Friday, April 04, 2008 SO LAUGHABLE DID SHE FIND PHILLIPE STARCK’S PRONOUNCEMENT... 1) Typical morning at our place. As always, we were talking obsessively about our weight. More obsessively than normal, in fact, because neither of us has a clue how much we weigh, because our bathroom scale is on the fritz. 2) The scale is a funky slab of featureless, purely modern silver designed by Phillipe Starck for his collection of stuff at Target. It was cheap! 3) Unless you count the gas that it took us to drive to Rochester, New York, three or four years ago. We went, actually, just to go to Target. We’d heard all these great things. Imagine our disappointment when it just turned out to be another Zellers/Walmart kind of place. 4) Although we both found Rochester lovely. 5) And we bought the scale, which has served us well for years, and is now dead. There’s a 1-800 number on the back for service, which Killer will call, but you know how these things are now. My brother just had some problems with his very nice point-and-shot digital camera, and the repair shop said it would be cheaper to buy a new one than repair it. Surely the Phillipe Starck scale will be the same. Disposable. 6) But talking about Phillipe Starck reminded me of what I’d read earlier. “He’s retiring,” I said. “Says he’s ashamed to have been a maker of things. That design is dead and that in the future there will be only personal trainers and diet consultants.” 7) And at that she spat her mouthful of coffee out into a basket full of her own clean laundry. * * * Thursday, March 27, 2008 IS IT WRONG TO EAT GREENS IN A BOX? Hell if I know. Perfect florets of maché encased in glassine plastic tombs? Frisée? Radicchio? Baby romaine? Wily produce finally reduced to squared off product? Picked, packed, prewashed, shipped and merchandised by armies of men? Trucked through the night in precisely orchestrated campaigns of freshness and plunked down by me next to my tenderloin with chimichurri? Tossed with sundried tomatoes and goat cheese and baby beets? Bedded down beneath the szechaun peppercorn-encrusted seared tuna? * * * Sunday, March 16, 2008 DISCIPLINE Scales and warmups daily for 10 to 15 minues. Blues-based two-handed improvisation daily for ten minutes. Then a run-through of the repertoire and work on the latest two or three songs. If I like a song, I’ll keep playing it. The ones I don’t like, I dump after I get them. I’m idly working up a schmaltzy arrangement of Walk On the Wild Side. I’m also working on a heartbreakingly bright improvisation based on the theme for Mango Pudding Blues, which you may have downloaded from this website earlier. And theory. Endless transcriptions of notes and scales to try to understand the architecture of sound. Noise divided by time. * * * Saturday, March 15, 2008 A FEW THINGS I MIGHT NOT HAVE MENTIONED TO YOU DURING THE LAST LONG SILENCE I bought a new piano. My father died. I decided to get more serious about my career as a graphic designer. I went to Thailand again, this time with the lovely Killer. Spent some time in Chaing Mai during the Loi Kraton festival. Magic. Went to New York City with on a brotherly love roadtrip with my brother to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of my father. Had my house infested by rats. Had a waterpipe burst in the ceiling over my dining room, which sounds like bad news but was good news, since the insurance paid for replacing the ugly ceiling with a very pretty new one and the old hardwood floor with wildly cool bamboo flooring. Bought a new gas stove when the old one conked out. I loved the old one, but the new one is better. Has a griddle on the middle upon which I make my long-suffering girlfriend her two favorite meals; blueberry lemon griddle cakes and grilled goat cheese sandwiches with onion jam. Got a bottle of ultrafine aged balsamico. I mean the really good stuff. It was for Christmas from my brother and his boyfriend, who are the finest. Bought a new spring coat. Urban grey. Very cool. Ate a lot of sushi. Ran a lot. Listened to lots of Miles Davis and Wolfgang Dauner and Lou Reed. Played some pretty cool gigs with the gamelan, including two wild fusions with jazz players and ghanaian drummers. Well, that about brings us up to date. What have you been doing? * * * Sunday, February 24, 2008 BOTCHED CASTRATI 1) I once read a harrowing account of the good ol’ days of opera when the thing to do was castrate pre-pubescent boys so they could develop ethereal high voices. You can look it up on Wikipedia. This was probably published ’round the time the film Faranelli came out. The article said the operation was not always completely successful, medical science still being in relative infancy. And it claimed, perhaps outrageously, that there were entire gangs of botched castrati roaming around menacing the citizenry of 19th century Italy. I’ve been contemplating the gangs of botched castrati on account of my own botched vasectomy, in which I seem to have developed a hemotoma in my inguinal canal, where my hernia used to be. The condition is painful and depressing, although only when I sit, walk or do anything. I’ve been treating it with Naprosyn (perscribed by my doctor) and alcohol (perscribed by me). The alcohol treatments are distressing to my long-suffering girlfriend, who has had just about enough of me. 2) In addition to pain and depression and an angry girlfriend, I also have fear. A close friend of mine has had chronic testicular pain since his own vasectomy, over a year ago. His symptoms began exactly as mine have. Chronic testicular pain. 3) However, I can offer you this nugget of comic relief. Before you go in, you must shave your scrotum. I cleverly decided to use the clippers that I shave my head with. And with the first cut they spectacularly bit into my scrotum. Blood everywhere. Big gash. When he was finished the vasectomy, my doctor laughed, saying, “You left a much bigger mark down here than I did. ” I remember with a sigh when that gash was my biggest ball-related problem. Before the hemotoma. 4) Do you know about the push gift? It’s what some men get their wives for going through the pain of having a baby. Killer got me a knife. Get it? It’s a small Global utility knife, to go with the Global cook’s knife she got me a few years ago. We had a good laugh when I opened it. 5) But now we’re not laughing. We’re crying. Holding each other and crying on the bed last night, because I’m in pain and I’m scared and she feels guilty and scared too and when is this going to go away? * * * Saturday, February 02, 2008 THINGS OF WHICH WE STRONGLY APPROVE THESE DAYS The Time-Warner building in New York City, although we hear some people hate it. The Hudson Hotel, where we stayed recently with the Killer and which, a visiting friend of ours pointed out, is too cool to even have a sign outside. Patricia Barber. Our own tuna tartare. Peruvian Boogaloo. The paint color of our main floor; Willow Wood. It’s a vivid yellowy green. Our cosmopolitain, which we believe is better than those we drank in chi-chi bars in New York. Chicago. Our new look, “graphic trash rock”, which involves lots of black clothes with grungy graphics and very dark jeans. The Complete On The Corner Sessions by Miles Davis. Handmade pasta. Philip Glass, more than ever. The Local Bar, a new wine bar with terrific food and a lovely visual appeal that opened in the lobby of the new Great Canadian Theatre in our neighbourhood, Hintonburg. The movie poster, album cover and idea of Control, the Ian Curtis/Joy Division film. Although, it must be said, we have not yet seen it. The smokey margarita that we stole from John Grey’s place in Playa Del Carmen. Hell, John Grey’s Place in Playa Del Carmen, on the Boulevard Del Corazon. THINGS UPON WHICH, ON THE OTHER HAND, WE HAVE TURNED OUR BACK Jonathan Lethem. Michael Chabon. Williamsburg. Beckta restaurant and wine bar. Blade Runner, a little bit, although it chokes us up to say so. The Replacements, who seemed to us so important during the strange, stunted second adolescence that we went though in our 20s, when we were devoted to them, REM and Husker Du. We do, however, intend to read that new book about them. * * * Friday, January 18, 2008 136 BEEF SOUP NEW MEE FUNG BOOTH STREET, OTTAWA Beautifully fast. Orangey-red. Bright and sharp. Firey! Smart. Piping hot. Salty. Soulful. Heady. Insanely great. Hip. Cool. Beat. Neat. Sweet. Eat it and sweat. Eat it and see the future. * * *