stina nordenstam, and she closed her eyes
the free design, don't turn away - i remember this, high hillsides and turning roads. all snow, all sun, no leaves left.
greg keelor, redemption
jane siberry, bound by the beauty - this is when we stopped for a smoke break. i bought a map. small shop, sandwiches. newspapers for the trip, probably really awful coffee. bananas, junk food. but a map, which i folded and refolded as we drove across the edges for the rest of the day.
smashing pumpkins, stand inside your love
mark eitzel, sun smog seahorse
swing out sister, somewhere deep in the night
the left banke, walk away renee - this song starts, "and when you see the sign that..." as if it had no beginning, you just drop in, partway through a sentence.
scott walker, rosemary
the motels, suddenly last summer
damon and naomi, little red record co.
laika, german shepherds
richard and linda thompson, cavalry cross
stereolab, the free design - i know where we are now.
tony rice unit, moses sole
bread, he's a good lad
saint etienne, woodcabin
the magnetic fields, jeremy
modest mouse, sunspots in the house of the sun
saint etienne, mr. donut - we're in peterborough now. the peterborough petes. we stop here, people shift, leave. more space - we spread out. i take two seats, amanda two seats in front. we talk, but not for long.
the left banke, ivy ivy
saint etienne, sushi rider - now we are on a highway, dark, it's all different. the world shrinks with the view. just a bus now.
sandy denny, no end
roger nichols and the small circle of friends, love so fine
charlie haden and pat metheny, the moon song
alzo and udine, something going
a girl called eddy, somebody hurt you - it really is just the bus now.
long fin killie, british summertime
the blake babies, disappear
ferron, snowin' in brooklyn
low, overhead
the lilac time, hats off, here comes the girl
goldfrapp, ride a white horse
slowdive, when the sun hits - in whitby, completely dark now. the GO train. this is where toronto really starts. this is the climax, the point in the play when you know how the end will ultimately. this is the end of act three. no surprises anymore.
fairport convention, who knows where the time goes
gene clark, lady of the north
destroyer, beggars might ride
joni mitchell, court and spark
my bloody valentine, only shallow - we're deep in the beast by now, past ajax, pickering, entering scarborough. stopping at the scarborough RT line.
todd rundgren, cold morning light - leaving scarborough town centre. this is where all the headquarters are.
low, two-step
radiohead, idioteque - now the don valley parkway.
elliott smith, punch and judy - turning off, on to richmond st.
saint etienne, like a motorway - dundas and bay.

+ i liked ottawa again. it's all context - twice now i've been in a situation where parliament hill has served as my psychological rock against which i measure the reason that i'm actually in ottawa. parliament hill makes sense, and is endlessly reassuring. oddly, it's how i know that coming from the right place. further, i know, when i go to ottawa, more than anywhere else in the world, that i come from western canada.

+ i've been thinking more and more about leading, leadership. not what we think of when we're asked to rate 'leaders' in a phone survey, but what happens everyday in every situation. what is it, anyway, day to day? i yell on the bus, asking people to move to the back. leadership on transit issues. decisive, determined action on the issues that matter. responsive, sympathetic. sure. "a community leader," they say, in a pamphlet for congress. "a tested leader on the issues that matter to you." see, that way you, the voter, gets to fill in the blank. if it matters to you, your leader leads on it. simple. "getting results."

failure

2007-11-06T00:58:00.000-08:00

+ and i bought wine tonight in a tetra pak. it's lighter and more convenient, better for trips. in fact, it would probably fit in my bike's water bottle holder. this is the future.

+ for three months i don't write. april through july. who am i then?

+ you can recycle a tetra pak. they shred it, soak it in water, and then separate the plastic and the aluminum from the pulp. yesterday, i recycled a toothpaste tube. rather, i cleaned it to be sent for recycling.

+ i'm reading the mammoth book of future cops, and it's good. i'll probably write a paper about the commonwealth of independent states that i'll have to finish for the 20th. i'm going to read sharon butala's real life again, though, for the third time. at the same time, too.

+ and i'll be in ontario later this month. wonderful. it could be healthy.

coast to coast

2007-10-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

+ the question is whether i will remember what i don't write down. science fiction about the future of crime and law enforcement is taking me out of life at the moment. the 'digital millennium' of 2047, when an extra 1 or 0 will have to be added to create the next year. the sheer capacity of electronic media to screen the world. each citizen is required to be exposed to a quota of advertising messages every day. and again, what do we, can we remember of our own volition. how much of our entire system of understanding is based on memory, and we effectively just make it up all the time.

+ and on memory, falling man is wonderful. how we deal with the extraordinary, how we really are just a set of routines, ways of getting through the day, codes and protocol, and what is routine, anyway, when your neighbourhood gets blown up. books by important authors on the important events of our times should be heavy and ponderous, perilous, but falling man floats.

+ and i read science fiction, but we have powdered egg today, reconstituted egg, and meals in plastic bags, ready to be boiled into life. we do these things already. i spend time reading about irradiation, nuclear power, advances in slaughterhouse technology. we may not even be aware of the fantastic world we inhabit.

from an old draft posts, but worthwhile, + i was 18? 19? at the blinding light watching not the wizard of oz to pink floyd, but the matrix to the collected work of radiohead. it was packed out. another night, i brought my 25 minute 1986 VHS from the old "science and tech 11" course in to show at BYO8 night. a crazy dystopian no-narrative educational video from and old BC high school curriculum that had long ago been deleted. it went on forever but everyone loved it. i still have the tape, too, and if i had the machine hooked up i'd watch it.

and, + one of the wonderful surrealities about modern american politics is watching senators try to wrap their old american mouths around arabic language. on one hand they're condemning the mujaheddin, whatever that means, and the next they're celebrating their faith in and friendship with completely unpronounceable afghani politicians. guys like saxby chambliss, max baucus, christopher 'kit' bond. guys named chuck. picking sides in something called "iraq". what the hell is iraq anyway. in a sense, we DID just make it up. it was a british idea. now senator jim inhofe, R-oklahoma, has to give speeches on the senate floor talking about a dead marine who was serving... where?

i guess we did this before, talking about vietnam. but really.

i like the senate speeches when they refer to each other by first names, or even affectionates. like 'kit.' the inside jokes.

garden city

2007-10-15T01:08:00.000-07:00

+ what i write about now is books. what this means when what i meant to write about, two years ago, was music, i'm not quite sure. i have less to say about music, and a lot more to explain, or rather document, about books.

today i finished upstream, which is the first of sharon butala's novels i've read which did not feel forced or awkward at some point. each of luna, fourth archangel, and gates of the sun felt flawed in some way, but upstream, felt far stronger, as though she'd aimed lower and scored.

i've pulled myself together to read delillo's falling man now. there is a unique and unexplainable terror about reading a new novel my my favourite author. it says a lot about me, or anyone, to have a favourite author, and any addition to that author - i.e. a new novel - has the chance to irrevocably change my relation to that author - which is of course only through their books - for better or worse. if some measure of who i understand myself to be is based on my favourite author, well, what then. well, it's also just a book. but after 29 pages it's a really good book.

+ but i have a midterm due for tuesday, and i haven't written anything for it yet. but i know what to say, vaguely. 1)international organisations do a poor job of fulfilling the traditional roles of the nation state - the creation of behavioural norms and the ensuing socialisation - at the international level. and 2)i agree that the impact of globalisation in the area of culture has been one of both fragmentation and consolidation, by virtue of at once strengthening bonds across nation-states with regards to diverse identities and at the same time weakening traditional ties to land and country. sure.

+ we went to richmond yesterday, me and amanda. we took the skytrain to 22nd street station and rode our bikes across the queensborough bridge, heading along the north arm of the fraser, looping south under sea island and then across it, then back across lulu island along westminster highway to the skytrain. 6 hours. exhausting and really beautiful.

+ it doesn't get more lazily nostalgic than reading record store 'weekly updates' archived from 2000/2001. i used to read these in surrey and want to hear it all, understand. i'm much more comfortable now. well, obviously, but this is another example for myself of growth and change. but there are gems here: saint etienne is 'the elevation of the mundane into art'. and isn't that what all art should be? or, isn't that what the mundane always should be? why worry about it?

+ this time last year i had class downtown, and was using what money i had to de-stress from school et al by buying lots of records after class at a & b. burritos from taco del mar on granville, not because they were good but because they were there. writing my peak columns from the harbour centre computer lab all afternoon. i remember writing one column from amanda's dorm room and doing laundry while she was grocery shopping with her mother.

global corporate power

2007-10-09T00:26:00.000-07:00

+ still reading. finished alice munro, open secrets, from 1994. also finished journey into russia. it got trite and strange, and probably made more sense in the 1960s. i appreciate having read it, though. now i'm consciously reading two books, which i rarely ever do. first, fourth planet from the sun, a collection of mars stories, from the 1950s to now, including ray bradbury's wonderful the wilderness, which sets the exploration of mars in a direct path with the expansion of the american west. i took a break from it on saturday and started sharon butala's upstream, from 1991. i'm past 1/2 through now, it's about a woman in a lousy marriage who finds her family and history. i mean, it's about saskatchewan and french canada, and personal history and national histories, and who you are vs. where you understand yourself to be.

i wonder if i collect sharon butala because of the sheer thrill, the collector's imperative, or if i really do revel in what she writes. but i remember reading real life and feeling that she knows, she gets it, she knows exactly what she's doing.

watching gary burns' radiant city documentary yesterday was wonderful, because it's right in the line of sharon butala, george melnyk, gary burns' old film the suburbanators. what is the west, what is the prairie? and in the suburbs, just where in the hell are we anyway? and it isn't smug at all. no preening, no satisfaction: yes the suburbs suck but if we stop there then we've gone nowhere at all. vancouver interests me, but only in the context of its suburbs.

+ i'm scared of the delillo books that i have waiting, unread. falling man and running dog. i have a delillo reader that i'll use alongside running dog and everything. it's called the physics of language. literary criticism.

+ i'll be giving my last class presentation on turkey and the EU. i haven't read the article, but i know what i want to discuss. turkey and the EU is the legacy of the eastern question: who gets the balkans when the ottomans die off? to deal with turkey, thye EU has to deal with the spectre of the ottomans. the silk road. mongol hordes, sweeping out of asia. delillo talks about that, in the names: 'sweeping out of asia.' i want to discuss europe not as a continent or as an "economic community" but as a state of mind. europe: if you lived here, you'd be home right now. believe it, live europe, and there you are.

further, i want to write about global corporate power, american empire, in the context of the frontier thesis. rather, in the context of the discrediting of the frontier thesis.

+ and tonight on the skytrain i saw a route map that didn't have maple ridge/pitt meadows on it. as in, the west coast express just kept going, but everything north of the fraser/east of port coquitlam was water. as if it was a great lake, or the atlantic. richmond/new westminster as north american dardanelles. i wish i'd taken it down to put up at home. pitt meadows/maple ridge, just not there.

+ i found a stack of CDs that i made to archive a lot of downloaded music in 2004 - things that i wanted to save, but didn't listen to enough to justify filling up my hard drive at the time. crazy.

i am spending a lot of time listening to, well, a lot. i put "top rated" on shuffle and sit back. songs called finisterre: i have three of them, by the lilac time, saint etienne, and blueboy. 'finisterre' means the end of the earth. finis terre.

+ it was a dry day, so we swept. i swept. after buying a new broom up the drive while on a trip to get a burrito. that was my day.

pennsylvania

2007-09-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

+ i've been reading so much. i'm reading about russia. a travelogue from 1964 by a british author, laurens van der post. in portland i read caroline adderson's pleased to meet you, more short stories. in august i read born on the forth of july, which is such a great title. i read the ugly american and followed it up with too many vietnam war movies. i re-read margaret atwood's surfacing, finishing it off while listening to the mountain goats, get lonely, on repeat. that same night i read and read about the pinetree line, radar stations strung across the country, the last line of NORAD, the last outposts of the cold war. mt lolo in kamloops, radar hill in tofino, a hundred more across the landscape.

+ on the way to portland we stopped at a post-mall north of everett, in washington. i felt as if i was very close to heart of it all, the heart of the beast. what's actually going on in the united states. washington is one of only 3 states to have all-female senate delegations, along with maine and california. what's actually happening in the united states. i watched a documentary about baseball, the somerset patriots. minor-league baseball in new jersey. the vancouver canadians are the only canadian team in their league. i live in vancouver, so why do i watch baseball? it's someone else's sport. maybe i just pretend to understand it, the rhythm of it. american teens at the post-mall wearing baseball caps, baseball shirts. outlet stores.

+ and there was a day in 2002 when it really felt like fall. taking the skytrain into work downtown and reading 11 great horror stories. it's almost that time again, now. listening to the sundays and drinking tea. reading all of my homework on a saturday. taking the bus to school in the cold, breaking through the top of the clouds on gaglardi way. reading horror stories and articles about globalization. this is my seventh fall semester at SFU, and i'm still reading articles about globalization on the bus. i'm not expectant anymore, i'm not hopeful. i'm almost done.

+ in pennsylvania there is an abandoned section of turnpike just outside of pittsburgh full of tunnels. they built a bypass to avoid the tunnels, to snake around the hills instead of under them, but the tunnels are still there. they just aren't used anymore. i can only imagine this place existing in fall. old highway markers and crumbling asphalt covered in dead leaves. orange trees and yellow trees.

+ i would make a list, books i've read, books to read, but it'll come out naturally anyway.

the last volunteer

2007-07-24T01:44:00.000-07:00

+ tonight we watched frantic, a 1987 movie about simple americans mistakenly caught in a paris crime scene. the climax is 3/4 through, when the american embassy guys suggest that several other characters, earlier seen to be as outwardly bad as the other bad guys, are on "our side". harrison ford reacts badly - our side? i'm not on anyone's side. americans in paris being chased by arabs. we're not on anyone's side, you bastards. globalism = no more sides any more, or no more relevant sides. harrison ford is the anti-citizen: he doesn't care about the arabs. he cares about his wife, and his friend. ok, so all politics are local. i do think there is stuff here about globalism and why should we care. rephrase: why should we care? in the terminator the cops are useless, just in the way, hapless, sidelined by a war between good and evil that they don't understand. this is a common theme. in frantic, the cops are the game, the war, and harrison ford is on the sidelines because it's simply irrelevant.

the good spy books are the ones that are honest about sides. the blurring. the kinship.

i do think that the lovely remote forests of the sunshine coast are a magnificent metaphor for queeruption 10. unless i am misinterpreting queeruption 10 as more significant than it is. as a cipher for radical, well, yes. of COURSE it's in the forest.

+ it's all a plus, still, but not really. everything is different now. or, everything was different in may. as if we are missing a centre? i had beer with ben tonight, which was nice. today is the day that i scored 16/21 on the burnout quiz.

+ i want to keep talking about globalism, and cities, and what it's all about, and what dubai means. i want to do this after i graduate. i have no doubt that i will get to talk a lot about rezoning.

+ i just finished john le carre's tinker tailor soldier spy and am now labouring through heinlein's the day after tomorrow, which is bad. i already gave up on it in may, and may yet again. i will next read fantasy government: vander zalm and the future of social credit. it is a polemic of sorts, but will probably make me feel the same as tinker tailor soldier spy did. kinda how harrison ford felt? i do want to read it, but i think it will strain my belief.

all the great state roads

2007-07-18T22:51:00.000-07:00

+ tomorrow i'll probably finish reading former sen. tom daschle's (D-SD) memoir of the eventful 2000-2002 years in the US senate. i love personal memoirs of time spent in politics, esp. those written by people farther from the action. daschle was obviously notable, serving as the senate's majority leader from '01-'02, but being in the senate means that he has far more to say about the daily grind of politics than, say, a president would. one of my favourite political books is the self-published a professor in parliament, by herb grubel, the one term(1993-1997) reform MP for capilano-howe sound. there's no rhetoric, posturing, or ego - just an account of the daily grind as as accidental MP.

in 2004, daschle lost his senate seat to john thune, an undistinguished republican who has been little but a white house puppet since his election. thune had narrowly lost to tim johnson in the 2002 senate race, by a mere 500+ votes, largely due to daschle's forceful campaign on behalf of his colleague. thune's win was then seen as both personal vindication and a national symbol for republicans. reading the commentary comeing out of that 2004 result, the assumption was that democrats would be on the defensive in 2006, fighting to hold on to west virginia, minnesota, new mexico, and north dakota. ultimately, republicans only put up a fight in minnesota and still lost there by 20 points. the only trouble spots pegged for the republicans in 2004 were rhode island and maybe pennsylvania. ohio, missouri, virginia, and montana weren't even on the map, and wins in all of those gave the democrats the senate. in 2004, it was supposedly all over for the democrats. red states were red states, and nothing could ever change that. cultural differences. unavoidable demographic shifts. just call the rest of history done. well, no. wrong. i can't foresee a scenario right now that sees a republican wining the white house next year.

the 2008 presidential election will feature the first open race since 1968, in which neither party will nominate a sitting president or sitting vice president. 1968 is iffy too, because nixon had been eisenhower's VP from 1952-1960.

+ can i do my job? i'm good at a lot of it, but i feel as though i'm blowing some key stuff lately. the important thing is to just not sweat it.

+ this december i'll be done with school. next april i'll be done with SFU, at least in this capacity.

always right

2007-07-17T01:18:00.000-07:00

+ we went to tofino in early june. late may? for a wedding. i was humming poppy family songs all weekend. then in europe i spent the first four days wanting to listen to joni mitchell. sitting and reading ice station zebra beside the pool in gargnano. i know who i am by where i am. when i don't know where i am, i lose my sense of myself. simply walking into town was crazy. the streets and signs are different.

+ beer this afternoon at the pub after a day in which i felt down and blue. i told people that i just wanted to go home and read sci-fi novels, which was true. is true. although, i'm at home now and i'm not reading anything, sci-fi or not.

+ saw a film last week in class called megadream, about the socreds and northeast coal development. bill bennett and bc place. it makes me think of wood paneling and scotch in tumblers. office windows overlooking burrard inlet.

a life of small horizons

2007-07-16T00:50:00.000-07:00

+ i have not been reading as much as i'd like to. further, i have a number of books (semi)actively on the go. right now, john le carre - tinker tailor soldier spy. also, a book about how franchises took over america, a book about hockey in canadian popular culture, a book about bill vander zalm's gov't, a robert heinlein book, don delillo's the names (my favourite book). i'm not more than 50 pages into any of them, with the exception of the names, which i am nearly finished.

+ a life of small horizons. a conscious choice. lillooet vs. everything else. at the same time, i live in a place now that i used to see every weekend from the skytrain window. i know where i live now because of where i grew up. i know how to site myself.

+ i love paris, and would love to return. rather, i plan to return. train stations and metro lines. i read the names on vacation because i wanted to wallow in it, and i did. i kept a paper journal, recording facts and details. timelines. i know how i felt, and who i am and was, but i don't know the timelines, the triggers. so, i kept those recorded.

+ in may 1999 i started to work at purdy's downtown. things changed. mostly my memory. that's when i date smells and sounds to. previously, i can only recall senses. as in vague senses. but i can date the smell of fucking crushed almonds to that summer, and four years following. eating in the food court. ms vanellis. flaming wok - i'd eat rice, sesame chicken, and vegetables. or, i'd eat a side of bourbon chicken on its own. or, i'd eat a side of vegetables. i knew how far i could get and what i could eat in a 15 minute break vs. a 30 minute break. i drank so much coffee. from yogen fruz across the hall, even though it was awful coffee, because they were nice and we got it cheap and sometimes free, at the end of the day. or blenz, also in the mall.

+ further, i'm not sure what year we stopped going down to eugene, oregon as a family each summer. at some point i brought a discman down and started listening to joni mitchell in the car. i wish i could index my itunes to when i'd bought records, as opposed to when i imported them. since 2001 i have been recording the month and year that i read a book on the title page. i wish i'd done the same with CDs. for a time i could recall where i'd bought albums and what other albums i'd bought at the same time. i don't know that anymore.

+ bike riding all day. downtown, then to breakfast, then to spanish banks and back.

+ camping last weekend, to cottonwood again, outside lillooet. powerful stuff.

+ almost done school. maybe. 4 or 5 more papers total. ever? maybe ever.

+ i just want to read some novels again. short stories. vacation without the pressure. i can do this, with concentration and focus. prioritisation.

bright land

2007-04-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

+ i've been reading all weekend, and am just at the end of brian fawcett's virtual clearcut. it's a memoir, essentially, built on one fact: the bowron river clearcut, just southeast of prince george, his hometown, can be seen from space. it's a good book, especially so for its basis in one simple fact. it's something i want to delve into.

+ facts:

vancouver is the 3rd most livable city in the world.
"the west wants in" / "the west is in now"
dubai exists.

+ it's a book about prince george, but it's really a book about british columbia. well, really, about british columbia in the world. it's also about men, and friendships.

+ i went shopping for books today, at pulpfiction on main and broadway. i found two more sharon butala books that i don't have yet - coyote's morning cry and wild stone heart. i may have more sharon butala than any other single canlit author now. wait, no. i have 10 atwood. only 8 butala. i like sharon butala more, though. it's strange, though; her themes don't generally resonate with me, and she can be quite awkward with her construction at times, as with the end of the forth archangel. but it's the pantheism and naturalism, especially as connected to western canada as a concept that really affect me, again, especially in contrast with predominant portrayals of the canadian west.i wrote an essay once, in which i contrasted sharon butala's west with that of george melnyk. melnyk has also contrasted the canadian west with the american west, suggesting that canada's is sociological while the US' is ecological. i want to know more about this. i want to know where i live.

+ and i am delving into canada, again. part of it is knowing that i'll be leaving the country this summer for two weeks. i need to know where i am from before i can understand being somewhere else. part of it is watching so much hockey. talking about hockey. meeting people in bars and talking hockey. going to hockey games with friends. going to hockey games with my dad. watching the vancouver giants play against the prince george cougars. i am also taking a canadian history course this summer. i'm getting resettled. tomorrow i will go to buy my textbooks.

the music lovers

2007-04-01T12:18:00.000-07:00

+ the only douglas coupland books i really enjoy are generation x and life after god, especially the latter. i have microserfs as well, but it doesn't really have that much to say. i'm reading delillo's the names right now. it's my very favourite book by my very favourite author. it's making me dizzy. when i read delillo i start to think like he writes. i end up sitting in class, marvelling at the words we use. transnational. terrorism. when we talk about dubai i kinda lose my shit. dubai. there's a deep patience that i find in reading delillo. i have so much else that i want to read, but i'm very tempted to reread mao II or underworld after this.

+ i'm spending the weekend reading and listening to records. and by records i mean my itunes library... 27.3 days worth of songs. i'm making a concerted effort to listen to songs that i have not listened to since this time last year, and marvelling at how long it has been since i have heard a lot of what i once considered to be favourite songs.

+ there was a day about a year ago when amanda took me out to maple ridge. we went to the civic centre and saw the high school kids gathering for the monthly dance at the rec centre. we bought hip flasks. mine leaked, but i haven't been back to maple ridge since and haven't been able to return it as a result. amanda filled hers with fireball whiskey for our camping trip to the sunshine coast at the end of the month. i borrowed that flask in december and have yet to return it. it's full of bourbon now. wild turkey.

+ i'll be taking my last history course this summer. the history of british columbia. i'm excited but also apprehensive. this is my history. the history of where i live, where i've always lived.

+ the tri-cities are richland-pasco-kennewick, in that order.

+ we went to whistler two weekends ago. it was in the middle of my second presidential campaign. kinda like a retreat to camp david. me and sean and ben sat in a hot tub drinking lots of beer while it rained and rained. we went up and back in ben's mother's hybrid sport utility vehicle with a live GPS map.

+ some of my very favourite albums, as is the case with anyone, i guess, are those that i listened to a lot in high school. for me, they include all of joni mitchell's albums from blue (1971) to don juan's reckless daughter (1978). there's not really much more to say about that.

the gravity model

2007-03-18T01:19:00.000-07:00

+ the park has more water in it than i think i've ever seen before. the last time it flooded to this extent was when the snow melted in 2006 - this is just due to rain.

+ this is the lowest intensity campaign i've run since my senate by-election win in 2004. i'm campaigning, definitely, but i don't feel the drive or the competition. this is the first time i haven't been able to paint myself as any sort of underdog in any way. people i don't know and have never met recognise my face and name. furthermore, they're happy to talk to me.

+ i have a paper to write, as well, which is similar to my situation last december. however, this is a polisci paper, and it's over a year since i've written one of these straight. i have all of tomorrow plus monday evening. no late papers accepted past 4pm tuesday. i do have to be in class tuesday because i have a presentation to do. that'll be easy, though - globalisation and canadian federalism. that's kinda what i do.

+ i don't expect to write more than 4 more papers as an undergrad, though. that's great. i've been reading about missiles. minuteman, pershing, peacekeeper, trident. ICBMs. titan, redstone. i've also been reading about the companies that make missiles. the honeywell corporation, for example, is famous for thermostats but it also makes missiles. see, there would have been a time between when these missiles were launched and when they actually hit. when everything is still the same in every way but will completely change within an hour. absolutely nothing can be done. the missilues are gone, but they haven't hit yet. it's a grey area. a dead zone.

driving home

2007-02-17T23:03:00.000-08:00

+ there's a very curious dichotomy between my professional/academic interest in bureaucracies and committee structures and systems of power and "canada" and my abiding fascination of apocalyptic fiction. the fact is that everything i am proud of knowing and understanding in a professional sense would be profoundly useless if everything changed. at the same time, i am fascinated by organisational development and structure and obsessed with its total collapse. the absence of order. there are passages in end zone where gary harkness imagines thousands, millions dead in major cities around the world. nuclear fallout. in other words, the total elimination of any field that i have any comparative advantage in.

+ at the end of november, i walked up victoria drive to sam's house in the snow with vol. 1 of battlestar galactica. it was snowing and my shoes were completely soaked. amanda had spent the night snowed in. the night before, we all trekked out to krisztina's house(at fraser and kingsway, where jan and i had searched for campaign offices a year ago while listening to fleetwood mac) and gar and i walked home in the middle of snowed-in 12th avenue drinking beer. i had a paper due on webCT that night i went to sam's, but i didn't really care. it was a paper on breed-specific legislation for my vegan course (which i got a C+ in). sam cooked chicken. i was asked on sunday night to use my connections to get a snow day called for monday. that wednesday i went to brentwood mall on the way home to buy boots.

+ i'm reading driving to detroit by lesley hazelton. i'm enjoying it, but not as much as i'd hoped i might. i was hoping to be surprised. i'm nervous to read delillo's the names again, in case it's not as good as i recall, which is just silly.

+ i went to washington state four times this summer, and i don't feel that i've examined it all sufficiently yet. i went to seattle, ellensburg, whidbey island, spokane, the grand coulee dam, bellingham, centralia. i also went to portland, oregon and coeur d'alene, idaho. that's all. and i did it all in the passenger seat, because i can't drive. if i could drive, i would.

shoreline to kent

2007-02-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

+ i remember oxygen bars. no, i remember the idea of oxygen bars. different flavours, lots of polished steel and surgical tubing. step in and hook yourself up to a respirator. it always seemed so dystopian. are things so bad that we have to pay to breathe flavoured air? i wonder if there are any oxygen bars left. i'd really like to visit one.

i also remember the time (times?) that everyone got tested for hepatitis after eating at capers, vancouver's yuppie health food supermarket. alternatively, the time that three of my classmates got food poisoning from the istanbul mcdonalds, after turning down the turkish restaurant that everyone else went to.

+ i just read margaret atwood's cat's eye. it's a parallel narrative. all reminiscence. how much of what we do in any given situation is informed by what we've done before, who we've known before, where we've physically been.

+ i remember the arch deluxe. clinton gore '96. we 'got' the internet in 1997, i think. we had 100 hours a month, using a 36k modem. i'd stay up late looking at simpsons fansites, yahoo's "hot pick of the day"... i can't even recall anymore.

+ i'm reading don delillo's end zone again, and it's making me dizzy, again.

everything's different now

2007-02-04T23:39:00.000-08:00

+ everything isn't really different now, because nothing's really happened. but i like the idea. everything's different now.

+ we went to port alberni. it always feels like going back to 1986 somehow. i love the ferry, the highway, the bookstore, the restaurants. starting in horseshoe bay it's a different province. we came home and took a week off. i spent several days doing nothing but reading. it was a strange limbo, in a sense - i'd started work on the 21st, but couldn't go back until the new year because everything was closed. the break was good, though.

+ that first week in the office was strange, not in the least because i didn't have a key. now it's normal, and wonderfully so. i feel on top of my game, capable and credible. for better or for worse, i feel old.

+ in a sense i've forgotten what i do here. maybe everything is different now.

+ when the snow goes i feel as though i haven't taken proper advantage of it, that a golden opportunity has passed by.

robson square

2006-12-14T01:12:00.000-08:00

this isn't as bad as it gets, but it's pretty bad. this paper is worse than the one i wrote on mussolini this summer. i felt my C on that was unfair. this paper is, however, better than the one i wrote for geog 265 - canadian cities in 2002. that was a bad paper. i left about five unfinished sentences in it.

at this point, my only concern is to finish the fucking paper and, hence, this semester. is this the wall? maybe, but i don't think so. i'm capable of doing this, it's just a lack of motivation that's keeping me down. i think i'll get through my degree without hitting the wall. after that it's easy. (hah!) i'd like to stop writing papers. i'll take an exam any day. but i don't want to write another paper.

my only excuse is a self-destructive streak paired with the pressure of high expectations - my prof noted on my draft, "i am expecting an A paper from you; don't let me down!" so of course i have. what now? at least 1000 more words. before 12 noon today. it's possible that i simply won't sleep. which is great, considering my presidential debate scheduled for 12:30. at least i have 30 minutes with my handlers for coaching and preparation. what did kerry say that killed him? "global test"? yeah. i won't say that. reagan had some killer lines back in the day, though. it's morning in america. remember how nixon resigned before he was impeached? yeah. that was smart. nixon always was underestimated. i used to be, once upon a time. now i'm this big asshole. another reason that this will be my actual last campaign. fuck this shit.

it's morning in america.

what we had to do

2006-12-04T00:19:00.000-08:00

+ tonight i made soup while listening to veda hille records. we met friends at breakfast. last week i went to the courthouse and i'll be going again tomorrow. my iPod died buy i resurrected it by slapping it hard and dropping it on a table, so i named it "Spock." the snow completely floors me, every year - i love everything about it, now that i have boots to wear!

+ in retrospect it all seems obvious, but i'm proud to have predicted dion's victory. we had an envelope stuffing party at my MLA's office thursday night, and i called it for dion. adrian was less convinced, citing ignatieff's lead and doubting kennedy's ability to deliver his 905 delegates to the race's only french guy. the globe and mail mapped out 8 potential strategies the other day, posing two winning scenarios for each of the top four candiates. dion rode the "leapfrog" perfectly. i also felt that whoever received the martha hall-findlay endorsement would be in a very strong position. it's the symbolism.

i'm a history student. we create/recreate/uncreate narratives - it's what we do, and this weekend was an incredible narrative. steady eddie sealed it. and by 'it' i mean the narrative, which he highlighted in his acceptance speech by proclaiming "good guys do finish first!" and they did. steady ed stelmach, premier of alberta. part of the narrative is a lesson on how poorly we'll be able to adapt to different electoral systems. 30% means abolutely fuck all in a majoritarian system if you can't pull it up to 50%+1. ignatieff played his hand for the last two months as if he only needed 10% more to go over the top. well, he played that campaign to a tee, and got his 10%, but if it doesn't get you to 50%, it's not worth showing up for. you'd think his rent-a-machine would have had a program for that. or, maybe they did but it just couldn't compute. if you alienate 60% of your electorate, you're dead in a two-person race.

but back to steady ed stelmach. i think we need to spend more time on how well these two campaigns mirrored each other. dinning = ignatieff. surreally, morton = rae. and the guys who weren't assholes won, essentially because they aren't assholes. this is what you get with preferential voting - personality-based politics that favours nice guys.

to be horribly honest, though, i was secretly rooting for ignatieff and morton, just to see some wild crazy ego stunts erupt! once again, canadian politics goes in the least-interesting direction. dion and stelmach. but seriously, a leadership debate between dion, harper, and layton is going to be the geekiest wonk-fest ever, as long as layton lets his inner poli-sci professor come back out.

+ when i hear the tragically hip, "fireworks", i remember coming back from whidby island, and kevin saying to amanda 'come on, you turn off the hockey game and now you're turning off the song about hockey too?'

interregnum

2006-11-20T18:27:00.000-08:00

they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness this is like joe jackson talking about the cure for gravity. variations on a theme, obviously.

now we're going out for sushi. it's less a matter of 'can we afford to' than 'can we afford not to.' again, these are the moments.

i'm in several long email conversations with people about my political future at my university. it's strange how these things develop. the greatest virtue is sheer tenacity - stick around long enough and you write your own cheques. and again, it is not a meritocracy. i spend a lot of my time on the political analysis of my campus - there is a future in this, but it is very strange and twisted.

modern optics

2006-11-07T02:33:00.000-08:00

+ heather wilson (R-NM) this is the last one i'll post. this ad is just a clip from a live debate that wilson did with patricia madrid, her democratic challenger and new mexico's current attorney general (an office which is elected statewide). madrid is currently running a good 3-5 points ahead of wilson, who has held the seat, which encompasses the albequerque metropolitan area, for several terms. madrid totally flubs an easy question on taxes, and it could be fatal. i feel so terrible for the woman. i've been watching it over and over again... she completely blanks when asked for some proof that she won't raise taxes. she totally collapses. maybe she had a bad moment, maybe she's an idiot. the correct answer to the question, of course, is: "elections are all about faith and trust. obviously, as someone who has not sat in congress before, i do not have a record to defend. the voters of this district will have to take my word on this issue - that i will not vote to raise taxes - and i do not say that lightly. your record, however, is clear. you are a sycophantic twit who votes in lockstep with a moron who has plunged this nation into the most ill-advised conflict since hitler's invasion of stalingrad. we're stuck with his ass in the white house for two more years, but we can kick yours to the curb next tuesday. fuck you." of course, that's easy for me to say: i'm not running for congress.

i did win my election to the board of governors, however. 223-190. turnout was up about 300% from the last senate byelection, when i won with only 72 votes. this might have been my last campaign at SFU.

+ i finished delillo's libra. it's got an incredible intensity and pace for a novel the ending of which inspires and defines the entire text, and which every reader is completely and intimately aware, i.e. the kennedy assasination. it might be delillo's most focused and coherently structured novels, aside from the body artist, which is entirely different in intent.

now i'm finishing the power game, which is all about the reagan white house and power structures in washington d.c. with a focus on their evolution to 1988. i'm also working through alice munro's something i've been meaning to tell you.

+ as far as SFU in general, i feel that we're reaching the end game. it's not even a question of momentum any more - it's largely (and deliciously) out of my hands. now i can start working productively for my student society again without my motives and credibility being impinged. if anyone has the right to conflate their ego with the health of the society as a whole, which i think is a bad idea regardless, it's me and MY friends, not some two-bit hack who just waltzed this spring and still doesn't get it. we've paid our goddamn dues, thank you.

production

2006-11-01T01:40:00.000-08:00

+ see, we're all cultural producers. constantly. that's what's great about everything!

+ i'm enjoying the iPod a lot. it's as if i preempted any anxiety by worrying about it for a solid year before actually getting the damned thing. the thing with shuffle mode is that it's shuffling through my own collection. that's 9000+ songs that i've picked out as being songs that i really enjoy, in some context or another. yeah, there are songs that i skip, but most of them i really like. the odds of finding something i dislike are quite slim, and i have to stop tensing in fear of this eventuality. i always do, though. when a song ends, i poise my thumb over the "next" button. to combat this, i am now listening to my "top rated" playlist, which is only about 3000 songs, all of which i really like.

+ my favourite band is saint etienne. my favourite record is joni mitchell, hejira. my favourite song is.. ferron, i never was to africa? maybe. probably not, though. fuck.

reaching out across the sea

2006-10-27T18:29:00.000-07:00

+ as a history student, i need to send out some US presidential ads from the past to complement some more ads from the current cycle.

nixon now! for you and me! it's a richard nixon song, guys!
two for one! democrats in 1982 these are two generic democrat ads from 1982, slamming reaganomics. it's an elephant in a china shop!
reagan '84! this one is classic. pure symbolism. it's really appropriate that this came out in 1984, too.
johnson '64! this one is the ultimate campaign ad. vote johnson or DIE!
mark kennedy (R-MN) this is mark kennedy again, talking straight about iraq.
amy klobuchar (D-MN) this is the woman running against mark kennedy. she's about 15% ahead right now, and will probably win. it's a lame ad, though.
you can't get answers from a bush this one is cute!
rick santorum (R-PA) he's a wrestler!
anti-harold ford (D-TN) this one has been pulled after bob corker, the republican candidate, publicly criticised it for going too far.
asa hutchinson (R-AR) children!
catfish grabbin' girls yeah, i don't know.

mountain standard time

2006-10-20T00:48:00.000-07:00

+ i attended the coquitlam hearing of the bc electoral boundaries commission tonight. only about 20 people were in the audience, including two MLAs, two city councillors, two school trustees, one former candidate, and four members of the citizens' assembly. i got some incredible maps, however, showing population density in the tri-cities area and across the province. i'll be attending the vancouver session on saturday as well. i love public consultation. the sign-in sheet, careful hotel ballroom, local pols grandstanding inarticulately, power point, jugs of ice water. what's getting scary is that i recognise lots of people at everything i attend. i meet friends at public consultation meetings. i'm totally going to recognise half the crowd on saturday.

+ avanbarb is your mutual friend! it says this on top of amanda's website, and i hadn't noticed before. how sweet!

+ some things that i listened to today!

the 5th dimension, the girl's song (1968)
beck, side of the road (2002)
blueboy, popkiss (1992)
judee sill, the pearl (1971)
the melody unit, nutation (1999)
montage, desiree (1969)
stina nordenstam, hopefully yours (1994)
young and sexy, lose control (2003)
weeping tile, ufo rosie (1995)
yo la tengo, cherry chapstick (2003)
the carpenters, rainy days and mondays (1971)
anne murray, talk it over in the morning (1971)
jane siberry, map of the world (part 1) (1984)
morrissey, you have killed me (2006)
joni mitchell, last chance lost (1994)
leonard cohen, the law (1984)
archer prewitt, over the line (2002)
phoenix, north (2006)
scott walker, windows of the world (1968)
p:ano, failure (2003)
joni mitchell, furry sings the blues (1976)

+ five people asked me in class if i won, but i don't know yet. i've never waited this long. i enjoyed the iPod today, though. it made me feel very placid. shuffe makes me nervous, however, because i never know if i'll be jarred by a crazy volume differential on the next track.

duality

2006-10-19T00:32:00.000-07:00

i was horribly sick all day. it's because we were drinking heavily and consistently from 7pm to 4am. we drank all of the clubhouse's beer. they switched kegs, but we finished that one too. so, we started buying bottles of asahi. they kicked us out after 1am, so we went to rich's townhouse and kept drinking; the group had gone down from approx. 20 people at 11pm to only 6 at rich's place. eating is such a delicate task after puking all day. sometimes i think a hangover is worth it for how lovely everything is when it's gone. this afternoon i was wondering if i would ever feel better. now i do, and everything is wonderful. but i do feel weak. i didn't leave the house at all today.

now i am procrastinating on writing 1000 words on a book that i really enjoy. i know what to say, kinda. i have not read the whole book, which is just silly, because i really like it. it's because i'm lazy and self-destructive. the late penalty is only 2% per day, and i am considering that option - handing it in to the department on friday - to give myself the chance to write a better paper. i think it's worthwhile.

i bought rich's old iPod from him yesterday. i'm a little scared of it, but also strangely tantalised. it's because i am deeply neurotic about my record collection and how i listen to it. 'but it's just a digital audio device.' that's like saying that the skytrain is just a rapid transit system. that my house is just a set of walls and a roof. we all hear the same song, but what we take in is shaped by what we ate for breakfast, for example, or how we slept the night before. or, most frustratingly, the environment in which we hear the song. this is the source of my anxiety. it's been well over a year since i've had a working discman, and i've really enjoyed just listening to the skytrain, to the bus, to walking. but there are the days when i really need to shut it off. i don't have any earbuds anymore, so i guess i'll try tomorrow with big headphones. i'm always so nervous that everyone around can hear my music. i don't want to be obnoxious.

the only history you can tell is autobiography, and when you tell another history, it becomes a part of your own. and that's ok. it makes me dizzy, though.

i bought the sea and cake's oui when it came out in 2000 because the cover was absolutely gorgeous and i was curious. i listened to it a lot over the next year. it's what i hoped my life as an adult would sound like. i'm not even kidding! i'd listen to it on my discman while walking from downtown to commercial drive along keefer and frances.

here at the western world

2006-10-14T00:14:00.000-07:00

i could talk about a lot of things, but i'd rather list some of the most intersting u.s. senate ads i've seen lately. i do this; i watch american campaign ads. it's something you never see in canada. we'll get advertising for party brands, but nothing for individual candidates, ever.

mark kennedy (R-MN): he's going for the same thing that i did with my gin posters.
michael steele (R-MD): jan and i used to joke that the best campaign trick would be to sit at a table in the AQ with a big basket of puppies. it would work! michael steele agrees: he loves puppies. i also really appreciate the fact that he's making puns with his last name.
harold ford jr. (D-TN): this guy's a democrat! he was forced to go to church, and he's better for it.
3rd party - vote vets: this one is brutal!
jim talent (R-MO): this one's like a pop-up video. i really dislike jim talent, though.
mike bouchard (R-MI): scroll down to "the date" - they're always trying to deconstruct the form. it's all so familliar!
jon tester (D-MT): i'm really rooting for this guy!
rick santorum (R-PA): he's on our side, against gay people and mexicans! the nice thing is that he's consistently polling 10 points behind. this freak is done!
don sherwood (R-PA): he's running for congress, but i had to include this. see, don sherwood, a long-time incumbent in pennsylvania's 10th district, tried to strangle his mistress, and people found out. this is his apology to the world.

at this point, nothing means anything anymore.

hands across the galaxy

2006-10-10T00:25:00.000-07:00

+ i know why i like IPAs. it's because of the hops. well, obviously, but cascade hops taste like grapefruit, apparently, and it's true. i agree. i like grapefruit a lot, and i like IPAs a lot. the railway club has one of my favourites - hop head from kelowna - on tap; amanda and i had beer there on saturday night, in what was a lovely evening. i finally got to show off the new entrance to granville skytrain station. it finally felt real, to have someone else there. no, it was still surreal. it was more as if amanda had joined me in a dream than if i'd joined her in reality. i forget sometimes how formative the skytrain was on my development.

+ after we left the railway club, i bought more records. my student loan came in, see:

anjani, blue alert (2006): this is the record by leonard cohen's girlfriend. it's really nice. similar to nu-cohen, with a very confident, restrained woman singing, and even more vaporous arrangements.
gene clark, white light (1971) and
gene clark, no other (1975): these are fantastic records, and i'm really glad to finally have them on disc.
martha and the muffins, metro music (1980): a CD copy to comtemplate my vinyl.
randy newman, sail away (1972): very delightful!
scott walker, scott (1967) and
scott walker, scott 2 (1968): i think that's all the scott walker that i need, now.
neil young and crazy horse, ragged glory (1990)

+ this week will mark my future in politics at SFU. this could be it.

+ i'm really enjoying quest of the folk: antimodernism and cultural selection in twentieth century nova scotia, and have an urge to go to queens for a masters, now to study with ian mackay, who wrote it! it's all about... everything.

+ it was a beautiful fall weekend. it will only get better from here.

i've been thinking things over

2006-09-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

+ i'm doing less reading in general than i'd like to. i'm also up far later than i should be, almost every night. but it's what i do. i slept over at sean's on friday night, after guinness at the mountain shadow. i'm the third person to report that bit of info to the internet, now. it's like a strange mutual affirmation. we were all there, and now we're letting each other know that we all independently noted the event as worth recording.

+ my mother took us out for sushi tonight. we went (actually, for the second time this week) to honjo, which used to be atami, at nanaimo and hastings. apparently she told my dad to 'fuck off' last week. there was no specific incident. they've been in a strange separation for three and 1/2 years. actually, they separated the same week that i left surrey to live on my own at sfu, before moving in with jan in august. the end of april, 2003. i still don't understand it all. i'm not sad about it, just confused. my dad and i went for an early dinner last monday and ended up drinking beer until 11.30 pm. we didn't even talk about it.

+ i still intend to write my geography of vancouver as a series of sushi restaurants that i've eaten at. of course, by geography, i mean autobiography. it's really the same thing. it won't really be about sushi, but it will, because sushi is a lens through which i see my city and ergo my life. these are the words: honjo, atami, kishu, kitto, toshi, ajisai, tokachi. i don't even know what these things mean. there could be a sushi restaurant called 'kandahar.' there is a tim hortons in kandahar, and a royal bank branch in dubai. i could go to dubai and use an ATM without incurring service fees.

+"come on, at least we don't have cancer, right?"

+ new records!

broadcast, the future crayon (2006): this is a rarities collection, spanning 1998-2005. seeing broadcast live in 2003 was very exciting. this is uneven, naturally, but nice to have and really lovely. i like what this band does!
leonard cohen, songs from a room (1969): i have not really listened to this much yet. just enough to know that it's terribly poker-faced. i'm far more interested by nu-cohen than classic cohen. i like him with a sense of humour. i'll spend more time with it.
jim cuddy, the light that guides you home (2006) : this is solid.
sloan, never hear the end of it (2006) : hooray; sloan is interesting again! i'd almost forgotten all about sloan, but this album is really, really enjoyable.
joni mitchell, clouds (1969) : i can't believe that i've never heard this album before. i've probably listened to the mid-'70s albums more than anything else i own, from age 14 on. somehow i've always missed it, and never considered it consequential enough to pick up. initially, it's her weakest album. i will need to spend more time with it.
jane siberry, bound by the beauty (1989) : not sure why i don't have more of her records. this one is really enjoyable, despite the dodgy production sound and sometimes trite arangements. it was only $7.99!
yo la tengo, i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass (2006) : better than summer sun, for sure. the first half is really fantastic, but i'll have to spend more time with the second half.

i made a conscious effort to only get albums that i hadn't already heard. it's a different way of getting to know albums. i'm trrying to restrict my soulseek habit to things that i can't get elsewhere. such as endless versions of what the world needs now is love. i've got 16 different takes now. i especially enjoy the version by sergio mendes and brazil '66, who were a easy-listening machine along the lines of herb alpert and the tijuana brass whose gimmick was running pop songs through a bossa nova filter with multiple vocalists. these are the things that ground me.

cash on the barrelhead

2006-09-19T02:17:00.000-07:00

cosmopolis was ultimately very good. some beautiful passages near the end, but an overall eerie counterpart to game 6. several lines of dialogue are ripped directly, such as the 'peeing under the manhattan bridge' cabbie riff. other situations are nearly identical, but inverted, such as both closing sequences, each of which take place in a barren, disconnected, vaguely spiritual warehouse but with opposite power dynamics and brutally different conclusions.

now i'm reading the body artist. i love it. the pace, the slow ecstasy of every sentence. i want to read it all. i want to save it for a rainy day off. i have so much to read. i also have a lot of time, and i simply have to prioritise books. wonderful books.

it felt good to back at senate.

it also felt good to be on campus at 10 pm! i like recontextualising SFU in that way. i like it at night, in the rain.

apparently the p:ano show i saw in seattle might be their last ever. they've recorded so much uneven stuff but the occasional moments of transcendance make it all worthwhile. i liked the bumbershoot show for its willful audience antagonism.

breakpoint

2006-09-16T02:02:00.000-07:00

i began working at the purdy's chocolates in pacific centre in may of 1999. listening to massive attack, protection and any bjork makes me think of the smell of crushed almonds. the ones we put on ice cream bars. riding the skytrain back and forth. i would sit in the end of the train and take pictures of the track. for a long time i would get coffee from yogen fruz, because it was just across the way. then they closed, and i went to blenz. when blenz stopped their buy-seven-get-one-free cards, i started to go to tim hortons for a coffee and a canadian maple doughnut. this morning i had the same, on my way to class at harbour centre. that doughnut made my morning. there was a michael ignatieff event downstairs that i missed while in class. i'd like to meet him, because i don't expect he'll win. he's a terrible politician, and the liberals should know better than to elect a bumbling rookie. but on the break i ate my doughnut and returned the phone calls that i'd missed during class.

between lytton and lilooet we listened to joni mitchell, court and spark. from the campsite to pemberton, along duffy lake, we listened to the left banke. then from pemberton through whistler we listened to the best of bread.

up until 5 am last night after a night at the railway club and then denny's. fuckin' denny's. i went to class and then came home, getting no reading done in the process. i did get a book from the library, however.

my dad lent me two ferron albums. some absolutely incredible songs, esp. i never was to africa, a song that i know as a trapezoid cover. i do this: i stay up late, very focused, listening to songs over and over again, drinking tea and bourbon, reading bits and piece of my favourite books. so many books. but i find that the ferron albums remind me a lot of jane siberry. and of when i saw jane siberry in 2001 at st andrews wesley and it snowed on the way home. circular songs, precise.

i hope to get a chance to reread george melnyk's new moon at batoche soon. it was two years ago that i was still staying every other weekend at the delta hotel downtown, listening to damon and naomi, reading george melnyk. i say that john henry introduced me to cultural theory that spring but it was really reading george melnyk that fall, looking at the city. my city.

west point

2006-09-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

i feel really good about politics right now. my instincts are good, and i need to learn to trust them. i pick up on things and i am generally correct about implications and intentions. student politics stresses me out more than real politics because i can't trust that reactions will be professional. there's no even playing field. when people lose by the rules, they jump to anonymous smear campaigns. they make things up. they lie. the frustration is that the people who believe in smears at this level are the ones working in real politics. things get ugly elsewhere, sure, but there's less stupidity.

what confuses me are the tactics that are clearly built for a daily or 24-hr media cycle. anonymous smears are only useful if they get into the media or other level of public consciousness before being discredited and spun. SFU works on a 7-day media cycle. within a day of launching an anonymous smear campaign, it will be answered. on the other hand, it's a classic identifying tactic, and might as well have had a signature across the bottom for all that it's a classic move. maybe it's just a matter of keeping the opposition off base. it rattled me, just because i hate to have to be at that level. i know the rules and i work within them well. i know how to win.

in effect, we're caught in a massive and national industrial sabotage campaign. that's all. today made that very clear: this is dirty fucking pool, and it has little if anything to do with SFU at all. the question is whether people realise that. i wonder if people believe that they are working on behalf of students, when in fact they are working on behalf of a corrupt business entity.

i've monitored myself well, in terms of committment and time. i asked good questions today about the ottoman empire's bureacratic tendencies! i understand bureaucracy. my curiosity about the debate over whether newfoundland was the victim of a british/canadian conspiracy in 1949: why would canada go to such trouble for newfoundland? they seem to have caused us more worry than not. newfoundland complicates things.

john kerry would spend all day on his phone as the days wound down in 2004. he'd come to a decision and then call up someone else for a second opinion. then a third. this is a variation on analysis paralysis. if john kerry had taken 50,000 more votes in ohio, we'd have to rewrite history. kerry's cell phone addiction would be hailed as brilliant. bush's intractable nature would be derided as idiotic, rather than stolid. campaign history is a difficult beast.

they're loading bombs into the hills

2006-09-07T01:48:00.000-07:00

+ i'm desperate to read don delillo's the body artist. it looks like a prose poem at first glance. 124 pages. a novella a best. bits of prose. shards. i've been reading cosmopolis and i'm having trouble figuring it out. the waves and patterns are wonderful but there's a bitterly sardonic edge that i can't quite grasp.

+ i've stopped talking about music here, which is strange, because this is all about solipsism and personal autobiography and simple record keeping, in a sense. i don't really enjoy talking about music. sometimes i do, but not often. listening to records is intensely personal, and the associations i create are almost always individual. this is an ideal shared experience but i keep it personal.

+ my student society is now just a shill for cellular phone plans.

+ lots of reading, of all sorts. i need to make time and go for hikes before the weather turns.

woodcabin

2006-08-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

+ i admit that i've been trying for months to compute life in a small town. i would love to live in lilooet. it's beautiful. there's one grocery. several pubs. an incredibly stark landscape. i don't know if i could live in a small town, but i am interested in trying it.

but to leave the city would feel like a retreat. the city is ground zero. for everything. 80% of canadians live in cities. i get giddy when i go downtown, because i live in vancouver. i LIVE here. the most liveable city in the world. i identify with it as my home. this is where i live. so much needs to be resolved here, in any city, and to leave, no matter how wonderfully appealing, feels like giving up. just abandoning what seems to be my generation's most urgent focus.

+ does riding a bicycle change anything? if it changes anything, anything at all, even my own awareness of simple changes in the grade of familliar streets, does it matter? it's a mode of local transportation that i really enjoy. maybe that's what matters. i was reading about thomas kinkade, painter of light, which threw me back into all sorts of philosophy of art, which is why, interestingly, i'm curious about my bicycle.

+ i did very little reading today. i spent most of the day feeling guilty about not having typed up minutes for my co-op before our board meeting this evening. then i realised that the quick way to get over it all was to just type up the minutes and send them out. so i did. i felt better.

+activities that i enjoy on a daily basis:

making coffee. assembling my french press, grinding beans, plunging the grounds.
drinking coffee. at home and elsewhere.
doing dishes. if i can accomplish nothing else, i can do this. it is deeply satisfying and visceral.
reading the newspaper. any newspaper. whenever i go to another town i buy a copy of the daily newspaper and track down any local weeklies.

+ here is a photo of the last canadian:

we can build the dream with love

2006-08-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

+ i am now in three courses for the fall. hist 350 - history of the ottoman empire, hist 485 - special topics: atlantic canada, and hist 485 - special topics: history of the animal protection movement. i will be on campus tuesday and thursday, and at harbour centre friday.

+ i've started drinking stella artois, which is quite a shift from the india pale ales i was fixated on for most of the summer. it started several weeks ago when we went to my mother's house for dinner and stopped at the 148th and 108th liquor store. it was bud, molson, or stella, so i got stella. it is a nice, bright beer. pleasant. i think i'll but more tomorrow and spend most of the day sitting on the patio reading and drinking beer.

+ i'm reading don delillo's libra at long last and it's making me dizzy it's so good. i got money this week, and went out and bought a lot of books. a list:

the last canadian, which is a pulp novel from the '70s. there was no synopsis, but the cover is an image of a single figure trudging across a vast expanse of snow, with the word TERRIFYING! in the top left and the title in red. the last canadian. i'm very excited.
end zone, by don delillo, which i've read before. good, but formative. mike hingston was right about the wonderful wonderful football game.
election 2004, by the staff of newsweek. this is just 200 pages of sheer election porn. it's all bite-size campaign analysis and narrative construction. total porn.
heart of the cariboo-chilcotin, short stories and tales. i'll read this when we go camping past lilooet.
power, a popular-politics book about power generation and distribution in canada. it looks ominous, i.e. bad things are afoot!
public power, another book about power generation and distribution in canada, focused on public ownership. it was written by the leader of the ontario NDP as a campaign prop in 2003.
a pile of textbooks, which i'll document another day.

+ while camping, i finished douglas coupland's generation x and read sharon butala's the gates of the sun as well as the orange r, by nobody in particular, and decision at delphi, by helen macinnes. the latter was lovely. international espionage, kinda, but more interested in history, ideology, and the deadly consequences of situational ethics in wartime. the ending is a let down, but the first three quarters are a magnificent slow build of resentments, old politics, and nihlism. nilhlism! the orange r was pretty bad. it's a didactic cautionary tale about nuclear power, but while i was hoping for some juicy gore and mutant-exploitation, i only got a grade-nine PSA about solar power and overcoming prejudice. blah. gates of the sun is better than luna, by far, but different enough from the fourth archangel so as to defy easy comparison. i liked it a lot.

+ camping was really wonderful. we spent the first night at skihist, a provincial park above lytton, but relocated for the next three days to a forestry campsite on the other side of lilooet. it was free and gorgeous. we were right on cayoosh creek, which we used to rinse dishes, make coffee, and keep beer cold. lilooet was a home base; we went back and forth several times, also to the bc hydro campground at seton dam for free firewood. i made a series of lovely fires. we ate well. everything was beautiful.

+ not sure what i'll do this fall. i'm feeling compelled by many factors to get back into student society politics and, to an extent, i never left it. i don't want it. i want to read and drink beer. i can do that all fall, so long as the books i read are textbooks. then again, it's something that i'm good at, and that i really enjoy. i am quite certain that, at this point, i deeply regret not running for re-election in the spring.

+ it's too late now to keep reading, so i'll just have to do it in the morning. i've got a whole week left.

almost gothic

2006-08-13T15:47:00.000-07:00

this morning i slept in, listened to gordon lightfoot while doing crossword puzzles and drinking coffee, and then switched to steely dan to do dishes. then i did another crossword puzzle and drank more coffee until amanda and gar came over and we all had a stella artois. now i'm reading and waiting for laundry, still listening to steely dan. i have six straight hours of steely dan on my computer. it's nice to have friends over in the afternoon for beer.

tonight i plan to watch a three hour documentary about the siege of stalingrad, called, simply, stalingrad. last night i watched game 6, written by don delillo. i liked it. it's about baseball, essentially. all sorts of hallmarks: a burst steam pipe with asbestos lining, leading to men in hazmat suits in the street. studious repetition of dialogue, including a crucial bit in the-play-within-the-movie. lists. casual references to extreme and inappropriate violence. close analysis of baseball-as-life. is it a good film? i couldn't really tell. i was just focused on the words, the language. i'm still hoping to start reading libra on monday, after my last exam is finished. we're still hoping to get away, probably north to quesnel or so. i'd like to take the fraser canyon, but not the fraser valley. we'll probably take the sea-to-sky up to pemberton, then across through lilooet to cache creek where we'll turn north.

terms that i defined and explained the significance of for my world war II exam last tuesday:
- atomic diplomacy
- spanish civil war
- lebensraum
- neville chamberlain
- anti-semitism.

it was a week ago that i went to washington with my dad. we went to spokane for a baseball game. it was family feast night: $1 hot dogs. i had three, along with two kokanees. after the game we went to a gas station, bought beer, and drank it until 1 a.m. while arguing about philosophies of art. is it the process? the intention? the artifact itself? the next morning we went to coeur d'alene in idaho, nearly got lost on the way to elk, and then had mexican for lunch in grand coulee. we didn't get a tour of the grand coulee dam, but we did spend nearly an hour in the interpretative visitors' centre. everything about the grand coulee dam is cool. i learned so much! we passed through a forest fire near omak and came back through the skagit river valley.

i don't really want to leave the house today, except to walk around the park. there's so much to read at home! and beer! and food! and stalingrad! i'll make a caesar salad for dinner.

rounds

2006-08-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

last night i read a good 400 pages of articles about world war II. the subject areas i covered:

life in the third reich - the war years, 1939-1945
german occupation policy, part I - germany's new order
german occupation policy part II - life under the rule of germany and its allies
the "final solution" - 1941-1945

I read a 30 page article about intentionalist v. functionalist interpretations of the final solution.

now i'm drinking gin and tonics, waiting for jan to come back from a membership committee meeting so that we can go out for dinner.

tomorrow morning i should be going on a two-day road trip to spokane with my father to see a baseball game, but we haven't confirmed. i imagine that he will just show up tomorrow morning. we've got a scenic route mapped out through norrth-central washington. we'll be able to stop by the grand coulee dam on the way back.

neverending math equation

2006-07-30T00:27:00.000-07:00

we had a camp out of sorts in convo mall yesterday, which took me back to 2003, and my introduction to politics.

i regret not being on the board this year, but i don't regret not running. stepping aside was healthy, in a personal sense. it helped to further clarify everything, really.

i've become deeply fascinated by the developing midterm congressional elections in the US. we're still three months away. joe lieberman could lose the democratc nomination in connecticut.

i was floored by the campaign video of jim talent, republican senator for missouri. an incumbent senator in the party that holds both houses of congress and the white house is running on an anti-washington platform. it's ludicrous. i still believe that jim green and co. would have won the municipal election had they run an anti-city hall camapign, however. jim talent understands his base better than the left in vancouver does. NPA=status quo. if you say 'keep a good thing going', you elect the NPA. jim should have campaigned to continue the insurgency.

mojave 3 and phoenix will be here in the same week this september. the 24th and 26th, i believe.

a swiftly tilting planet

2006-07-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

notes:
+ i've got exactly seven courses left in my degree. three more upper division political science courses and four more upper division history courses will give me 123 credits, a history major with a north american concentration, and a political science minor. i can do three courses this fall, three in the spring, and one next summer. next summer will give me breathing room, in case there are any snafus. next week i will declare a polisci minor and drop my labour studies minor. it's strange; i feel that there is so much more that i should know before graduating.

+ three beers currently come in stubbies: red cap, red stripe, and phoenix gold lager. i like the latter best. it's got a gorgeous retro label and it's tasty too, unlike red stripe and red cap. we played canasta last night while drinking, variously, lemon rum, gin, rye, and beer. i've never had rye whisky before; it tastes like candy. so sweet. my favourite tonic water is the superstore house brand; i think it is 'president's choice'. the safeway house brand and schweppes are lousy. canada dry is ok. in any case, i prefer plymouth gin.

+ amanda and i walked into CJSF today and got ourselves a radio show! we'll be doing segments, possibly leading to full hosting duties, of 'sfu news and issues' this fall. finally, an outlet. maybe i'll finally try to start a music show too while i'm at it.

+ we went through the residences today, and i got all nostalgic for my summer in shell house. that was three years ago. 2003. wild. it changed the way i see the campus.

+ my mussolini paper is now late, but i've got very little (aside from 25% of my grade) invested in it. i did get 35/40 on my internationalisation paper, which equals 87.5%. i failed to investigate the history of the conception of 'trade in services', whioch would definitely have added a lot of meat. i've got about four of the 10 pages i need for the mussolini paper, and can fill at least two up with the moderate/maximallist/hardline tensions in italian socialism from 1919-1924. then another page or two on the technocrat/populist/peasant/industrialist/bourgeoise tensions within fascism over the same period. maybe i'll fill a page with quotes of mussolini hating socialists. he made several speeches about it.

+ five years later, the doha round of WTO negotiations has collapsed. no one seems to care! guys, this was a big deal in 2001; they moved to qatar specifically to avoid protests and media coverage. in a sense, it's smart that we aren't celebrating:
see, in multilateral negotiations, there's always someone who can jam the system, which is why the doha round has put multilateral liberalisation of trade "somewhere between intensive care and the crematorium", to quote india's minister for trade and industry. multilateralism is being replaced with bilateralism, which is far more closed door than the WTO ever could be. the left went from strong systemic criticism of international trade regimes to hipster bicycle fetish parties. what the fuck? the drive to make make social change fun so that people will want to join in has turned into an 'up with people' celebration of our own awesomeness. i miss bill clinton. we didn't hate him; we hated what stood behind him. now we all hate bush so much that we're ignoring the machine.

these early days

2006-07-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

washington was wonderful. learning about different organisational cultures is always fun, as is being in towns that i've never seen before. i'd like to spend a lot of time in washington state. i'd like to spend a lot of time everywhere.

delillo's players finally kicks in about halfway through. he starts talking about terrorists and global capital and computers and it's all wonderful. currents of invisible life. waves and charges.

in a recognition that i do, in fact, live below the poverty line, i've spent the last several days downloading a lot of albums from soulseek.

the millennium, begin (1968) - lovely soft/sunshine pop album. curt boettcher arranged a lot of the association's more ornate stuff. thi is kinda up-with-people, but i really love that. touchstones!
the association, anthology (1960s) - more lovely sunshine pop, less ornate; the geeky indie version of the 5th dimension.
everything but the girl, idlewild (1988) - solid and wonderful adult contemporary. my vinyl copy is worn out! the other, less skilled but more honest side of swing out sister. 'the night i heard caruso sing' is about the cold war, and the little things that help people get by! it's all detail.
luscious jackson, fever in fever out (1997) - who knew! this is a really super album. i also really enjoy the 1999 semi-hit 'ladyfingers'. i listened to 'naked eye' all day on saturday. i understand why people mock this band, but, again, i've separated myself from the decade-old hype and it's a really nice album!
jobriath, jobriath (1973) - the biggest gayest glam star that never really made it. bowie was ambiguous, but jobriath was just really gay. morrissey is a big fan! i can hardly handle it all. gospel and swagger!
the pursuit of happiness, love junk (1988) - super cancon power pop. i've been playing guitar along with all of the basslines. i requested the replacements, 'bastards of young' when moe berg was DJing at the tap, on bloor st in toronto, and he played it. that is my moe berg story!
sonic youth, rather ripped (2006) - somehow, i've never ever listened to sonic youth. justin was playing this at the peak on friday and i really enjoyed it. gorgeous guitar sounds; 'incinerate' has a wonderful pace.
modest mouse, this is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (1997) - not sure why i've never heard this before. i have been listening to lonesome crowded west a lot lately.
bread, the very best of (1970s) - soft soft rock. i love everything.

i miss aspects of my old job a lot. i miss having authority and backing. telling people that i could take care of something, or arrange to have something raised at the appropriate point, or the ability to have a positive influence over my community. a lot of it is ego. when my term on the co-op board is up, i'll be out of a functional governance position for the first time in several years. i'll still have senate, and NDP committments. i imagine i'll just dive into those a little more. i do love high level decision making, though. it's a comfort zone for me at the university now. i have to remember that these are still early days. the question of the large v. small life is still weighing. early days. i don't know what could possibly be on my polisci final exam, because the course is really just about how things are. the current of invisible life - transnational flows of currency. little green numbers on boards. shipments tracked by satellite. a stock portfolio. my stock portfolio. i explained mao II today as being about the supplanting of novelists by terrorists in the world of ideas. white noise is about the fear of death, but also about academia. hitler, as a cipher for total unimpeachable meaning, is just a token, a lifestyle, a field of study. nothing means anything. or, everything means everything to everybody. cans of food in supermarkets! labels!

i listened to scott walker on repeat at the peak on friday. i'd be working, then stop and just stare at the stereo.

progress board

2006-07-12T01:16:00.000-07:00

for anyone who was curious, my paper, "the collision of internationalisation and privatisation at sfu" is finished at about 3600 words. it's not bad, i guess.

i'll be up in about 4 1/2 hours to go to washington state. it's been a good day.

let me lead you into love

2006-07-11T00:43:00.000-07:00

we've moved. it's an adult house. an upstairs, a downstairs, a courtyard/patio, a real kitchen, laundry. we got a new bookshelf and it is already 2/3 full. it's nice to be surrounded by books and records again. i can feel stress rolling off of me. an 8 month move, man. we're not quite organised, but almost enough to feel settled. from our windows we can hear the skytrain in grandview cut and the signal at the crosswalk telling blind people that it's time to go.

i'm stalled at 1200 words now, and i'll be having jan deliver my paper to the polysci depertment on wednesday for 5% off in late marks. this lets me work all day at the library tomorrow. i had to come home early today, and was only at the library between 12 and 5, due to a 7.30 co-op meeting. since 2003 i have been doing the bulk of my paper writing at the library, and it really works for me. i invariably meet caelie there, but it's ok because we're both working on papers, albeit of different scales. we provide each other with mutual decompression.

i'm not stuck, just stalled. i write in chaotic chunks. i'll leave paragraphs unfinished, and jump around, so that any time that i get stuck on the phrasing of a certain thought i can jump to another. it's a strategy for maintaining momentum. there's always a thought to finish. i can't work at home anymore. there's just too much else going on. books. so many books.

working vacation this week; a trip through central washington with university administrators and some student society teammates. i think they hate me. the latter, that is. it makes for a funny dynamic, feeling distrusted and disliked by fellow students but comfortable and freewheeeling with administrators. we're spending the night in ellensburg. ellensburg has the highest number of coffee cafes per capita in the world. 34% of the 15,000 residents are below the poverty line.

i have a book titled nuclear choices. it's a not a metaphor, though it easily could be. is it a double entendre if the second meaning is merely the first-as-metaphor? i was trying to work last night, and ended up reading pieces of nuclear choices and vancouver: from milltown to metropolis. see, this is becoming a definite problematic.

my bicycle is in the courtyard, which will certainly incline me towards running smaller errands on it. when i have to fetch it from a different space, it feels like an adventure rather than daily life. i rode to and from the baseball game with rich and his friend aaron on saturday night. our team went from 0-3 to 4-3 in the bottom of the eighth! such excitement. baseball makes me want to read don delillo.

sean is coming back this fall. i hope that we'll do a lot of hiking together. he'll be for me what i am for amanda. we have to get her to my level so that sean can help us both.

internationalisation in post-secondary education. GATS. globalisation. institutional drivers. IBT. i'm using my own meetings this spring as references for this paper. i'm writing about my own work. it's exciting, in a sense; this is the only the second paper i've written that i feel is actually a contribution to our collective knowledge. no one else has written this paper with these sources. no one else has done this work in this context. i know this for a fact. now i am excited. tomorrow, when i'm working at the library, i'll keep that going as a mantra. thousands of people have written about world war II, mussolini, communism, and every possible combination thereof. very few people are writing about internationalisation in post secondary education. even fewer are writing about it in the BC context. even fewer are writing about SFU, and none of them, as far as i know, sat on senate or SCUP during this spring's IBT discussions.

capital flight

2006-07-06T01:01:00.000-07:00

i went to the walk-in clinic today to get help for my finger, which is infected. it was all puffy on the side, with a nice spot of pus beside the nail. the doctor recognised it right away, and i was out within five minutes. after picking up my prescription, i checked the active ingredient in the sleep aid 'nytol'. yes, it was diphenhydramine again. i.e. the same agent is sold under two different named with two different uses: benadryl for allergies and nytol for sleeping. i also seem to have developed an incredible sensitivity to medical situations. i didn't faint, but i nearly did. it was a delayed reaction; i made it in and out before i felt the effects, but they came on hard when i got to safeway to fill the prescription.

i've been preoccupied to some extent with the concerns of jack gladney in delillo's white noise, esp. around the effects of consumed agents. the horrible intertwining of my chance encouters with, say, benzene, and my ultimate fate as an individual. will my death be any more than the sum of my ingested chemical traces? flashing stars. nyodene d. myelx. i'm looking forward to reading libra. i've had no urge to read past 60 pages of players, though. i'm enjoying rules of engagement; it's better than minus time.

i've left myself 3 days to write this paper. tomorrow i will be moving, all day. on friday i will be peaking all day, with the exception of lunch, when i hope to meet pauline at the highland pub. can i pull it off? probably. i met my neighbour liz today, who said 'ah, whatever; that's 16 pages. the introduction to my thesis was longer.' her thesis was about non-verbal pain cues. i.e. how humans express the level of pain they are experiencing through non-verbal cues. there are lots of applications, from accurate WCB claims to identifying instances of systemic racism in emergency rooms. i love hearing about people's enthusiasms, esp. when they are guarded about sharing them.

some words: thixotropic. isostasy.

joni mitchell's the hissing of summer lawns has become completelty inseparable from family road trips to eugene, oregon. there's a huge overwhelming sense of the unreachable to this album as well. court and spark, blue, don juan's reckless daughter, and esp. hejira do this to me as well. an intense nostalgia coupled with a severe mystery. would i be happy holed up in a cabin with my record collection and library? yes, for a time, at least.

food technology. the profession of 'food technologist'.

rifles in their hands

2006-07-05T02:33:00.000-07:00

i've finished minus time, and may move on to rules of engagement, also by catherine bush, next. i started it today; it's really good, again. 40 pages in, it reads as definitely more mature than minus time. helen was unquestionably still growing up and sorting her childhood out. arcadia has her own life. it seems as though this novel will address my long-standing concern with polisci students; they learn all about how the world works, but consider themselves all to often 'above the fray', too studiously removed to treat actual politics with anything more than a curious disdain.

on sunday we went to lynn headwaters and hiked all day. we've got good stamina. with water and snacks, we could do something more serious. as it was, we chanced giardia and cryptosporidium by drinking from norvan creek. it was delicious. i've been skeptical of the 'most liveable city' title, but i felt it on sunday. this city is beautiful. perhaps we will go to belcarra next week? or a hike on top of buntzen lake?

i got quite drunk off of several gin and tonics. in fact, far more drunk than i should have been. i attribute it to the exercise and dehydration earlier in the day. maybe i had a parasite after all? i was mixing them in a bombay sapphire bottle again, which feels so wonderfully classy. it's a gorgeous colour.

we really will be moving. we spent some time in the new townhouse tonight and it is very nice. i can sleep well thinking of how to lay out my den and organise my bookshelves. the kitchen is beautiful; new everything. beaonca, who moved out, left us two frozen pounds of ground beef and a 2 litre jar of sauerkraut. we will eat the beef but will happily send the sauerkraut to a good home. maybe we will have a sauerkraut party? we've got a gorgeous washer and dryer setup as well. it feels like a place where adults would live. the courtyard will be fine, if a bit barren. perhaps a housewarming in august.

i simply can't focus on my polisci paper. i'll try again at school tomorrow. i can't feel the crunch, the pressure. i'm hoping that moving will kickstart me. 4000 words; 6 days. only preliminary research done so far.

navigation lights

2006-06-29T23:28:00.000-07:00

it's been over a month since i've gotten a comment aside from tilley telling me "dude, your blog is boring!". what a pal. this just amps up the solipsism, though, which is not a problem. i'll devolve into lists of parks, brand names, cities, records. "shards of prose".

i got nothing accomplished today, aside from all sorts of lovely conversation.

my house is becoming overwhelmingly depressing. we need to move. we will, between next wednesday and saturday. supposedly. we've been "about to move" since march.

i live in the most liveable city on the planet. we were demoted to second, once, in favour of zurich, i believe. many thousands of people would like to move to the city that i live in. this is the best city on the continent. this is as good as it gets. i live here.

i have a 1500 word assignment due tomorrow for HIST 339. it's a comparative essay, analysing two articles about the differential experiences of indigenous peoples in new zealand and australia following british colonisation. it's actually quite a fascinating subject, but i can't drum up the energy to write about it.

hopefully, i'll go hiking on saturday. i want to hike all day, up golden ears and back.

theory of pension

2006-06-27T23:44:00.000-07:00

todd haynes' safe is a film that i would like to own. julianne moore becomes allergic to the modern world, and retreats further and further from life. the film is ambiguous as to whether her condition is physical, mental, or psychosomatic. the film is also ambiguous, often uncomfortably so, in its treatment of the surrounding cast, from doctors to julianne moore's LA friends to the leaders of the hippie commune she ends up in.

there are five things for which i feel no guilt for consuming.

books
records
information
alcohol
public transit

i picked up a new bicycle route map from the library today. i've long wanted them to add little icons indicating where the steep hills are, and they've done just that for the 2006 edition! the only new routes listed are downtown, but i'm happy to have them.

new records, too. i felt depressed, so i bought records. it never fails.

scott walker, tilt (1995)
scott walker, climate of hunter (1984) - bob stanley from saint etienne wrote the liner notes!
heather duby, come across the river (2003)
the ecstasy of saint theresa, susurrate (1992)

some days i just can't make it out of bed. this is only a problem if it begins to negatively impact my life. it does, but my sub-par is apparently enough to get through the day without attracting undesired attention. am i a high-functioning alcoholic, or just a high-functioning individual? the two do not preclude each other, by any means.

today, the newspaper says that junichiro koizumi, prime minister is a mega-elvis fan. he's visiting with george bush, but only after he makes a pilgrimage to graceland.

my camera is back in working order, three years later. the second repair was under warranty.

stadium house

2006-06-25T01:00:00.000-07:00

today i read a week's worth of newspapers between 12-4am, slept until 1pm, and spent the rest of the day reading about world war II. if this is really autobiography for me, i should be adding more details.

i got a phone call from a woman, julie, who'd found my number on a cell phone that she found at granville island. did i know anyone who'd lost a cell phone? no, but i only know one person who has my number and spends time at granville island. rich got his phone back from julie after i called his home and left him her number. he left his phone at granville island because he was distracted by a cute girl. in a few days he'll be going back to california for a wedding. he's going to fort bragg. it's several hours north of san francisco, on the coast.
i've been exchanging e.mails with a good friend all day, and it's reminded me of how rarely i use e.mail for actual communication. when i was in high school, i'd use e.mail to write long letters. my address was 'harder@intergate.bc.ca'. i wrote "fx: the series" fanfiction, and made a lot of friends across the continent on an "fx: the series" bulletin board.
catherine bush's minus time is wonderful. it reminds me a lot of margaret atwood, but more ambiguous, less didactic. i'm really enjoying it.
tomorrow i'll continue reading about world war II and the british empire. this week, i have to do a lot of work on my polisci term paper, due july 11.

the stage furniture of fascism

2006-06-19T01:19:00.000-07:00

-x men 3 was definitely enjoyable to watch, but i agree with kevin that the political subtext has changed for the worse. all the ambiguity of outright resistance v. tentative cooperation that made the first two so interesting in a political sense was gone. now we have explicitly evil mutants and explicitly good mutants. what this movie had to say about the proper fate of subcultures was disconcerting; the phrases 'collaboration of local elites' and 'native informants' kept popping up for me.

the signifiers for 'good mutants' and 'bad mutants' really bothered me. on one hand, we have the brotherhood of 'bad' mutants, who are dressed up like punks and goths. magneto's team is pierced, tattooed, androgynous, over-sexualised, 'bad-ass'. name an 'alternative' 90's subculture, and their touchstones were gathered to destroy the human race. on the other hand, our heroes are predominantly clean-cut, well-dressed, from middle class suburban backgrounds. the film ended with an extended riff on the jocks beating up the geeks.

-when i was a teenager, there were all sorts of viable pizza delivery options. the big ones that i recall were little caesar's, domino's, pizza hut, and panagopolous. when i was much younger, godfather's pizza was a viable option, but more so for eating out. i remember the restaurants as very dark, ominous, tinted glass, dark booths, low hanging tiffany lamps with low-wattage bulbs. pizza only came with mushrooms, green peppers, and pepperoni. i remember the gimmicks in the mid-1990's. pizza hut put cheese in the crust: the 'stuffed crust'. domino's made square pizzas, just because. did little caesar's come with 'crazy bread? crazy bread meant twisted breadsticks with garlic and parmesan cheese. it might have been domino's. in toronto, i knew things were different because of pizza pizza, which i had never seen before. panagopolous had a cartoon rock band, called 'the panaplettes', loosely modeled after the california raisins. my parents still have a 'panaplettes world tour '92' button up in the kitchen. at some point in the last five/ten years, panagopolous shortened their name to panago and became the automatic pizza delivery option in vancouver. in every context in which i have ordered pizza in the past four years, i have either had local independent pizza or panago. panago is canadian, and is based in abbotsford; i do not know how far across the country they extend now, but i do not believe they have crossed the prairies. i wonder how they gained total market saturation in such a short time. i get domino's flyers on occasion, but it would never occur to me to order from them. i have not seen a little caesar's in years. the godfather's concept seems utterly anachronistic now, but my memories are very vivid.

-white spot has over 60 locations, almost entirely in BC. several outlets have opened in alberta, and several have opened in hong kong. there is a second cup franchise in dubai. there is a tim horton's franchise in kandahar. i don't even know what kandahar is. maybe if canada wins the war, the new afghanistan will give us a square mile of their country to call our own, like the french did after world war II. one square mile of vimy ridge is officially canadian territory. i believe that it is our only exclave.

-in related news, i recently found out that my 16 year old cousin plays drums in a punk/jam band called vimy ridge.

-i'd like a job that would send me to dubai on business, but i think that i would end up dizzy from the sheer post-modernity of it all.

things that are terrible

2006-06-16T02:01:00.000-07:00

listening to scott walker's tilt now. after eight glacial minutes of 'bouncer see bouncer', 'manhattan' absolutely explodes. i've been reading acres of text about how difficult and obtuse this album is. i love it; it's surprisingly accessible, but then i guess anything would be given the hype. 'the most difficult album that is worth working at'. yeah, it's worth it. this album matters! i will buy climate of hunter next. i regret not picking it up when i was downtown this afternoon. scratch has a copy! no one has copies of tilt or the drift. what do i put on after tilt? ah, randomly, saint etienne, 'he's on the phone'. i love everything.

i've decided to go back to canlit after second foundation is done. with luck, i'll be able to finish it tomorrow. next up is minus time, by catherine bush. it is about family alienation in the 1990s, made concrete by the mother's career as an astronaut going for a space endurance record, literally disconnected from earth. i picked it up on a whim, and am eager for it to be good. i worry that it will be sub-par instant zeitgeist pastiche. i hope that it will say something to me about my life. i also got my fifth sharon butala book, and the first in her loose trilogy, before luna and the fourth archangel. both novels are flawed, i feel, but i enjoy reading them. gates of the sun will be up after minus time. i am saving delillo's libra for the semester break.

there are days that i just want to curl up with art, any art. records and books. not even a consistent novel, but snippets and shards. bits of prose.

i picked up photos today for the first time since 2003, when we lived on dundas. my camera is back with vancam, but i shoiuld be able to pick it up again in 10 days with a repaired light meter. the photos i took without it are good, but consistently over-exposed. some are very, very nice, though.

escape to witch mountain

2006-06-15T03:33:00.000-07:00

at the same time, i'm relishing scott walker's monolithic the drift and anne murray's talk it over in the morning. it's all one long song. today i bought the new paul simon and phoenix albums. i looked for the drift but nobody has it. my auto-genre-selector calls scott walker avant-garde.

some of my very favourite songs:

veda hille, noah's ark (1998)
scott walker, it's raining today (1969)
spanky and our gang, leopard skin phones (1968)
phoenix, napoleon says (2006)
mojave 3, the mutineer (2006)
swing out sister, you on my mind (1989)
underworld, pearl's girl (1996)
rickie lee jones, coolsville (1979)
joe jackson, the verdict (1984)
steely dan, doctor wu (1975)

i tried to make it through the day without diphenhydramine. i was sneezing consistently and squinting a lot, but the itchy eyes finally drove me to the little pink pills at 6 pm, before i took out the dog. i was promptly knocked out. at 10.30 pm, with a fair amount of reading left to do, i decided to turn the situation around; i made myself a cup of coffee. now i am awake and going strong at 3.40am, thursday morning. the last two nights i have been in bed by 11.00, but awake between 1.30-3.00 am, unable to sleep. i then sleep in until 11.30 am. the next day. i wanted to go to the sustainability shindig tomorrow, but i know that i will not be functional until the early afternoon.

my iTunes: 6853 songs; 26.5 GB; 19 days, 12 hours, 13 minutes and 34 seconds; 695 albums; 299 artists.
the current top 10 most played:

paul simon, rhythm of the saints
dusty springfield, in the land of make believe
mojave 3, the mutineer
the new pornographers, sing me spanish techno
phoenix, consolation prizes
scott walker, we came through
a girl called eddy, tears all over town
cher, gypsies, tramps, and thieves
dillard and clark, the radio song
donald fagen, what i do

see, #s 7-10 are all at 6 plays each, along with the next 17 songs on the all-time list. it's ranked alphabetically.

birds are singing and the sky is beginning to lighten. i am awake! things i need in life? a vacation. time in another city/country/region/climate. i'll be seeing my dad this sunday, and i am really looking forward to talking to him about records. there actually isn't anyone else that i can talk about records with, except rich, except i never see him either. i just hate talking about music. but i LOVE it. i've been thinking of ways to lead off a review of the drift for the peak. "any discussion of latter-day scott walker inevitably dissolves into a question of high-art vs. low art, authenticity of creation and of appreciation..." i like it, but why?

tomorrow i will undoubtedly be a wreck, but i'm not terribly concerned about it. by tomorrow i mean later today. tomorrow afternoon i will go downtown to pick up two rolls worth of photos. one has been sitting on my bookshelf for about two years; i have no idea what is on it.

satellites as cultural death stars

2006-06-13T00:39:00.000-07:00

- the liberal leadership race is a gong show. volpe is a crook. kennedy is a slave to ethnic ward bosses. ignatieff is a grouchy old man. brison is an impetuous snot. rae is a dud. fry is just loopy. bevilacqua is an unrepentant free-trader. bennett is a patrician. dion was pied! dryden is just really fucking dull. i admire hall-findlay, and would happily vote for her, were i under duress. her rejoinder to brison re. his vote to stay in afghanistan for several more years was on point: he suggested that avoiding an unfavourable headline in the new york times was of key importance, and she hit the obvious comeback. i saved a poster from SFU advertising an upcoming appearance of hers in coquitlam; rather than showcase her own photo, the sheet had a headshot of wilfred laurier.

- i got through the day without any diphenhydramine; i can only hope that the season is subsiding.

- today i got through the battle for north africa and most of the eastern front. on wednesday i will read about the home front and news reporting/propaganda. i am approx. two (2) weeks behind in my british empire readings. i hope to work on those on wednesday and thursday. possibly tomorrow as well.

- when i finish isaac asimov's second foundation i will either read the orange r or delillo's players.
it is also possible that i will read some star trek novels. TOS #39 - bloodthirst!

an almost indescribable sense of terror and doom

2006-06-07T23:38:00.000-07:00

i've written this over four days. at the moment, i am at once highly concerned about the effects of Benadryl (diphenhydramine) on my life and curious about taking significantly higher doses in a controlled environment. several of its side effects correspond to symptoms i have recognised in myself this summer: dry nose and throat, increased sensitivity to light, blurred vision, short term memory loss, and several central nervous system effects associated with delerium. most excitingly/terrifyingly, diphenhydramine is distinguished from common psychedelics due to a unique difficulty in differentiating hallucinations from reality. i.e. really fucked up.

clearly, the lesson is to stop taking diphenhydramine. at least, not on a daily basis. i hope that my seeming inability to retain information from my recent WWII course readings is due to my drug habits, as opposed to a sudden decline in my inherent capacity to synthesize information. the problem is that diphenhydramine stops my hayfever symptoms. the itchy eyes and runny nose are infinitely more obtrusive in my daily life than the side effects i currently experience. nothing else works.

diphenhydramine is an anticholinergic agent. i.e. it acts as an inhibitor to acetylcholine receptors. 'magic mushrooms' act as antagonists for the same receptors, making the effects of Benadryl diametrically opposite to the effects of mushrooms.

working as a copy editor has made me hyper-attuned to hyphen use in daily life, as well as the production features of major daily newspapers.

don delillo is apparently a leading figure in the 'hysterical realism' genre. its key is the 'extravagant treatment of everyday events'. sometimes, i love don delillo more than life itself.

all the rest was written earlier. i figure i might as well post it. this is a highly mediated form of constant autobiography.

my own fucking ten!

damon and naomi!
scott walker's the drift!
three new pairs of pants, four new shirts, and a sweater vest!
buying records!
swing out sister's kaleidoscope world!
joe jackson!
the music taste of a 40 year old man!
baseball!
gin and tonic!
maybe, possibly, hopefully settling into a new house in less than 30 days after roughly 240 days (8 mo.) of various states of moving.

american politics astound me. most interestingly, there is no defined leader of either party. is the repub. leader bush? hastert? frist? harder still, who is the dem leader? dean? pelosi? reid? democrats who could run for president: bayh, warner, clinton, edwards, feingold. gore and kerry too. 435 congress seats are up in november. i'd love to run for congress. nevada's 2nd. california's 43rd. illinois' 8th. georgia's 5th. some states have only one congressional district. vermont is an example. for 12(?) years, it has been represented by bernie sanders, an independent socialist. now, jim jeffords is retiring from his senate seat and sanders is running to replace him. the democrats will leave him uncontested, so he is sure to win.

see, everyone is expecting the democrats to do very well this november. they could take the senate. they need a net gain of 6 seats: pennsylvania, ohio, montana, missouri, rhode island, tennessee. imagine: 435 seats, open every 2 years. plus 33 senate seats. wild.

the last president to be elected from congress was john f. kennedy, in 1960. kerry came the closest; 100,000 votes difference in ohio would have swung the election.

action and anticipation

2006-06-07T00:22:00.000-07:00

i am learning a lot this summer! i have two more maps to add to my growing collection now, of washington state. i'd like to see a lot more of it, esp. mt st helens again, hanford nuclear facility, grand coulee dam, and the olympic peninsula.

india pale ales that i've had:

phillips IPA, from esquimalt
tree 'hop head' IPA, from kelowna
nelson 'paddywhack' IPA, from nelson
pyramid 'thunderhead' IPA, from washington state
bridgeport IPA, from portland

it's my favourite beer. i need to take time before drinking another beer, because everything else tastes like budweiser
i had a lot of bad beer last may. i would stay 1-2 hours after everyone else some days on the kingsway campaign to get data entered, and all we had in the office was budweiser. my favourite gin is plymouth. i also like bombay sapphire, but i do not like tanqueray.

i'm listening to a lot. my itunes is keeping me up at light, because it just keeps on going. there's no natural stop, and all of my favourite albums are instantly accessible.

century egg #2

2006-05-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

two realizations.

1. i have idols! i've concluded that there are two people i have had the opportunity to work with over the past year that have become idols to me. i consider myself lucky to have worked with them and hope to have the chance to work with them in the future!

2. i love music! i absolutely do!

also, i need to chill out.

golden phoenix

2006-05-23T03:27:00.000-07:00

i spent the last week thinking about how similar globalism rhetoric is to the rhetoric of the british empire in its heyday, and then i came across an article that made the connection explicitly, and positively. i.e. globalism is great, it is doing just what the british empire did. gosh.

the british empire, in the 1800s, began to relax somewhat in creating a formal empire in favour of an 'informal' empire, where all of the benefits in trading rights and market access are accrued without any of the expenditure in military force and local administration. smart business, that. bush has taken clinton's informal empire and made it explicit and overt. while 'no one is in charge of globalization' was once a central tenet of globalism, the us has become explicit about its mission and leadership role. btw, how much longer can we continue to suggest that a smaller gov't is a goal of globalism when it is only state power that keeps it going? it is a shift in the focus of state 'intrusion', not a general reduction in its activities. oh, and the complicating factor of democratic states electing leaders that don't like globalism? what happens then? if democracy = liberalism, then hamas wouldn't win elections. no wonder peter mackay tripped on that one. this is all making me nostalgic! i read about these things between 2000-2003.

i said on friday that dubai seems taken straight from a don delillo novel. i want to know what he thinks of it all. the biggest mall in the world. a gigantic island, just because. see, the seven emirs of the UAE only got together to keep up with the game. 'hey, nation-states seem to be the hot new thing. let's make one of our own!' ergo, UAE. dubai has been characterized as a city state. perhaps it is just ahead of the curve this time? i think about dubai a lot.

why does everybody need a job? because we cannot sustain ourselves by our own means without over-producing something to trade with someone else? the answer is in economies of scale. what will we do if our supply chains are interrupted?

although i've diagnosed myself with a combination of acute sleep deprivation and a mild form of general anxiety disorder, i'm still awake at 3.30am. i am rapidly accruing comfortable domestic trappings without either the stable income or relatively defined career path. career paths are terrifying me lately. we look at the employment histories of people applying for positions at the university and judge their career paths. i expect to get just under 4 hrs. of sleep tonight.

kensington - cedar cottage

2006-05-17T22:37:00.000-07:00

this is the second attempt at a post. i simply do not have the patience to painstakingly reconstruct the entire post that i unwittingly deleted. see, i am using safari, which features tabbed browsing! i often make the mistake of closing the entire window when i mean to close a tab. i just closed the entire window, including my 'blogger.com' tab, without saving a draft. mozilla gives you a warning: 'you are about to close 5 tabs. proceed?' i am now going to finally install mozilla.

a summary!

i got a case of beer on monday and one of the bottles was empty! it was easy to return it for another case.
i like india pale ales and sean doesn't. IPA was made by the british in india, as they attempted to find a beer that would not spoil in the hot climate.
i am interested in learning more about british india
i am interested in learning more about the end of the ottoman empire
we were told in my POL 327 tutorial that wikipedia is not an acceptable source for a research essay. from an earlier version of the 'political parties of latvia' page: Badass Nigger Foundation or BNF; this is largely believed to consist of Sweet Sweetback, the only black man in all of Europe
i like politics and committee work but i do not like the student society.
i like music.
i like isaac asimov's foundation trilogy a lot, and am now on the second book. we've covered some 200-odd years of history now, and when there are references to historical events in subsequent chapters (every 20 pages or so) i get very nostalgic, even though i only read the referenced event last week. incredible. i only read it on the skytrain and bus, and i only read textbooks at home.

also, unsurprisingly, dose is ceasing publication, as of today. on a typical skytrain car in the morning, i will see 15 copies of 24hrs, 8-10 metros, and maybe 1 dose. nobody reads it because it is LAME and it tries too hard. lame pseudo-hipster trendoid cheesy and LAME newspaper. now i feel smug! DOSE was our OK SODA. kinda. quote from the toronto star: "dose wasn't funny". so true, so true.

i am smug about the failure of dose. is this akin to people's smugness at the failure of david blaine to break his underwater breathing record or the failure of the segway human transporter? yes, because these are all tales of hubris! these are life lessons to the rest of us, reminding us to not get ahead of ourselves and always stay grounded. i feel no guilt over my smugness at dose's failure! they were dishonest.

i remember when they picked the new pope! i was in bed, listening to 'the current' on CBC. they had a correspondent in vatican city. "white smoke. the smoke is definitely white this time. they've picked a new pope". several days earlier, kevin, amanda, and i had been discussing the pope selection process over breakfast at the sunny spot cafe. i remember this very vividly!

oh, also! we watched the 'no logo' movie in class on tuesday, and i got very very nostalgic. people marching in streets with nike logos on placards! i read no logo in 1998(1999?) when i was in high school, and this reminded of that time. going to high school, thinking about logos and branding and global supply chains and lifestyle marketing!

kitsault

2006-05-14T00:30:00.000-07:00

today, after eating lunch at bao chau and getting dog food, we went to a used bookstore, 'companion books', in burnaby. i got

the orange r, by john clagett (1978). a science fiction novel about america after nuclear contamination. society is segregated between those who are radioactive, called 'roberts', and the 'normals'. now, the normals believe that they have found a safe new way of producing nuclear power, and only the roberts can warn them of the horrible dangers. i expect that it will be a didactic screed against nuclear energy!
second foundation, by isaac asimov (1953). i am nearly finished foundation, and i now have the next two books in the series ready to go. gar, do you need to borrow this? i will probably not get to it for at least a month.
white niggers of america, by pierre vallieres (1968). the title, of course, refers to les habitants. the original subtitle translated as 'the autobiography of a quebecois terrorist'. this book is considered a manifesto of sorts for the FLQ, who kidnapped and killed pierre laporte 2 years after its publication. laporte was strangled to death with his rosary beads.
decision at delphi, by helen macinnes (1960). i read this many times in high school, and now have my own copy. it's international espionage(!) set against the backdrop of post-civil war greece. i have always related this book to delillo's the names, set in greece some 20 years later.
louis riel: a comic-strip biography by chester brown (2003). i have wanted to read this since it was released! today was the first time i'd seen it used, and it is in immaculate condition.

we have begun to move boxes over to our new townhouse on the other side of the co-op. i'll finally reorganize my bookshelf, i hope. jan and i may amalgamate our collections to some extent. we have not yet settled where the bookshelves will end up or what books will go where. we will definitely need at least one new bookshelf.

when i have some free time at the end of the summer, i will go back to companion books and clean out some of their arthur c. clarke. i am also considering picking up some paperback ray bradbury short story collections. i have a huge, hardcover collection with all of his stories, but it is hard to read anywhere but home due to the sheer size and weight. several smaller collections at 3.00 apiece may be a wise investment.

the outer worlds

2006-05-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

+6148 songs in iTunes now, which translates to 17.6 days. 2279 of those are still unplayed. my most listened to track is still paul simon, rhythm of the saints. i listened to scott walker, nite flights 5 times yesterday before i backed off, not wanting something to take the top spot after two days in the library.
+four days on the sunshine coast! another camping trip in the middle of june, too. possibly to manning park.
+i am going in late to the peak today. i'd hoped to be in by 11.30, but it's 11.45 now and i'm still at home waking up. i made coffee and read the newspaper. we will be moving within several weeks, at which point i will be able to spend each summer morning making coffee and reading the paper on our patio. once again, i'm hoping to change my sleeping pattern so that i can get to bed before midnight and get up before 8 am.
+i was up until roughly 12:30am last night looking over my schoolbooks for the summer, memorizing due dates, getting familiar with type faces, reading loads. i have an incredible amount of information to assimilate each week. as a palate cleanser, i am reading science fiction. i made it halfway through isaac asimov's 'foundation' this past weekend, and will probably tear through some star trek novels this next weekend. last week i read TOS #79 - the patrian transgression. i love the plots. this one was a well-worn ethical trope. the enterprise is called in to help a local government against rebels forces, but they soon find themselves sympathizing with the rebels in their fight against a totalitarian regime. within the last 15 pages or so, the corrupt elements are rooted out and the system begins to reincorporate the rebel elements, who are grateful for the enterprise's independant legitimization of their cause.
+it is only now hitting home how diminished my influence on campus is. i have no bargaining chip, no 'people' to bring on side. that said, i am probably the single most influential student on campus within significant portions of the administration. this would be super if i was earning a paycheque. i trust that dividends will be paid later. in a sense, i wish that i had run again and lost. it would have been a clean break, closure. i can't go onto campus now without being stopped for gossip by someone, or consulted for either information or advice. this is incredibly flattering, but i will never be able to resume my life as a student. again, that would be great so long as it came with a paycheque.
+everything about the sunshine coast was great. absolutely everything.
+i intend to stop bringing newspapers on to the skytrain with me. only books. i will read newspapers at home.
+how did joni mitchell end up meaning so much? i listened to blue, hejira, court and spark, for the roses, don juan's reckless daughter, the hissing of summer lawns, and turbulent indigo an incredible amount as a teenager.

+some iTunes statistics!

11 songs with the word 'paper' in the title
29 songs with the word 'bird' in the title
only 8 songs about 'death'
3 monday, 2 tuesday, no wednesday, no thursday, 3 friday, 6 saturday, 8 sunday! 116 'day's, and 9 'week's
14 'dog's, but only 1 'vacation'

traces of the western slopes

2006-04-22T01:13:00.000-07:00

alt title: uranium hexaflouride.

i'll be going to yale tomorrow. i love the fraser valley, and am eager to cross the bridge at hope. agassiz, lytton, boston bar, yale.

i am now 23, and 81 credits into an undergraduate degree. i put together a c.v. last night, and had trouble putting anything down under 'university relations officer'. asking for references was a huge ego rush, i must admit. what have i done this year? a lot, i believe. while i inherited a good portfolio, i am leaving it better than ever. i was asked to run for president next year, today. i could graduate next year. i could do a lot of things in my life at that point. i was asked tonight if i was doing my masters. yesterday, someone guessed my major as 'business administration'. have i assimilated the language so well? i am good with language. i love it. i was repeating the names of timber companies yesterday over a beer. weyerhaeuser, timberwest, macmillan bloedel, norske canada. on mitchell island, the shipping containers are piled higher than the knight street bridge. maersk. the dubai ports authority owns the port of newark, new jersey. they bought it. in dubai, they've built an indoor ski hill. there was a picture in the globe and mail of men in white robes and long beards skiing, wearing sunglasses. aviator frames.

we had dinner at a restaurant in coos bay while camping at eel creek. we sat next to a wide window which looked out onto a slough. the fog was very thick, and we couldn't see very far. we haven't been to port alberni since last summer, i believe. port renfrew, tahsis, bamfield, ucluelet. hartley bay is at the mouth of the inlet that leads to kitimat. skeena, north coast, bulkley valley-stikine, peace river north, prince george-omineca. takla landing.

i've taken out a book from the library about millenials. the book is about my generation, about me. those of us for whom the cold war was not a formative experience, but the world trade centre's collapse was. i am afraid to read this book. knowing what the leading authorities on my generation believe they know about me, i fear i will be constantly conscious of my actions and thoughts. am i being typical? and i being atypical? purposefully? i am afraid that it will change me.

the world trade centre's collapse, i.e. the collapse of the centre of world trade. rather than read my millennials book, i am reading dark age ahead, by jane jacobs. i hope that it changes me.

i've also dropped my camera off for a full tune-up. it has been unstable for about three years now, and will cost roughly $150 to fix. i pick it up monday.

tired of working

2006-04-19T22:32:00.000-07:00

-we camped at golden ears last summer. i read 'the decline and fall of the habsburg empire' and 'mao II'. on the trip there and back we listened to the 5th dimension. i'll never forget it.
-what if, years from now, my only memories are those that i write down here? personal histories are just as fallible as any other. it's like turning on a flashlight. when it's out, you can see everything kinda. when it's on, you can see what's the light is focused on really well, but everything else is completely obscured. so it goes with history. so it goes.
-i am not tired of working. in fact, i had a wonderful day at work. i was part of the full-day retreat of the student services strategic planning team (group? task force?). it was fun. i made a speech about engagement being different today than before; a student who is unengaged with their campus community may simply be engaged elsewhere, and will not easily switch allegiance. this is an effect of, among many other things, identity politics, and is not something that we should fight. we need to accept that the SFU brand won't be the centre of everyone's life while they attend school. it was a nice building as well: the new segal school of business. it's open to the public, essentially. i'm going to use it as a nice quiet place to read while downtown.
-communication and reporting lines are crucial to organizational development. just as we are working hard to clarify these in student services, i am acknowledging their stupid weakness in the student society and dealing with their total, even stupider breakdown in my co-op. i am tired of the co-op. it makes me feel guilty, because i feel that there is more i could do, and blaming problems on a lack of competent support staff is simply to easy, however valid an issue it may be.
-a man on the skytrain home proclaimed that he was tired of working. he asked the skytrain attendant if she was on or off duty. she was off. she remarked that she loved working.

modern painters

2006-04-13T01:44:00.000-07:00

the bum on the skytrain was trying to make conversation. he said hi, i said hi. he smiled and said 'you look pretty happy!', so i just smiled more! it was true. i am pretty happy.

see, there are these moments. i'm listening to my itunes on shuffle (5203 songs now), and on comes steely dan, razor boy. i LOVE razor boy. i just got back from destroyer and my ears are still ringing.

will iran be bombed before the midterm elections? more urgent and key, will nuclear weapons be used during my lifetime?

century egg

2006-04-12T02:10:00.000-07:00

i bought books today. a whole lot of books.

emily carr, the house of all sorts (1944)
margaret atwood, oryx and crake (2003)
fred hoyle, the black cloud (1957)
audrey thomas, intertidal life (1984)
nevil shute, on the beach (1957)
don delillo, players, (1977)
daphne du maurier, 'don't look now' and other stories (1971)
daphne du maurier, the house on the strand (1969)
alice munro, something i've been meaning to tell you (1974)

in other news, rich lured me out to see destroyer tomorrow night. i also finished the soviet experiment tonight, and am nearly done armageddon averted. i plan to spend all day friday reading anything that isn't about russia. i do, however, enjoy pictures of yulia tymoshenko. she became a billionaire when ukraine's oil and gas industry was privatized, and her husband is in exile, fleeing corruption charges. she spent time in jail herself, also for corruption.

purposeless play

2006-04-11T00:50:00.000-07:00

in 20 years we will be making movies about iraq vets. i can't wait to see 'the return of forrest gump'. he'll grow up in a suburb. a suburb of philadelphia. drexel hill, pennsylvania. bubba will be hispanic. they'll come back from iraq and realize their dream of operating a bed and breakfast in the adirondacks. what is post-AIDS? maybe bird flu will be our AIDS?

having read don delillo's end zone yesterday, i started re-reading white noise today. i'd forgotten both how funny it is and also how explicitly postmodern it is. at the most photographed barn in america, jack and murray remark that the assembled photographers are taking pictures of taking pictures. it is the most glib of his novels i have read yet.
end zone was wonderful, but clearly formative. the elements are all there; repetition of phrases, focus on vaguely sinister non-words(CENTREX/SIMUVAC/SEMTEX), shabby maladjusted academics, obsession with jargon. a good novel, but i was often distracted by knowing the more fully-formed archetypes from later novels.
we watched TRON for my birthday! TRON! the first time i saw it, i was too distracted by the gorgeous images to follow the subtext, but the anvils hit me tonight. it is about individualism v. communism, NATO v. COMINTERN, freedom v. fascism! i want to see TRON on IMAX.
once again, i am up too late. i do not need to be on campus until 12pm, but i do have a report to write in the morning. i need to stop reading don delillo until friday, and immerse myself in soviet history for three more days. 1945-1991.
i had serious second thoughts about the townhouse on sunday, but tonight it looked really beautiful. i have better coping skills than i generally believe, and can certainly manage the increased cost if i pull myself together. when i get concerned, i only need to imagine sitting on our new patio with coffee and a newspaper in the morning. we can start an herb garden. i have been wondering how to arrange our couch and the ethernet cable between our two computers. we have three stories! two alcoves(two!)!
i'll be attending a public hearing on the gateway transportation project tomorrow, at the north surrey rec centre.
i have:
- 133 bruce cockburn songs
- 79 destroyer songs
- only 23 dire straits songs
- 87 joe jackson songs
- only 52 stereolab songs
- 62 veda hille songs
- 116 saint etienne songs
- 166 richard/linda thompson songs
- 51 sandy denny songs
- 52 fairport convention songs
- for a grand total of 269 fairport diaspora songs!
- 87 cocteau twins songs
- 141 joni mitchell songs
douglas coupland uses repetition to make brand names absurd, while don delillo uses repetition to make brand names sinister.

echelon

2006-04-05T02:47:00.000-07:00

i've got two half-written posts sitting in draft form that will probably never get finished. every day feels like a week. the end of the semester seems closer than ever, though. i feel as though i'm engaged in a protracted procrastination process, despite the lack of any projects requiring my consistent attention.

so, then. some notes:

don delillo makes me happy in a way that few other authors can. i want to re-read the names.
my stress management skills are poorer than ever. they operate inverse to the actual levels of stress in my life. the lesson may be that i can only self-actualize in a stressful environment. of course, i say that now, etc. etc.
the fall of the soviet union is really affecting me! perestroika + glasnost = total pathos.
i thought about 'new sincerity' for a day, but i ultimately concluded that it is bunk. instant zeitgeist nonsense. there is a term for this in generation x, i am sure. historical underdosing v. historical overdosing. fuck it.
will any of my anticipated lifestyle shifts chnage me for the better? no, at least not in and of themselves. this is a fact.
i am doing well in life! i am well-equipped to go places in this world!
i'd like to win a free ipod, thanks.
the sooner i sleep, the better i'll feel tomorrow. i plan on working for no more than 3 hours, between 11am-2pm, at which point i'll go home. perhaps i'll take my dog to the park. i'll read more soviet history, and perhaps start to read jane jacobs' dark age ahead. i'll do some laundry.

indifference

2006-03-27T23:17:00.000-08:00

-tonight i've been reading up on the issue of illegal migrant workers in the u.s., and various political responses and plans. it's a big deal. here's a great take from a political angle: The impetus for addressing this issue is not coming from the political strategists, who see it as too problematic to make a good wedge issue. The pressure is coming up from the grassroots. That makes it really interesting. US politics always gets intriguing when it escapes the management of the professionals and reflects the actual concerns of regular citizens. i like that a lot. this is actually happening. In Los Angeles, an estimated 500,000 protesters objected to a U.S. House bill that would make it a felony to be in the U.S. illegally, impose new penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and erect fences along one-third of the U.S.-Mexican border.

-the question of xenophobia is an interesting one, and is also something that i grappled with a lot this spring while arguing about internationalization at sfu.

-i live in the official neighbourhood of kensington-cedar cottage. i sent an e.mail to the city yesterday, asking to be kept informed of futrure planning meetings of the future of the broadway/commercial transit village. i use that corner almost every day of my life.

-leonid brezhnev spent the last five years as leader of the soviet union completely doped up on tranquillizers. he would do business from his hospital bed. politburo meetings would last for 20 minutes at most. the word of the year: gerontocracy. i means "rule by old people".

-a joke: "in america, you can always find a party. in soviet russia, the party always finds you". apparently that's from a 1980's beer commercial.

sound dust

2006-03-24T23:19:00.000-08:00

a note:
- i know that it will be summer time soon, because i want to drink beer. i don't drink a lot of beer during the winter. i prefer wine, or gin. last weekend i bought a box of pale ale. today gin and choice was on special, but i had a pint of keith's instead. the buzz from cold beer on a warm day is better than red wine. it feels good.

songs from my iTunes on shuffle(4478 songs, over 12 days straight), with stories

bruce cockburn, call it democracy, live 1997: i can't recall ever not listening to bruce cockburn. i was mildly interested until 1997, when i got the charity of night, which is still a favourite album of mine. i listened to it continuously for several months. this song is a didactic, as one can guess from the title. i like this version for the guitar sound. it's his electric resonator guitar, heavily distorted.
crash vegas, linoleum, 1995: a long defunct canadian band. again, a favourite album of mine in 1999. i listened to this album a lot. fern gave me two songs on a mix tape when we worked at purdys, and then lent me the album. i think it is out of print now.
mark eitzel, can you see, 2001: in 1998, i was determined to collect anything and everything produced by mitchell froom and tchad blake. to that end, i bought an american music club album that they'd made(mercury, 1993) and soon began collecting mark eitzel albums. a boring story. this is one of the few songs i like on this album, which is overproduced and dull. the booklet has a photo of a space shuttle launching, which i like a lot.
elvis costello and burt bacharach, toledo, 1998: i bought this for burt bacharach, not elvis costello, who i find irritating. this is a very 'adult' album. what does that even mean? i love burt bacharach. my dad got a free ticket to see him at the orpheum last month and reported that it was 'cheesy'. well, yeah, obviously. oh well. i like to song a lot. a trumpet line!
david bowie, big brother, 1974: my friend rich LOVES bowie, and made me listen to bowie. now i love bowie. well, some bowie. i like diamond dogs and hunky dory especially. the only album i own, however is reality, from 2003. odd.
veda hille, wrong, 1999: on an absolute whim in 2001, i went down to the east van cultural centre to the release show for field study. since then, i have seen maybe 5 more shows. to be honest, i first listened to bowie because veda hille did life on mars as an encore at that first show, and i loved the melody. i remembered the lyrics and looked up the song. it was bowie!
new york city, take my hand, 1974: from saint etienne's songs for mario's cafe. while i have listened to this a lot, i associate it with coming back from kamloops, october 2004. it also ended up on my 'my hotel year' album at the end of the year, collecting songs that i listened to a lot while staying at the delta hotel for the citizen's assembly.
fairport convention, one sure thing, 1968: fairport are part of the richard thompson extended network. this is the worst of their first four albums, an awfully amateur debut. po-faced psychedelia.
joe jackson, it's different for girls, live 2003: an incredible song! the best live show i've seen was joe jackson at the commodore in 2003. one of my favourite songs.
dusty springfield, in the land of make believe, 1969: my most played song to date: 6 times! all this when i still have 2000+ songs that i have not heard even once. this song is the key to the album and as a result is very special.
paul simon, hearts and bones, 1984: this album is a confluence of cold war paranoia, rumination on belonging, and nostalgia. it is also another hit from my dad's record collection that i've picked up myself. one of my favourite records.
the lilac time, in iverna gardens, 1993: a crazy story. my dad lent me a tape of rickie lee jones' pop pop in 1996 or so. i was uninterested; covers of old pop songs, whatever. on the other side was something called 'the lilac time - astronauts'. not knowing which was the band and which was the album, i tried listening. i loved it, and listened to the tape for a good four years before i found out who the band were, where they were from, or whether they still existed. it is a story of faith! the album is pastoral. gorgeous production.
beck, the golden age, 2002: the only beck album i've ever liked. supposedly a 'morose and dull' album. i bought this used on a whim. i like it, but not enough to try anything else.

the box above my head

2006-03-20T20:24:00.000-08:00

it feels good to campaign again. it's a good feeling. time moves differently. the endorphins and adrenaline are kicking in. on two hours of sleep, i managed a fairly solid day of campaigning.

everyone that i've worked closely with this year has either encouraged me to run for re-election or un-reservedly endorsed my candidacy for senate. the few administrators that are also students are voting for me. even if i don't win, i will take this support as a strong indication of a successful year. even those that i have argued against at times are supporting me. my name and face recognition is still high, too. i feel respected, and i am grateful. i am still glad that i'm not running for re-election to the executive. it's a mantra now: work with good people; all else will follow.

i am eager for the next set of american presidential primaries to begin. it is a unique and intensely surreal electoral process. i was nervous for several months before the 2004 election, kerry v. bush because i was so unsure of what the deciding issues in the race would end up being. i'm still not sure what happened. i think this was the crux: when someone offers you a cheesehead, don't ask for wine, just put it on your head and take a seat at lambeau field!. remember that? wow. THAT was what mattered in 2004. i've been reading up in anticipation of november '08, and the midterms in '06. look at this: forward together. i think that pop-up is going to lose him support.

news from the front

2006-03-17T23:16:00.000-08:00

new records today!

belle and sebastian, the life pursuit, 2006
leonard cohen, the future, 1992
destroyer, destroyer's rubies, 2006
donald fagen, morph the cat, 2006
his name is alive, detrola, 2005

the real canadian superstore

2006-03-17T00:43:00.000-08:00

i was having a BAD DAY until i got to commercial and broadway this morning, when i began to have a GOOD DAY. three reasons for that:
+ an ad for long distance phone plans in a bus shelter, which was a big map of north america, divided by states and provinces, on which each name was 'vancouver'. there was north vancouver and lake vancouver and new vancouver and many, many, vancouvers. every state, lake, province, and island was called VANCOUVER. it made me so happy!

+ humming leonard cohen, 'democracy'. from the brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet. Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

+ my coffee was already there for me when i got to the till at blenz, because i get a double espresso from them every day and they know me.

other points.
+ i made a new friend today! how lovely!

+ we will be moving may 1 into a townhouse in the coop. the interior work will likely be finished in april, so we will be able to move gradually, over the span of several weeks. how relaxing!

+ i won an election w/o any effort at all. i can only assume that i won on people's faith that i would do a good job, despite my lack of previous experience in the job. i'll be working for a semester with several people that i know to be really good, and others that i don't know well yet. work with good people. all else will follow.

+ i am sitting on two search committees for the university right now, and am learning an incredible amount about the way the world works. i am also feeling especially competent about my knowledge of the university's recent history. i know more about the department of student services than many people in very senior positions within the broader university. we have engaged an executive search firm: korn ferry. crazy! shortlisting is a strange process, and one in which i am torn between the hive mind and anxiety of influence. the skill to effectively shortlist candidates and defend selections is one i am glad to develop. also, watching some very professional people and others less-so going though the same process is invaluable in and of itself.

+ thinking about iPods and politics and the effects of absenting oneself from daily conversation. i wish i could avoid the chatter on buses to and from school. there is always awkwardly strained conversation as people who barely know each other and do not, in fact, want to talk, feel forced to chat after bumping into each other on the bus. witnessing awkward moments of this nature stresses me out. this is why i avoid stand-up comedy. i have had, for several months now, a very difficult time focusing on anything but these incredibly banal conversations when i am within earshot. i want a portable personal music player again, to block it all out!

i saved an article from the globe about '(i)pod-people', suggesting that our collective fixation with developing our own intensely personal playlists, rather than listening to, for example, radio stations has led to a vacuum of collective culture. this impacts politics, where, after not finding a candidate to exactly match our personal 'playlist' of criteria, we turn off of politics altogether. as we absent ourselves from mass cultural phenomena, do we also enter an age of personal politics? not individualism, but simply an aversion to any collective expression of politics that would dilute personal 'playlists'? gasp, the end of democracy! these are fun things to think about.

+ reading margaret atwood's 'dancing girls' again. i read it last in november 2001. i feel blind for several pages of each story, until i get through enough to remember how i visualized the story upon first reading. i visualize stories very intensely, but without details. it's all very impressionist. lots of focus on specific colours, temperatures, weather, furnishings. no focus on people, or facial features. blank, shapeless people moving in intensely structured envorinments. i assume i do this because the stories provide the characterization, and i have to fill in the rest. it beomes frustrating when i remember a specific visual, but cannot recall where it came from.

the road goes no further than before

2006-03-10T00:57:00.000-08:00

-i took the dog out two hours ago, and the ground was clear. since then it has snowed considerably! how exciting!

-i've saved an article from last saturday's globe and mail titled the killing machine. it is about the bird flu virus. i want all of you that doubt bird flu to read it. the killing machine.

-i've been in a stump all week. there are several reasons for this.

-tonight i found the diaryland website that i wrote some 250+ entries on between 2000-2003. i will not provide a link yet, as i'm not sure how comfortable i am sending everyone over there. it's autobiography, though, and i am glad it still exists on the internet as the archives i'd made on my old computer are gone. the title of the website: everyday, rock and roll is saving my life. i still appreciate the sentiment!

-i've really been enjoying gar's dream synopses. last night i had a dream too. the other side of 12th avenue was different: there were still houses, but they were on the edge of a long slope, thick with dry grass. there are similar fields in south surrey. i was on a bike ride west across town with my father and sister. i knew they were there, but they never entered the narrative. we got to victoria, where in each direction there were only fields. after commercial, 12th avenue became a dirt lane, with worn rocks. then there were buildings, small buildings, and big elm trees. not afternoon anymore, either, but 11.am on a bright summer day. this was main street. we went south several blocks and turned west into a lane. cobblestones. there was a brass band playing. still west, past the band, across a field with very loose, rocky soil and then into a series of garages, somehow connected underground by plywood passageways. the last one led to a set of stairs that opened into what was definitely the garage of my home in surrey. it was quite different. either were were moving in or someone else was moving in. still a summer day. this was the end of a much longer dream, i am sure, but that is all i can recollect.

-i'd go to bed, but i don't want to miss the snow.

toluene

2006-03-04T15:18:00.000-08:00

notes:

i am happy to be part of the burgeoning trout lake consensus around keeping the new rink and community centre in the same location. this evening, after voting again for option 'a' at this morning's meeting, i saw a sign tacked up in the park urging me to attend and vote for 'a' to preserve the park. excellent! the frustrating aspect of the meeting was the palpable distrust and cynicism with which most residents seem to be approaching the planning process.
i want to know more about british india. this is a time and place about which i know very little, aside from the gandhi myth and vague images of opulence, heat, and the pathos of an empire in its last days.
i have over one week's worth of music on my hard drive now. i have made a 'smart playlist' that lists every song that i have not yet played. once i hear the song, it disappears. i've been listening to new songs all day.
an overdose of quinine can induce abortion.
USDA regulations do not permit the addition of MSG to irradiated products.
on that note, while last night was cultural theory, today has been food information and chemistry. i started reading a wikipedia article about berries, and have been led about through all sorts of food additives and different vegetables and am now reading about cargill foods.
the global supply chains of modern food production are incredible. i read up on cargill initially in the summer of 2003, when we lived on dundas st. we'd take walks along commissioner street and look at the train yards. i saw a boxcar with 'cargill' on the side, and looked it up. cargill.
we'll go for dim sum tomorrow morning, at the golden phoenix. after that, we'll go to superstore to buy a new electric kettle and a 12-can box of tonic water. see, today i got a bottle of plymouth gin and 4 limes. as there was no tonic in the house or at the husky station across the street, i had to drink wild turkey all day. what a shame.
i listened to sarah mclachlan's fumbling towards ecstasy over and over again while re-reading the hobbit in... 1995? 1996? thereabouts. listening to the album now, i remember that i really enjoy it. it also makes me think of re-reading the hobbit
i'd like to spend time getting drunk off of beer in cans at a local park this summer. maybe trout lake, maybe somewhere farther afield. perhaps we'll move by the time it gets hot, and we'll have a large patio for drinking on summer nights.
we went to ubc on bicycles and found the paprican building. we also saw a large group of sheep. i want to go back and explore. it might be hard, as we'll be lacking the natural arrogance of students, and won't be senators of the institution. we won't have any friends in high places to get us out of trouble.
reading about irradiation reminds me of how fascinated and horrified i was a a child reading about radon gas. it seeps out of cracks in basements. the silent killer.

the land of make believe

2006-03-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

this evening i read warren zanes' dusty in memphis, a book all about the record. well, rather, it is a book about what the record is about. and, rather than being about the south, dusty in memphis is about a fantasy of the south. it is escapism. the questions of appropriation, authenticity, and appropriation are all germane as well.

i've never been enamored of the southern myth. initially, the book challenged me; why would i ever read an ethnography of the south? the album serves as a hook; i love the record, quite separately from any southern myth it relies upon. (in fact, the album is notable for it's relative lack of reliance on southern tropes) ultimately, the book both named and reinforced what i've always found difficult about the south: its unassailable authenticity within the popular american myth. i've never found 'the blues' aesthetically appealing, and whether that is based on issues of the 'aesthetic emotion' or an aversion to sticky questions of the authentic is hard to say. to what extent jerry wexler is exploiting that sense of 'real' in sending dusty springfield to memphis is a key part of the book. also, to what extent the south represented the 'make believe' that dusty always traded in, as an individual; is it merely more vaudeville, another mask.

remember moby's play album, looping alan lomax's recordings of old bluesmen over techno tracks? this book also clarifies what put me off so much about that enterprise (aside from the fact that i really didn't like the music). 'authenticity' was the word, again. by putting 'authentic' blues recordings in a techno context, moby made techno 'real'. those old blues records had 'feeling', see.

a lot of the current vancouver hipster fascination with 'roots' music is tied in with this as well. exclaim, canada's national indie rock tabloid, has a review section that used to be titled 'moonshine junction' and is now called 'wood, wires, and whiskey'. to make country more 'authentic', i.e. palatable for the hipster, the modifier 'alt-' has to be placed before it. the term 'roots' itself, which has come to refer to bluegras, country, and folk collectively, i guess, is so imbued with notions of authenticity and what is 'real' that it is, to me, a baffling term. rarely does a genre develop that is so overtly and unashamedly concerned with its own realness.

edit/update: to what extent is the south's authenticity reliant on dominant perceptions of its poverty and backwardsness?

here is dusty springfield, in the land of make believe, from dusty in memphis.

between the wars

2006-03-03T12:51:00.000-08:00

+ we went to kitsilano for dinner last night, to the vineyard, which is open until 2 am. alright food, large portions, and good drink specials. i had a pint of kilkenny for 3.99, which is quite reasonable. it is the most beautiful beer i know. i could learn to love uberbrew, but why bother when there are any number of other, better beers out there to drink? uberbrew just isn't good.

+ i had a pint of stella artois yesterday. it tasted a bit scummy, and in retrospect i think it was just the first real pint out of the lines that day. it was beautiful, though. all sorts of bubbles.

+ going to kitsilano always reminds me of august 2004, when i tried to go to zulu records on a weekly basis to keep on top of incoming used albums. i read don delillo's underworld on the #9 broadway bus, back and forth. underworld is one of my very favourite books.

+ superman's song just came on shuffle. here it is for amanda: crash test dummies, 'superman's song'.
i have two albums. i listened to these in... 1994? the second, god shuffled his feet, is better overall. lost of songs about getting old and frail. the band flamed out pretty quickly, as i recall. the guy is still putting out oddities from his new home in the maritimes. i bet they'll be re-discovered in 20+ years and rehabilitated.

+ everything is phrased as a 'plus'. i do this deliberately.

the athletics of loss

2006-03-03T01:30:00.000-08:00

+ my itunes is now at 2182 songs. that's 6 days 7 hours 18 minutes and 2 seconds. i am staying up far too late, because all of my favourite songs keep coming, one after another, constantly, never stopping. i wanmt to keep on listening all night and all day. i've quelled the urge to skip songs to find out what surprises are next in store. in the first 10 seconds of each song, i say 'i know this song. whatever. what's next!!'. one i get past that,. i'm fine. it's a problem. my sleep patterns are also a problem; i'm staying up too late again, and feeling bad all day as a result. i think i'll take this weekend to get back on track. lots of reading through the day.

+ i listened to the leslie feinberg talk that everyone's buzzing about and got two lessons out of it.

it's like this: ()
class is the root of oppression

i learned that from mark leier in 2002-3 in my labour studies 101/301 courses. the intersection of class/race/gender was really key. identity-based oppression as an economic strategy. there are a lot of very successful upper-class queers in the world to back that up. the question is whether communists are queers or whether queers are communists. i trust that people more interested in the topic will get back to me.

+ we won't be snowshoeing after all, so i will spend friday reading at home and listening to my my record collection. i will be reading soviet history, mostly.

+ on inertia, again: i never want to take the dog out to the park, but when i am there i am happy. every single time. tomorrow i will take the dog out in the afternoon.

+ all sorts of courses that i want to take this summer, including the following:

cmns 130 - explorations in mass communication (distance)
geog 312 - geography of natural hazards
hist 300 - approaches to history
hist 338 - world war two (distance)
hist 339 - the british empire and commonwealth (distance)
hist 436 - british columbia
pol 324 - the canadian constitution
pol 327 - globalization and the canadian state
pol 329 - selected topics in canadian government and politics

city in progress

2006-02-26T19:17:00.000-08:00

+ last saturday, we attended a public workshop at trout lake community centre to discuss the future of the park. see, capital plan question #4 in november asked the city to commit funding towards a new rink and community centre. the question passed, and now the parks board gets to decide how, when, and where to build the rink and community centre. about 50-60 people were there. each table of approx 5-7 people got an aerial photo of the park, divided into sections a-through-h. our task was to discuss how we used the park and recommend the three best sections in which to place the new rink and community centre. we went to defend the status quo. the buildings are now in the far southwest corner, well back from the lake where we walk the dog. i like the isolation, and the relative wilderness of the lake path.

at first i felt somewhat guilty for having a preconceived concept for the park. i should be open; here is an unprecedented opportunity to shape my corner of vancouver for the next 40 years. the park can be anything that i want it to be! then again, when has change for the sake of change ever worked in urban planning? furthermore, i really like the park as it is. the current set up suits my needs perfectly. interestingly, most of the people that came out agreed. the two most popular choices were sections 'a' and 'b', where the current buildings are located. a distant third was 'e', in the under-utilized northeast corner beside grandview highway.

next saturday there will be another meeting, at which the initial plans, based on our feedback last week will be unveiled. there are two important and contradictory considerations that will have to be taken into account. the first is program delivery during construction. if the current site is chosen for the new buildings, as it seems it will, the task will be to effectively rebuild the existing buildings. for 2-3 years, there would be a significant negative impact on the programs currently run out of trout lake, and the clientele base would likely diminish. the second consideration is soil type. most of the park is bog. flat, spongy land, prone to flooding and sinking. very bad for construction. most of the surrounding houses are also built on bog, and many are having severe problems with settling, apparently. the only part of the park that is not bog is the southwest corner, which, like most of the city, is glacial till. so, the only stable land to build on is already occupied.

+ the last 10 songs on my iTunes

the lilac time, the darkness of her eyes
the tragically hip, the completists
michaelangelo, this bird
belle and sebastian, i'm a cuckoo
joni mitchell, the sire of sorrow (job's sad song)
the sandpipers, never can say goodbye
kate bush, pull out the pin
broadcast, papercuts
stina nordenstam, love hurts
dire straits, brothers in arms

+ i have a new computer now. i have been pumping records into my iTunes all weekend. it is a g5 mac; one of the flat screens with a pedestal. it is a very sexy piece of design. it came with an optical mouse, as well. i've got 1424 songs in now, just over 4 days of continuous music. my last library was of a roughly equal size, but most of it was crappy stuff off of the internet. all of these 1400+ songs are from my own collection. it is absolute bliss to sit back and hear song after song that i really really like. i'm rediscovering a lot of records that i don't listen to often, because they're popping up on shuffle. with my old computer, i'd spend more time listening to albums off of the internet than from my collection, because it was easier. i'm happy now!

+ we have seven different sorts of mustard in the fridge. i will try to go to polonia sausage house this week so that we have something to eat the mustard with.

way of the sun

2006-02-20T22:18:00.000-08:00

i go to rock shows alone for the solipsism. i find a rock show alone is an excellent time for intense self-reflection. tonight proved no different. i saw archer prewitt at the media club. i have all of his albums, and i know them note-for-note. with the exception of the one new song he played tonight, i knew everything. i knew the riffs, the swells, the climaxes. i got nervous when he started to play cheap rhyme because i love the trumpet climax so much. then, just when i was waiting for it, the keyboard player picked up a trumpet. hooray! he played almost the entire wilderness album, and several songs from three. i saw archer prewitt before in toronto, in 2002 before i had heard any of his albums, just the song final season. since then i've collected everything.

i listened to archer prewitt's three a lot during 2003's elections. other songs that i associate with spring 2003:
-toto, africa
-gowan, moonlight desires and strange animal
-the cardigans, for what it's worth

and albums from 2003:
-damon and naomi, more sad hits
-beth gibbons, out of season
-kristin hersh, the grotto
-saint etienne, built on sand

for 2004, the bad year, i made an album. the track list is here: i hear a symphony.

the only two songs that i associate with 2005:
-the beatles, and your bird can sing, which i heard in kinkos as amanda, kevin and i were getting our senate posters printed at 3 AM.
-the beatles, she said she said.

this year, i won't associate anything at all with the election cycle. it's a major step. my last three years have been dominated by this event, and i'm taking a pass.

navy blue

2006-02-19T19:10:00.000-08:00

films for the week:

the net
the game
requiem for a dream
insomnia
ghost rig

albums, today:

leonard cohen, songs of love and hate (1973)
kate bush, aerial (2005)
bjork, vespertine (2001)
joe jackson, body and soul (1984)
depeche mode, playing the angel (2005)
stereolab, margerine eclipse (2004)
archer prewitt, white sky (1999)
pat metheny group, american garage (1979)
blue rodeo, casino (1990)

and a song: the tammys, egyptian shumba (1960-something?)

discovery park

2006-02-15T22:05:00.000-08:00

a good day. i felt off kilter, but ended up on the top of my game. i feel foolish, because if i don't run for re-election i will be squandering an excellent campaign platform. i feel like writing a campaign speech regardless, just to keep my muscles in shape. i want to know if i can distill my year and future plans into slogans. keeping it to myself and close associate will be a challenge. to run for re-election would be giving in to the worst excesses of my psyche. to step away, knowing that i could likely win a second term will be an interesting trial.

i have never been so neurotic as when i have run for election at sfu. the stress is incredible. huge highs and huge lows; there is no proportion or perspective. there is a huge rush to seeing your face and name on posters all over school, and the faces and names of close friends.

initially, i used foxbase alpha to chronicle wonderful little parts of songs. here are a few:
-the chorus to fleetwood mac's you make loving fun. esp. the guitar line and chimes. the verses are firm and solid, anchored. the chorus goes up and up; it's beautiful.
-neil young's after the goldrush. the whole thing. especially the melody.
-the drum fill that starts fleetwood mac's dreams.

lady bayside

2006-02-11T00:04:00.000-08:00

another long busy week. i was chewed out this morning by two dudes from facilities management who aren't actually in a position to chew me out. i'm not sure if they realised that i have a not-bad rapport with their boss. i tried to sound apologetic without apologising: 'well, i apologise if that seemed unclear in any way'. 'i'm sorry about the confusion that may have caused you'. i tagged on to the meeting; they weren't expecting me, but decided to seize the moment and whine that i'd been going over their head. well, in my experience, if a link breaks down, it is better to go higher up the ladder of responsibility to report problems.

my output to return ratio on energy is becoming frustrating. i'm working too much and to hard for too little pay and/or tangible effect. i have no faith in my potential successors, but i'm moving on for myself. just for me!

we'll have dim sum for breakfast tomorrow at the golden phoenix. it's twice the price of bon's next door, but it is tastier and we feel better having eaten it. there is also rarely a wait, and we can grap a plate of food right away. dim sum is a wonderful way to start the day.
my favourites:
-shrimp dumpling
-shrimp and spinach dumpling
-gai lan
-beef dumpling

tomorrow i'll also begin reading everyday stalinism. for good measure, here's a steely dan song: the boston rag (1973)

may my heart be cast into stone

2006-02-07T01:48:00.000-08:00

see, i worked for the good guy who lost, and it feels like a punch in the gut for the bad guy who won to turn tail and become a REALLY bad guy, two weeks later. all day people were chatting me up about vancouver-kingsway. when i told them that i'd worked in the riding, for the 2nd place new democrat i got a lot of sympathy.

we joked during the campaign that, if ian lost, we'd get some small comfort in seeing ujjal and emerson on the opposition benches for the first time. in emerson's case, he'd be making less money than he had in 20 years. we'd tell people that emerson had no interest in politics if he wasn't at the cabinet table, and that voting for emerson while martin lost would surely send us into an immediate by-election, as he ran back to some corporate boardroom. we never floated the thought that he'd jump to the conservatives. ever.

i wonder what the frat boy i scrutineered with at tupper thinks of this. i wonder if he's still following federal politics, now that martin's cashed in his chips. jan wants to track down the liberal scrutineer that she met at beaconsfield and talk her into switching parties. our local executive is getting together soon. ian is on the phone with the leader tomorrow. i thought we'd have a nice break, some time to build the provincial riding up and get set for a fight with the boundaries commission. we're back in the thick of it now, though.

we won a minor victory at senate today, as a proposal that we mustered significant opposition to was pulled from the agenda. rather than risk defeat, items that have not reached consensus are commonly retracted, giving the administration time to either retool for broader appeal or muster their troops in favour. if the story is correct, and this was the only window within which to approve this proposal, this delay could result in its end. that's exciting; i got into senate expecting to never win a fight, but i led a lot of the opposition on this issue, and it feels like a victory to see it faltering in the last lap. i think that tonight was only my second opportunity for a real celebratory drink this year. the first was at the cambie, last june. tonight, we all had a drink at the duc before dinner. hot tip: the duc doesn't measure their highballs. they just pour. despite the two gin and tonics, i spoke very well at senate on several issues, and felt more comfortable than i have before in the pseudo-parliamentary setting. i love senate.

i'm feeling more convicted in my return to civil society. i look forward to watching more movies and reading more books.

popsicles and icicles

2006-02-05T23:49:00.000-08:00

here: one of my very favourite music writers on what happens when your hard drive crashes, iPop is dead. stylus is the only online music journalism i read, and a lot of it is due to nick southall. my computer is dead, and i have missed very little of the music collected on it. these are the things that i think a lot about.

equally as much analysis as can be put into country songs can be put into 60's girl group songs. try this one: the whyte boots, nightmare.
or this one: joey heatherton, live and learn. there's not much to the second one, actually. just a lovely song. they've got names like 'the angelettes', 'the exciters', 'the goodies', 'the lovelites', 'the tammys', and 'goldie and the gingerbreads'. i've got 2 1/2 hours of this stuff now, and at only 2:30 per song, that's a lot of songs.

the next level

2006-02-05T00:11:00.000-08:00

you can tell that BC is different from the rest of the western provinces by the shape of its electoral districts. while alberta, manitoba, and saskatchewan all have lots of straight lines, BC's divisions are all twisted along rivers and the ridges of mountain ranges. the prairies were all plotted out by the CPR, and today's boundaries still run along those old lines. BC was never plotted. you can trace its geography by its riding boundaries.

i had a lengthy discussion about STV today, and it reminded me to finally get my citizens' assembly materials organized. my wealth of information will be worthless if it is not digestable.

in regards to my political future at SFU, i'd been waiting to get advice from two smart people with no connection to the situation but with some interest in my future and records of success in a field i have interest in. the unanimous vote is for me to run for senate and finish my degree. i'll be more flexible once i have a degree done, and might as well speed up the process. if i feel like stepping back into student politics, i can always do an MA at SFU and get back into the swing of things. with a seat on senate, i'll still have a hand in civil society. i may end up like moe sihota or sheila copps, and go back to 'journalism'. i'm excited to be flexible. senate is a marginal committment in comparison, and i'll be able to be a student, rather than an administrator/bureaucrat/occasional advocate. if i take 3 courses per semester, i could be done by fall 2007.

that said, i had an incredibly good week at work.

here's the other trout lake.