Is Sushi a Moveable Feast? A Weak Imitation of Master Hemingway

In honour of Hemingway Week at ye old PBIHT.. 
[Originally published here on March 19, 2010]

There was a warm, friendly atmosphere in the sushi shop. I sat at the bar of the restaurant, sipped the green tea and pulled my new hard-covered book from my bag. I ordered my usual for a Japanese restaurant so far from Japan, where unless you have the money to blow, you won't get fish good enough for straight sushi. I ordered the rolls that have the shrimp tempura and green vegetables inside and that are topped, each one, with a big generous slab of salmon, an orange not quite the lovely bright you find in Kansai, but still with those white V-shaped stripes that go down the length of the fish. The salmon slithered smooth and sweet down the throat when you ate it. The crunch of the tempura and wedge of cucumber balanced the softness of the fish and the ripe avocado, and then to wash it down with the cold of the Japanese beer I had ordered to go with it. The fresh crispness of the lager complimenting the sweetness of the fish.

It was good to be alone in the restaurant like that, sitting, the only one, at the counter, but comfortable there, absorbed as I was in the flavours, and the slow chopstick way I'd learned from a friend to eat sushi, putting wooden utensils down after eating each piece, making the meal last, allowing the belly to fill. And all the while reading sensous pages far better written than this and so strongly styled, so uniquely written. I felt inspired to rush home (I didn't rush - that's a lie; the weather too spring gorgeous to rush, the night too clear, a sliver of moon high in the clean air) and write about my experience in the style of the book I was reading. Or at least, a lazy approximation of that style, of Hemingway's style, in particular from his great collection of memoirs called, "A Moveable Feast." Cause what I'm really trying to do is recommend this remarkable literary remembrance to you.

Movie of the Summer of 2010: "Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World"

I will see this movie again before you see this movie if you haven't seen it already. I'm writing about this movie right after watching this movie because Ai is already asleep so you, dear reader, get excited run-on sentence me all hyper with how Scott Pilgrim filled me up it is that good. There it was. The run-on sentence. Did you catch it? Did it kill you? Do you care?

People walk out of this movie. They walked out of my viewing, a few did. That's how good it is. And I'm not even being half sarcastic. All great flicks divide, and half the people I know will hate this movie as much as the other half will go bonkers-bananas for it.  (You have been warned!) I'm not saying you had to be good at Super Mario Brothers to even slightly enjoy this movie, but I will suggest that if you can't sing the Super Mario Brothers theme music (if only the main part, even if you can't remember the wicked underwater part) it may not be for you. This is a metaphor (the Mario Brothers theme music does not actually get played in Scott Pilgrim Vs The World). It's also a limitation. It's a shame the movie not be for everyone. But then the world is full of shame and taste remains subjective. (I'm sorry but I have yet to finish a novel by Salman Rushdie.)

Scott Pilgrim, his bass guitar, his fight against the world. This flick is funny as hell. It's silly as hell. It's smart as hell. Michael Cera who is supposed to be Scott Pilgrim but is really just Michael Cera (with some awesome CG super powers) because he is always Michael Cera in every movie he appears in, but so what and what of it? Jimmy Stewart was always Jimmny Stewart and I never got tired of him or of Audrey Hepburn playing up her Audreyness, and though Cera ain't pretty and though he certainly idn't no James Stewart, he is from Canada and he is funny and he's charming and you try to do what he does at 98 pounds. 

The movie is filmed in Toronto and it's about Toronto and there is a concert at Lee's Palace, which has to be one of the great rock venues. And Casa Loma gets a role, and so many exteriors are shot at Bathurst and Bloor which has to be one of the great intersections of all time and just the fact of seeing Honest Ed's in the background, it just makes me want to write crude things expressing the extent of my pleasure... that's how excited I am. Nuff said. No. It's not. God bless Toronto cause no one else will. Everyone rags on T.O. If they're American they laugh at it as if it were Pittsburgh. If they're Canadian but not Torontonian they just hate it cause they have the mistaken impression that we think we're God's gift when really we are constantly in the New York shadow just fighting for a little cool, a little self-respect, a little transformation like you see at the new AGO or in the architectural marvel that is the OCAD building. Fighting for the kind of cache that only comes along when a director as talented as Edgar Wright (and boy do you bet I will be running out to rent Shaun of the Dead and kicking myself for not having done so already) puts your city at the centre of his visually awesome affair. 

Kieran Culkin. Tell me something: what is it about the younger brothers of once stars and how they can so surpass their elder siblings and become something really pretty great? Think Joaquin Phoenix, think Casey Affleck. Culkin's is a supporting role but he is a great actor. With little he do much. With humor he have plenty. With my vote he be nominated for Monsieur Oscar. (Never gonna happen.)

The movie has ass kicking, rock music making, nerd video game playing, wicked-ass special-effect-creating joy all over the place. I was beaming. Beaming throughout the movie like a light bulb, like a laser beam, like a kid. It was that good. I am that hyper. It is 1:15 am (perhaps my not having to wake up and teach tomorrow is having an effect on all this).

Scott Pilgrim is like a cheesy video game come to life in the best way, full of energy and fun and music and the rest. Except it's also got heart. Oh and did I mention it's funny as hell?

I could go on. I could sing the hills are alive I could dance like Michael Jackson I could get out my joystick and play an old-school video game just to hear the ping each time I get a point and relive a little of the wacky, wonderful willy wonka genius that put this movie together.

Brilliant. I'm shaking my head. Just brilliant.
Can't wait to see it again.

Go Local!

Returning home from New York  last month was hard. From a vacation in the Biggest Apple of them all, seeing theatre, going to museums, concerts and even a brunch with old friends and their famous writer parents, to then return to ... Toe-ronto, or Trono, as we locals pronounce it, or rather, mumble it (when asked where we're from we can barely say our city's name aloud, we have such little pride). The gastronomical analogy is that it was like going from a spicy Thai curry to a cold piece of dry toast (though in all fairness T(o)ron(t)o sports some killer Thai options).

But, you know, when the sun is shining and the weather is sweet, when t(h)ree little birds are by my doorstep, when Ai and I can walk from our midtown apartment to a pretty ravine, walk silent amongst a forest of green, I think, gosh darn it (no I do not; I think, fuck!), I don't need 5th Avenue. I certainly have no desire for Times Square. And the Greenwich Village Paul Simon sang about, where "$30 pays your rent," let's just say the up and coming Paul Simons, they aren't living there. They aren't living close to there. You'll say they're all in Brooklyn. I say, shit, on a day like this I don't even care about Brooklyn and the hipster music it's producing. CBC Radio 2 keeps reminding me we have all the great music we could want right here. And once the leaves come back to the trees and the people return to the streets, with each passing year, and each newly risen condo, Toronto for all its conservative, uptight woe, gets a little bit denser and a little bit buzzier. When you can spend an evening on a Bloor street patio drinking a Creemore, watching the multi-coloured crowds go by, you realize it is a pretty great city after all.

Also, when I have my first heart attack and they rush me to hospital I won't have to worry about whether I brought along my credit card(s).

More Makers Than Takers - Pt I

Two of Toronto's nicest pubs sit across the street from one another (Prince Arthur Avenue, for locals and future visitors).

The one, the Bedford Academy, the better one (sh), what with its rather convincing fake fireplace, the old books on the bookshelves and the dim candlelight, serves Kilkenny and you can get sweet potato fries with spicy mayonnaise.

Ai and I were indulging in precisely these treats, the creamy brew and the crispy fat dipped in creamy fat, last Friday eve when a gentleman, a lady and a teenage girl came and sat at a table next to us. They were not, as I first thought, a family.

The gentleman, clearly well spoken and not afraid to speak at strong volume and with words comprised of more than a single syllable, drank tea, with honey. The lady, quieter, more Canadian, but also clearly pretty bright, was, however, really just a woman. ie. her dress was not fancy. But the gentleman, he had these very round glasses, small round his eyes, and clothes that were formal, too stylish to be called academic, but still rather academic all-but-the-pipe dress. I struggle to remember details like the actual articles he was wearing. He could have been in a blazer or a topcoat. Dark denim? Light khaki? I don't have the foggiest. Don't even ask me about colour (my 2 favourite t-shirts are the same shade of grey). I could swear, though, that the gentleman had on a vest, and the impression of a bow tie, though not, unfortunately, the reality of one - apparently what he wasn't wearing I can remember. It all suggested to me that he was either in publishing or that he wrote.

He wrote. He writes. I listened in on his conversation with the woman, who turns out to, amongst other things, critique children's literature for "The Toronto Star" and who had brought the writer to the University of Toronto for a talk (I think). The teenager - well I never worked out what exactly the teenager was doing there. My guess is she was some kind of a big fan. Whether she won a contest to go to a pub and have tea with her beloved writer or whether she was in fact the niece of the woman I'll never know.

But I bring this all up because of an overheard line of the writer's that I've been mulling over since,

which I'll post in Pt II.

Ice Whine

If I lived by a beach.
If it was warmer.
If I had more money.
If I had more time.

If if if.

It would be so much easier.
I'd feel so much better.
The world would be so much better.

Ok, maybe not.
That doesn't make it easier, though.

The daily grind again.
That hamster wheel to nowhere.
The dreary 9-5.
The endless cycle.
The tired Monday.
The can't get out of bed Thursday.
The too short weekend.
The Sunday night I hope this never ends.

Sigh.
To be on a good Ko in Thailand.
Just five days.
That's all I'd need.
Fruit drinks with straws, umbrellas.
Mornings that never end.
Two hour breakfasts where you read the whole newspaper.
Long beach walks at dusk.


Meanwhile February's just began and I live in Canada.







Fuck.

Previously Published*: Passports, Pears and Gatekeepers Pt. I

You don’t have to fit a racial profile to run afoul of U.S. customs officials, Jonathan Mendelsohn discovered

To some this may be passé. But to white Canadian boys, it’s still new. So bear with me.

I was at Pearson International recently en route to New York city. I had my passport, aware that soon enough we would no longer be permitted to enter the country without one. I waited in the snaking line of U.S. customs control the requisite forty minutes.

The director of traffic, the man in a blue blazer at the front of the line, sent me to booth number five when it became free. It was manned by a woman no older than thirty. I thought this would be to my advantage. I figured it would be better than dealing with a man. Angry men are generally less susceptible to male charm, you see.

Unfortunately, my customs officer was a woman who’d been angry many years before she met me. There was no charming her. I was doomed before I started.

She didn’t yell but almost yelled. Where was I going? New York city. My purpose? Vacation. Where was I staying? The Bronx. I was staying with a friend I told her. What’s the address? I'm sorry? The ADDRESS? She was yelling now. I don't know it, I stammered. The friend I’m staying with is going to pick me up.

I’d been to America countless times before and had never once been asked for an address. You need an address, she said. I'm really sorry, I don't know it. What am I supposed to do? Her arms were crossed. You're gonna have to find it out. How, I asked? You'll have to call your friend. But he works in a hospital. He won't answer his phone. She hadn't uncrossed her arms. Listen, you want to come in to the United States, you need an address.

How is the government supposed to keep track of you without an address? I dared not ask why they needed to keep track of me. But I did say, pleading: if he doesn't answer his phone what can I do? (I'm now truly hating myself for not having made one up.)

YOU CANNOT ENTER WITHOUT AN ADDRESS, DO YOU UNDERSTAND? I said I did and she directed me to a pay phone.

Pt. II

*Published a few years back in "The Toronto Star."

Pioneers! Oh Pioneers!

On Snobbery, Poetry, Fiona Apple Sullen Beauty, Walt Whitman and Levi's?

Of the 20 or so would-be writers in my first-year creative writing class, there were two who had actual talent. They weren't a couple, as it turned out, but initially we all thought they were, and so, those first autumn months, they were, in my mind, the king and queen of the class. In this case, the queen ruled above all.

She wore black, smoked cigarettes, was Fiona Apple thin, short, sullen, big-eyed cartoon adorable at the same time as she was a total complex, dark, (fucked up?) mystery. Even when you talked to her, she could not look you (or anyone else) in the eye. Still more teenage girl than woman she wrote so well (craft, imagination, perception) I'm not sure I understood why she was in our class. A friend of the family I passed one of her stories onto proclaimed it to be New Yorker worthy.

One day, this is more than ten years ago now, I went to her apartment, an ugly high rise near Toronto's York University (are there any other kind up there?). Nothing happened. She was quite beautiful but yet oddly not sexual. I was also young and probably wouldn't have known how to do what I might have wanted to do had she let me (which I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have), confused as I was of my own intentions, enamoured of her girl charms but just as covetous of her artist talents, wanting, needing to know her secrets. How could I do what she did, how could I succeed to effect others as she did me, to write that way, to go forth and conquer on paper.

Pioneer! Oh pioneer!

It was afternoon, thus bright from the light come into the apartment. No wine was being drunk, no heroin injected, not even an old record player to provide scratchy music for mood. It was actually rather disappointing to find the apartment so neat, the generic selection of magazines on her coffee table, and not elitist Harper's type rags either. She had Rolling Stone, Cosmo. I commented on them, surprised that she read this kind of stuff. I expected her to read nothing but obscure French poets and James Joyce.

I remember her response. She said that magazines were a "totally valid form of art." I thought it was the most pretentious thing I'd ever heard. I also started allowing myself to read magazines more frequently, more openly after that.

All this to say that I've come to believe that advertisements can be a totally valid art form.




Cause any ad, even if it is rather eerily nationalistic, that can so effectively use a Walt Whitman poem, is pretty cool in my all too often snobby books (though not, apparently, my iTunes collection, which includes, much to my friends' delight, the latest Britney Spears album).

CDA, T.O., AGO

canada is such a small country, such a young country. at our best, it's not that we are nice and polite, it's not even that we have health care for all: it's our humility. we are not, on a national level, arrogant. quite the opposite. this the advantage of never conquering other lands, or being at the top of many lists. we have never been the almighty and thus don't get big-headed about it. still, all this means it's hard for us to wave our flag, to be proud, which may sound ironic to anyone who's ever seen a canadian tourist. but the flag patches on our packs are simply 'we're not american' symbols, because sometimes, much i imagine like kiwis and scots and most of the people of belgium, we don't enjoy being mistaken for our big brother neighbours.

i grew up wishing i could be american. this is true. i still dream of new york. i still hate most canadian movies, and envy much of the best side of american (movies, hbo, magazines, obama, john stewart), but with age and george bush jr. i've changed. all this to lead up to an email i wrote to a friend about the newly renovated art gallery in Toronto, the AGO - the Art Gallery of Ontario.



"...something's changing in me. maybe i'm starting to settle in to toronto for the very first time in my life. so maybe im trying to put a positive spin, but i just felt, in the ago, like i didn't give a shit about the met, or the uffizi or any other gallery. no, there isn't a single van gogh of note (chances are you missed teh one they do have - it's nothing special), id love if they had more monet's, pissaros, etc. still. the impressionist gallery was ... impressive. ha ha. also, how else to build up canadian arts than to showcase them? and the group of seven stuff, lawren harris' work, amongst all that beautiful wood, and in brigher light, it's pretty damn great. in fact, what the group of seven capture, what the museum showcases is how majestic their work, and our country really is. for the first time in my life, i didn't feel any sense of underwhelment at being canadian, at being torontonian. actually, i felt proud. that word came to mind very soon after i first entered Frank Gehry's great building. dundas west just got a whole heck of a lot cooler.


it's like with music. 15 years ago i would have said we were sub-standard (sp?). i wouldn't have even wanted to go to the horseshoe to see local stuff, wouldn't have known about CBC 2 and wouldn't have understood that joni mitchell, neil young and leonard cohen will go down as three of the 20th century's greatest songwriters. never mind the future: neko case, the new pornographers, rufus wainwright, broken social scene, ron sexsmith, etc...

i think this museum is a big step. i think it changes the city ever so much. i think people will go to this museum, locals and tourists. it's not The MOMA. it's not The MET. but it's something. we're a young city. but it gives me hope. and i take this shit like religion as you know. and even if our dumb-ass prime minister, our narrow minded leader who knows nothing beyond the bounds of business, and i mean that in the least entrepreneurial, creative, good sense of the word, even if he has already cut major funding to the arts, i can only hope that the newly done AGO is a sign to our people that culture, that the arts are what makes cities great. and that's what i want. i want toronto to be great. great!

panties, pornos and the future

anything i put up here i share. anything i share i want people to see. anything you see i want you to see.

we see more.

today rushing down the steps at yonge station i saw a young woman's panties. she was running ahead of me. it was a kleenex light skirt. a crinkly light thing that the wind took up. a big monroe show. they were red. her panties. thongs.

the other day it was a boob i spotted, bare, in profile. the whole boob, the boob in its entirety, all except the nipple, and that only because said nipple was pressed up against the shirt the woman was sort of wearing. she had her button down shirt that wide open. that few buttons buttoned, i mean. that much boob showing. no bra of course.

a blog is so often where one comes to watch blogger cry and yawn and scream and preach.

should i hold back?

should i keep secrets from you, dear reader?

or should i instead share my perversions, and that cool and analytical and judgmental as i may be now, that i wasn't feeling quite so anything but titillated in the heat of the panty spotting moment? more posting about who did what to who and why? like the water cooler blog extraordinaire?

because really, would you look so much, so often, and share with your friends, if i didn't share my panty colour with you?

my boob with you?

some days i take the subway and feel like i am living in a porno. the panties and the braless ladies. all of it.

if you could turn to the back cover of toronto's Now magazine from this week, dated thurs july 24th, you'd see an ad for american apparel. a collection of pictures of one young girl. her age isn't the issue (this time around). It's this one picture in particular. a view from behind. it's a close up of her bent over in black underwear. the view though, the way her legs are (ie not so tight together), is not just of an ass.

i keep thinking, how long before we're all just walking round naked? that's about as far as it's gotten, almost. it need go just a couple steps further, from showing their thongs to not wearing thongs to just not wearing anything but accessories, high heels and big hoop earrings. and why not?

it'd never work. for 1, cause it wouldn't be sexy. there is no 2. we can only take it so much further. and then what? like the einstein quote about what we'd fight world war 4 with?

sticks and stones.

if Now magazine can print adds of girls crotches, and women can bare their boobs and their panties? we really aren't far from the naked thing. what then? damned if I know.

corsets?

chastity belts?

who's to say? but sex this out in the open has a twin and that twin is violence. so in the comfort of my home and without a pair of panties to distract me, i'll end on this: i think it's more dangerous than we realize. a lot more dangerous.