I think I'm going to apply to Ryerson's j-school master's program in fall 2008. Still a year and a half away, but it's a goal to set. Need out of Alberta. Miss Ontario. Six months of winter killed me this year.

Went to the opera last night. Ed Stelmach was there. Before the performance, the opera's AD announced that he was in the audience and ballyhooed a bunch about his arts funding initiatives, which are jack-squat. And the audience applauded. Oooh...
He was standing near me during intermission, alone, with a drink in his hand, which I thought was odd. Thought about engaging him in some sort of discussion, but I chickened out, of course.

Moving this weekend, to the new apartment. Cheap rent, great neighbourhood, best of all worlds. Thank god spring is here.

Mythy-ness

Haven't posted in a while, eh? May kill this thing... but for now...

Reading Barthes' writing on mythology right now. He proposes that we neither accept mythology as is, nor fall victim to the popular trend of deconstruction (if we parse the myth and discover the rhetorical implications behind it, we can safely say that the truth is its opposite).

Instead, if I understand him right, he proposes we simply read the myth. Understand it without necessarily becoming attached to one or another conclusion about it. After all (and I'm extrapolating) to consciously reject a myth is another form of myth making.

Anyway, I was thinking about a post I made a long time ago about how realtors don't ever use the word "house" anymore. A house implies en empty building, a vacancy. Something you have to fill. Instead, realtors use the word "home", which implies somethin very different. It's gotten to the point that few people in a certain middle class milieu even use the word house anymore. My parents always say home, even when the word house would be more appropriate (i.e., driving past a big house, she'll say, "That's a nice home".)

But you can't sell someone a home. You can only sell them a house. They can make it a "home" or not, but a house is a structure; bricks and mortar. A home is not.

Of course, I guess I'm falling for Barthes' second means of interpreting myth: deconstruction.

Serge Gainsbourg

is a dirty old man.

It's ugly but it's efficient

It was a community of privileged North American kids with a romantic bent who had met in various European cities before dispersing back to the proximities of their childhood, and now spent their time online and on the phone shoring up their tenuous European identities, strengthening their European mien. Their prose was florid (of course there were always a few good writers in the bunch) and their romantic dreams of idling in cafes and parks and the stalls of street merchants were at least a half century behind the reality of Europe in the 21st century; but they were beautiful in their youth and their belief that there was something beyond their bland suburbs and crummy doughnut joint coffee and applications to grad school. They’d always have Paris—or Milan, or Barcelona, or Amsterdam.

We thought they were merely irritating in their little club, and those of us who’d spent our entire lives on this mass of rock and soil called North America felt condescended to. Europe is dead and old, we said. This is the new world, made of unadorned concrete and stone. Fast, clean, stripped down, all right angles and sharp edges. Going places. It’s ugly but it’s efficient. Europe’s baroque identity: ornamentation, gothic clamminess, the confused melange of failed histories—fuck that.

But they weren’t as annoying as the drugged out party animals who’d backpacked around South Asia, a beat-up copy of On The Road in their backpack and facile enlightenment in their hearts, finally ending up in Thailand where they dropped too much acid and took too many hits off a six-foot bong in the shape of Ganesha’s trunk, unconcernedly confusing and conflating cultures, unaware of the rolled eyes of the locals whom they fetishized, and eventually returned obsessed with their Asian zodiac rather than their Indo-European.

Boisclair

Andre Boisclair is in trouble…

Good. Damn country-destroying, no-legitimate complaint having jerkoff.

(I would like to take this opportunity to express my belief that Quebec IS a distinct culture, and a beautiful one, and should be recognized as such. Albertans don’t seem to believe it; maybe you have to have lived there to really understand. HOWEVER, the persecution that sovereigntists claim English Canada perpetrated on them is long past, and in the first place most of Quebec’s woes have been caused either by their own insularity or the 19th and early 20th century Catholic church. Hey, I was a Quebecois Catholic, I know!)

Anyway, Boisclair suggested that the Crucifix at the province’s National Assembly should be removed, which didn’t play well in a province that is still, outside of Montreal (and even to some extent inside it), deeply religious. And apparently his gayness is more of a liability than he’d counted on, which is unfortunate, but again, Quebec is a more conservative place than many seem to believe. It’s also a deeply xenophobic place with a strong antipathy to outsiders. To some extent that xenophobia has been a blessing—it’s kept Quebecois culture strong and more vibrant than probably any other regional culture in Canada. On the other hand, Quebecers seem to know even less about the rest of Canada than Albertans. And that’s not much. Actually, people in Ontario don’t know much about the East. Actually, nobody in this damn country seems to know much about the people in any other part of it. Maybe Canada is too big.

Anyway, I’m digressing. I don’t want to see Quebec separate, because ultimately I would like to live there (or Vancouver, c’mon, Vancouver). On the other hand, the self-righteous politics of persecution practiced and embraced by so many people there would send me up the wall.

The deer and the antelope, my ass

It doesn't matter how often I see it; the prairies at dusk, the dark clouds menacing the horizon, the last pink tendrils of light about to abscond with the day, it's terrifying. Some kind of sinister presence manifests with the evening.

The land throws up no natural barriers to sight besides sheer distance, so there's a distant communications tower with its blinking red light, or a lonely farmhouse miles away; citadels against a void. The brittle little prairie trees and snow fences leading off diagonally from the highway have disappeared into the dark. Anything can happen, but more likely nothing will happen, and that's the fear. If you can turn and go in any direction, how do you decide which way to go? The grass is short and the trees are short and the blackness of the giant sky overpowering.

Maybe it's agoraphobia. A kid raised in the Canadian Shield still isn't used to all this openness.

A typical departure

The scene: A Greyhound bus terminal. Dozens of weary, ill-tempered passengers-to-be are standing in a line-up that snakes from the departure gate to the front entrance. There are clearly too many people to fit on one bus, which is scheduled to leave at four.

3:45 - Boarding is announced.
3:54 - Driver comes out, boarding actually begins.
4:10 - Bus capacity is reached. No more passengers to be allowed on. Remaining passengers are told that another bus will arrive at 4:30.
4:55 - Next bus arrives.
5:03 - Bus begins to board.
5:16 - Passengers are boarded. Luggage handlers chat jovially amongst selves, exemplifying a certain langorous, relaxed approach to their work that I would find quite admirable, had I not been scheduled to leave over an hour ago.
5:29 - Bus loaded, luggage bay doors shut. Driver must place phone call before departure.
5:32 - Driver boards bus.
5:33 - Driver de-boards bus; smokes.
5:34 - Luggage bay doors opened again, more luggage put on. New passenger arrives. Existing passengers glower.
5:41 - Driver boards again
5:43 - Driver starts the engine, on-board radio begins to play the "John Tesh Radio Show".
5:47 - Departure! The "John Tesh Radio Show" continues in all its MOR glory for nearly the all of the 3 1/2 hour ride to Edmonton.
7:14 - Somewhere outside of Red Deer, my head explodes after listening to Tesh play three Billy Joel songs in a row.

Feb 21

In ancient Rome, this was the date of Feralia, “the festival of peace and love”, when all friends and families would gather for a huge feast. No one was allowed to leave the feast until their disagreements and quarrels had been resolved. What a grand idea!

PS I may become the magazine's staff writer, rather than an editor who mainly handles admin crap. This would cause me great joy.