Author: admin

Posted on

Mini-vacation

Morning reflections on lake

Last week, I took a mini-vacation. Ed and I organised a four-person canoe trip to Massasauga park (yes, named after the only-poisonous-animal-in-Ontario rattlesnake). I’ve never done my own canoe trip – I did a one-night run in 1996, but that was entirely organised by “adults” and I still don’t even know where we went. The Massasauga was quite nice – just a bit south of Parry Sound, and dead empty. We only saw two other groups on the water during our three day trip, probably because we had a midweek, early June date. As it happened, early June was not a problem; it was gorgeously hot and sunny.

And despite my recollections of Ontario parks as “boring,” it was quite attractive. Sure, it doesn’t quite have the drama of a BC rainforest or mountains, but it has the same inherent calm, misty beauty. And there’s plenty of wildlife – we saw a fox, a turtle with a shell the size of a dinner plate, and a small water snake swimming with its head poked out of the water. The only real downside in comparison to BC was the presence of mosquitoes (especially in the swampy portages), but somehow the 50-100 bites I got didn’t really itch or annoy me. If there were truly no decent outdoors options near Toronto, that might have been a deal-breaker… but this was quite a good trip. Photos are available, of course.

The second half of my vacation was a trip to Montréal. The main point of the trip was to hang out with Tyson and Gill, who flew out from Vancouver for some vacation. I tacked on a dinner in Kingston with the grandparents, ploughed through a few hundred pages of A Short History of Nearly Everything on the bus ride, and mostly chilled out in Montréal proper. Oddly enough, I did run into undergrad classmate Dave Carney on the street, and caught up with a small crowd of ex-NetIntegration people from undergrad at a party later that night, and caught up with Dave Coombes over drinks later in the weekend.

This was my first summer visit to Montréal since I lived there in 2001, and there were a few changes worth noting. I was pleased to see that they’d knocked down the pointless spaghetti of freeway-style ramps at the intersection of Parc and des Pins, although they didn’t seem to have a new urbanised vision for the intersection. There were considerably more cyclists on the streets, for starters. While I didn’t see any new separated bikeways (just the two older ones on Rachel and Berri), there were many new bike lanes and new “sharrows” indicating a route intended for cyclists. They also had an interesting approach for handling turns from one cycling route to another, buliding a protected turning area at a corner by installing bollards (I have a photo; ask me if you care).

In terms of urban design, it looks like the condo phenomenon is progressing apace there, suggesting that the housing market is getting back on its feet. I had never spent much time in Mile End, which had an extraordinarily Mordecai Richler feel when we passed through it, with more orthodox Jews than I’ve ever seen in one place. (Eddy – thanks for the Dieu de Ciel brewpub recommendation; great place.) Outremont was also a stunning area, with gorgeous terrasses and stylish restaurants on Bernard. Finally, after seeing the ongoing success of Toronto’s 1930s buildings, I’m still surprised by the near-abandonment of Montréal’s old banks near the Vieux-Port. I still don’t have a good enough feel for the area, but I suspect the Ville-Marie Expressway isolates the entire Vieux-Port from the rest of the city. Too bad; it could be a beautiful area if it was lively and connected.

Posted on

Upgrade

In an effort to fight comment spam, I’ve upgraded the website from WordPress 1.5 to WordPress 2.2. I’ve disabled some of my older ineffective antispam plugins, and I’ve switched to Akismet instead. As a bonus, I can start using some of the newer plugins like the movie reviews thing that Eric uses.

Let me know if you have any problems.

Posted on

jPod

Spoilers ahead. Like any good techie Vancouverite, I know my Douglas Coupland. My favourite novel remains his 2003 Hey Nostradamus! – a very human, relatively realistic novel, where the characters and relationships take priority over the cultural insights. jPod, by contrast, is Coupland at his quirktastic extreme. It’s a very dark, bleak take on humanity and the amorality of the present day.

On the one hand, I recognise the context at a glance; the perks and psychoses of the video game industry are only too familar, down to the tiny details like trying to beat Super Metroid in under an hour. I’d be interested to hear from someone way outside that context, to see if all the discussion of texture artists and so on actually makes sense. The comparison of techies to autistics remains too scarily accurate, I suspect; Wired has even commented on the unusual rate of autism found in Silicon Valley, when techies mate with techies and many recessive traits are expressed simultaneously. Curious stuff…

The hectic go-go-go over-the-top tone really put me off initially, but it quickly evolved into some real belly laughs as everything got progressively more insane. Coupland’s quirky books are endlessly quotable, and his use of himself as a narrative device and character are utterly fantastic in jPod.

But the central theme of the book? I’m not sure what to make of it. My take on it is that jPod is indeed a post-Google version of Microserfs, where the utopian dreams have faded and revealed the ultimately vacuous uses of new technology. Google and the Internet permeate the entire book, and yet are never used for any positive purpose; they have become simply another part of the entertainment/consumer sphere. All of the world’s information is now at our fingertips, but we don’t really want it. We can no longer feign ignorance of all the problems around us, so we have to invent new coping mechanisms to allow us to avoid dealing with the problems of the world. Ethan is just an example of this coping mechanism: an amoral disinterest in the madness unfolding around him.

Did it have to be so bleak? Did all of the characters have to be so forgettable? Hasn’t this essentially been said before, many times?

So, like everyone else blogging about this book, I’ll close with a few quotes.

“Oh God. I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.” [Beware, Little Lytton. He’ll be making submissions soon.]

“I ended up falling asleep watching the Schindler’s List bloopers DVD”

“And the air [in China]! Okay, imagine that you’ve built a bonfire of telephone poles – the ones dripping with creosote – and throw in a fax machine, a photocopier, some asbestos stacking chairs and a roasting chicken.”

“Inside the house here, the bathrooms have no doors, and it’s a liberating feeling to be in them, it really is. Doors are nothing more than flat wooden burkas invented to keep women from feeling proud and fallopian.”

“You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually on the brink of being obsolete – whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness.”

And, in a non-sequiter, my favourite GenX quote, from Dag’s father: “Hey, Sport. Isn’t the smell of gasoline great? Close your eyes and inhale. So clean. It smells like the future.”

Posted on

A cinematic mix

As you may know, I still occasionally put together little mix CDs. The purpose is usually just to squish a bunch of my favourite tunes into one album, to keep a sort of record of my tastes at a given moment, and to foist the music I like upon unsuspecting friends. After I listen to them dozens of times, the mixes tend to gather lots of sentimental associations. Whenever I hear the tracks on their original albums, they feel somehow wrong – I always anticipate the next track from the mix afterwards, and the real album feels surprising.

Anyways, a new mix. The themes this time? Well, a bit more cinematic than usual; the Amon Tobin and Joe Henry tracks belong in a movie, and Angelo Badalamenti scores all of David Lynch’s films. Plus, my appreciation of the Beastie Boys and Beck has grown since I started watching the fantastic Director’s Label DVDs from Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.

My tastes do seem to be stuck in a rut that doesn’t extend far beyond 2002, but that may just be a result of spending too much time in library of older mp3s. Or it may just be a consequence of the precipitous decline in electronic music since around that date.

E-mail me if you want to listen to the mix. Assuming you’re someone I know, that is.

  1. tracy chapman. fast car. folk, from tracy chapman, 1988.
  2. sufjan stevens. the upper peninsula. folk, from greetings from michigan! the great lakes state, 2003.
  3. buck 65. wicked and weird. hip hop, from talkin’ honky blues, 2003.
  4. beastie boys. sure shot. hip hop, from ill communication, 1994.
  5. amon tobin. four ton mantis [radio edit]. drum & bass / breaks, from supermodified, 2000.
  6. blaze. lovelee dae [isolée mix]. electro / house, 1997, from miss kittin: radio caroline volume 1 (2002).
  7. redagain p & smash j. propella man. electro, 1999, from miss kittin: radio caroline volume 1 (2002).
  8. dj teebee. quiet moment [instrumental mix]. drum & bass, from the legacy, 2004.
  9. angelo badalamenti. the bookhouse boys. soundtrack / jazz, from twin peaks, 1990.
  10. joe henry. stop. pop / jazz, from scar, 2001.
  11. mocean worker feat. mahalia jackson. summertime / sometimes i feel like a motherless child. acid jazz, from home movies from the brainforest, 1998.
  12. the little rabbits. des hommes, des femmes, des enfants et le sexe. pop, from la grande musique, 2001.
  13. mouse on mars. schnick schnack meltmade. ambient / experimental, from autoditacker, 1997.
  14. plaid. porn coconut co. ambient / experimental, from double figure, 2000.
  15. beck. tropicalia. rock, from mutations, 1998.
  16. man or astro-man? tetsuwan atomu. rock / surf, from intravenous television continuum, 1995.
  17. broken social scene. superconnected. rock, from broken social scene, 2005.
  18. the most serene republic. epilogue. rock, from underwater cinematographer, 2006.