'The Moment After 2': WTF did I just watch?

I have the complete Internet/pay-cable packages. I get HBO and the movie central channels. So my wife and I were playing catch-up with the 24-hour selection, trying to PVR everything that we could see, until we looked at the pay-per-view section, and realized that all the movie central movies, HBO shows, and Oscar films can be ordered for free. That’s pretty cool. 

Or is it? To fill a rotating selection of films and TV shows over 5 channels, 24 hours a day, without news or commercials, is not easy. So when I look through the free-order stuff on my box, I see a lot of movies that I’ve never heard of. 

I’ve seen a crappy, heavily subsidized comedy-drama written by a guy I lived with in university. I’ve seen three cheapo planetary disaster movies shot over the bridge in North Vancouver; I have no idea how they got made. To those of you who only see big-studio movies: there’s a whole world of trash and treasure, mostly trash, but it’s worth looking into if you get a chance. Unfortunately, The Moment After (Part II) is not a treasures. 

Released through (or by) the Christiano Film Group, and directed by Wes Llewellyn, The Moment After (Part II) follows the story of Adam, a renegade FBI agent convicted of terrorism because he helped a rabbi escape from government. The world is dominated by Global Corp, a multinational entity that has converted the world to personal biochips and one currency. It throws religious people in jail. Poor Adam has to make do with taking smuggled communion bread and reading smuggled bible pages. 

He escapes into the desert and hooks up with a runaway band of Christians, or as Global calls them, ‘religious extremists.’

The first third of the movie is a typical cheap-movie setup. The last third is a pedestrian showdown with the bad guy, who just might be Satan. It’s the middle third of the movie where things get terribly odd.

The runaways signal to each other by drawing Jesus fishes in the sand. They live in the desert, and in a strange similarity to the Jews and Egyptians, or the Christians and the Romans, the Americans in this movie are persecuted nomads who are at odds with a heathen, techno-savvy enemy. The leader of the religious renegades is a rabbi named Jacob, who carries a bible and preaches Jesus every chance he gets. One woman admits that she was a ‘science major’ but is now so much more happy following the way of the Lord. Everyone hugs, wears baggy mom jeans, and unconsciously throws in bible verses in everyday talk. 

And the dialogue! In one scene, one of the principal characters meets a Christian woman after a rousing hymm-sing. What follows is strangely awkward, and combined with the wholesomely meaningful looks exchanged, unexpectedly sexualized.

‘The Lord is gracious, isn’t he?’

‘I suppose he is… um…’  

‘Laura.’ 

‘Laura. It was good worshipping with you tonight. Good praise, sister.’  

‘It just feels like His Spirit moves so much when we worship like that. Don’t you?”   

“Yeah. Thank you.’ 

‘God bless you, brother.’ 

This is an awful movie. The acting is terrible, the gun violence is sanitized, the fight scenes are ridiculous, one character keeps a cigar in his mouth the entire movie and never smokes it, and every man has tousled mop of bedhead hair. But my fascination with the movie is cultural.

Do Christians feel in their hearts that there will come a time when they have to flee and take to the desert? I can’t see how any American citizen of European descent could claim a cultural memory that is more appropriate to someone of Mid-Eastern or African descent, and yet in these movies (and part 3 is coming) they’re the persecuted minority they were 2,000 years ago. The Moment After (Part II) was very successful with Christian audiences. Do they think this? Do they think that a large and secular government will always threaten a religious society? Interestingly, the Global soldiers wear camouflage and berets similar to UN peacekeepers. Behind the praying, the hugging, the brothering and sistering, The Moment After seems to lust for a time when Christians can fight and, more importantly, suffer for their right to exist, with the back-up knowledge that everything will go according to God’s plan, and in the end good will triumph.

But that’s already happened. Jesus died for our sins over 2000 years ago. Those great and primarily secular civilizations collapsed and these days no one worships false idols. A president cannot be elected in the US without being avowedly religious. Catholicism has replaced Islam as the fastest growing religion on Earth. Mega-churches dot the continent. There’s no longer any reason to feel persecuted, and yet these… religious fetish movies sell like hot-cakes. 

But really? I hated the end. They could have gone apocalyptically, old-testament, crazily biblical with the climax, with big scary angels, but instead it was martial arts and machine guns in a barn. If you’re going to go the paranoid religious route, you should go big or not bother. 

Blindness

Have you ever heard of Usher’s Syndrome? Children are born deaf, or become deaf within the first year of life. Soon after, Retinitis Pigmentosa follows - a progressive blindness as the optic cells deteriorate and cataracts develop. But there is a team of doctors here in BC who insist that the day is fast approaching when blindness is thing of the past. We need simply the money and the will. The brains and technology are already here. 

On the evening of Valentine’s day, my wife and I went to Dinner in the Dark, a fundraiser for vision research. Tickets are expensive; there was an auction of Canucks memorabilia, a Gordie Howe jersey, a beautiful kid’s bike that we bid for and failed to win, and finally, the gimmick: we had to eat with blindfolds on.

I had thought we were to eat in pitch-dark. But just how would our waiters pour our wine and serve us dinner? The blindfolds made sense. 

A few things about Blindness charity dinners. They like details. All night they played Andrea Bocelli, and I was about to complain until I remembered he’s blind. The centrepiece was a glass vase of roses interwoven with leaves of kale. Why? Kale is full of eye-positive vitamins, although I don’t know why the centrepiece wasn’t also stuffed with carrots. Among the auction items were fancy bottles of French wine with braille labels. 

But on to the sensory part of the evening. We put on our blindfolds early in the evening and did a wine-tasting (in stemless glasses to avoid a glass catastrophe). Servers were instructed to tap our right shoulders to get our attention. “We can fool around and no one will notice,” murmured my wife flirtatiously, until I pointed out that we wouldn’t know if anyone was noticing us.

Being blind for an enforced period is odd. You quickly begin to bellow, because you aren’t sure if anyone is listening. You’re used to seeing someone’s face, someone’s eyes, looking at you, and you begin to fear that you’re being ignored. At first, when I put on the blindfold, I was heartened by the thin band of light that shone up along the bridge of my nose. At least I’ll be able to see my food, I thought. But that was wrong: my eyes got tired of looking down, and soon all the light gave me was a bright wash at the bottom of my perception, which is how many blind people ‘see.’ 

Another thing: many of us assume that we could survive being blind, thanks to our Daredevil-like spatial abilities and acute hearing. We think we’ll be fighting crime and playing piano concertos in our spare time. But I lost count of the times I stabbed my plate and brought an empty fork into my mouth; I struggled with dense, three-dimensional waves of junk sound in order to hear people who may or may not have been speaking to me. All I could hear was rhubarb-rhubarb and the clatter of forks. I had no idea how much I interpreted speech through faces, hand movements, context, body language, and eye direction. Hearing is something we romanticize - in reality it’s one of our least important senses. Hearing is supported so much by vision and touch. 

There were a number of parents of Usher’s Syndrome children at the event. You knew them because they still wore the blindfolds when we adjourned to the auction room before the main course. The rest of us chickened out and took off our blindfolds when we went to the auction; they kept them on. They wanted to know what it was like to be blind, to stumble around in the dark, to constantly be at ease in a world that can run you over, bang your shins, cop a feel, or just simply ignore you in your world of clattering sound. They wanted to know blindness long term, because their kids would know nothing but. 

The keynote speaker was a blind journalist and writer. He told us, flat out, that he wanted us to donate to the cause, but not for him. He wanted to stay blind, because he had a gimmick: he wrote about being a blind father, and he travelled the world and wrote about being a pathetically blind traveller. He had a unique niche in the writing biz. He even went to Egypt during the uprising, and the hotel staff took care of him with an earnestness that suggested they thought God had given them an onerous task. At the end, after we had nearly soiled ourselves laughing at his jokes, he thanked his wife. “She lets me fail,” he explained. It was a privilege to hear him speak. 

We went home, paid the babysitter, and looked at our own kids. At the same time, many other parents were coming home and looking at their kids, and wondering if they were to be the blind people on the bus, desperately trying to prevent other passengers from stepping on their dogs tails. They probably thought of trust funds, surgical procedures that might one day work. I like to think they felt supported, that they had hope. 

So if you get a chance, donate to your local blindness-fighting charity. If the doctor who spoke that night is right, we’re around the corner. We just might beat blindness. 

True Valentine's day Story

A night that shall live in infamy

This happened at least four years ago. I’ve tried to forget it.

We were heading back to Halifax for our usual summer visit. The same routine - stay with in-laws, be infantilized, do nothing in our home town, eat a lot. Except this time my best friend was living nearby. I’d known this guy since the fifth grade. We’ve always been tight. Since I only saw him once every few years at best, we always had to do everything in one night: see each other, drink several years worth of booze, talk as much as possible about everything. Whenever I saw this guy, whom I’ll call Ricky, I had to plan on being bedridden the next day.

I told my wife that Friday night was my time with Ricky, and she agreed. I met him near the train station and took him out for Indian food at the Taj Mahal restaurant. Then it was off to drink at the Midtown on Grafton street. The Midtown has always been cheap and a good place to start a drunken night. With hindsight, starting the night with beer is stupid, because you’ll be bloated when you graduate to spirits. Then the night goes south, as it did with us.

We talked for hours at the Midtown, then we went to the Economy Shoe Shop, which for years has been the ferny yuppie hangout on Argyle. We had at least eight rounds of rum and cokes, which is the maritime drink of choice. How do you order coke with two ounces of dark rum? ‘I’ll have a double dark’n’dirty, if you please!’ By this point we were making grand declarations of love and outrageous promises. I dimly recall Ricky promising to help murder an acquaintance or relative who’d been plaguing me, and he said so with drunken and pedantic honesty. 

After I had paid the waitress and tipped some unknown amount that she had suggested, we headed to The Liquor Dome. It had a Cabaret License, which allowed to stay open until three in the morning. That building had always been known as the Last Chance for Romance, because if you hadn’t gotten lucky anywhere else, you could always go to to the Dome, which had two floors and bars everywhere like adult diaper stations. Ricky was buying even more drinks and shoving them at me. I was having trouble standing. I finally persuaded Ricky that we should head home. 

We walked along Barrington Street where it was quiet. All the lights were dazzling and the air was whooshing in and out of my lungs, which is what happens when I am extremely drunk. I think we may have gone into an all-night store and inexplicably bought a litre of strawberry soymilk. 

We arrived at the corner of Barrington and Inglis, the beginning of the good part of town. 

“Sometimes,” slurred Ricky. “There are people along here. Right about here. At night.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. If had been sober I would have figured it out right away. 

There was a woman on the corner, standing by herself. 

“You guys out drinkin?” she called.

“Yup,” answered Ricky. “And we’re not done yet!” 

She was very nice and walked with us for half a block. “I got tequila at my place,” roared Ricky. “Let me buy some mix and we’ll meet back up with ya!” The thought of more liquor made me almost faint. 

She sort of faded away, back to the corner where we had found her, and I waited outside a convenience store while Ricky bought the sort of mix that’s whitish green and comes in a long bottle. The stuff you always pass over in a store because it looks poisonous. Ricky took a long time, an oddly long time, because he’d bought something else instead of tequila mix.

When he came out, there was a middle-aged black woman with him. She wore a halter top, booty shorts, and walked with a herky-jerky strut. “She’s gonna do us both for eighty bucks!” said Ricky. 

“What,” I said. He’d found her in the gas-station convenience store? 

“You come along with me, honey,” she said. She took my hand and led us off as I looked over my shoulder for the nice lady I’d met down on the corner. Where had she gone? I’d wanted to talk to her.

The area near the bottom of Inglis where it meets Barrington is odd. You’re just below mansions, endless green lawns, wrought-iron fences. There’s a heritage bus tour that goes through it, for Christ’s sake! It shouldn’t be next to several blocks of rooming houses, drug dealers, and a student ghetto for a university that requires a 60% average out of high school for admission. But this is how it’s always been.

She took us into one of those places. Up some stairs, past rows of doors. She opened one door into a room with a floor covered in trash, beer cans, and a diagonal mattress. A hinky-looking man lay on the mattress smoking something out of a glass pipe. “I need the room,” she said to him, and he just said, “Okay,” and got up and walked out. “How’s it going?” he said to us as he walked by. 

She took us in. I was still very drunk, and regarding everything with clinical and numb amusement. She got down on her hands and knees, and took off her shorts as she bent over in our faces. Ricky knelt down and grabbed a cheek. “Take a look at that,” he said. “Not bad at all, eh?” For a crack addict she had reasonably good ass, I had to concede. 

My gaze wandered over to the mantlepiece, where there were a few pictures leaning against the mirror. “Whazzat?” I said, pointing.

Her face lit up. “Picture of my babies!” she said. “Wanna see?”

“Sure,” I replied.

“NO!” said Ricky. “No, we don’t want to see!”

But she had already stood up, gotten down a picture, and showed me. Three girls. They looked to be about fourteen, seventeen, and twenty. Freckles, hoodies, tight curled hair. And that was it for me.

“I’m going outside,” I said. “Rick, I’ll see you in a bit.”

She took me by the hand and led me out to hall and to the foot of the stairs. Still buck naked, she gave me a big hug and went back into her room where Ricky was waiting.

I went down to the corner. The first woman was there. “Did you come back to look for me?” she said.

“Yeah.”

We went to her rooming house and sat together on the porch. “My buddy’s up there with that other woman,” I said. 

“Her?” she said. “But she got no teeth.” 

“Oh,” I said.

“You wanna go upstairs to my room?”

“Nah. But if you want to leave me here and head back out to your corner, I won’t mind. I know you gotta make some money.”

“No, I’ll talk with you.” 

Her name was Liz. She was Hamilton originally. She had blonde curly hair and little sharp teeth. She had three daughters too, and she smoked rock. 

Another girl joined us, a heavy, pale girl who wore a shapeless black hoodie that pooled around her head and made her look a little like Bergman’s spectre of death. 

“Do you do dates?” she asked me.

“Nah,” I said. “You could have talked to my friend, but he’s up there with another girl.”

“Her?” said the girl with the hoodie.  “But she got no teeth. He know that?”

Ricky came down a moment later. “Right after you left, she took out her friggin dentures and said, ‘let’s get started.’ I got outta there quick.”

The four of us settled down and got to talking. Once or twice the hinky-looking man wandered by and said hello. I don’t remember much of what we talked about. I do remember Ricky handing Liz a twenty and holding open her shirt. Liz talked about how she kissed her clients and how that made her special. It was around 4:30 in the morning when I decided that I needed to head back to my in-laws where my wife and kids were sleeping. 

Ricky and Liz joined me. We walked along Young Avenue, the site of the heritage bus tours, past the mansions, the gardens. Less than two hundred feet from my in-law’s house I gave both Ricky and Liz a massive hug and bid them goodnight. I found out later that Ricky went back to her room and bought himself a good time.

The punch line to this story should be that a crackwhore accompanied me along the nicest streets of my hometown. But I knew Liz as a mother,  someone who spent time with me freely, and I really hope that she turned out alright. She was over forty when I met her, with three kids somewhere in Ontario, and a crack addiction. 

The next morning we drove to the middle of nowhere to visit my grandmother. I barely survived. Ricky called me the next day and suggested we keep this particular story to ourselved. Which is why all names are changed. 

The new OKGo video : Needing/Getting

This band is amazing. From their first smash viral hit, A Million Ways, they've been at the forefront of inventive visuals. They usually get a grant to fund their work, and then release it into the wild. This time they've persuaded Chevy to fork out the money. The payoff? They use a Chevy van in this video, and the emblem is front and centre.


They swear they've used only inventiveness and hard work to accomplish the impossible feats of synchronicity and timing in their past works. I don't believe them; I think they've used some sort of of editing or computer trickery to fix the glitches. In this new video, they appear to be doing the impossible: chaos theory and Murphy's Law should have made this video a bust.

Whatever the truth is, Chevy has a new product placement that is cheaper and a billion times more inventive and effective than paying Will Smith five million bucks to say a few lines, and OKGo has a new video. Enjoy, and if you can figure out how they hell they did this, let me know.

Indian food and some silly pictures

The in-laws are here this weekend. They’re lovely people, but they’re old. Any one of my generation should have boomers as parents, which means our parents slept with other people, did drugs, travelled, found themselves, and generally accumulated some faults and mistakes. My mother and father in-law are just a hair older than the oldest baby boomer. 

What does that mean? It means they got married right out of college, mommy immediately quit work to look after the kids, sacrificed everything, and deferred to daddy in every decision. Before the kids were born, they’d bought the house they were going to die in and daddy took his one and only job from which he's now retired.They’re unlike my parents, and the parents of many in my generation, who are mobile, and had many jobs, took some risks. They’re lovely people, but they’re old and I don’t have a lot in common with them. They’ve never made mistakes. 

They arrived yesterday, and while they were out on their daily walk (they’re the sort who take twice-weekly showers and daily walks), I shopped in the big Indian store near where I live. I made my favorite: Saag Paneer, which I’ll describe in a moment. I also made Eggplant Bartha and threw together a dahl. 

Saag Paneer means spinach and farmer’s cheese. You throw three or four bunches of spinach into a mess of onion, garlic, turmeric, cumin, green chilis, and most importantly fenugreek, and then let simmer for an hour until the spinach has cooked down into an aromatic slime. It may sound awful but it’s my favorite dish. Purree partly, add a dash of cream, and put in salt and the blocks of cheese, and you have an pot of steaming emerald goodness. 

A dahl is simply lentils and spices. There are thousands of different recipes in every province of Indian. India has always been highly populated and very Hindu, and those two factors have come together and made good vegetarian cooking a necessity. 

The third dish was the kicker: eggplant bartha, a curry made from eggplants and a typical blend of spices, garam masala and coriander being the dominant flavours. You have to roast the eggplants first. I don’t have a barbecue, so I had to do it in my oven. Indian eggplants are long and purplish, and in the oven the skin gets black and tight. By the end, I thought there were three severed and blackened arms in my oven.

They’re scary when you first take them out. You have to cut the skin lengthwise, and peel it back. For a moment I thought I had dead and rotting squid on my stove. I’ve attached a picture for your edification.

Above the eggplants is the completed saag.

I made some Naan bread later on, and had a three dish meal with fudge brownies for desert. I’d attack a picture of my apron but I don’t do that shit. 

Some other silly pics:

Yoda makes everything better

A boxer on a trampoline

Photos from the weekend

This is a Costa Rican Owl Butterfly next to my hand. My hand is not small.

    Not much happened this weekend. It was beautiful, not rainy, so we went to the park, and went to the lookout where all the tourists go. We fed ducks and did lots of family stuff.

   We went to Stanley Park yesterday because the park staff were giving a talk on raccoons. Let me tell you something about those little black-masked bastards - they're smart, have opposable thumbs, and can problem solve. If they figure out how to unlock your raccoon-proof garbage can, they will somehow teach that skill to other raccoons in the neighbourhood. I can almost see three hundred years in the future, where we're all retarded internet denizens, completely insensate, and human-sized raccoons are harvesting our physical bodies for meat. I bet we taste pretty good to something that considers stale cookies and stolen dogfood a treat.

Feeding ducks and an American Coot.

A lovely scene that belies their violence.

That view I mentioned. Please click.

 My wife parked the van while I took the two boys on a hike around Lost Lagoon. The older one was being a twit and holding back, so I texted my wife to keep an eye out for him and took the younger one along the path.

  There was a sharp, rippling shriek, and a bestial hiss from the bushes by the shore. We went closer; I imagined that a skunk or raccoon had taken on a goose for a challenge.

  We looked into the bushes. Some idiot had taken a large box of cream-filled cookies and dogfood and put it in the bushes. Two enormously fat raccoons were stuffing their faces.

  Later on, the park staff complained to us that the Stanley Park raccoons had become diurnal (active during  the day) and were at risk of becoming diabetic from all the sweets they were eating (this is a downtown park). I'm not worried about them. They're becoming like us and one day they're going to want a twitter feed. They just want  piece of the action.

Lulu the Cat

Many years ago, sometimes during the mid-nineties when I was perpetually in school, one of my best friends in the music faculty asked me something.

“Mac,” he said. “You know anything ‘bout cats?”

I looked at him. He was a heavily built Italian guy, with jet black hair and a brilliant smile that he’d had even as a baby. In the time he’d been at school, he’d gotten to know the backstage guys, got keys to every door in the building and kept them in a ring on his belt, and had a small female labour pool who warmed his bed, did his homework, and helped him learn his music. God had given him so much in his way with people, and somehow God, in His infinite wisdom, had given him a mild learning disability. He couldn’t read music. 

That year he’d become the general dogsbody for our music teacher. He did things for people, free of charge. Whenever he asked me for a favour, I jumped at the chance; I had to somehow pay him back for all his meals I’d eaten, the drinks he’d bought, all the millions of things he’d done. Now he was asking me something about cats. 

“I had cats when I was kid,” I said. “I guess I know a few things.”

“David wants me to take his cat to the vet. It needs shots or something, I dunno. They gave me a list for the vet to read. Help me bring it to the vet?”

“Absolutely,” I said eagerly.

We took a cab over to our teacher’s apartment. David and his wife were big, hard-working, and very hard drinking Southerners. They had a house in Vermont, but they’d done their best to make the Saint Catherine’s street two-bedroom a home: A black baby grand, a wall full of mirrors (I was told they made a place look larger), autographed posters, enormous poofy couches, shag carpets, and (this was something many people had remarked on and it had never been explained) black candles on the dining room table. 

When we arrived, the gigantic Lulu waddled daintily out to meet us. She was black and white, a mixed breed, but carried herself like a prize-winning Persian. Anthony stood back as I scratched Lulu behind the ears and then unceremoniously rammed her into a carrier. 

To this day I don’t know why David and his wife sent Anthony, a big Italian who throughout his life never had so much as a pet rock, to oversee the medical care of their prize kitty. A few years later, I heard that they’d hired an untrained music student to care for David’s senile and incontinent mother in-law, but that’s another story. 

The vet was a burly man with a heavy gallic moustache. He tossed poor Lulu onto his metal examining table, shoving his large hairy fingers into here and there, taking her temperature, and finally giving her several needles into the bulging nape of her neck. Lulu, although a mouser of reputed savagery and sadism, lay there and peed herself, her furry limbs spread like a dead octopus over the smooth stainless steel.  The vet had an Italian name and Anthony chatted with him (“E voi che siete Italiano?”). I knew just enough Italian to remember this exchange, while the vet was weighing Lulu. 

“Thirteen pounds. That’s a very heavy cat,” said the vet.

“You should see the owners,” said Anthony.

We left. Anthony had paid the vet bill and put the receipt into an envelope. On the cab ride back, Anthony bent down and took a look at Lulu inside the cat carrier.

“Did the vet give the cat a sedative or something?”

“No. Why?”

“Because she’s so quiet.”

On the way to the vet, she’d cried unhappily with a high, kittenish meow that belied her size. Now she was quiet as a stone and stared straight out the window. She didn’t seem angry. 

We got back to David’s apartment. Lulu emerged from the carrier, and seemed to grow and fluff out as she put the vet’s big and knobby hands out of her mind. I looked around the kitchen, opened a small pantry, and there, against the wall, were several hundred cans of Fancy Feast. I opened one and poured it into Lulu’s bowl. The meat, or whatever it was, came out the same shape as the can, with the can’s metal striations shiny, perfect, and straight against the wet mess of cat food. Lulu dug into her food. Her tail rose in pleasure, and I noticed something down there. I bent over to take a closer look.

Sticking unobtrusively out of Lulu’s ass was the vet’s rectal thermometer. 

“Jesus,” I said. I grasped it, pulled, and it slid firmly out. I stood there for a moment, aghast, upset, and as of yet unaware that later in the day I would tell of this several times and I would be laughed at, by both my friends and Lulu’s owners. After a moment, I went to the sink, and washed catshit off the thermometer. As the person whom Anthony had designated as a animal expert, I felt ashamed and somehow responsible that Lulu got violated. 

I placed the thermometer, spanking clean, on the coffee table with a note. Dear David, The vet left his thermometer up Lulu. Here it is  - Mac. PS. Don’t worry, I washed it.

A few years later, I heard that David’s mother left Lulu outside all night during a Vermont winter. In the morning, all that was left of her was a pile of snow against the patio door with two little eyes peeking out. Lulu survived that as well. 

A lonely Saturday night on the Internet

Too easy and ethnocentric, I know. 

The school needs to call this man.

   Internet people are visual. I don't have a lot to blog about tonight; I really shot my wad with my Stephen King review last night.So instead I’m going to fill you in on what’s been going on. Just a little pause for station identification, if you will. Also, some funny pictures. 

Someone in my son’s class has been making death threats. This is the fourth grade, so the kids are between 8-10 (my son’s nine). Someone found a note in her backpack. It said If you don’t stop talking to me I will kill you. This is the second such note. 

Now, when I heard about this, I thought that teachers in my day would have brushed that under the rug and continued on with the lesson on General Frontenac. But my kid’s teachers (there are two in a job-sharing situation) are taking it very seriously. First, they worked out that only a student within the fourth/fifth grade split class could have written the note. Then they asked the class en masse for the culprit to come forward. If you come forward and confess, things will be much easier for you. You know they’re searching the faces of every single person in that class, looking for the slightest guilty tremor. But nothing; no dice. 

The next step was a visit from the cops, and a lecture from those boys and blue about how serious it is to threaten someone with death. Each child has met the teacher alone for extra-special scrutiny: How do you think this person is feeling? How would you feel if you were that person? The final step: handwriting analysis. That’s right, they’re going CSI on a class of fourth and fifth graders. Each kid will have to submit some handwriting, and then the clock will start ticking. I doubt whoever did this was prescient enough to disguise his or her own handwriting. I also think that you could whittle down the pool of suspects by looking at the neatness of the handwriting: if it’s really neat, then a girl probably did it. I’m not being necessarily sexist: many of the student assignments are posted on the wall outside class, and the girls always have neater handwriting. 

I’ll keep you posted on the elementary school death threat situation, but in the meantime, some funny pictures. Because the internet has to have its dopamine fix, its visual stimulation, and its flashy and funny things. 

Beautiful steampunk pens. Drooling? They're Montblanc limited editions.  These five pens cost more than a house.

A rude ghost spying on kitty's derrier.

Spiders can be cute. Really!

11/22/63 - Stephen King

11/22/63 is a massive, breathtaking novel that may finally affirm Stephen King as a great writer. I’ll get to that book in the moment (just finished it today), but I want to talk about something else first. 

I recently read a speech by Brian Keene, which he gave during Anthocon 2011. It was called 'Know Your Genre'.’ He runs through the history of horror literature, dividing it into waves that span from the 1900’s to the present. It’s a decent speech, and near the end he poked fun at several posters on the Shocklines message board who aren’t all that familiar with Robert Bloch. He gave the impression that without a knowledge of that very definite and linear progression of horror writers, a new horror writer is in trouble. 

I felt the speech was too precise - it posited horror writing as wizardry that must be handed down from one generation to another. Stephen King himself, along with Dean Koontz and Peter Straub, is named as part of the Fourth Wave that came to be during the seventies and eighties. Before the fourth wave came the third: Serling, Bloch, Bradbury, Matheson. After the fourth wave came writers like Keene, Joe Hill, Tim Lebbon, Wrath James White. Going by Keene’s speech, I can almost see these writers at neat, persnickety horror-genre  reunions in which the tables are grouped by age and rank. Then they get drunk and knock up the serving staff with illegitimate children. 

My own take on the ‘Know Your Genre’ theme? I’ve been a horror fan all my life. I think the progression of the genre is far more amorphous that we’d care to admit. I think that to group it into this square Danse Macabre is limiting and not particularly accurate. I also think that Stephen King wasn’t part of a wave of any kind. He was a meteor that sent waves crashing out in every direction. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read horror published within the last five years that has some element of Stephen King. Often, these efforts fall way short of the mark, but I can still tell.

Let’s discuss King’s influences. If you’ve read Bradbury, you know how much King owes to Bradbury’s collection ‘The October Country.’ But Bradbury was more a Science Fiction writer; he hung out with Heinlein and Forrest J. Ackerman. Right there is a broken link in the genre chain.

One of King’s favorite tropes is the simple, childlike character with precognitive ability: Danny Torrance in The Shining, Mother Abigail in The Stand, the blind girl in The Langoliers, Charlie in Firestarter, John Smith in The Dead Zone. In The Stand, a character wistfully remembers reading Richard Adam’s Watership Down. If someone in a King book talks or thinks of a book, it’s because King thought it was significant. Who is the central character in that novel of talking rabbits? Fiver, the dreamy and runty little rabbit with psychic powers. He foretells the arrival of the dog who attacks General Woundwort. Two of King’s great influences are fantasy authors. 

So we have the greatest horror writer in the genre, who happens to be one of the best-selling authors world-wide, who has non-horror writers as his influences, who writes best-selling novels that sometimes aren’t even horror. King is a great storyteller who happens to like writing horror; he could write anything and you’d still be reading the review at the front your newspaper’s book section. He takes whatever he needs from every genre and has melded it all into a cohesive whole, into a style that reminds me more of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. And he isn’t part of a wave of the seventies and eighties - he’s still here and right now he’s at the top of the heap.

11/22/63 is a sort-of time travel novel, but that’s a conceit that allows King to write a story that at its heart is of adventure and love. It is not a horror novel. 

Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, discovers that the owner of the local diner has been travelling back in time to buy his wholesale meat at 1950’s prices. Besides buying cheap ground beef and winning long odds sports bets, Al Templeton has been researching the Kennedy assassination - he wants to stop it. But here’s the wrinkle - the time portal he uses takes him back to the same place in 1958, five years before Lee Harvey Oswald kills Kennedy, and when he steps back into the present in 2011, only two minutes have passed. During his last visit, when he was gone for years while planning to change history, Al got lung cancer and had to return to the present to find a replacement who will save the president. Now dying and desperate for a chance to see his dream fulfilled, he wants the divorced and childless Jake Epping to go back in time to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. After Jake sees the time portal (which is in Al’s pantry) and what it can do, he agrees. 

What follows is a dizzying trip back to the year between 1958 and 1963. Ford Sunliners, hipsters, Glen Miller, gullwing fins, crewcuts, segregation, soda-shop rootbeer, taking a trip two towns over to buy condoms, poodle skirts - these are just a few of details among thousands that King and his research assistant have put into this novel. Jake comes into a world that is vastly more simple, kind, and cheap, and finds himself falling in love with it. He travels the country, starting in Maine, going to Florida, and finally to Texas to hunker down and wait for Lee to arrive in Fort Worth before he makes that fateful trip to Dallas. Jake falls in love, makes friends, trying desperately to keep his future self apart from his past self, which has become a teacher and respected member of the community. 

I became completely immersed in this book, much in the way I do when reading George RR Martin or Jonathan Franzen. Amidst the world-building, the characters that seem to step living and breathing off the page, there is the King obsession with words, and the deeper meaning below them: names, places, and actions all have similar but not identical siblings throughout the book, engendering a sense of unease and unreality that belies that fabulous, rock-solid historical detail. It is as if magic is bubbling up through cracks in asphalt. 

King, as he always has, writes in serviceable, clear prose, which you would think is the easy way out, but why don’t more authors write like this? As in Betty Smith’s writing, there is never any doubt as to what is happening. But, on rare occasions, King busts out with beauties like this:

     It’s all of a piece, I thought. It’s an echo so close to perfect you can’t tell which one is the living voice and which is the ghost-voice returning.

    For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? Chaos, storms. Men with hammers, men with knives, men with guns. Women who twist what they cannot dominate and belittle what they cannot understand. A universe of horror and loss surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.

    Here, and in a few other passages like it, which I can count on the fingers of one hand, is where the true mystic emerges. This is talent, it’s magic, it’s (too make a pun with the title of one his novels)…IT. I think that here, in this one passage, lies much of what makes Stephen King tick. It’s not horror, not any particular genre, but story. Storytelling, narrative. Hope, dancing (dancing is an enormous theme in this novel) against the entirely purposeless force of decay. 

   Buy this novel. Start it on a Friday so you won’t miss work or school. But read it. 

  Stephen King still has it. After his accident, at the age of sixty-four, he’s still the equal of the young turk who wrote The Dead Zone and The Stand. He might even be better.

My old second-hand Bookstore

When you’re a young fan of horror, there’s not much choice; at least, there wasn’t much choice when I was growing up. In the 21^st century, you can order horror novels off the internet - which you’d think would be cheaper, but instead you’re paying fifty to eighty dollars for a book about giant monster crabs, because in ten years it will fetch a big price at the Las Vegas Monster Crab Book Convention. But I digress. 

There wasn’t much at the regular bookstore; horror is never a big draw. Also, new books were and are expensive, and that was before the advent of the small press. No monster crab and zombie collectibles, just an American price on the spine above a much higher Canadian price. 

Faced with exorbitant prices and and little choice, the discerning (desperate really) horror fan had to go the second-hand route. Where on Earth could you go? The United Cigar Store, on Barrington Street in downtown Halifax. Nova Scotia.

This place is so obscure that I can’t find a picture of it on google; I looked. It sold cigarettes and cigars (I think it did, anyway), and the rest of the store space was devoted to second-hand books and magazines. There was the obligatory rack of old porn mags (Hustler, Oui, Gallery, and Juggs, which should have been called Hard-Up Women with Back Problems ), and if I knew my horror history then like I do now, I would have taken a peek at them to see if I could find an old Stephen King story.

It was/is the most normal-looking store. Dirty old tile, bright trashy lights, soft drinks and bags of chips up front, a small rotating rack of bestseller hardbacks that had probably been bought at the bookstore in Scotia Square a block over. The bestsellers and candy were a beating heart with the dead and lost books a dying corpse around it. 

Some odd things about this place: It had two racks side-by-side, one full of identical copies of the killer-bee disaster novel, The Swarm(Arthur Herzog), and the other full of identical copies of the psycho killer-whale thriller Orca (also by Arthur Herzog). I have no idea why they had hundreds of copies of these two books, or why they didn’t just junk them all. Those stupid books stayed there for years and years.

The other racks had regular, non-identical second-hand books, and a wonderful horror selection. The lovely schlock I waded through when I went to that place! For one of my birthdays a friend of mine just gave me a stack of random novels he bought in bulk from that store. I loved it, because the horror rack in a second hand store is like a beach full of flotsam and old condoms, with treasure buried somewhere beneath.

What did I find there? All the old James Herbert rat-apocalypse books (The Rats, Lair, and Domain), the classic Incubus, by Ray Russel (which I’ve written about), a wonderful coming-of-age werewolf novel called The Orphan, by Robert Stallman, and an absolutely enraging piece-of-shit called Spawn of Hell (William Schoell), which was about strange slug creatures with the faces of their victims’ relatives grafted  onto their heads. I re-read Spawn of Hell whenever I wanted to get mad. 

The United Cigar Store is still there. The incongrous racks of identical Herzog novels are gone, thanks to the 21^st century business climate. But a lot of the old second-hand books (the horror in particular) are still there. I would guess that a few of them have not been touched in twenty years. They’re probably lousy with bedbugs and crumbling to acidic dust, although I like to think they’re still there, fine but just a little faded, waiting to be picked up for a buck or two. 

If you’re ever in Halifax, that store is still there, and still in the most central location in Halifax. It’s mainly second-hand, but a lot of stores in Halifax are second-hand. There is a huge second-hand bookstore in the AT&T mall at the corner of Spring Garden and Barrington, and it looks far more dusty and decrepit than The United Cigar Store, if you are so inclined. You can go to these places, or you can go to the wonderful and impossibly ancient Lawrence’s Books here in Vancouver, and see the strange and wondrous world of things that people gave up because they had to move, spring-clean, make a few bucks, get divorced, or clean out a house after a death. 

The inarguable weight and size of books, their tendency to rot and smell, make them automatically antique and obsolete before their time. There were second-hand bookstores long before ebooks, and they have always been places where the slightly oddball among us have come to search for things others might not have valued. 

The second-hand books will moulder as we buy less physical books. Second-hand stores are going to disappear, and the only thing left will be the typical box of 50-cent paperbacks at the Goodwill or the small-town antique store. 

So if you see a second-hand store, go in. Look around, remember. No one will make a second-hand store for second-hand bookstores. 

Living with A Stoner

During my third year of university, I had to find a roommate. I couldn’t afford a place of my own. So I did what most people do: I looked at the walls of the Student Union Building (which, at McGill University, was called the William Shatner Centre, and no I am not making this up) where there were housing ads taped alongside the fliers for protests marches and student social clubs.

I was embryonically stupid then. I wouldn’t say I was a genius now, but I’m surprised that back then I didn’t need an artificial lung to take over when I forgot to breath. I met a fellow I’ll call Murray, and despite the filth of his apartment (where we would live), I agreed to live with him. 

I arrived to begin school in September and the horror started. 

I might have been stupid, but he was barely human. He went through terrible marijuana binges where he would shut himself into an the airtight front room (the door would be closed and the door to the balcony was sealed off with insulating plastic), smoke himself into a stupor, and watch TV all night. In the morning before I went to school, I would sometimes look through the window on the door to the front room to see what lay beyond: Murray sprawled on the floor in an insensate heap amidst his twisted sleeping bag, his rear end more often then not poking out from his partly pulled-down shorts. Grapefruit halves with dead cigarettes stubbed out inside them  and upside down pizza boxes littered the floor around him. It was almost exactly akin to the scene in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when a young women enters a murderer’s house and sees a living room so terribly, insanely messy that it seems to ooze evil and menace. 

I often got ready for class as quietly as possible so I didn’t wake him up. If he did wake up, he would emerge from the fetid depths of the front room, the sleeping bag wrapped around his upper body but his bare legs and sagging underwear exposed, to shuffle into the bathroom and pee, farting like an old man. Then he would shuffle back to go asleep. I never understood why he slept in the front room like he was a stoned and hibernating bear; his own bedroom was four feet away.

When I got ready for class, I often put the phone off the hook. Otherwise his mother would call, wake him up, and I would have to look at him. His mother was rightly worried about him : Murray’s little brother was in his first year of Engineering; his older sister was doing her MBA at Yale. She was worried about her disappointing middle child. So she called every morning if I let her. When Murray would answer the phone, the conversation went like this (I heard this almost every morning so it’s burned into my head. You have to imagine his Montreal urban anglophone accent, which sounds a little like a New York accent. You also have to imagine that she owned the building and he was sort of this half-assed disaster landlord who did absolutely nothing, for himself or anyone.)

“Hi mom. Yeah, I was up. No, I’m going to head out and look for a job. Yeah. I have to go. I have to go. Good-bye. Good-bye. Good-bye. I have to… Good-bye. Okay, I’m hanging up the phone. Good-bye. Good-bye.” This went on for many minutes, and sometimes happened several times in a morning. Sometimes, on snowy days, she’d arrange for him to clear the walk in front of his uncle’s Jewish tombstone store. That was all he ever did when I lived with him. He was a perversely fascinating creature, and like Gollum, he didn’t know how hideous he had become. 

But somehow, somehow, through those twists of fate that happen to stoners and the unfortunate idiots who live with them, our female roommate left (understandably - she probably would have killed him if she hadn’t left), and Murray rented a room to someone even worse that he was. 

Joey was in his early thirties and psychotic. By psychotic, I mean he talked and screamed to himself, and kept a long line of pill bottles on the mantle of his room. Thank God he was smaller than me, or else I would have been terrified of him. Murray hated him, and for a while we sort of bonded over our fear and loathing of this chaotic and doomed man.

Then the inevitable violence happened. 

Joey liked to smoke when he wasn’t coasting on his many suppressants. The deal he had struck with Murray was that he would smoke with his door closed, since I hated the smell. But Joey began to smoke with the door open, and the cigarette smoke reached me. It was the end of the year, it was getting hot in that Montreal way, and the apartment was on the third floor. 

One day I charged into the living room, hot, angry, and infuriated that the smell of cigarettes had come into my room. I yelled that he had to close his door. He came out. 

“I need the fresh air, fuck!” he yelled (the use of the word ‘fuck’ is at the end of a sentence is a Montreal thing, and it comes from Quebec french)

I charged and he met me in the middle of the living room. For a few seconds I had him in a headlock, him grunting in rage, and then I was saying: “Joey. Stop. We have to stop. Jesus Christ, we have to stop.” I let him go. 

After he rose, I held out my hand, he held out his, and we shook. He went back into his room. I looked at my arm, where there was a gash that had somehow opened during that encounter. When Joey came out to the kitchen to fix himself a snack and smiling as if nothing had happened, he had a flap of skin two inches long hanging from his arm. 

Beyond my initial and heat-driven rage at Joey, I wasn’t angry had him. He was ill and couldn’t be anything else. I was angry at Murray for renting a room to this man. 

I moved two days later, Murray screaming at me as I carried my stuff to a rented van. He said I owed him money, and I insisted that he’d made my life hell and that I owed him nothing. I probably should have payed him something, but hate is a powerful motivator when you realize you can effect revenge through money. I wanted his parents to be angry at their 26 year-old son who couldn’t run their investments and rented to psychotic welfare cases. But more than anything I just wanted to be finished, to not contribute a single cent more of my worth to sustaining what I realized was a rotating door system of college kids and crazy people who lived with this useless man-child.

This happened a long time ago, but I still think of it from time to time, and wonder if Murray (who would now be in his mid-forties) is still offering himself as a roommate to bewildered college kids, or if the great wave of money and gentrification that swept through downtown Montreal swept him up as well, along with his parents’ apartment buildings and the tombstone store up the street. I almost hope not. He added some clownish colour to that great city and I learned a lot when I lived with him.