Paperback Savant

Man-Strength and other surprising things I like about my thirties

2011-06-10T23:04:00.000-07:00

I had one Guiness and one Coke sloshing in my belly, a full day and some interesting company, ready to call it a night, I was boasting in a 40% ironic way that I could lick anybody in the house. No sooner had I said the words and believed them then a young fella called me on it.

"You think you could out-arm wrestle me?" said he.

"Yep" says I.

"You want to put $20 on it?"

"Nope"

"Just for fun then?"

"Sure!"

Inside we went, shooing a pair of retired teachers I'd conversed with earlier from their table and submitting to the advice and etiquette discussions of a number of half-in-the sauce patrons. We began. He composed himself and wrestled as if he knew a thing or two about this sweet science, and I was immediately behind the eight ball. He tried thrice to pump me out but I managed to compose myself after each , and in short order he had exhausted himself to give me the well-earned win. It was a gift of genetics as my gym log reads like a list of good reasons to get a face tattoo. But goddammit, I stepped up to the plate and secured my wrung in the great ladder of merit.

I wasn't thinking about that though, I was thinking about "The Old Man and the Sea". I was thinking about how good it feels to be trying absolutely as hard as I can, that real exertion. My success was only sweet sweet icing on the cake. Maybe there's a lesson to be learned there.

Anyway, I find myself in a pretty good place.

Essex County: Southwestern Ontario needs a Hug. Bad.

2011-01-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

It's Canada Reads Time!!!!!!!!

Five New Can-Lit novels found themselves under my tree this Christmas, and as is my habit, I'm reading them in a particular order

It goes like this...
I read the book I figure I'll like the best first
Then I read the remaining for in ascending order of what I think I'll like the best, that is, worst to best.

That's not to say I go into them with my mind already made up, it's just that I judge a book by its cover with the expectation that I'll be surprised. I never fail to be surprised.

That said, the first book this year was Jeff Lemire's Collection of Graphic Novels called Essex County. I don't know why comic book is a dirty word, but call them Graphic Novels, so there.

This is a handful of interconnected stories about a small Southwestern farming community and the well-broken families that inhabit it. Each one of these characters has their hearts broken right in half, thanks in part to their own weaknesses. They are each and every one as lonely as the flat farm they inhabit. Which is to say, very.

Lemire's drawing really hits home, the expressions on his characters faces portray that Protestant melancholy as well as anything I've ever read before, and if the art isn't the most sophisticated thing you've ever seen, he uses every panel so thoughtfully that you might start turning your nose at the shortcomings of realism. Every single panel is a snap shot, nothing is wasted and everything is in sync. If you were shown any one panel from any of the different stories, you'd be able to tell me what the story is about. It's very involved, but at the same time you can absorb it all right away, there's nothing hidden and there's nothing held back.

Lemire hides humour in the despair he describes so very well, but they're the sort of jokes that have everyone giggling, and then trailing off into quiet with everybody staring at their shoes and putting their hands in their pockets.

You can read the entire 500-or-so pages the first time in an afternoon, but the characters might just hang around in your guts for a long time after that. It's not pick-me-up reading, but if you're staring at a snowstorm and the natural light has all but disappeared for another day, you might just find this complementing your mood.

For any of you on again off again CBC listeners, Sarah Quin of "Tegan and Sara" fame is defending the book. Expect Jian to gush and gush and gush.

Love on the Killing Floor

2010-11-07T19:17:00.001-08:00

Love on the Killing Floor is a rat's eye view of Toronto in the early nineties. In our story the city has just been dragged into the cosmopolitan tempo it would beat its chest to a decade later, kicking and screaming. The novel opens in the shadow of Paul Bernardo's Scarborough horrorfest and the race riots of '92. Our protagonist is a bottom rung photographer for a small studio; a divorcee moving from party to party and woman to woman, a smug nihilist smack in his element. With his narrator's voice he turns his observations towards the ethnicities he see's as flooding his Toronto, and rehashes arguments and gripes against the inevitable you're likely to have heard yourself from malcontents of every stripe. The racial disharmony is easily the most prominent theme in the book, but one of the more interesting off-shoots of our narrator's wailing is his opposition to the Homer Simpsonization of white masculinity.

He sees media reflecting a flabby, bumbling, inelegant coward in his image while the "plight" of the "Other" is romanticized. It's bitterness, but it's bitterness that makes those enlightened souls we swallow a little harder. Trevor Clark very cleverly paints his narrator into a corner, quickly running out of faces and people he can stomach, and allows for his escape by way of Yolanda. Yolanda is a black go-getter who thanks to our narrator's formidable boldness is seduced and enters into a relationship that finally lets him take his foot off the passive aggressive pedal. She nips the sharper points of his swelling bigotry and acts as the part-catalyst for his getting his life together; getting a proper job and systematically dropping all of his old suspect acquaintances.

Love on the Killing Floor holds within its expertly bound pages about as many sex scenes as you could shake a prosthetic leg at, none of them exactly laden with allegory but entertaining enough and a very compelling blend of machismo and sensitivity.

The book is bound to make you a bit uncomfortable, it pushes a few buttons that don't usually get pushed anymore and any Toronto Readers will love hearing short stories about people who could live on low wages and still afford beer in bars and studio apartments. You missed one hell of a recession son.

Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine

2010-08-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

Can'tLit is prefaced with a "Not your parent's short stories" rant about how Margaret Atwood is ruining Canadian Literature for everyone else. The editor promises the grotesque, the avant guarde, the So-Hip-It'll-Make-your-Ears-Bleed sentimentality. Work that finds its way onto Broken Pencil and by extension this book are meant to reside on the edge, where the cutting happens, and fuck you if you don't like it Gramps.

"Whoa" says I.

So I open it up in the middle as I am wont to do with Short story books with that tingling sensation that makes me feel like I should be wearing a seatbelt. What does Can'tlit deliver me?

Nice stories, sad stories, stories about sex, stories about sad or even violent sex, but this hardened soul did no blushing. You get the feeling that some of these writers are carrying some serious baggage, but never once do you think they are anything worse than the kind of hipsters who'd help you shovel your driveway if you looked at all fatigued. I didn't feel grossed out and I didn't feel disturbed. I felt welcomed, I felt witty, I felt good.

Dear Broken Pencil,

When I was 18 I read Naked Lunch by Burroughs, when I was twenty I read American Dream by Mailer, my grandparents have a copy of the Satyricon next to their Asterisk comics. If you want to shock me with sex you had better dig real real deep into the tickle trunk because I have to believe when you've read about a guy strangling his wife, sodomizing his maid and then clunking up the stairs to chuck his wife's body out a window, there's no mountain of shock left to climb.

What we've got here is a failure to communicate. Can'tlit is not a book that's clankering for a censorship debate, it's a collection of very good writers writing very good stories. It was a pleasure to read and I really liked it. It dug into some pretty unorthodox sexual dissertations, but always with one foot on the ground and usually tempered with a playful tongue in cheek.

In one story a flat chested preteen falls for a boy with moobs, in another Jesus buys hookers so he can have somebody to talk to, in yet another a gal tours around town in a car painted to resemble her lady bits (or somebody's lady bits). These stories are too hip and too thoughtful to be shocking, and never does any writer do any shocking for shock's sake.

Therein lies the trick I guess. I could probably describe some of the stories in such a way so as to make them seem grotesque, but the writers with no exceptions paint a good story behind even the worst descriptions and make the final product...palatable.

I read Can'tlit at a cottage and the lovely summer weather on the lake didn't hurt the ambiance one bit, so If you're making a late run North to enjoy the last bit of August, pick this one up. May you have as good a time as I did.

Barney's Version

2010-06-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

*I've been remiss in posting and I have the happy excuse of being very busy, nevertheless...

I ran into a copy of Barney's version as one of two dozen paperbacks I grabbed from the Canadian Federation of University Women's Georgetown chapter Book sale a year ago. If there ever was an unbelievable mound of literature ripe for the picking this is it. I grabbed the aforementioned novels, an armload of biographies and a good grocery bag full of kids books. The sale is notoriously good and I'm staring down a thick Hemingway Biography my wife got me this year that I'm tackling this summer.

Richler follows his Narrator Barney Panofsky down his slow destruction at the hands of Alzheimer's, of love and love lost, the grandeur of the squalid West Bank in Paris and the sterility of Montreal during the referendum of '95. All the while he gives a fantastic presentation and stanch defence of the sort of modern Judiasm that colours and frames his perception and makes you want to flush anything you've ever read of Saul Bellow. It makes for a great read, an interesting and complicated love story, a mystery resolved, a snap shot of two disparate times and places and the best fiction on mental illness this side of The Sound and The Fury.

I've heard it said that if Richler is at times a misanthrope, he is a misanthrope for entirely the right reasons. Barney has the added benefit of being hilarious in his flaying of friend and foe alike, and most importantly, his barbs are always deserved, or at least defensible. I enjoyed every page of the book, and have every reason to believe you would to. It's that rare marriage of patient allegory and palatable storytelling that sets the book and the author on the pedestal their ghosts enjoy now as much as they did in life.

Beatrice and Virgil: Horror by any other name

2010-05-09T20:53:00.000-07:00

Yann Martel. Yann Yann Yann. I read Life of Pi. In fact my entire family read it. It was a mass Christmas gift from my Grandmother to each and every member of the family, which all in all constitutes a good third of the copies sold worldwide. On behalf of the Beals, you're welcome.

Life of Pi was by most measures a very good book. The prose was nice and the story was phenomenal, but enough has been said. No matter any allegiance to the Can-Con gods or touchy feely all-the-children-of -the-world nonsense, his book smacked of pandering. I'll happily let it slide because it got me thinking differently and I liked reading it.

So I pick up his letters to Stephen Harper and I scratch my head till it bleeds. He takes a hand preaching to the choir and bangs a drum about the PM not giving him the time of day after he took the trouble to send him a book every week or so for a year. Answering the letters of an activist (dare I say at this point narcissist) writer is a lose/lose proposition, Martel even admits as much, but he still made a cool fortune pestering him about PMO's penchant for form letters. Again, Martel pours fuel on the impotent left's campfire and they swipe debit cards en mass in return.

So, some nine years and a requisite visit to the death camp museums after his last novel he unveils his artistic rendering of the Holocaust. A story told through a selfsame narrator about his relationship with a collaborator and the latter's fragmented post modern play. The play is about a donkey and a howler monkey (the title characters respectively) who have lived through "The horror" and spend the play trying to establish a context for talking about their torture. If you're looking to feel sick to your stomach about the human capacity for meanness, this book twists the reader's guts as well as any other on the subject. In this regard his misstep was drawing on the descriptions of physical torture and a series of horrible "Games for Gustave" questions that navigate ethical and spiritual minefields. Nine tenths of the book is spent suggesting at the subject of the horrors, in the play and in the Old taxidermist playwright the narrator is so fascinated with. The last tenth is as gruesome a prose as you're likely to come across. He trades his Beckett cap for a Freddy Kruger mask and the result, though heart-wrenching, abandons any possibility of covering new emotional ground on the matter. His slip into the literal, both the shocking and the disgusting, and consciously abandons the context he set out to establish. He either didn't have the forbearance to take it all the way home or was afraid of what following his thesis to a conclusion would mean.

In the great tradition of CanLit condescension Martel walks us gently through his thesis, holding our hands and pointing out the attractions of the ride. "This beast is called an elephant. Yes, he does take up the entire room." Here's the biggest problem: He purports to try something new in terms of writing about the holocaust. That might have been a bold endeavour but he cuts his own efforts off at the knees by walking on egg shells the entire time. The beginning of the novel is an explanation of the allegoric dance that is to follow. Why does he telegraph his punches? He wants to set up a pressure release valve. He builds in a defence against the critic who will rightly ask what the fuck he knows about the Holocaust. Every sentence is an apology to any B'nai Brith donor who happens to turn the book to a random page. "I'm not even Jewish!" his protagonist proclaims after being kicked around by his publisher and right before giving up his original essay/artistic interpretation of the Holocaust. No, he and his creator may not be, but if you want to talk about the Holocaust as a blight on humanity, how it needs to be looked at through different lenses, and about you're position as a gentile artist tackling the subject, you don't start by tripping over a disclaimer. Asking pardon for drawing breath demeans your efforts and patronizes the reader, jewish or otherwise. Nothing good came from it.

Men are from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, Women are from Venus

2010-03-31T21:14:00.000-07:00

The Conversation went like this.

"Say Honey, What would you do if you had Telekinesis?"

"You mean moving things with your mind?"

(Beaming) "Yeah!"

"Dishes"

"Dishes? You have the most powerful weapon ever, and you're going to Bibbity Bobbity Boo?"

"Hmm."

"No wonder there aren't more women in politics. I'd rob a bank in the first 20 minutes. Then I'd tear the livers out of anybody who had a problem with it."

But now that I think about it, it's kind of nice. My wife is nice. A superhero comic about my wife would be about heroes solving infrastructure problems and conquering the meddlesome inefficiencies in review processes. Being married to somebody who's not mad with hypothetical power is swell indeed.

(Plus that means I wear the world conquering pants in this family, huzzah)

The Jade Peony: Canada has Read!

2010-03-08T22:45:00.000-08:00

Another years worth of Canada Reads in the bag. The Jade Peony is about a Chinese family in Vancouver during the dirty thirties and forties.

It breaks down into three stories seen through the eyes of the younger siblings of a less than nuclear family. Each story has an ending that's sort of heartbreaking, you get to watch people get squeezed pretty tight by the community, and though the reader is left with a certain fondness for the overall Chinatown of the author's imagination, the pressure points get rubbed raw.

I guess there's something to be said for universality, but I thought two of the three crisis were tired. I won't spoil it, but in terms of plot it's about as close to an episode of Chinese Picket Fences as I've ever wanted to be. The plot is really just a vehicle for the author to paint a picture of the community and the history of the place. That doesn't mean there isn't some great characters peopling this book, and lovely descriptions of the time and the place. I didn't know the first thing about Chinatown, and now I am led to believe I do, such is the veneer of authenticity on these stories.

If I was a betting man, I'd put this book making it deep into the playoffs. It's not the worst of this year's crop of novels, but it's not really anything special either.

The Long Slide by James Grainger

2010-03-02T21:11:00.000-08:00

In Two Naught Naught Four *ECW published a selection of short stories by James Grainger. The Long Slide.

The year is 2010. I'm looking for something I can't find in Chapters... but can still find on Chapters.Ca (that's here for anyone feeling thoughtful). You know, really digging.

That means the last of my gift card scratch went straight to Grainger's pocket and in four to six weeks the package arrived.

In a half dozen stories you can lick in a sitting each, Grainger took a bite out of his twenties, chewed it over good and used his readers as a spittoon. Equal parts self-loathing and arrogant. I liked it.

It's pieces of love through different spectrums of neurosis. Filial, romantic and other. Maybe all his characters sit in the director chair beside you and give the "Get a load of these guys" nudge, but you get a naked shot of some real neutral human beings.

His first story, the title track, is pure Salinger minus all that classy stuff. If you've ever spent a summer day that turned into night hanging out North of Bloor you're bound to be able feel your way around his character, you'll know his swagger even if you don't like it.

The Government of Spiders is a love affair gone bananas. It's about the mental illness and the straws that break backs. It plays as the most bizarre allegory for procrastination I've come across.

A Confusion of Islands should be read aloud to anybody who can't get After the Goldrush out of their heads. A road trip to put road trips to rest.

The book is arranged in ascending order of the responsibilities of the protagonist, from tongue-in-cheek hedonism (picture cruel intentions in the College St. Set.) right up to single-parent widowhood. All of his characters are done the first leg of the race, and they aren't moving until somebody tells them their score. The sort of Spiritual fermentation that grows furious buried under student debt. This is the book I'm going to push on my friends when I see them.

*ECW is the subpop of Toronto Lit, or so a handful of black-rimmed Devil-may-care head shots would have me believe.

The Wire: WHOA

2010-02-21T20:58:00.000-08:00

Good people told me it was terrific. I dismissed them. I thought "you've seen fifty cop dramas, you've seen them all". I was wrong.

I am the better part of two seasons into The Wire, and I just got it. I don't mean to tickle you, I didn't mean I just figured out that it was worth watching; I've been glued to my TV since my first hit. I knew it was good, but I spent a good three weeks trying to think of a cognoscente way of nailing down why it's so special.

I got my answer tonight.

While one Mr. Cash and his bag-of-sex-and-nails voice walked the line, the humble audience is treated to machinations of good honest-to-Christ detective work in action. They bug, they snap, they follow and they track bad guys who are every bit as smart as they are in an opening act montage that belongs on the Mount Olympus of Television moments. It's gritty, it's mean, it's funny and if it's missing anything in terms of realism, it makes up for it with believability. Every character in this show is patiently thought out, interesting and believable. The show can embrace such an amazing scope, an cast of journeymen and amateurs alike playing "real" people in so many different stages of "the Game" and never once make me feel like they're skimping, on a story line or a character. There are certain personality traits (McNaulty's libido and Rawls' angry) and even some characters (Omar, Ziggy and Brother Mouzone) that are over-the-top, but the urge to roll my eyes is mercifully absent.

They just show love for every character on the screen. It is badass to be good at what you do, and on every level from criminal to copper to politician, every character on this show is firing on all cylinders. Even the junkies and baby mommas are playing the game.

The natural reflex I and everyone I've run through this with is to compare The Wire with The Sopranos. I think that's fair, but only because both shows took a formula buried with examples of mediocrity and made it enthralling on all levels, but that's where fair comparisons have to end. Where Sopranos was operatic in everything it did, from violence, to story, to comedy to the absurd, the Wire can be understated and still pull off the same greatness. The Sopranos is about Tony, and because of that they got away with a stable of one dimensional characters filling up the cracks. The Wire is about Baltimore, and that's where it's special. Any character could get shot and the show could go on without a snag, because it's a big city and for all the work, and the violence, the net result of whoever wins or loses is inconsequential in the end.

So, since I'm only 2 seasons into it, and since Tony and Malfi have come to occupy the same place in my mind as Lucy and Charlie Brown playing football (thus rendering it sacred), I cannot and need not pick a favourite.

All I can say is, there is no Janice in The Wire.

Spring Tides: Read with Warm Feet

2010-02-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

This could very well be the first book review I've done where you've probably never heard of the book in question. I got it on the recommendation of the proprietor of Different Drummer Books in Burlington. It is my favourite book store by a long shot and I've been meaning to blog about it for some time. I digress. This book is a translation from the original French and the translation is published by Archipelago Books in the States. The copy I got was oddly shaped and had the most pleasing textured cover you've ever seen. It might be a bold thing to produced a book differently, but I don't think it's gimmicky, and it's is in perfect keeping with the insides. This is one of those books with both feet in the Allegory river, with the absurd always peeking in through the windows, testing the locks from time to time and stealing food left unattended. I shall make every effort to describe the book without revealing spoilers, in spite, or because it's really not the sort of book you could spoil that way.

The point is, that's not the point.

Our main character is a partially infirm translator of comic strips (word play is a distraction in some chapters, entertaining and all the more commendably so because its an English translation of a French novel about translating English Comics into French) who at the bequest of his well-meaning patron lives alone on an island on the St. Lawrence with a cat and a Tennis Machine named "The Prince". Because the millionaire owner understands his employee to be unhappy he sends a number of people, each one more archetypical and disruptive than the last, to cheer him up.

Equal parts Kafka and Wes Anderson, but pleasant at all times even when it comes to breaking a few eggs in the name of progress. The imagery is layered and at times accusatory, but playfully so, the way you picture an funny uncle poking a snotty niece until she giggles.

I've mentioned it before, but I am going to great lengths to read indy lit this year (Canada reads notwithstanding) and if this is any indication of the stuff I've been missing, I'm obliged to burn down nearest Indigo (perhaps I'll start a facebook group, perhaps not). So I cannot recommend this book highly enough, it's a warm blanket that's sad and comfortable and lovely. I'm quite sure I'm a better person for having read this book, though the improvement is certainly an immeasurable and trivial quality.

Good To a Fault

2010-02-09T22:40:00.000-08:00

The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

T.S. Elliot Murder in the Cathedral

So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

Matthew 6:2-4

Number 4 of 5 in Canada Reads 2010 is Marina Endicott's offering.

This book was sold on the nature of good deeds and of selflessness. The theme is pasted as big as the title inside and outside the cover. It's a huge challenge to write about and one of the central themes of sin, but in the text there isn't really any conflict of the sort. The main character is completely sympathetic, she takes in a family of three children, partly because she feels responsible and partly because having a newfound family is profoundly life affirming for a very lonely woman. When the children's mother recovers from a near-fatal bout of the Big C, Clary feels horribly as the children she has grown to love over several months instantly disappear from her life forever, and harbors mean feelings towards their actual parents for all of 5 minutes.

Very early in her story, a mean church lady tells Clary her good deed doesn't count because she's just grandstanding. Although this eats at the protagonist the whole novel, from the reader's perspective it's never the case and therein lies where the book is lacking. This gal doesn't have a malicious bone in her body. She is doing the right things for the right reasons and suffers heartbreak when her job is made redundant. On top of it all, one of the children, the baby, has spent so much time with her that they've bonded the way babies and mothers do, so the reader instantly forgives Clary's moment of weakness even when she doesn't, because every parent knows exactly how horrible a feeling that must be. The story is very pretty and pretty sad, particularly when told through the eldest daughter's perspective, but the characters never really move out of the first dimension. It reads like Club Soda tastes. I liked it, but it took me longer than I figured to finish it.

Un-Comment

2010-01-28T20:05:00.000-08:00

This is me not blogging on a certain author's passing.

The End of Violence: A Lament

2010-01-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

As First Published at www.Hockeyinsight.com

There is no nice way to put it. The National Hockey League is sharing a room with an elephant the size of Gibraltar and even if there were clear solutions neither the owners nor the PA have anyone in the driver’s seat with the fortitude to make tough decisions. It’s a case of a thousand cuts and if it doesn’t mean death it means a right proper castration at the alter of player safety.

Over the course of our favorite sport’s modern history, you might have been forgiven if you thought it mismanaged, bizarre, even a touch self-hating in parts, but you could never call it sterile. If fancy passing, iconic goals and Lady Byng-ing it up with the less fortunate are the head and heart of the league, then Sherwood dentistry, blood spitting fisticuffs and dirty checks are most certainly it’s guts. The Stan Mikita, Claude Lemieux and Gordie Howe legacies might not shine as brightly as Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and … Gordie Howe, but they’re there nonetheless and history would be sorely lacking without them.

Fighting, for starters, is on the way out, beginning with the CHL (more a weather vane for hockey’s big league than any other feeder system for any pro sport). David Branch has said as much when pressed, and it stands to reason that if the kids aren’t allowed to fight, then the services of enforcers won’t be required in the minors. That all but evaporates the pool of tough guys for the league to draft, unless they want to go nosing around the octagon to see if Keith Jardine knows how to skate.

That’s ok, because on the one hand, most fans consider fights to be an amusing but ridiculous sideshow, but on the other hand, watching Iginla trade knuckles with Lecavalier after two and a half periods of agitation, that’s something you tell your grandkids about. Now fighting has taken a convenient backseat to the newest bugaboo, head shots. Talks of banning or even curbing fights have been pushed back for a while, but it’s all part and parcel of the same thing. Head shots cause career ending concussions, brain spasms, and are in all ways a thing to be avoided. But players duck, players put their heads down, and in a league that lets mutants like Chara play against regular sized people, head shots are going to happen unless body contact is ruled out altogether.

The same forces that rally against demolition derbies, smoking in the workplace and unprotected sex are now lined against violence in hockey. No, not violence, just fighting, head shots, interference, charging, elbowing, hitting from behind, and a nice fat caveat reserved for whatever causes the next big injury.

So when Charlie Tator, the doctor with a man-sized hunger for his fifteen minutes, calls out Don Cherry for promoting an aggressive game, he does so with crippling, flat, sterile reason in his corner. Don can give him the one-fingered Kingston Salute, but he can’t sit down and argue because all the good doctor has to point to is Don Sanderson, or Steve Moore, or Mikael Tam or the dopey stream of players past and present coming out of the concussion closet. These are tragedies all, and products of violence in hockey. There is no more compelling motive than these examples, and no reasonable objections can be made against taking all measures to prevent them. Hockey is just a game, and a game is not worth more than life. End of story. Grapes will argue and preach for self-governance amongst the players, a policy he knows is doomed to fail, all the while loving the kids on the ice and the game itself the way guys like Tator can’t understand. The way Don sees it, hockey is one or two new rules away from cashing in the very spirit that makes the game great in the name of safety and reason.

Hockey is dangerous. These boys get paid to go real real fast, to throw their bodies around, to drop the gloves and to hurt each other on purpose. They do it because there is a desire for violence amid the glory, a need for the unsanitary that puts asses in the stands at Joe Louis Arena the same way it did at the Coliseum. You don’t get the frenzied electricity that makes hockey fans hockey fans without the threat of fists, sticks, shoulders and elbows bubbling in the pot. They go hand in hand and it’s what makes our sport better than anything else out there. No one would ever suggest that the game can’t change with the times, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. At some point, when someone gets hurt, the NHL, it’s players and it’s fans have to say “So it goes” or abandon it altogether.

Hockey is dangerous, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be played tomorrow in such a way that would negate all but the most basic risks. Players could skate across center ice with their heads down, wingers could screen goalies with no thought of reprisals, and the weakest of men could taunt the strongest with as many barbs as they could imagine. We can have a kinder, gentler NHL and there is sickly, constant pressure to move in that direction.

The NHL’s debate about violence is really a debate about identity. Hockey is a sport like no other and the rough stuff is a big piece of what sets it apart. Without the mean body checks, the fighting, the missing teeth and the violence, how close does hockey really get to soccer on ice?

Fall on Your Knees: Bummer

2010-01-13T08:11:00.000-08:00

What the hell do authors have against Cape Breton? If you only read CanLit and never visited you would think the whole island is a festering pool of hateful priest rape, incest, polio, crippling poverty, depression, drownings, murder, am I missing anything? This Bird, Marie Anne-MacDonald, follows a long line of hack Feminist authors and writes the most depressing tripe, full of evil weak-spined men and strong but bat shit insane women hacking their way through horrible lives.

Balls.

I'd like to think, and I suspect, that our author has gone through some horrible experience, and that this sort of sewage is her therapy rather than a product of manic depression for manic depression's sake. The story is revolting and desensitizing for no good reason other than to shock. Not shock us out of apathy, or into action, only to make us feel sick.

I've been to Cape Breton, if it's poor but by god you couldn't want a more beautiful spot filled with the nicest people one could hope to meet. So I spent the better part of the book irritated.

The text is minimalist in all the wrong ways, and the cadence makes you sea sick before you even realize that you're reading rape scene after rape scene.

Perdita Felicien presented this novel after consulting her "Literary friend". If losing at your sport doesn't qualify you for CBC darling status, then not reading regularly will.

I am super glad this book is in the Circle of Winfrey, I was getting blue just thinking about the books I like that she has endorsed. Steer Clear of Fall on your Knees

Avatar: Good

2010-01-13T07:43:00.000-08:00

Before I talk about Avatar, I want to talk about Transformers II.

This photo is not from Transformers II you say. No, but I think it illustrates a point.

Transformers two was ridiculous and anyone who doesn't think so is foolish or a bean counter. But Transformers had something going for it, not plot, not acting, not je ne sais quoi. Transformers had Wicked awesome robots tearing each other apart for a good chunk of the movie. Robots fighting Robots is very cool, so I liked Transformers, much to the chagrin of my more snobbish associations. That said I had to like it despite what seemed like a great deal of effort on the part of the filmmakers to evoke a contrary Response. My love for Optimus Prime can move mountains.
Avatar is not Transformers. Avatar is passably acted, by that I mean it isn't revolting at any point. There are no Jar Jar moments and there is no Shia Lebeouf. The plot has been compared to Dances with Wolves, but I think gets closer to Braveheart. Insofar as the plot is a vehicle for the visuals, fine. They went to amazing lengths, considering the fantastic scope of the story, to avoid insulting my intelligence. Avatar is a fucking great movie! It's butter on whole grain popcorn. The 3D is great without being ridiculous, the story is exciting and hits all the action high notes that make the 10 year old in me squeal.

There is a scene in this film where a Mech fights a Warrior Princess riding a Lizard Panther that lasts a good 5 minutes. For all of you who know what I'm talking about, just rest your eyes for five seconds and think about that.

The Film is PG but it didn't feel like that hampered it, you can get good action movies without chopping heads off it seems and I'd be pleased as punch to take my kids to see it for an excuse to don the Buddy Hollies again.

Calls of Racism, of Neo-Colonialism, of Blasphemy, of deep fried leftist propaganda, etc etc have been, um, called. Maybe, but lighten up already. It's a goddamn movie.

I had a coupon for a free movie, but the talking acne colony at the concession/ticket stand told me my coupon was only good for 2D movies, and Avatar was a 3D movie. That extra D cost me a mortgage payment. Imagine my surprise. I was pretty uptight when I sat down, and because I had heard a handful of reviews that said it was garbage I was ready to ruin the movie for everyone, but it was not Garbage. It was good. The McDonald's Avatar toys that came with happy meals, they were garbage.

This movie made more money than you could spend. It is not the greatest movie ever made. It is just awesome.

Nikolski: Multicultural Montreal Makes Me Merry

2010-01-04T19:56:00.000-08:00

Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski is the reason "Canada Reads" is awesome. I shouldn't think I'd ever have occasion to read this book otherwise, and I really liked it. It was a charming, light and funny read and absolutely unlike anything I've read since Fruit last year. That it won a GG for translation probably means it captures most of that which is usually lost in translation, so I do feel comfortable saying Dickner maybe swung for the fences a little bit more than he needed to, but the result still feels like a comfy small town story that spans the country and the Americas.

The picture he paints of Montreal is really cool. I'm so soaked with Toronto-centric media that having a go at the multicultural hodge podge of big cities through a different lens is refreshing to the point of giddiness. The characters are troubled without being tragic, and the overall arc of the whole shebang is happy. It's a quick read and it makes you smile. I should be frequenting that city a lot more than I do.

Generation X: Death to Hipsters

2010-01-02T23:48:00.000-08:00

The world is going to end in a great ball of nuclear fission, and all the Pepsi bottles from all the landfills in Michigan and the great plastic garbage bag continent floating in the North Atlantic will be vaporized and instantly kicked up into a whirlwind the size of Australia. The prevailing winds from the fallout are going to rain down liquid polymers all across the eastern seaboard and well into Manitoba, instantly fossilizing anyone caught by surprise, fusing charred flesh with bits of snow fence and dismembered GI Joe arms and legs. And when a society arises from the ashes, half-cockroach half-Nebraska field hands who's ancestors happened to be exploring Cold war bomb shelters at just the right time, they'll stare in awe at the Tableau of bipedal Titans frozen in time, wearing big bead necklaces and kaki shorts standing in line for chances to win six months of free text messaging.

Thanks to Canada Reads 2010 and Douglas Coupland, I've had to re-evaluate my stance on reading in public, kinder eggs and hygiene for hygiene's sake.

Verdict: I cannot say I am very fond of Generation X.

The heros of this novel clumsily hate all things plastic, workaday and futile. Drinking themselves numb in the desert at what they suspect and hope is the end of the world, they tell beautiful little stories, true or otherwise, and seek out small measures of epiphany all the while minding their waistlines and abandoning all but the purely masochistic sexual relationships. Dropping completely the ambition and money lust that characterized the eighties so appropriately for middle class America (Alex P. Keaton be Damned).

Wikipedia declares that I belong to this navel grazing subcategory, and insofar as it means I am angst ridden, I suppose they have an argument. So houses are too expensive, job security is a thing of the past (hehe) and the world is free falling to disaster whether I tell it to stop or not. But I came of age in the tech boom and bust, where kids with vague ideas were driving cars normally reserved for first round draft picks, all on the tabs of Boomers and their mutual funds who had sensibly weathered a handful of nifty recessions and figured it all was fine and dandy. There really is one born every minute and since we're not running out of bubbles any time soon all these fatalists could have had their three-car garages if they had slugged it out for another 5 years.

Cynical is not the same as intelligent, but Coupland declares everyone should stare at his protagonists as if they were dilettante sages in a world gone stupid. They can only feel in ironies; imagine achieving enlightenment by rolling your eyes for seven years.

Maybe if I was born five years earlier, and in an AMC Javelin on it's third clutch, and tended bar across the street from a boarding house where William Burroughs once got arrested, maybe then I would "Get" Generation X, and then Ms. Ryder would be asking for MY number.

The saving grace of this book is the ending, a moment of beauty that has to be read to be believed and is really quite something.

I Can't Get a Decent Haircut in This Town

2010-01-01T10:58:00.001-08:00

There is an element of alchemy to haircutting that I do not understand. I would never suggest the trade is an unskilled one, on the contrary it is an art upon which a great deal depends when it comes to a professional's clientele. No matter your station in life, a bad haircut is worn at your spirit's peril and on the other hand a terrific hair cut can open doors and glide the rest of you through them. I have extensive experience with both these scenarios.

I do not consider myself a particularly difficult client when it comes to hair cuts. My hair is extremely thick and that very fact has been a consistent if one-sided topic with every haircutter I have ever encountered, from the hyper-permed Thunderdome refugee who saved me from my mullet, to the vicious electric razor-wielding OAC football captain bent on my ritual humiliation. It may be thick, but all I ever wanted for the last two decades was a number two on the sides and back, and short on top.

There are no shortage of Barbers in Georgetown. In the radius of a short walk I have half a dozen options when in comes to trimming down an imperceptibly greying blessedly thick head of hair. The generic cheapskate unisex option is open, but the one next to me is lousy with that particular militant single mom vibe, they remember you and your specific opinions on a wide range of subjects and their quality of work runs in direct correlation to your political compatibility. Not good.

There is a wonderful man across the street who runs a spartan outfit wedged between a diner, and a vacuum repair shop. A giant poster of a peasant girl from the old country picking grapes with cleavage that could launch a thousand ships at least dresses the far wall along with hot rod calenders that cover most of the chips out of decades old paint and plaster. The fellow smiles, makes a few off colour but appropriate comments about the weather in the beautifully broken english no one can pull off as charmingly as old Italian men and sets to work humming bits of music that probably comes from Operas. This would be the most perfect hair cutting place in the entire world, were it not for the fact that the haircuts are horrible. I find clumps of two inch too long hair for days afterwards and end up doing my own sad hack job that makes me look like an malnourished Okie up for the picking season. I could even let that slide, but for this gentleman rubs his crotch against my shoulder for the entire duration of my haircut. I've been to him twice, and I've been subtly molested twice. His place doesn't look very prosperous, and I sort of feel bad about dodging it, but where I come from, unsolicited sexual man-healing is a deal breaker.

There is a place in our mall staffed by half a dozen retired gentleman who have been rehashing the same argument in some Eastern Block tongue for as long as I've been living here. You come out of their place looking like a bad Sopranos extra, but after a wash it ends up being a pretty good haircut. Unfortunately I've been effectively blacklisted, as my son was momentarily possessed by a shrieking demon earlier this year during my hair cut that very quickly cleared the place out. I can't speak their language, but I know fear when I see it, these guys pegged my one year old as something diabolical, and cross themselves whenever I get within twenty feet of their shop. Bummer.

My fall back has been this proper little quintessential barber shop in town. The haircuts are somewhere between good and very good, but never very good. The atmosphere is good, relaxed, busy, old posters and photos concerning the town, hockey, the longevity of the business cover the walls and evoke a simpler time. The Barber is something of a celebrity in his own right, being forever voted the town's favourite and counting such luminaries as Mike Holmes and ... Mike Holmes as customers. He greets everyone as "Neighbor" and works contentedly and appropriately.

but...

His politics are just wonky. He opens every haircut with a loaded comment about our boys overseas, the untrustworthy nature of the Persian, and the unstoppable wave of crime throughout the GTA thanks to decades old conspiracy laden immigration policies. He gages your response and will weave the conversation from there between hockey, local issues, personal anecdotes and back to charged nationalist-minded diatribes that back you into a with us or against us corner all the while with a razor blade centimeters from your jugular. I don't mind politics, and I love jawing with hard liners of any persuasion, but in the prone position I'm never 100% certain I'm safe with this fellow, and there are too many places around here to dump a body with half a haircut where no one would ever find it.

I'm thinking of growing my hair out, but I always look like such an idiot...

The Shack: The Reader's Digest Da Vinci Code

2009-12-17T23:37:00.000-08:00

So as I understand it, Amazon buggered up my neighbors book delivery, something about a botched address, so after a little song and dance from the squeaky wheel, he ended up getting the same delivery of books twice, the second of which he kindly passed along my way in the form of a literary care package. I scored Steven King's new encyclopedia, a Vonnegut novel and The Shack by William P. Young.

Thanks buddy!

I was anxious to read the latter right away, because my stolidly agnostic friend was ranting and raving about how his whole perception changed thanks to the book, and how he wanted to start going to church (Still waiting...).

I polished it off in about 3 days of casual reading when I should have been minding my children. It was.... okay....

Here's the thing. The Shack is not written particularly well. Not really... It's not much good at all, except that it is, kinda. It's written with a cadence Toronto Sun readers would probably find familiar, and while that might out me as a special kind of snob, that is shitty writing. The whole time I couldn't help but think how better served the story itself and the themes it tackles (the nature of love, of the Holy trinity, of forgiveness) would have been in the hands of a gifted scribe who used words as more than a means to an end. A great deal of fuss has been made over this book, and it pokes a few holes in the sensitive underbelly of religious dogma in plain down-to-earth english your reader's digest reading, Stephan Harper loving grandparents would probably find enlightening (not my grandparents though, they're sharp as all hell).

That is not to say the book is not without it's strong points. Alright, the guy's daughter gets murdered, and it just so happens I have a daughter, so if a fella gets sort of teary eyed when he's reading about it, that doesn't mean he's soft. That point needs to be established. The book tugs pretty hard at the heart strings but in terms of theology its nothing I haven't heard before. I would have a harder time recommending this book if it wasn't such an easy read. As it stands, it was a pretty bizarre change of pace after reading the Fountainhead, but if you've got the luxury of a cozy Christmas day to read Chicken soup for the lackadaisical Christian soul, this will do the trick.

2009 in Books

2009-12-14T16:09:00.000-08:00

I went on a pretty good tear this year and knocked a few off the "You should have already read these" list. I've harbored a pretty serious bias for dead writers my entire reading career. I guess it's because you only get so many books to read, and I want to get in all the classics I can, but that's dumb. I want to appreciate contemporary literature and I pledge that in 2010 I will patronize writers above ground. I'm going to try and read the Giller nominees and lots of small press numbers, when I do, you'll know about it.

Jeremy's 2009 Reading List

The Canada Reads 5
CBC darlings pitch their pet books and through a ridiculous "kick off the island" round table, systematically erase my favourites in order of preference two years running. It's fun to follow what CBC radio is talking about and I love getting these for Christmas every year (Thanks Hunny!) but I always feel a little snotty afterwards.

The Fat Lady Next door is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay
Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
Fruit by Brian Francis
The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Birthday Books
I got a few Chapters Giftcards for me birthday, much obliged Mom and Dad!

Down and out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer
Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
Call Me Ted by Ted Turner

The Paper Backs

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Les Enfant Terribles by Jean Cocteau
After Many Summer by Aldous Huxley
Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
The Gospel According to the Son by Norman Mailer
Faust 2 by Gothe
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Centaur by John Updike
The Shack by William P. Young

Week 13: WTF

2009-12-11T19:10:00.000-08:00

As published on www.ongameday.ca

Week Thirteen had more twists than a Lost/Dr. Who crossover, and I’m thanking providence I never got around to calling the Vikings a sure thing before the weekend.

It is absolutely killing me, but I’m going to finally have to start paying Arizona some respect. The Bridesmaids of the NFC butted heads in Sunday Night and the Cardinals dusted off their loss last week to the Titans by kicking the shit out of a Vikings Team that never saw it coming. It may not have been the upset of the season, but it’s a huge statement for a team that’s been on again off again all season despite being uncontested in their division. The Cardinals secondary came up with some looks that were straight out of Vaudeville, nobody knew what to make of them, least of all Favre who threw two picks, and got sacked three times, Osteoporosis be damned. The Arizona O-Line deserves medals of honor for the pass protection they pulled off against the meanest front four in the game. Warner had enough time to check his investments via Blackberry before finding and hitting his receivers. The Cardinals are the first team this season to consistently double team Jared Allen. They did it and it worked, so you can bet number 69 is going to have to make friends with two Offensive Lineman for the rest of the year. It must be flattering. I’m looking for these two teams to renew hostilities somewhere in the playoffs and prove once and for all that not all old people are completely useless.

If that wasn’t enough to throw my Sunday in a loop, the Dolphins beat up a Patriots team that have now dropped three of their last four. Anyway you slice it Boston’s finest sure ain’t what they used to be, but you can bet whoever’s lined up against them in the playoffs isn’t going to feel lucky. The Dolphins meanwhile have four games to take over first place, and if Ricky Williams keeps playing the way he has, they are going to walk all over Jacksonville and finally take hold of the AFC East.

All this stuff is weird, but nothing could have prepared me for flicking the channel over to the Saints game to see them squeaking a win out in overtime thanks to a bum kick by one Shaun Suisham, a terrible person who should just fall on his sword and get it over with. Regardless, that a consistently hopeless Redskins squad beat the spread like an enemy combatant and only lost on a last minute fuckup has to mean the Saints have a little more paper to their tiger than anybody thought.

It had to be a crazy weekend indeed for a Stars/Giants matchup to fly under the radar, but it might have been one of the better games of the year. Romo was scoring with Witten like he was a skinny Jessica Simpson and still they couldn’t beat a Giants team that was making hungry touchdowns. That NFC East is the tightest division in Football, and next Sunday’s meeting between the Giants and the Eagles is going to be the game for the ages.

In My Defense...

2009-12-05T21:22:00.000-08:00

I set out to make this blog my Literary Soap Box, but for a reason unbeknownst to my waking conscious I've been thumbing through The Scarlet Letter for two months now and I just couldn't pull the goddamn thing to bed. This hasn't happen more than twice before in my entire reading life, but a book mark is still sitting 200 pages in, creeping ever so slowly towards completion.

In the interim, I have broken another habit and begun another novel in in order to slip out of the funk. I found the Fountainhead in a 50 cent bin at the library, and having read and enjoyed Dear Ms. Rand's hyper contentious "Atlas Shrugged" this spring, I went in with guns blazing.

This blog was started ostensibly because I read Atlas Shrugged, but I never wrapped my head completely around the book itself and the recent hoopla around it. Even if I still haven't entirely, I wanted to address the growing trend amongst otherwise clever writers of simply dismissing it out of hand as being fascist. I think this book has received the popularity, not of Glenn Beck and his ilk, but of an impressive set young readers, because of a vision of the individual that is in keeping with the mantras they're inundated with about the virtue of hard work, character and discipline, without all the moral loopholes and caveats that render those same codes spineless. Our culture, particularly but not exclusively, men of my generation, is besodden on all sides by Lotus Eaters, and it has become entirely too easy for men, educated or otherwise, to become comfortable both economically and socially without ever having been forced to excel at anything. There is a wealth the likes of which the world has never experienced of smart, inspired energy evaporating into the ether with either monotony or complacency. Atlas Shrugged for me was a call to arms against atrophy, an inspiration and instruction to pursue excellence and to flatly ignore the impulse to compromise. It is the bible of ambition, and while you could lead a herd of elephants through the holes in her logic, there aren't any examples in literature with a more compelling argument for hard work that I'm come across.

Rand's heroes are pitted against their world, which may only be a shaky mirror image of ours, but if you can't recognize a piece of her frustrations with elements of bureaucracy, elected government and our most artificial and hypocritical social script, then you simply do not pay attention.

Her Philosophy, though harsh, does not condone half truths any more than Christianity does on the other end of the Spiritual spectrum. It is a strict atheism, and has genuinely fair guidelines in terms of integrity, both social and economical. Hank Reardon doesn't ship his plants overseas to increase profits any more than Dagny Taggart hires scabs. To truly worship at the alter of objectivism requires personal standards a great many of her recent boosters do not in good faith possess. That is in large part, I think, the reason for the dismissal and intense dislike amongst her critics. A great many of her fans happen to be assholes.

Rand's style is entirely void of modern stylistic apparati and thusly is more in tune with Romanticism (thank you paperback preamble). I'm not at all adverse to that convention so I didn't have the hard time ploughing through Atlas as some of my peers confessed to. The author uses every word, every character, every symbol and every circumstance in her novel to promote her ideology and makes no bones about it. It is as focused a writing as you're liable to read, while still leaving room for excitement and heart-pumping page turning.
The stories I think are compelling, but that the characters are 100% archetypical is an adjustment; there are villians, heros, the unredeemably corrupted, the born again Objectivists and the sheep. Period. In my lifetime I have never met anyone who was just one of theses things, and the author herself certainly didn't walk the walk (pass the Amphetamines would you darling...). At any rate, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are books you should read regardless of your political leanings. If you start freaking out and plotting to take over the world, just take a cold shower. You got through the Grapes of Wrath without ever helping any poor people and reading Ayn Rand won't turn you into Ralph Klein.

Saints Go Marching, Colts Limp Towards Perfection

2009-12-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

As first Published at www.ongameday.ca

It seems to me that between the NFL’s last two undefeated teams, there isn’t a lot in common. The Colts, for the last handful of games, have had straight up barn burners, notably against the Pats and the Fourth and Short heard round the world, and now with the Texans, their division rivals.

This Sunday Indy looked like a team that had finally underestimated an opponent. Texans were hitting fast and hard, and even if they were down at the half, the Colts looked worried an the Texans were taking charge. Half way through the third, a ridiculous interception by Matt Schaus set the stage for the Colts offense to put the entire affair to bed courtesy of One Mr. Manning. The Texans D didn’t get the memo and shut them down to set up the touchdown in the early fourth. But eventually the Texans succumbed to death from a thousand cuts. Offside, False Start, one huge pass interference, and another interception and finally a blown onside kick all amounted to the white and blue rally from which Huston could not recover. The Colts with a little help from their friends in the black and white stripes, squeeze by a team that had no real business making it so close.

On the other end of the world, the Big Easy got to watch their home squad beat New England and the point spread like a three-legged dog in a Toronto pound. Brees and his merry band of receivers made a monkey out of Billichek’s revered defense and made sure everybody knows the Patriots aren’t the team they used to be. Monday night was touchdown night. Brees gave one to everybody who wanted one, he was throwing everywhere, five different receivers, two cheerleaders, his mom, the hot dog guy, people walking by the stadium, everybody. Especially strange was watching Bilicheck say over and over to the press what a better team New Orleans was. I wonder if you can smell a stroke coming on?

The Colts are playing a tough Titans squad next week, Vince Young’s star power and Chris Johnson’s heroics might be the toughest thing left on the Indianapolis regular season to-do list. The proline is paying really well for anybody bold enough to take the underdogs, and I’m checking the V just because I don’t think we’re going to see two perfect seasons.

If New Orleans can be stopped this year, it’s not by the Redskins (it’s by the Vikings). I’m looking for the momentum from Monday to carry over and for some scoring records to be smashed this Sunday.

There’s something to be said about the grit it takes to come form behind for the win constantly. It means a team that takes “Never say Die” seriously, a team can play the clutch and laugh in the face of defeat. There has to be something tangibly beneficial to hard fought battles that at the very least make for better games.

But really, how can you compare a team that squeaked by the Pats on a bizzaro gamble vs a team that dominated them, start to finish, in every aspect of the game. Maybe we’ll all get to see on February 7^th.

Canadian Buffalo and the Hype that Wasn't

2009-12-01T10:27:00.000-08:00

as first published at www.ongameday.ca

Time will tell whether canning Jauron will make a positive difference in Bill’s long term health, but winning one at home two weeks later sure helps makes the decision look smarter. Even though their playoff hopes were all but scuttled in the last minutes of the first regular season game, the Bills have given a few cheery moments to their bedeviled fans, and none as thoroughly pleasing as playing spoiler in this Sunday’s whipping of their aquatic arch-rivals. Any die-hards who put their mark on H+ are looking pretty smart today. The chemistry between Owens and Fitzpatrick keeps on rolling out tasty tasty goodness with 96 yards and a TD late when it really mattered. The only way this revelation could make Trent Edwards look worse would be actually having him play some more.

All in all it was a great team effort in front of a home crowd that deserves that sort of win a lot more than they get it. Miami was eyeballing a coup d’etat on their perpetual NFC leaders in two weeks, but thanks to Buffalo the Pats breath a little easier this Monday as they hold their grocery bags in front of the tank named New Orleans.

And now, Ontario proper can look forward to hosting the most important game of the year as two teams with no prayer of playoff contention coming to Toronto this Thursday. After the buzz blared through the thousand-headed Roger’s Hydra failed to drum up the excitement. TO in TO they cried, as if Terrell was going to perform ninety minutes of standup during the day-long festival of lead up. Well, the big day is four nights away and tickets are still on sale, as of this writing 100 level seats are still going for around a “reduced” two hundred clams a pop. I think Canada as a whole, being immersed in the NFL at no less a clip than our neighbors to the South, would appreciate a game more if it didn’t feature the bottom feeders of the AFC East duking it out for honour and draft picks. After all, ninety percent of Canada is a good road trip away from a stadium and we aren’t losing our collective minds about the game because nobody is losing their minds about the game, but that’s just the cynic in me talking.

Talk of the Bills migrating North to the Roger’s center for good had reached a fever pitch this summer, but it seems to have died down in the quiet way disappointment tends to. Now good old At-Least-We’re-Not-Baghdad Buffalo is talking big, Bill Cower big, and I’ll be damned if the hope that runs eternal doesn’t actually feels less ridiculous from my Bill-fan acquaintances.

Cheering for the Bills this coming Sunday in Toronto should come pretty easy to a city full of underachieving teams that are ceremoniously fed to the lions in every professional sport thay participate in. To be fair though, having two teams each coming off big wins might just make this one enjoyable and there are a host of reasons to expect an good performance. After all, both teams have explosive elements, Buffalo has a wide receiver core that can stand against any, while the Jets’ defense is still ridiculously talented despite their salty record. Now that Sanchez got the monkey off his back he might even swagger into Toronto and throw like he did the first 4 games. Regardless, it should be every loyal Proline playing Canadian’s duty to have an opinion on this game and put their mark where it counts. Maybe even shell out a hundred bucks on nosebleeds, they’ll close the dome and you can always PVR Private Practice
.

Now or Never for the Titans

2009-11-29T11:21:00.000-08:00

As published at www.ongameday.ca

It never sat right with me watching Tennessee locking themselves into the basement of the AFC South for the first six games of the season. Not after the crazy tear they went on in 2008. These guys should have been building on the season prior and giving the Colts a run for their money, instead they were running out of steam half way through games and playing collectively like they spent the summer watching Detroit Lions motivational videos.

Jeff Fisher, for all his football savvy and mustachioed wisdom, was stuck firmly on “Team Collins” no matter how many losses, incomplete passes (89 but who’s counting) and general embarrassing Sundays his team had to wander through. To his credit, Fisher must have been properly shaken after Young’s suicide debacle a year prior and is forever inclined to go with the fella with a proven track record of not-crazy, but this is the NFL and crazy shit is going to happen. At some point you have to put it down as dark chapter in an otherwise amazing biography and run that one-in-a-million risk of a “Last Boyscout” incident.

After the Peyton Manning Jersey Mia Culpa Fisher finally caved to a murderous Bud Adams (who was reportedly angry enough to start bleeding from the eyes) and gave Young the nod after a long and ugly bi-week. He more or less admitted he didn’t want to, but an 0-6 coach more or less forfeits his right to ignore the man with the big wallet. The rest is a four game history.

So all of the sudden the Titans have a storyline, and the football gods just loooooooove a storyline. Four wins in a row and two of them against division rivals. Teams that are a joke don’t go 4-0 in the middle of a season. It’s an uphill tooth and nail battle to the 6^th spot in the AFC, but every season has a Cinderella story, and my gut tells me the Titans are gonna crash the party or at least put on a good show at the door.

This Sunday night is where we find out of the Titans are serious about their comeback. Arizona is a solid team that puts up big numbers and the Warner Fitzgerald one-two puts on as good a show as there is in the league. Of course all that aside, this game means a hell of a lot more to the home squad, and Superbowl appearance aside, they still aren’t that good. Being kings of NFC West this year is like beating up on children. Look for the Titans to fire off a cannonball named Chris Johnson and ruin Thanksgiving for the Cardinal’s linebackers.

The Over/Under is 47.5 and I’m thinking that’s pretty conservative, this is going to be a highlight-rich slobber knocker and if I’m lucky enough the Cardinals D is going to spend a lot of time on the field.

The Hall of Fame makes me want to be a better man

2009-11-20T10:01:00.000-08:00

The Hockey Hall of Fame swelled both in membership and prestige this week with some of the more worthier inductees to have ever laced up skates, that is, Steve Yzerman and some other dudes. Judging from the coverage and the noticeably amped up production value, the shrine on Front Street and the ceremony surrounding it’s big night has upped it’s game to the credit of the game and everybody in it.

Even though the scrum might have followed Gretzky’s entrance like he was drunk Mylie Cyrus falling out of a dress, the coverage was sharp overall and to the point the way you would never expect to see on TSN (this might bode well for the Olympic coverage, cautious optimism is the order of the day). They should be commended for keeping the strobe light graphics and passive-aggressive banter to a minimum. The ceremony was more of the same. The highlight reel for #19 was demonstrative of his abilities (especially so against the Blackhawks) without being sappy or otherwise ridiculous. James Duthie did the introduction with the classy sort of prodding that played for chuckles while never letting anyone forget that he was Duthie and the inductee was an immeasurably better human being.

Steve Yzerman stole the show and for good reason, as qualified as Hull and Robitaille may be Yzerman is exactly the sort of player the NHL has been built on.

Yzerman’s career was a study in competence becoming excellence, while he wasn’t without a spectacular highlight reel, his steady consistence, a mastery of fundamentals and work ethic that stands second to none were what set him apart and made him what he was. He represented the very best character of the NHL; his dignity and hardwork were what elevated him above every other run-of-the-mill 1755 career point hockey player. He may have produced like a superstar but he never acted like one. The NHL is full of Yzerman’s sort of player. Small town kids overjoyed to be playing hockey for a living and finding it all a little hard to believe. For every Shawn Avery there are ten genuinely good men slugging it out every game knowing full well their moms are probably watching and behaving accordingly. One couldn’t suggest he played like a saint, he took up enough lumber in the penalty box to build a fort, but on camera he was every bit the composed role model he will be remembered as.

If they awarded Lady Byngs for induction speeches they wouldn’t ever have to give it away again. He hit all the notes with the humility and straightforwardness he had employed every time he stepped on the ice. He’s no Tony Robbins on the microphone and looked more than a little embarrassed over all the brouhaha. The kind of modesty you can’t fake did him all the more credit. He thanked the wife and kids, talked up his fellow inductees, coaches and everybody else there was to thank, it was a speech by the numbers from a fella whose actions always speak for him. It is no surprise he got recruited as masthead for Team Canada and if the Red Wings front office is ever dumb enough to let him go he’ll fit into a GM chair somewhere in the League very nicely.

One of the NHL’s biggest assets is the years and years of history behind it. You have Maurice Richard riots, Paul Henderson defeating communism, Gordie Howe hat tricks, Theo Fleury after-parties and a trophy older than Hugh Hefner hoisted by all the biggest names in the game. The Hall itself, its archives and its reach into the wider cultural landscape should be used over and over again to promote the game worldwide. Inducting Stevie Y to the big club may be a no-brainer, but selling him as exactly the sort of guy that belongs there makes the Hall, the league and the sport better.

Is Belichick ready for Shady Pines? No.

2009-11-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

Now everybody and their mom knows America and it’s National Football League love hyperbole as much as apple pie, cheep ammunition and jail bait, but all this fallout is two degrees South of ridiculous. Does going for it on a fourth and two mean your coach is a lunatic in charge a nuclear submarine? Does it mean he’s blinded by hubris? Does it mean he’s secretly in cahoots with the Governor of Indiana? NO, what it means is your coach has balls. He has a quarterback that has done the impossible over and over again, he has an offense he feels better about than his defense, and he has balls. He didn’t make the easy decision, and taking a risk ended up biting him in the ass big time, the risk didn’t pan out. Oh well, there’s next Sunday to worry about, back to the drawing board. If football fans in Massachusetts start pining for a coach who calls the game according to Hoyle, then they should have to give their last three championships back because you don’t get the sort of dynasty they’ve enjoyed this decade when your team is run by a bunch of pansies.

I feel their pain, losing to the Colts is a hard thing for Pats fans to do, but losing a big game midseason does not constitute grounds for a mutiny. First place in the AFC east is a lock unless Miami recruits God for the second half of the season, and everybody knows God is backing New Orleans this year. Life as you know it is not over and baring some sort of 2012 disaster canceling the season these two teams have a rematch on the dance card in two months. Stand by your man for Pete’s sake. There, I’m finished.

The future tastes easy for the victors, and after the confidence boost that was Sunday Night they would have to set the spread at triple digits to keep the Colts from beating it against the on-again off-again Ravens. If there’s any defense in the entire league that can solve Manning for 4 quarters of football, Baltimore ain’t it.

The Patriots meanwhile can lick their wounds and think about taking out all their embarrassment on their next opponent. I expect Mr. Sanchez and his Jets are going to get to know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a sixty minute, bitter, no nonsense shitkicking.

A Long Hard Road Out of Suck

2009-11-05T11:24:00.000-08:00

As first Published at www.hockeyinsight.com

With the Tuesday’s overtime loss against the Lightning, the Leafs have declared their residence in an upper level of purgatory, where four consecutive overtime losses represent the slow climb from running joke to bona fide hockey club. As bizarre a trend as it is, it does mean Toronto has been an over five hundred team in the last five games, and while that’s not quite worthy of a round of high fives, it’s something and something is unequivocally better than nothing.

It means that in four games, if the Leafs can snap out of letting in the first goal, they win. It means if they can sharpen up their late night four on four, they win. It means if something on the bench clicks and they can do one better shift of offense or defense, they win. That may be a lot of “ifs” but the biggest one yet is Kessel. He played well and managed to get himself open enough for a bunch of shots, none of which looked too convincing but judging from last year’s highlight reel if he gets any part of his groove back they’ll be turning into bullets and real productivity.

As of this writing the season is creeping up on a quarter finished and the Buds are sharing last place with the Hurricanes, which though hardly enviable is only seven points out of a place in the postseason. While there’s nobody out there writing off the latter, just about everybody assumes the former are set to make their customary early exit come April 10th.

The case has been made that the new team is being built from the ground up, and will without doubt be a while finding their feet. As they’ve immediately established, should it actually occur, the nature of the Maple Leaf turnaround is going to be slow. The best anybody can hope for at this point is that it’s steady. Of course an eighty game season is an awfully long time, and word has it those in the employ of MLSE, along with the Flames, have jumped the line for those special H1N1 meds all the rest of the suckers are going to have to wait for. If any of the other teams in the league are dumb enough to behave like gentlemen and actually wait their turn behind infants, asthmatics and pregnant ladies, a nice fat bout of swine flu could throw more than a few games their way (Please excuse a digression the writer thinks he should be permitted as he just had his children vaccinated).

So what happens next? Friday has Toronto up against the aforementioned Carolina team full of long-established talent and a Cup in recent memory that has so far Staal-ed (ahhhhh) out of the gate. Friday means the same thing for both teams. A team in last place that means to rise above has to win games like these, to put itself on the proper trajectory by stepping on the heads of the real losers. Whatever the outcome, expect a game with playoff intensity, more than a little rough housing and enough dirty to make late-nineties Christina Aguilera go three shades pink. In short, a proper hockey game.

If the Leafs come out on top it would make 6 games with a point, a notch up in the standings and the biggest momentum push of the season, which is a fancy way of saying nothing much. A loss means just about the same, but those two points have to come from somewhere and it doesn’t look like it’ll be any easier with the Wings, the Hawks and the freshly inoculated Flames all on the immediate horizon.

So the recipe for success is…The Monster stays good or better, Kessel makes friends with the back of the net, the young guys skate fast, the tough guys get tough and the Southern partisan crowd keeps daydreaming about NASCAR. Sounds simple right? Right? Right.

As a postscript, all this stuff about baby steps aside, would it have really killed them to beat the Habs in the Waldo jerseys? Would it have been that hard? No one deserves two points dressed like that.

Tom Cable Ruined My Sunday

2009-11-02T22:07:00.000-08:00

The kids were fed, the dog was walked and I had settled my brain for it's customarily fulfilling eight hours of Sunday football. I started as I always start with Berman and the gang over at ESPN Sunday NFL Countdown, and cousin, it made me squirm. Not on account of the jokes, those crumby jokes warm that “warm peanut butter cookie and playoff sex” part of my heart like a glass of Crown Royal. No, what made me cringe was the piece of investigative journalism concerning Tom Cable’s bringing the pain to his assistant coach’s jaw two weeks prior.

After the police decided the case didn’t warrant the laying of charges, ESPN’s Colleen Dominguez did a little digging and put together a regular “This is your Life” featuring a train of ex-wives and girlfriends Coach Cable had kicked the shit out of. They made a pretty good case for old Tom being the biggest asshole in all of football today and even suggested that though all the incidents were investigated, his position on the team was what really kept him out of trouble.

This shocked me on two counts;

Firstly, that ESPN has the capacity for investigative journalism. CNN doesn’t have the budget for investigative journalism. Have we have reached the point where sports writing is the only arm of the profession with license to challenge men in authority? ESPN is actually armed to tackle issues as serious as domestic abuse and they can do it without fear of being called fascists on the left and terrorist sympathizers on the right. Furthermore, they can do it on a Sunday morning, surely the most effective place to distress the comfortable.

Second, ESPN aired a piece that shone a bright light on the NFL’s dirty laundry. They bit the hand that feeds them, lays golden egg after golden egg, and puts their kids through college handily. Without all due respect, and there is a great deal offered up, this is fishy as all hell.

The National Football League loves women. Every year more and more are tuning in on Sundays, and beyond that, they are the mothers, sisters and wives of the God fearing athletes that butter their bread. If you hadn’t noticed, this year they’re sporting pink like it was going out of style, and it sure doesn’t become a league that talks up curing breast cancer on one hand to be coddling serial woman beaters on the other. Furthermore, the league genuinely strives to frame a narrative that shows them taking the higher ground on issues of ethics. Point in case, the Michael Vick Eagles press conference, where Tony Dungee and Jeffery Lurie evoked American redemption and Christian forgiveness to explain their decision. In the case of Tom Cable however, the only option besides hoping it blows over, is to throw him to the dogs.

Officially the NFL had no comment on the matter, but it really is giving ESPN a lot of credit to to think they have gone independently and clearly shamed the league, ostensibly prodding them into action.

A hypothesis then: The league has a scumbag coach they know is as guilty as the day is long, but they have a police department clearing him of all charges. That’s the last thing they want to contradict, but at the same time they need to protect their image and get rid of an obviously destructive influence. So the NFL sanctions the ESPN piece that introduces the new evidence of Tommy Boy’s previously silent victims, waits for the outcry from the usual suspects, and placates by canning Cable, saving face and appearing proactive. These guys should be running the Whitehouse, if they aren’t already.

Playtime For the Leaf Nation

2009-10-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

*As first published at www.hockeyinsight.com *

The powers that be in Toronto have decided to take the odd and mixed blessing of a week’s downtime in an Olympics-compressed schedule and have a little fun with it. The Buds spent the week jumping from brooding high-paced practices where Ron Wilson mused about fights breaking out amongst frustrated teammates, to games of dodgeball and a cavalier three-on-three tournament where the first goal was to have fun.

If cheering up the sullen troops was the aim, then he certainly hit the mark. When the young team left the ice everybody to the man had that “can you believe they pay us to do this” grin pasted all over their mugs. The talking heads have smelled blood in the water all this short season and in the scrum they had to do a double take at this new devil-may-care coach preaching the gospel of serendipity.

Wilson can’t really get anymore red-faced at the troops than he has at this point; they’re all in the same boat wearing dunce caps and big red targets. There’s a real bad taste to the Toronto air and if this streak doesn’t turn itself around soon everybody in the club from the top to the bottom is liable to be found hanging from the ACC rafters beside that ’67 Stanley Cup banner. In a city that sways on the poles of hyperbole, a couple of practices spent maxin’ and relaxin’ is either going to look like a stroke of genius or a declaration of war. A win or two on the upcoming road trip could see the Leafs a transformed team come back from the edge of dead with a good head of steam, but with Phil Kessel still weeks away and both starting (though uninspiring) goalies banged up but good, the team will have to do it with heart where talent is waning. A loss on Saturday will make this the worst opening season in Maple Leaf history and you can bet more than a few fans would remember the week-long lock in at the rec center as a centerpiece of the failure.

Win or lose, a good chunk of Southern Ontario is looking at the 6 – 2 Coyotes (who as of this writing just popped an overtime winner against the Red Wings) and wondering about what could have been.

There Ain't No Second Chance Against the Thing with Forty Eyes!

2009-10-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

It's almost Halloween, and that's cool, because candy is cool, carving pumpkins is cool, girls dressed as sexy vampires, sexy nurses, sexy archeologists, sexy schoolgirls, sexy vampire nurses, and Princess Leia are cool, and scary movies are really cool.

These are the movies that have scared me the most. I list them here either because you can tell a lot about a man by the movies that that made him shit his pants or because I can't do all my posts about sports and still claim geek cred.

For the record, Richmond St. in London ON is the best place to spend Halloween.

#5. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master

Young Master Jeremy was prohibited by his well meaning parents from watching any film featuring the talents of one Robert Englund. This put him at a social disadvantage whenever the schoolyard conversation turned to Freddy Kruger, which was I recall, every single recess of every single day of elementary school. So with the help of an arms length friend of the latch key variety, I finally found out what all the fuss was about. In terms of acting and production value, this was probably the low point in a franchise with some ups and lots of downs but nine year olds don't have that sort of perspective and I thought it was the sweetest film ever made. I wasn't scared, even for the first few nights, but for fun I'd play the "What would I do if I were dreaming right now" game, and after a while I got to thinking about just how goddamn vulnerable I was. You could never really be sure you were awake, and you could never be sure Freddy wasn't out to get you. Even if you were a nun-chuck Olympian, Freddy doesn't play by the rules, he could just turn you into a bug and crush you. Most important, I had been told by those in the know that only girls could kill Freddy. Before a week had passed I couldn't go into the laundry room without praying. I never really batted an eye at Jaws, the creature from the black lagoon was a joke, but there's a scene where Freddy's claws shoot across the water and onto the beach right before he jumps out of the sand and steps on Kristen's head that had me scared of beaches for a good two years. Worst of all, since the film was verboten, I couldn't ask my dad if he had ever played vigilante on a neighborhood child murderer without arousing suspicion. I had to face uncertainty all alone. I'm over it, but that burnt-faced so-and-so gave me a lot to think about.

#4. It

I read the book in Grade 7. The book was scary but with the book, there is so much going on that between the gradeschool orgy and the cosmic turtle and the ritual of Chud my mind was swimming too deeply to be scared. I watched the movie and for all it's spookiness they had to skip the best parts because how do you explain the ritual of chud on prime time. It all would have been fine, until I heard the story. The fella who sat next to me explained that on a dark and stormy night, he was trying to find "It" in his VHS tapes, and after failing fell asleep watching a comedy. When he woke up, he discovered "It" was recorded after the first movie, and as the lightning struck outside, he swore he saw a clown outside the basement window, just waving and smiling. That image, Tim Curry doling out balloons outside every basement window I have ever been in after dark, will never leave me. Thanks a lot Cory.

#3. The Silence of the Lambs

So, you tell yourself you're being silly. There's no such thing as monsters, its all your kids stuff. Well I've got some bad news for you sunshine, crazy serial killers do exist. And Anthony Hopkins exists too. So chew on that as you take out the garbage at night in the dark. Just you think about it. Are you smart enough to evade a genius maniac after your tasty love handles? No, you aren't.

#2. 1408

Stephan King strikes again. I watched this movie, during the day and it just freaked me out. You get the idea that when they made this movie they did exactly what they set out to do. Everybody but John Cusack knew not to fuck with that hotel room, but he just had to go and do it. What got me wasn't so much Mr. Cusak's torture, but the way the other folks treated the room, and the stories and images of the other people the room had eaten. I mean, this room can tailor make a nightmare that will tweak you just the right way, forever and ever. If it gets a chance it'll trap your family too. Yep, I will never never stay in any room 1408 so long as I live.

#1. Fire in the Sky

On the worst night, I spent an entire night on a couch with all the lights on just thinking about it. I hope aliens do not exist, but I think if they do, then they're messing with us. The syrup scene is just the limit. If you haven't seen this movie, maybe don't.

I'm giving honourable mention to The exorcist, and to 28 Days later. Happy Halloween.

A Gentleman's Game

2009-10-20T17:29:00.000-07:00

If you didn't see it, it's here. Clifton Smith got hit so hard his girlfriend died. Dante Wesley did a bad bad thing. It was dirty, it was brutal and it appeared to be committed with intent to injure. So of course, pushes were exchanged, names were called, and honours were defended. But no punches were thrown and thanks in part to player's restraint, the official's prudence, and even coach's boldness, the situation on the field calmed down as fast as it had flared up, save for Wesley's temper tantrum on the sidelines for the half minute it took for the ref to eject him. Smith got up and walked off the field under his own power, mumbling something that sounded like Cantonese and calling Coach Morris "Professor Buttonsworth". Wesley is suspended for next Sunday, a punishment everybody except Clifton's mom thinks is adequate. Cased closed, on to week 7.

I was born and raised on hockey, to me this is fucking amazing.

One: The minute the cheap shot happened, everyone and their dog with a level head went right to work making sure nothing escalated, no fist fights, no retribution, serendipity baby. The NFL is so vehemently against fighting because they have made the decision that it doesn't wash with their image and they stick by it. The NHL has hummed and hawed about fighting like it was abortion legislation for as long as I've been alive, and they're no closer than when they started. All they know is that they don't like the game the way it is. I don't have anything against emotions spilling over, but the staged stuff is consensual ridiculousness and I can't be the only person that feels that way. So make the former acceptable and stop condoning the latter right? Nope. The league that regularly eats the PA for breakfast kowtows to the goons. Whaaa?

Two: The aftermath was; there was no aftermath. One game suspension and on with the show. The NFL doesn't have to pontificate for a year and a half on the nature of violence in society, press criminal charges, or cry in Barbara Walter's lap. The NFL is as pleased as punch with the way their game has evolved, everybody from the owners to the commentators will tell you that same thing.

This is very good, because I'm a sports fan and the only off field drama I want is cheerleaders gone wild and the odd dog fight. I don't want to see fucking Kelly Hrudy weigh in on how children are going to react to bloody noses, I want to see sports being played and the men playing them composed, honoured and pleased to be doing so.

So, maybe the NHL is more unsure of it's identity because of its place in the sports pecking order. It's a mite easier to be content when half your owners are billionaires. Maybe it's a function of it's history to always be in flux, after all, the NFL never had a Maurice Richard, never had a summit series, never had a miracle on ice, never had a Todd Bertuzzi (although they've had a few Sean Averys). What ever the reason, I'm not concerned that the two leagues are so very different, I just think the NHL could learn something about cohesion from it's big brother, and a thing or two about composure from a Sunday afternoon cheap shot.

Gerry Bettman: A Bad Person(?)

2009-10-16T19:11:00.000-07:00

I would like, if I may, to take you on a journey back in time to a special year they saw fit to call 1993. Snow and Meatloaf had hit albums, Bill Clinton brought sexy back to the white house, and the NBA snuck a trojan horse monkey wrench into the works of a surging National Hockey League in the personage of one Gerry B. Bettman.

The NHL at the time was indeed surging; Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky shared time on Prostars, they were superhero teammates, equal and awesome. In fact, between the Mighty Ducks movie popularizing the hash-mark "triple deke" and league wide roster of arguably the best players ever (Lemieux, Roy, Gretzky, Hull (uggh), Messier, Gilmore, Fleury and on and on), the NHL was looking to take a real big space at the American sport table. North of the border the news was already out, it was getting less and less okay to make fun of "Rabid Canadian Hockey fans" and lo and behold, the with the playoff quarterfinals underway all signs pointed to Lord Stanley's Cup being decided between the two Canadian original six franchises. At that point in time no one I knew could give a flying fuck whether the league's new position of commissioner was occupied by Lucifer himself.

Then it happened, the high stick heard round the world. I'm not going to pretend that I can prove it, but my gut tells me Kerry Fraser got a talking to before hand from the new boss about his plans for California and Lord Stanley and I'm as sure of chicanery now as I was when I was thirteen. The rest is bizarre history; two work stoppages and a lost season, two great Canadian cities stripped of their franchises, and half a league's worth of failing teams a spitting distance from the Tropic of Cancer. And of course we have this summer's desert Blackberry clusterfuck.

Even putting all that aside, the real point is the NHL has underachieved. Tickets are just not selling in a bunch of key markets, various TV deals have left networks with shitty ratings shaking their heads and placing hockey somewhere between woman's basketball and elephant polo. Under Bettman the league has made lots more money, but opportunity for the sort of breakthrough everybody was expecting has come and gone.

I know there was a plan, and I'll even admit that a lot of the teams sputtering now could have been successful with less boneheaded management, and I'd be willing to let it slide if it wasn't for that smugness. That shit-eating grin, the way he's always touching Ron MacLean, the way he can just deny deny deny ever making mistakes in his long tenure.

Okay, maybe hockey fans are just disposed to dislike him. The guy is a politician, he's a businessman, and he sports a naturally sleazy disposition. His public character could possibly consciously channel Vince MacMahon because that fills a role and takes heat off the club owners for unpopular decisions. You tell all that to the tourists. Take a look into this man's eyes. This is a man who just plain doesn't like hockey. He likes money and he likes cameras and he likes power, but he just doesn't get it and worse, he doesn't care that he doesn't get it. For those of us that have genuine devotion to the game and it's place in our national identity, who equate Bettman's entire career with the worst sorts of treason, to have a fella who just doesn't care calling so many of the shots makes for a frustrating eighteen seasons. But brothers and sisters, there ain't no hero waiting in the wings to right all his wrongs, the new boss will more than likely be same as the old boss, but hope springs eternal, and just maybe...

Week 5: Thoughts on the Haves and the Not-Haves

2009-10-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

There are five undefeated teams left sitting pretty after five weeks of season, and nine that have managed one win or less. While there has been no shortage of great games, it seems to me that for every close game we have to sit through two unmerciful beatings the likes of which we could have predicted the tuesday prior. Five games this Sunday had more than 20 points seperating winners and losers. There were good close games (Buffalo and Clevland notwithstanding, if that game were any more boring and shitty they would have had to call it soccer) but a good third of them weren't much more than afterthoughts. On this point I really don't want to sound vicious, but if Seattle can beat Jacksonville 41 nil what business does Jacksonville have being in the same league?

These discrepancies in talent, motivation and\or just general having-shit-togetherness are all the more bewildering when you take into account the setup the NFL built for itself to avoid this very same problem. The NFL has the candy shell of competitive capitalism with a soft chewy oligarchical center where revenue sharing and a salary cap basically levels the field, bonuses notwithstanding. Even the differences in revenues, ranging from large fortunes to very very large fortunes, doesn't help explain why The Vikings (lowest) can be perfect while the Bucks can be 0 and 5 and still belong to the Billion Plus club. What it speaks to I think, is leadership that wants a superbowl the way I want a piano keys made of rhino horn compared to ownership that wants to kill a rhino. So if the Lions can be a perpetually terrible and embarrassing with wicked draft pick after wicked draft pick, and the Colts and the Patriots can just win win win till they're blue in the face, maybe that's the real NFL message to the world. You can be a team that has inspired heads of state, dedicated and knowledgeable coaches, and hard working players that follow the game plan and live in a state of competitiveness, excitement and victory, or you can be a bunch of hacks given every advantage chasing your tails who never get and never deserve to get out of the basement.

Franchises, like life's opportunities, are not handed out to the best and brightest, or even the most capable, they are given to millionaires. You can buy a place at the table but if success could be bought, then you can bet the Cowboys wouldn't have spent the last decade watching the second half of the playoffs on TV's, no matter how big they are.

The Last of the Mohicans: A Book that Eats like A Meal

2009-10-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

As I am wont to do, when I began to read this novel I posted as much on facebook and received congratulations for doing so from two of my more bookish pals. Then I recieved more comments from others in person, then a conversation about the novel from one of my more non-bookish pals came up. Before too long I came to grips with the fact that I was the last English speaking person to have read this book.

I scored it from the hyper-discount rack at chapters along with two other books I should have already read. I had watched the movie with my mom just before I started the book. The movie, I thought, was pretty good, its hard to judge violent period piece movies before Braveheart (everything changed after Braveheart) but I liked it all the same and my mom thinks its just great. I know everybody and their dog likes to yak about how the book is better than the movie, but brothers and sisters, these two stories are kissing cousins at best. The flick really strays from the original story, and adds subplots that really amount to themes 180 degrees from the book. I'll throw in a disclaimer though, because there are more books in the series so the movie could have just compressed plots me being none the wiser.

This book is wonderful, and probably everybody should read it. It's a nice look at at least one man's opinion of Montcalm that strays considerably from the heroic image we're taught in school. The story is the sort of exciting that makes you ignore a ringing phone, interesting the way that makes you pester your family with misguided insights into first nations issues, and reads just like a nineteenth century New Englander's Lord of the Rings.

In order to corner the saucy gentlemen market, Cooper jumps the shark large late in the book and has the heroes running around in furs pretending to be a bear in the Huron's camp. It's ridiculous but is prefaced with quotes from Midsummer Night's Dream and I suspect conforms to some matter of form requisite of fiction in his day and age. Other than that the story is of folks killing folks, warriors being heroic (I found enough parallels with Homer to get a little more excited than probably necessary) and the French being smug ditherers. It gets pretty heavy when a Huron brave smashes a baby against the rocks and splits his mom's melon with a tomahawk, but having read all the Mercer Mayer books I am no stranger to gore.

Apart from the violence, the groovy language and the history, the best part of the book is to have a look at the attitudes of the characters, and the differences between whites and indians, English and French, and between Huron and Delaware. To hear Cooper say tell it, if there's one thing Indian's hate, it's other Indians, perfectly in keeping with what I know of human nature. The real action comes between two rival tribes, and they have all sorts of mean racist sentiments towards each other's tribes that I didn't understand, like when I watch All in the Family.

So read this book if you haven't already. It's great and you'll learn more about our continent and the fiction it has spit out.

The Invention Of Lying: a film i saw recently that i will now review

2009-10-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

Before I review this film I am obliged to tell a story. It's a story about a boy and a girl, in the early part of this very same decade. The boy asks the girl to accompany him to a film, and that film was a film about a house. This house was a strange one, it contained corpses, and not just a few corpses, several, say, a thousand. And despite the film featuring the talents of a future "The Office" actor, that girl who agreed to see "an art film" insisted her date owed her one romantic comedy for every corpse in the film. "The Invention of Lying" is #42.

So Ricky Gervais gives us another turn of the RomCom wheel, as a down and out dude who develops the ability to tell untruths in a world where that sort of thing has never been done. He turns his gift into fortune and glory with a trip to the casino (But sir, I was on thirty) in a few minutes and spends the rest of the movie getting the girl but not before committing a most fundamentally bizarre act of ?blasphemy?.

OK, so, nobody ever told a lie right, so Ricky tells his mom, who's on death's door, that there will be an afterlife full of love and happiness. As fiction has never been realized, this idea is a new one, and as no one on earth has never before born false witness, everyone assumes that because someone said it, it is true. So apart from being rich and famous, the protagonist is now seen as, and acts as, a medium for "The man in the sky". Ricky delivering his layman ten commandments on the back of pizza boxes would have been the funniest part of the movie, but it was kind of ruined by weird timing and an obvious lead up.

The most remarkable thing in this film is the director\lead actor\producer's ability to have Louis CK not be funny for an entire flick. My thinking is that old Ricky got a little uptight about anybody topping the old eh eh eh... no wait no hey-I'm-a-British-person and thusly hamstringed the whole of his formidable supporting cast. Maybe I'm wrong, it seems like Jennifer Garner speaking frankly about masturbating before a bad date should be funny, but, no.

It was alright, but it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been with the seven thousand A-list cameos. I like his standup and I like his style, but on this side of the pond you have to do better than this if you want to make the move from sensation to institution. A swing and a miss kids.

Monday Night Shamelessness: Vikings 30 Packers 23

2009-10-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

I will never again be able to watch Brett Favre play without the mute button. Nobody without a grudge that touches madness is going to say Number Four is anything but the reason they build halls of fame in the first place, but this shit is too much. It's like Michelle Obama fell out of her dress on a slow news day. Those bastards had a perpetual loop of blind praise going that put pop radio to shame. Say viewer, would you like to watch a highlight reel of the special Brett Monday nights again? No? Too bad.

Football, professional sport, is a product. Ok, fine, but can we as viewers, fans or otherwise, be granted one iota of intelligence, of self respect? We understand what the game meant. This isn't the Superbowl; there's nobody sitting on the couch keen on getting to the commercials. I will bet my left nut that not one viewer watching this game didn't know there was some history for these two teams and these two quarterbacks. So the good folks at ESPN ought to get to work filling the dead air with banter that doesn't make me flip to Kimbo Slice reruns as soon as the play gets called dead. I'm not saying don't milk it, for god's sake, I'm not against pomp, but every one of them sounded like a drooling idiot. I demand a small measure of the sublime be retained in an event that really was special for football. This isn't Temptation Island.

As soon as the clock expired they swarmed the man with a shamelessness the likes of which I have seen only once before, (The cameras following Jordan into the locker room after his championship) and Brett, always a professional but never eloquent, gave them a few polite sound bites that I have reheard about a million times since.

The real story of course is that the Vikings beat the Packers, and it was a team effort that gave the latter a beating much worse than the score lets on in all measures except for those concerning Adrian Peterson, who was dwarfed by his teammates efforts. It's worth mentioning that Jared Allen had maybe the defensive game of the season so far, making the makeshift Packers O-Line look like they didn't belong in the league, but the league loves it's quarterbacks...

And now, the football sun also rises, we move on to week five, where Peyton or Eli or Drew or Mark or whomever will make some new bonehead stat and everybody will shit their pants yet again. There's a point to all of this, Football is a goddamn wonderful thing without the talking heads repeating the fact over and over like orangutans who just learned English. Hows about letting the game do a little bit more of the talking.

The Vikings and their momentum are going to keep on winning next Sunday and unless the Ram's recruit some Mac Trucks for linemen it's going to be very very embarrassing day in St. Louis.

The rudderless Packers get a week off to lick their wounds and think about whether or not mediocrity is going to be acceptable.

Being Erica: The Curious Sensation of not being Pandered to

2009-10-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

For those of you who haven't been following the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's stab at Carrie Bradshaw, Being Erica is the life and times of one 30 something just-shy-of-hot Toronto Urbanite who through the help of her magical shrink goes back through time and relives the highs and lows of her pretty-girl-by-the-numbers in search of transcendence. It's very nearly as terrible as it sounds but the season finale had me scratching me Gulliver and anxious for more.

A summary then: Erica uses her visit back in time to prevent the momentous death of her older brother, a very serious time continuum no-no, and is berated by Dr. Tom who ends their sessions altogether and promptly tells her to stick it where the flux capacitor don't shine. As soon as she gets back to real time, her brother, now a successful fellow with a family, dog, etc etc, dies in a car accident, and the Hades gets it's soul back. Erica begs Dr. Tom to set things back, he agrees, and disappears. The end of the episode and the season has Erica being swooped into the new office of a new shrink, who says that she'll be handling things from here on.

So the viewer learns that there is more than one magical psychiatrist, and that she is so much more important than everyone else that she even has a backup. This got me thinking of a few possibilities my inexperience let me think might just happen.

One: This Erica bird is more than just spoiled; her life has some special significance, like she's meant play some integral part in the cosmic ballet, stop a plane crash or push somebody in front of the subway Gunslinger-style.

Two: There is a supernatural war going on between rival magic shrinks and Erica is a pawn between two rival demigods in an eternal Freud vs Jung chess match. With Light sabers.

Three: Erica under her new shrink would become an agent of chaos, having Carte Blanche to go back in time and fuck with everything.

No No and No.

The new shrink made her peer and her temporary patient kiss and make up, Erica went on to learn about overcoming insecurity with communication, and I like a jilted lover contemplated how one ordinary man could go about getting a show cancelled.

I shouldn't be upset. From Spike to CNN to Discovery, 90% of television is devoted entirely to making me happy. The shitty Dharma and Greg remake notwithstanding, the electric world is my happy place. Being Erica is tailored to my better half, like twist-top wine bottles and Ricky Gervais. The plot twists push towards emotional growth, romance-heavy sex, and magic for the sake of good. In short, this show is liable to make you cringe and get to work cleaning out the garage, and that's okay. The view from Mars is a little sadder, but a little wiser.

St. John's United Church: Not your Parent's House of Worship

2009-09-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

The United Church of Canada was a pillar, and a goodly pillar, of my childhood and adolescence. I bowled under their banner, I learned about critical thinking from their clergy, and I plucked my wife from their ranks. Even during the times in my life when I've been pretty hostile towards organized religion in general, I always prefaced it with the fact that I did alright by them. So I've been backandforthing the idea of a return to regular attendance for a year or two, and having been invited to St. John's United by a cat hawking coffee at the Georgetown Fall Fair I decided to give it a try. A week ago I showed up for Sunday service, and having not burst into flames upon entering, enjoyed a great service and a warm welcome that made me glad I went through with it.

This week I showed up same bat time same bat channel, was warmly received once again, had a lovely time, and was exposed to a U2 video that displayed animated genitals flashed with a degree of abandon that while arguably tasteful struck me as, well, striking. I should preface this by saying that St. John's, like most churches I am led to believe, has taken their audio\video game well into the twenty first century. The clergy wear head-set microphones (shades of Tony Robbins) the hymns are broadcast from an overhead projector that hangs in front of an ornate chandelier like it has every right to be there, and during the sermon that same projector shines pictures of canoes on the Canadian Shield, Children with their parents watching the tides come in, puppies, doves, etc etc. I am tempted to suggest it's a step away from congregating at Chucky Cheese, but actually it's not so weird.

Now I can't find the video to post, but it opens with a naked fellow flashing his manhood before turning into a dove or something, and later a vagina is displayed in such a way as to evoke that crazy flower scene from The Wa ll. On top of the softcore, this video suggests repeatedly through an admittedly clever spelling of Coexist that Islam, Judaism, old faithful Christianity and whatever religion worships a giant burning eye (Sauronism?) are all equal and cool. As for the latter sentiment, I don't think I'm exactly comfortable, but I'll let it go for now. Now this place was maybe 60 percent filled, and the median age was firmly set in the golden years, and not so much as a eyebrow was raised by this video save mine.

I would have never guessed that would have been copacetic amongst protestants of any persuasion, but I was made to feel uncomfortable and thinking myself a pretty with it dude I resented being made to feel like Pat Robertson in a pride parade. It got me thinking though, there must have been a change that happened in the decade I played hooky from church, a cultural upheaval that has left me rushing to catch up. Faith, or my denomination's faith, has not remained static and it has not waited for me, it has moved and it is moving. I think maybe it's not entirely bad being made to feel uncomfortable once in a while. I am in a small part, moved and shaken. I may still dislike Bono, but I'll be back for more.

Jets 24 Titans 17: The Cult of Sanchez Reaches Critical Mass

2009-09-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Jets and the Titans threw on cash-grab throwback jerseys from the old school this Sunday, and before the first commercial break it looked like the latter were going to be taking a beating straight out of the Old Testament. Rookie sensation Mark Sanchez did his best John Elway impression and ran one in headfirst, and special teams set him up a convincing touchdown pass thirty seconds later. Sanchez then spent the next thirty minutes of play pondering his inevitable GQ cover shoot and let the Titans slither back into the game. The Titans may have made it close, but they spent most of the game looking like Joaquin Phoenix on a talk show. Tennessee special teams looked more like the special olympics and even though Kerry Collins had a few unbelievable throws, you can't blow the last thirteen passes of a game and collect your paycheck with a straight face. The only part of Tennessee's game that was consistently good was Jeff Fisher's mustache, and the mouth underneath was calling bonehead plays to beat the band, the most glaring of which saw his team inexplicably going for a fourth and seven with lots of time left in the second quarter.

In the third quarter Mr. Sanchez landed back on earth and turned a defensive recovery into a third touchdown and put in a solid finish. The Jets have yet to play an amazing four quarters in a row, but to come out of the gate 3-o with room for improvement is an enviable position indeed. The Titans are looking exactly like an 0-3 team determined to be less than the sum of their parts, but their matchup with the equally underwhelming Jaguars is as good a chance as any to step back into the light.

The Jets in contrast are spending the week preparing for the Saints, who appear to actually be under divine protection. Their chances of going 4-0 under those circumstances are about as good as Rex Ryan not having a heart attack in the next five years.

Circus Maximus in Philadelphia

2009-09-24T20:30:00.000-07:00

It looks like Donovan McNabb’s ribcage is bowing out of Sunday’s contest against the Chiefs. That means this season’s biggest off-field drama is about to go center stage in the personage of one Michael Vick. Now the powers that be are insisting the nod is going to Kevin Kolb. You’ve heard of Kevin Kolb right? He likes quiet walks along the beach, fine wine, smooth jazz and throwing the ball to the Saints of New Orleans. Vick has been the talk of the league since August 14^th, Vick is finished his suspension, Vick is the greatest quarterback alive or dead… well, you get the picture, Vick will be getting minutes this Sunday.

This whole thing couldn’t be more Hollywood if Andy Ried were coked-out on the sidelines reverse cowboying “Swoop”. Ron Mexico, having crawled his way back from perdition, gets his first regular season start in front of his adopted home crowd after Kolb throws yet another pick. He leads his team down the field and to victory, looking over to a teary-eyed Tony Dungee and mouthing “I’m Okay” from the shoulders of his teammates. You can bet Jeff Lurie wants to see his pet project walk the walk. He produced this movie not without some hassle and now that all NFL eyes are on his team he wants his Oscar.

All the writing is on the wall. Ried hasn’t been working the Wildcat offence because he has a crush on the Dolphins, he did it because the pivot his team got on the cheap is as good at running as he is at throwing. Who knows, seeing Vick get knocked around a bit fighting for yards might even make the SPCA crack a smile while they burn a cross outside Lincoln Financial Field.

On the other side of the coin Kansas City is looking at a long season of being the team that loses every game of significance to their opponent's heroics. Quick, can you name the team whose quarterback Rudy sacked at the end of the movie? You can? Fuck off. I'm looking for the Eagles to win a squeaker, a field goal on a late rally. The whole football world will be abuzz for as long as it takes for one of the Manning brothers to do something awesome. Pop some corn and get comfy, this one's going to be enjoyable. Fido, you might want to look away.

Angel Dust: An Album for the Ages

2009-09-21T17:36:00.000-07:00

This year marks the 17th Anniversary of Faith No More's best-selling album and is a perfect time for reflection on what this album has meant to me. First of all, just because it's their best-selling album, doesn't mean it gets the respect it deserves. Secondly, this album is hard hitting where it needs to be, catchy without being the sort of radio-friendly that makes you want to tear your teeth out, surreal and complicated enough to be appreciated more and more after multiple spins on the old compact disc player.

I was introduced to Faith No More in my last year of high school ('98-99) by my buddy Pete. Pete was a fan the way Cindy Crawford was a pretty lady, that is, very.

Says I "Say man, that's a pretty cool tattoo of an angry red dog on your arm."

Says he "That's the Faith No More dog... dog. What's up?"

In short, my initiation.

I bought Angel Dust a year later on a whim in Kingston from one of those CD sales they used to have on Campuses with the expressed intention of establishing my "alternativeness" to an army of peers. That night I commandeered the CD player after U2's "One" made its third trip on the rotation, it played about a third of the way through when one of the gals rolled her terrible eyes, the host ran with it and said "Yeah Jer, what the hell is this". Philistines. Anyhow, my defense of the music wasn't enough to steer the room from the "lets talk about our high school boyfriends" vibe so the album got shelved and I think thrown out the window by my friend Cam, though I've never been able to confirm my suspicions. The important thing was I knew fundamentally then and there that me and Faith No More were right, and they were wrong. When all my CD's were stolen out of a car my girlfriend bought me a new copy along with The Downward Spiral and some Mudhoney Bootleg. Yes, I went on to marry her. A few months after that, I finished a double shift at the ole' Mac's Milk with this prototypical townie coworker who had hours earlier snorted "found" drugs he scammed from the toilet of the punk bar across the road and summoned the energy to keep me company in the latter half of my shift. We walked home, and after rousing my roommate for a wake n' bake I mentioned casually that I had been listening to Angel Dust lately, to which he replied "That is the best fucking album ever made". So there you have it, a second authority on the matter.We listened to the entire album and played Tony Hawk, and I'm pretty sure he got arrested shortly thereafter. Some years later a track (Midlife Crisis) showed up on the radio in San Andreas. I was slowly drawing a bead on Ryder as he tried to swim away. Ryder was a friend and I felt bad doing it, but somehow Faith No More made it ok.

The point of all this is that knowing about Angel Dust has been like a secret handshake for me on a whole bunch of occasions. But not a cute badminton club sort of handshake, the sort of hand shake you could expect from David Lynch, or the guy covered in tattoos just before it was cool to be covered in tattoos, or maybe even the guy working the midnight shift at Mac's Milk in the 3D glasses. So go and buy the damn thing. It might open the door to a world full of kicks you never knew you wanted.

Call Me Ted: Call me impressed

2009-09-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

I haven't read too many autobiographies. I got a signed copy of Chretien's book for christmas from the missus a while back and my buddy Paul at work gave me Trudeau's so Ted according to Ted makes 3 I can think of.

If those three are representative of the genre, then methinks the autobiography is none too nuanced a platform. That said, you get the story of the person straight from the horse's mouth and where the author and his helper\writer does and does not place their emphasis tends to be pretty telling and helps one sneak a peek between the lines.

This fellow Skipped the Courageous to an America's Cup, owned the braves and got a world series ring, owned the WCW (that curiously went unmentioned), started CNN, gave the UN a billion dollars, became the largest American land owner and had sex with Hanoi Jane (in her fifties albeit, but still no small potatoes). All this goes to show what a tremendous thing an education in the Classics can be.

But back to Jane Fonda. In an effort to use up more virgin rainforest the book is peppered with anecdotes written by his friends and foes, and a good chunk of them are stories about the totally inappropriate ADD shit Turner pulled that ended up being really smart in retrospect. The best ones though, are concerning the bozo move that was merging Time Warner with AOL. Turner says before he made the move, he asked four fellas for advice, and immediately afterwards all four of them have a half a page to deny ever having done it. The narrator himself is self-admittedly missing that muscle employed in introspection, having traded it for the hyper-distinguished mustache gene. So the only real digging is done in Jane Fonda's paragraphs, where she talks about his inability to do whatever he had to do to fulfill her spiritually because of his personal tragedies (of which there certainly are some).

This book is a must read for anybody who cares about TV and the cats who run it. The better part of the book is dedicated to the moving, shaking and ultimate vulnerability of networks, studios and cable. The big theme he pushes is the rise and fall of the little guy. To a point I guess I'll buy it though to say he bottomed out would be a bit of a stretch. This guy is absolutely gifted at making money and is a hard worker the way Usain Bolt is a quick runner. He accomplished all this stuff and had people stepping on his head the entire time. At times he reads like an Ayn Rand hero on speed, but the guy actually cares about the issues and spends his time shelling out his cash and making a difference, which is more than I can say for you. But above all else, he had sex with Jane Fonda. Probably over and over. Maximum respect.

An Immodest Proposal

2009-09-17T07:29:00.000-07:00

The story of Caster Semenya and her clear persecution at the hands of the track and field powers that be shines a clear light on the greatest of all barriers in human sport. In her instance, because her body's intersex mutation presumably produces hormones and body structure that give her a perceived advantage over her more normal competitors, the sore losers cry foul. The simple truth is that her opponents did not try hard enough, and the nut sack hiding somewhere in there is only sitting a foot or two lower than a heart as big as a room. This entire argument is only scratching the surface of the real problem, the sexual segregation of athletics. It started in the backwards era of false modesty, when "the weaker sex" sat on the sidelines confined to the role of nurses, widows and hapless victims whilst the men would go a'warring with cavalier abandon, thumbing the noses at bodies just as ripe for cannon fodder left to lay fallow. In what we call more civilized times, even as children we are indoctrinated, sent to changing rooms cruelly separating boys from girls.

We as a sport loving populous need to tear down this wall between male and female competition. There need not be an WNBA, only an NBA, where men and women alike are free to compete and thrive together. Finally women will have access to the major sponsorship dollars available to the "boy's club" of professional football. Think of the money University athletic departments would save when there are no woman's and men's clubs, only "the team". Usain Bolt is fastest man in the world sure, but what about the fastest human?

For that matter, down with the special olympics, let those kids compete with their brothers and sisters who have as much right to be there as they do. There can be nothing more honest and more pure than a completely level playing field, and we all have a responsibility to help overcome these artificial and bigoted boundaries. There will come a time, perhaps in our lifetimes, where a man, a woman, or anything that walks or crawls in between can just pick up a discus and let 'er rip, and by god let the best creature win.

The Road: The Bummer Side of Post-Apocalyptic America

2009-09-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

Cormac McCarthy makes his bid for the biggest buzzkill of the english language. Something horrible has happened to the earth and as far as the two protagonists in the story are concerned, there is no sanctuary. A son and his consumptive father make their way to the coast in an effort to escape the cold winter, fighting almost constant starvation and hiding from roving bands of rapist\cannibals (or is that cannibal rapists?). There is no hope and and they both see death as slow creeping certitude. There are a handful of extraordinarily horrible moments, and another handful of heartbreaking tenderness brought to you by the good people at Coca-Cola and Honest Jim's Bomb Shelter superstore.

One of the sparse moments in the book that feature other characters has the father explaining to a shriveled old man to whom they just fed some of their precious stores that his boy is something special. He fights despair even whilst coughing blood like it was going out of style because his boy would give a spiteful dying bastard some food that meant an extra day of starvation less than a week later. Mr. McCarthy paints the power of devotion between father and son in even the most bleak, and I mean bleak, circumstances. Their proposed idealism, "carrying the fire" as the boy calls it, is chipped away by compromises that tear schism after schism between the two that are healed over with sad sparse conversations. The broken father who will kill and loves his boy all the more because he won't punched me right in the gut and if you've got a dad or a son you might feel the same way.

This book was one serious trip and enough folks have said as much. The cultural landscape is armpit deep in apocalypse porn, from Mad Max to Waterworld to Mother Abigail's corn bread. Always it seems surviving the big one is a sexy sexy time filled with repopulating duties, free Cadillacs and the subtle perks that come with being amongst the chosen. Maybe the nuts who pine for the end times as a chance to shake things up had better read about the bag of shit the world might turn into and start sorting their fucking plastics properly. The book is pretty overwhelming, short and sad. Read it yourself and see.

CRASH BANG BOOM: Zen and The Georgetown Fall Fair Demolition Derby

2009-09-12T20:47:00.001-07:00

I end up pulling all those WWF adages out of the repressed subconscious. It was a slobberknocker, It was a vicious beating. No quarter was asked and none was given. It was as prototypical a demolition derby as one could conjure from imagination. Pulling from such exotic locals as Toronto and Bolton, brave men and one woman faced off to see whose twisted metal could best stand the taste of chaos. Three rounds of small car figure eight races. One special fox and hound match brought to us by the good people at Moffat, and one blistering eight cylinder slugfest that went on through fire, explosions, and gentlemanly madness.

I couldn't be happier with my town. A crazy accident in the dirt bike showcase earlier held back the show some two hours, but when they finally got going the crowd was no less fun and no less there. There were babies (mine included) asleep on their parents shoulders, teenagers from all of the sects, a healthy mix of the tax brackets, gear heads, straights, off duty cops, math teachers and a handful of fellas taking enough sips from sentimental silver flasks to add to the ambiance without taking away from it.

Maybe part of the draw is that the whole scene feels like it's on borrowed time. It's pretty easy to see a future where this sort of thing has gone the way of pitbulls, indoor smoking and riding in the back of pickups. It's wasteful and it's silly and everytime I visit one I feel that Norman Rockwell incandescent glow and put kids to bed just about as happy as they get. It is that perfect mix of nostalgia, community and the appeasement of a more carnal instinct anyone worth their salt has sloshing around in their guts. Milton is throwing one later this month. If you haven't been to a small town fall fair, do it. Take a big long whiff of the sort of life that won't exist forever.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: Off the bus and scratching my goddamn head

2009-09-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

I started Tom Wolfe's novel without knowing it was actual makeshift journalism but with the expressed understanding that it was the end all and be all of hippie acid lit. I suppose maybe it is. Find me a man who can write a better stream of consciousness and I'll read him with bells on. Wolfe was in top form in that respect and the book goes a long way (and I'll suspect did also to his straight contemporary audience) in explaining just what the fuck these long hairs were running around like lunatics for in the first place.

The book covers the adventures of Ken Kesey and his merry band of pranksters as they push the hallucinogenic gospel through raves they call "acid tests" to the who's who of California always pushing FURTHER. When the scene actually takes off in San Fransico his message evolves into going "beyond acid" and is consequently shut down by the team of Judas purveyors cleaning up catering to the heads digging the ambiance Kesey had spearheaded.

If this was journalism, then Wolfe had abandoned objectivity and played acolyte for the gospel according to Kesey. That's fine, his contemporary and detractor Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night played that same sort of game a few months earlier and they threw a Pulitzer at it. But whereas the pretenses, personages and especially the hero in the latter were challenged, critically analyzed and aired in public, Wolfe paints Ken Kesey as modern day Siddhartha, generally flawless even as he bolts ridiculous along the ditch beside the freeway trying to evade the feds..

Kesey and his bus on the east coast pay telling visits to his movement's most direct parents, namely Tim Leary and Jack Kerouac, neither or which seem to enjoy their company. The former, working in a prosaic estate and bent on reflection, meditation and all the rest of it have no real use for their loud and revolutionary guests, and the latter is bewildered and doesn't connect anything with them. Wolfe's answer for both cold receptions is simple; They don't get it. Hubris at is most pure and stupefying.

Both the kids on the bus and the chronicler himself were after the same thing; The pranksters wanted it without acid and Wolfe wanted it without dizzy spinning-discoball prose, transcendence. Both end up falling short. The line between yahoo drug addict and vanguard spiritual initiate is a lot thinner than four hundred and sixteen pages, but I'm far enough removed from the sixties to call it falling short with a measure of objectivity.

Masterpiece? No. Worth a Read? SSSSSUUUUURRRRREEEE. But no big rush.

Inglourious Basterds: The best 15 bucks I ever spent outside of The Fabulous Forum

2009-09-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

*Spoiler alert* Nazi's are a bunch of dicks

Man, I am telling you, this cat just keeps getting better and better. Much has been made about the spouts of the ole' Ultra Violence in Basterds; it's just pretty window dressing if you ask me. This is an movie that throws around a lot of scenes that politely insist they belong to the annals of film history without alienating the masses of the golden plated demographic or abandoning the respectful art of homage that has always been Tarantino's calling card. The obvious screen stealer is the personage of Christoph Waltz in his turn as Nazi no-good-so-and-so. He did a real real good job mastering that self-satisfied shit-eating giggle that seems to belong solely to Nazi's, bureaucrats, and Nazi bureaucrats. The Tarantino bump is sure to land this fella on the red carpet for a decade of overpaid turns that try and reclaim this precipice. I've heard, from my buddy and fellow movie goer amongst more professional opinions, that Brad Pitt fell short in his role, but I don't buy it. He was the cartoonish ingredient the movie needed to transcend melodrama, and I don't think anybody else could have married bloodlust with whimsy and guffaws so tightly (certainly not Eli Roth the Bear Jew, the Jazzy Jeff to Quentin's Fresh Prince).

For all the incredible scenes, the groovy showdown in the pub, the countryside ethnic cleansing and the theatre ka-booming (and one could say the plot pushes pretty hard just to get over to the big scenes), you could fall asleep for them all and not feel bad about your fifty dollar popcorn, if you only saw Melanie Laurent doing her minimalist gut contortion over fluffy dessert with the butcher of her family. If Mr. QT has bonifide genius, it is tapping genius performances out of his ladies, and with Laurent he makes everything else he's done look like learning experiences.

I endorse this flick. The Beal seal of approval. You'll leave the theatre walking on air and if you don't we probably can never be friends. Quentin, never stop, never ever stop.

Jesus Christ, the NFL and The Lonely Grave of Ron Mexico

2009-08-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

Back when the egg on Michael Vick's face only came from his alter ego's genital luggage, the Mexico moniker was a source of extreme embarrassment for the NFL and it's somewhat paradoxical sense of purity. However, since the real bomb dropped and the Eagles have taken their perplexing leap of faith, that very same alter ego could be a manifestly useful symbol. To hear all parties involved, from Roger Goodell to Jeffery Lurie down to Donovan McNabb, Vick is going to bury the dark half and what could be better than having a name on the tombstone. I watched the press conference live by chance on August 14th, and it whacked me like a hammer just how important this game has made itself to America.

Lurie was first to sit and after laying down the rules of engagement, he made a well thought out and impassioned speech about Michael Vick. He and his organization were offering Vick a hand up, and he wanted to make damn sure nobody left the room thinking it was a hand out. Success in this endeavor would not be measured on the field, but in the community where Vick would be making a real difference all the while suffering the slings and arrows of his justifiably angry detractors. Only if that happened would the chance the Eagles took be a good one. America is a place for redemption, and Michael Vick would get his chance to be redeemed, but it would not be automatic and it would not be easy (though in fairness a seven figure contract might offer some cushioning). Lurie said that this wasn't about football, it was about giving Vick the chance to right wrongs and the evidence would give the claim some credence. The Eagles have a dedicated, image friendly and clearly spectacular quarterback in Donovan McNabb, who had not only signed off on the idea of acquiring a potential rival, but instigated it. While one cannot ignore the benefits of getting a back up of Vick's calibre on the cheap, Vick's landing in Philadelphia is sure to cause a measure of distraction a team bent on a Super Bowl can always do without.

Vick appeared next flanked by Andy Ried and Tony Dungy who each spoke afterwards and fielded questions. Dungy, the league's answer to Jimmy Carter, was of course the perfect and perhaps only person to be the spiritual representative of this ceremony. His character and moral standing are beyond reproach and more impressively, genuine. If Lurie evoked America, Dungy cut deeper into the matter and talked about the Lord and Christian forgiveness. Dungy has formally stretched his neck out real real far on Vick's behalf, and if that alone isn't enough pressure to make #7 walk the line, one is led to believe nothing else will be.

Andy Ried may have looked like he'd rather be at the dentist than the press conference, but all parties insist he was willing to take on Vick. Even though it might have been on account of McNabb's insistence, Dungy told the cameras that Ried called him (though he was ambiguous enough to suggest "about a dozen coaches" had expressed some measure of interest). It's worth mentioning that Ried was the only handler to talk about his abilities on the field as more than tertiary to Christian philosophy and the SPCA.

Clearly embarrassed and ashamed of himself, Vick spent his time at the microphone thanking all parties involved in his return and repeated his boss's talking points about helping more than he had hurt in his "pointless activity". Vick said all he could be expected to say and gave no indication of insincerity. The stage is set and now he has to prove good to his word.

A good many important people have circled the wagons around Michael Vick where they could as easily have left him to the crows. A black superstar quarterback may be one of the rarer commodities in the National Football League, but its hard to believe that it could trump the league's good name and image. The cynic in me screams that this is a matter of dollars and cents and saving face, or that the league in the end just didn't take his crime seriously, but I can't rule out that X factor my gut says can move mountains, just maybe they did it out of love.

Harlot's Ghost,

2009-08-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

*SPOILER ALERT* JFK gets assassinated

In my circle the CIA sits pretty well synonymous with evil. It's like KRS-1 (who incidentally isn't amongst my circle of friends) said, Criminals In Action. To read Mailer is to see the agency as a brand, like a Wu-Tang Clan where Method Man might not know exactly what Ghostface is up to. In fact RZA and GZA might be at work undermining U-God unawares that they are actually puppets to Inspectah Deck's master plan. They may work under the same umbrella, but the ship sails on the winds of leverage and everybody is keeping secrets from everybody. Yes, just like a hip hop group, only they work on the public dime and topple democratically elected governments.

The story is told through the eyes of a young company man named Herrick who stems from New England mid level aristocracy, who through 2 parts nepotism and 1 part talent gets his fingers in a lot of messy pies, from Berlin in the fifties to rubbing shoulders with KGB big wigs in Montevideo up to the Bay of Pigs invasion and John Kennedy's most famous visit to Dallas. Herrick is moral, tough, reserved, loves America and is mainly confused by the deviance and chicanery that surrounds him and chips at his weakest parts.

Apart from a host of interesting superiors and peers, Herrick really takes his orders from his Dad Cal (who between running the far east and the Castro assassination party planning finds time to arm wrestle Hemingway and obsess over the great American obituary page) and Harlot. The title character is easily the book's most intriguing. Harlot is a spy's spy who seems to know everything about everyone, has the run of the entire agency, and just might be completely insane, or worse, a soviet. The better part of the book is presented as secret correspondence between our narrator and Harlot's wife, who is understood to have divorced her husband for his underling after the events of the novel.

Apart from showing equal parts disdain and admiration for the Central Intelligence Agency, Mailer explores the idea of strong personalities steering history with grandeur and often with spite. We are led to believe that perhaps the whole course of American history could be wiggling under Harlot's thumb. A large and amoral character who acts as a philosophical foil to Herrick named Dix Butler sums it up neatly when he expresses his hatred for Castro. Not on the grounds of his revolution, but under the understanding that Castro has accomplished more than him in the same time. The fearless Butler explains that there can be only twenty or so amazing men in the world, and that he is setting to work on being number one.

This of course is contrasted with the convolution of politics, self important but petty double agents, and most importantly, Oswald. Mailer doesn't give any serious credence to conspiracy theories concerning JFK's death, but the slim possibilities are insidious and so many that his narrator chooses to believe in a long gunman because the alternative would mean a quick fall into insanity.

It is worth noting that this theme is taken up in Mailer's last novel The Castle and The Forest where a fictitious article written by Mark Twain laments the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth in Geneva. Albeit with a more religious bend, there is a greater theme that weighs pettiness and chaos against the machinations of powerful men.

The novel opens up on a cliff hanger that is never resolved and even after 1200 odd pages promises "to be continued." Not too many of the greatest American novelists get to pull a Back to the Future ending and hold their title, but I'm willing to let it slide if you are.

You sendin' The Wolf?: An Eternal Loop of Violence

2009-08-27T07:50:00.000-07:00

I settled an old old score this week. A South American war of attrition spanning more than two decades was finally put to rest. I rescued all five "high value" hostages, massacred hundreds of soldiers, and sent one Russian prototype super helicopter to that great junk heap in the sky all with deftly thrown grenades and a barrage of M16 fire. When I flew out of that airport there wasn't one commie motherfucker left to launch so much as a pea shooter. When I returned stateside, a prototypical CIA head (or was it supposed to be Ollie North?) gave me his congratulations, a whole mess of greenbacks and a swift kick in the ass right back out into the shit to do it again.

I have been genuinely trying my very best to beat Operation Wolf since a buddy got it for Christmas in the mid eighties. It finally happened, I just picked up my wiimote, sat down and beat the game. I am old enough to appreciate the skewered context on which the game is based, though all the same my first instinct after mission completion was to hit up limewire for Van Halen's PANAMA and start smoking big expensive cigars. It happened pretty unceremoniously considering the scary amount of hours invested but every time I think of it I get a tinge of pride that says my cumulative years of effort were not in vain. It's my soldier of fortune Stanley Cup. So many games I've played are cinematic in nature and make ultimate success a matter of patience alone, this game made me bleed, sweat, and cry. Even if it was a half-assed 8 bit payoff, I'm infused with this grim pride that Killing Liquid Snake for the fifth time can never equal.

VIVA LA NES!