Hello Dolly

Gotta love Dolly Parton. This song and video made me laugh out loud, a lot.

Teela by the Bay

I got a surprise phone call from one of my oldest and best friends from San Francisco the other day.



I have not seen Teela since last August when Justin, Shaun and I went home to San Francisco for three weeks.


*(mmm In and Out)*

I did not know at the time that that trip would probably be my last to the City by the Bay for a while, because the family up and moved to France.



Anyway, I was looking through some photographs I took on my last trip home and since Teela hasn't seen them I thought I would post them.



Those last two are from the road trip we all took up the coast to Calistoga, I had never driven the coastal route. We stopped in a small town, right near where Hitchcock filmed The Birds, and had breakfast. Do you guys remember the otters swimming around us, and how I had that eggs benedict with oysters? Sounded like a good idea at the time.

Thank You

And thank you Hilary, your orange pantsuit was inspired

she would have made such a great President



Oscar de la Renta would have been a frequent White House guest, oh the humanity.

Pussy Juice Brainstorm

Thursday night, Lauren, her work friend Kelly and I met at Circa to see the Collie Buddz show. We ended up meeting up with Abby, Yeri, Nikki, Margeaux, Kyle and Marlo, (those last two are Abby's siblings,) in the line-up and we all partied together all night. I thought the performance was a total bust. Collie, you're not really famous enough or good enough to keep people waiting till two in the morning. But the partying was great. One of Abby's girlfriends, whose name I have forgotten, wore the infamous perfume Pussy Juice. Now I know what you are thinking, but Pussy Juice is the shit, it smells really good and definitely attracts some sexy attention. Anyway, all of ladies decided that Pussy Juice is so powerful that it needs a short film in its honor. I'm not going to give it all away but let's just say that this song will definitely inspire the theme.

Just cause it's the weekend

And cause I love Tracy.

some nostalgia

My dad had this song on a cassette and I used to play it and rewind it over and over. Mary Pierce too used to play it on the guitar and we would sit around my grandmother's old house and sing. I miss those summers in Connecticut

HBO's got me hooked on Nationalism

Two of HBO's newest shows are all about Nationalism and American propaganda in diametrically opposite ways. The first, Generation Kill, is an in depth look at the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Told from the confused perspective of a battalion of reconnaissance marines. I have gotten so addicted to this show, and it isn't just because it is a babe fest of actors playing marines - although that ain't hurtin it. No it's more to do with what I perceive to be a fairly obvious picture of blatant American stupidity juxtaposed with an inherent patriotism within us all. I also like the idea of a war drama on the television scale, because unlike the capsulated image presented in film, television is ongoing, and that to me is a more honest reflection of wartime realities. The other show is John Adams, the blockbuster bust starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Bust because it has gotten bad reviews and I don't know if anyone is watching except me. Here is the complete opposite end of the spectrum, a historically based look at the glorified Revolutionary War, brought down to scale. And yet some of the same elements are visible in both. Individual quests for glory masked as patriotism. And a continued belief in the ideals of Republican Democracy. Anyway I've posted this clip of the trailer from the most recent episode of John Adams because there was a scene in it that greatly reminded me of a certain situation from a few weeks back that's been mentioned here and elsewhere. The shot happens at about 25 seconds into the clip, (don't blink you'll miss it). John Adams is at a dinner in Paris with Benjamin Franklin, and damn if those Frenches aren't giving money for those flags ... I kid I kid

I'm sailing away

When you are used to seeing the Pacific Ocean from bed everyday even being on a body of water as large as Lake Ontario you can still feel land-locked.



It's all I can do to resist the urge to get onto a sailboat, head off into the sunset and never come back.



It's probably because I don't want to face the reality of work and life. And because that kind of extraordinary simplicity is something to always strive for

Emerging Art Productions blog

http://emergingartproductions-eap.blogspot.com/

The latest post is the first one I've done for EAP in a while. check it out!

Northern Yonge @ the Chelsea Room

Northern Yonge has got a gig at the Chelsea Room next friday Aug 22nd. Be sure and come out, and check out Dylan Le French, the 84.85 and the one and only Northern Yonge. The show is free as far as I know, and hey you might have Sex on Dundas

Opps

TORONTO - A young woman with a fistful of cash stood at the back of Ralph Nader's speech in Toronto on Monday, handing bills to people as they left.

The money had been donated to Mr. Nader's presidential bid by well-meaning Canadians, but only American citizens and permanent residents can contribute to U. S. political campaigns. As a champion of electoral reform and long-standing paragon of virtue, Mr. Nader would have had a hard time accepting.

The 74-year-old visited Toronto this week as part of his fourth presidential campaign. He told 150 supporters at an event held at the city's former stock exchange that many of the ideas he espoused -- such as single-payer health care, a multi-party political system and carbon taxes -- were already in place in Canada. But the independent candidate was also in Canada to raise funds from the expatriate community. After his speech, Mr. Nader called upon Matthew Zawisky, a 28-year-old supporter, to solicit funds. In a bit of barnstorming, Mr. Zawisky asked if an American in the audience would donate $4,600 -- the maximum amount a U. S. citizen can contribute to presidential campaigns under their country's law.

In exchange for the tiptop gift, Mr. Zawisky said the donor would receive a copy of Mr. Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed.

When nobody stepped forward, Mr. Zawisky dropped his request to $2,300, then $1,000 and finally $500. As the dollar amounts fell lower and lower -- and an uncomfortable silence settled in--Canadians in the crowd began to ask if they could contribute. Mr. Zawisky said donations could only come from Americans. Someone then suggested the crowd give their money to a U. S. citizen, who could then donate it.

An American in the audience who identified herself only as "Liza" volunteered to serve as an intermediary. Eager Canadians were soon approaching the young woman with 10-and 20-dollar bills.

Toby Heaps, a Canadian who volunteers for the Nader campaign, quickly approached reporters to clarify the situation. The Nader campaign could never accept the tainted Canadian funds, Mr. Heaps assured.

The money was briefly handed over to the campaign, but later returned to Liza. As she spoke with organizers, there appeared to be some confusion over whether she could keep the money and use it to make a donation online or whether she needed to give it back to the original donors.

There was further uncertainty when the young woman left the event before its conclusion, prompting Mr. Heaps to chase her down the stairs outside the hall to make sure the money was given back to its sources. She agreed to stand at the back of the room with the cash and return it to people as they left.

Alongside vice-presidential hopeful Matt Gonzalez, a former municipal politician in San Francisco, Mr. Nader is mounting his fourth bid for the presidency. He ran as a Green party candidate in 1996 and 2000. In 2004, he appeared on the ballot as an independent.

jcowan@nationalpost.com

Thanks fierceness

I got to shout out the book club, because there is nothing like a good book. And I have been loving what the girls have been doing. The book club came about during the winter this past year. I don't know if it was all the snow, a light work load or what, but I had a urge to get back to fiction, something I had abandoned for most of my university career. I read of course, but even if I was reading for pleasure I found more solace and stimulation in the pages of MacMillan, Kearns-Goodwin and Shilts than I did in any frivolous fiction. I would also say that when I have, in the past, been drawn to works of fictional literature it's with a snobby and decidedly conventional approach. I love the Russian classics: Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, pretty cheap eh? I love Jane Austin, such a girl. And the great Black Americans and their influencers, Emerson, Du Bois, Douglas, Ellison and Wright. Anyway, all of this is driving at the point, that in fact as my undergraduate education neared its close I felt a distinct void. I didn't take a single literature course at the University of Toronto, not even children's lit. which I bet would have rocked. And I stopped reading. So when those long nights set in in January I began to feel something must be done, and done it was. Eight or nine girls agreed that we would commit to one book a month. Strangely we also agreed that the book club would be girls only. Not even gays! Not that we have anything against male readers but there was a certain female dynamic which felt right from the beginning. There is always a certain pride in exclusivity. We had a preliminary dinner to discuss the structure of the book club, and our plans for the next meeting. So far we have been through two cycles, it should have been three, but things happen. Our last meeting was at Andrea and Emily's - we read Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls and drank margaritas. This month Lauren chose Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle. Now both of those are memoirs, not fiction, but that is beside the point. The point is that yesterday when I went to the St. Jamestown library to look for the book, I came away with a few others. Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Linda Little's Scotch River, and Steinbeck's Cannery Row, plus a couple of study books, since I am contemplating taking the GRE's and the LSAT's - you know because I am counting on this fiction thing getting old.

*just as a side note, I chose that image of Walls's cover because I thought the cheesy Amazon logo was awesome, not because I was incapable of finding a freestanding image of cover.

Kylie you are the One

The Hand-Over

Riot Creative photog, Natalie Castellino came to Paul's handover goodbye party, and she was awesome enough to take some pics for me - since I don't own a camera...

Nader in Toronto

I just received this email from the Nader campaign. I can't F-ing wait.

Ralph Nader to speak on Monday August 11, on the trading floor of old Toronto Stock Exchange building.

Event also features partial screening of the biographical documentary, An Unreasonable Man.

Hovering over 5 per cent in national polls, Nader is on his third run for President of United States.

Find out why he runs and what's at stake for Canada this election.

Ralph Nader is the only major candidate for President of the United States standing up to implement Canadian-style universal healthcare, a Dion-style Carbon Tax, and ending the war in Iraq with a full 6-month withdrawal. Over ten million Americans say they will vote for him, and another 20 million say they would if they thought he had a chance of winning. He's on track to be on the ballot in 45 states, and has a shot at getting in the Google Presidential Debates to be held in New Orleans this September. Come see him this Monday August 11 at the Design Exchange in Downtown Toronto.

Event Program:

* Screening of a portion of An Unreasonable Man, the acclaimed documentary on Ralph Nader

* Ralph Nader Remarks on the US Presidential Election: What's at stake for Canada?

* Q and A with Ralph Nader

Where: Design Exchange, 234 Bay Street, Toronto, Ontario M5K 1B2.

Time: 7:00 to 9:30 pm

Getting to know you -Toronto

At the end of this month I will have lived in Toronto for five years, and in that time I have come to know this city well enough to know that, in actuality I know very little - about Toronto, or anywhere else for that matter. On the eve of that anniversary I have been thinking about what I do know. Then today as I waited, for several hours and at multiple locations, to pay a delinquent traffic violation, I realized that if you want to know how this city really functions head down to any municipal bureaucractic office and you will learn about the total chaos that really runs this city. I spent the first hour of my endeavour at Metro Hall, that glorious early nineties monstrosity at Wellington and John - you know the place. Only to be told that despite what my ticket said I could not pay the 23.75$ that I owed, for making an illegal right on Bloor. No, no, Metro Hall only deals with parking tickets. I mean I guess it makes sense that moving violations be dealt with twenty blocks away, just not sure why they haven't cleared that up on the ticket itself. Anyway, as I sat waiting in the Provincial Courts offices at 137 Edward Street, for over an hour, I reminisced about the last time I had been to Metro Hall.


It was just over a year ago, and Paul accompanied me. We waited for at least an hour, because I guess bureaucracy here is like 35mm film development; you can usually count on it being at least one hour. And while we waited, we saw perhaps the most aggressive civic disobedience that I have witnessed in this city. A gentleman, born in Toronto but raised in South Africa, who was several people behind us started the uproar. He fumed about how long it was taking, loudly saying, and I quote,
"Even in Africa it doesn't take this long... even in Africa"
Now I am sure I don't need to go into how uncomfortable this rant made the two dozen other waiting parking violators. But he did have a point, which everyone seemed to agree with. I mean over half of the people in that line were there because they worked for, either the City or exempt corporations, and they were only there to have their parking tickets voided. Makes one wonder why they were administered in the first place. In fact the gentleman directly ahead of Paul and I worked for City Hydro.

As a result of the growing frustration and the goading of the South African he began telling us about some of the more unsavory City infrastructure projects, he'd worked on. My favorites were the story about how he had been working in Rosedale on a broken water line, which had been crimped and the whole neighborhood was without water. He had his hydro truck on Yonge Street with all his equipment and the City had it towed. He had to wait four hours for a new truck so that he could restore water service to a huge swath of the city. The other was the ironic story about how five years ago the City changed the asphalt they use to repair potholes on our streets. They made the change because the new batch was much cheaper. Of course there is always a catch, and in this case it was that the cost savings was the result of a decrease in tar in the asphalt mixture, which resulted in a decrease in the materials longevity. Meaning that potholes filled with the new asphalt have to be repaired twice as fast as the original road around it. (And anyone who rides their bike around Toronto knows that road quality is something short of stellar). There were other stories but those sum it up rather nicely.

Anyway back to Metro Hall, while the City Hydro worker, Paul, and I commiserated, Mr. South Africa grew more and more enraged by the wait, and finally he stormed past the line to the window and began banging heavily, demanding to know why it was taking over an hour to deal with twenty people - something which legitimately seemed to be a surmountable task. He was so heated that others in line began to feed off his energy and suddenly Paul and I were members of a Canadian mob - not nearly as scary as others mobs but a mob none the less. Mr. South Africa wanted to know who was in charge and how he could make a complaint. He then proceeded to hand out the contact information for Metro Hall's parking complaint division to everyone in line. Before ceremonially departing as the buildings guards were being called.

I must say Paul and I agreed we had never felt more alive in this city or more connected to it than in that moment. We also laughed our asses off.

Fast Car