BEAUJOLAIS REDUX

Upon which side is Mango Pudding Blues in the eternal debate about Beaujolais Nouveau? Bright celebration of youth embottled or tacky bubblegum marketing ploy? Mango Pudding Blues, dear reader, sides with the first team. Now, as you know, Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé on, like, the third Thursday in November. So why do we mention it now? Well, because our local hooch hut managed to dig up a case or two that got overlooked in the annual beaujolais rush, and we are sipping some as we write this. In this small stroke of luck we feel we have been given a second chance, for we stupidly, short-sightedly, bought only one bottle back in November, distracted as we were by the Leonid meteor shower. Worse, we failed to mention to you, our legions of minions, how important we feel it is to wring every drop of pleasure, every moment of sweet life, out of everything you encounter. And ergo, we are bullish on Beaujolais Nouveau. You don’t have to like it, but next year, on the third Thursday of November, at least buy some and have some friends over and engage in the debate.

RETIREMENT

The old Mango Pudding Blues retirement plan was to take over some dusty little used bookstore. We were going to spend our final days with cats and Debussy and the dizzying dance of dustmotes in sunbeams, sneering over boxloads of paperbacks brought in by lonesome hopeful inner-city bookworms for trade. But fuck that. Now we have decided to take over a small tanning salon upon retirement.

In spite of our disgusting recent run-in with a mole the size of your fist, we are very fond of tanning salons. We had never really sampled one until we moved from Alberta, where the skies are not cloudy all day, to Ontario, where we were horrified to find the winters rendering us as pale as an Ikea tealight. We asked our brother, a longtime resident of nearby Montreal, about it the first winter we were here. “Yep,” he said. “In the winter here one turns pale. Green pale.”

He was right. And it’s not easy being green. You can’t imagine the effect on the ol’ self-esteem. His solution is to spend most of February in Mexico. At Mango Pudding Blues, our solution is the tanning salon.

This is what we told our brother after we got the hang of it:

“Tanning is actually highly pleasing. Lying there naked in your plexiglass tube with your little plastic eye goggles surrounded by man-made neon sun is the height of modernity. If you weren’t really doing it, if it didn’t actually exist in dozens of salons in every city on earth, you would think it was something cooked up by H.G. Wells or Robert A. Heinlein or George Orwell. Something in Kubrick’s 2001, except it really is 2001, and we really are roasting ourselves up in little electric wombs. Every time I leave the tanning salon I felt like a new man. Reanimated! Reincubated! Flushed a glowing pink and slightly moist. Reborn! I would go every day if they’d let me.”

Oh yes, dear reader. We enjoy our tanning sessions. And there’s something else. It’s this; tanning salons regularly employ a certain type of person. We are not that type of person. We come from a background of alternative rock and foreign films and hair dye and art-school underground nightclubs and Billie Holiday and black berets and beat poets and The Smiths and so on. Your average tanning salon employee comes from pop heavy metal and hip-hop and tight jeans and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mariah and Cosmo’s Nine Ways to Make Him Stay and eye shadow and hockey and Camaros and Jeeps and their friends are waiters at the Keg and they’re all drinking coolers and Corona and having an endless summer until they get knocked up and buy the mini van and move to the suburbs. And people like us, the people we hang with, the erudite bookish effete New-Yorker-reading gallery-going types, are vicious and violent in their contempt for the admittedly frequently not-very-smart tanning salon people. But at Mango Pudding Blues we secretly love those people. We adore their gold chains with the floating heart pendants. We love their Gold’s Gym forearms poking from their Limp Bizkit t-shirts. We enjoy overhearing their gum-snapping gossip and seeing them jutting our their hips in their low-rise jeans while they bloom with the full flower of youth as they arrange their disco rendezvous on their nail-polish cellphones. We love to love, from afar, their bravado and their unbearable lightness of being as they beautifully pull their packets of cigarettes from their purses and pursue their daytime dramas.

Those kids are toxic in large doses, but once we’re running the Mango Pudding Tanning Salon, we’ll smile upon the small but steady stream of them as they arrive to bronze themselves for their sweet Saturday nights.

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BLOGNOSCENTI

Is Dean Allen the king of all bloggers? Well of course he is. Nobody would dispute it. All of the blogs that we here at Mango Pudding Blues read regularly consistently pay homage to his brilliant Textism, including Heather Champ’s ground-breakin’ Harrumph, Joshua Allen’s wistful Fireland, Grant Hutchinson’s wise and generous Splorp, and Zeldman, and The Morning News, and Coudal and more that I could go on and on about. Everybody digs his site. Here at Mango Pudding Blues, we must confess, we pretty much worship Textism and have been known to check for new posts sometimes more than once per hour. When people ask us what blogging is all about, we usually just send them there. In fact, we wonder why you are reading us right this minute when really, you could be over there reading him.

However, we have lately been amused to note that we, and people like us, are taking a lot of brutal, withering abuse at the hands of our hero. For instance, we at Mango Pudding Blues eat no meat (“...unless you are a vegetarian, in which case you’re already going without pleasure”), and we like Serge Gainsbourg (“...what the fuck is it with you people and Serge Gainsbourg?”) and we are employed as an art director for a big corporate concern (“There are those who make a living as art directors or creative directors, in agencies and large organizations; I simply don’t have any respect for them.”).

Ouch!

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I BET THEY WERE THE BEST BLTs EVER

This is why I want to move to New York City.

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BOY GENIUS

Mango Pudding Blues thought nobody else remembered good ol’ Encyclopedia Brown, but our old pal Cacomixl tells us that he’s also fondly recalled by the Modern Humorist.

HIBERNATION

Mango Pudding Blues’ physical location is in frosty Canada, dammit, which we think explains our recent total physical malaise. We are tired. We don’t want to work. We don’t even want to blog especially, although we are willing to endure that hardship for your sake. What we want to do is lie nearly motionless on the couch and eat snacks and watch The Sopranos until the days get longer again. And we are horrified that we feel this way already and it’s not even snowing yet. God.

LUNACY

And speaking of natural light and its scarcity, MPB wholeheartedly supports new research that suggests this whole body of folklore about the full moon is simply a social vestige of the time prior to electricity and readily available cheap candles, when people would take advantage of the monthly full moon to do things. Staying up all night once a month would create a rhythm of anticipation and result in various exhausted neuroses, the echoes of which we are still hearing. Get it? Mango Pudding Blues would credit this research properly, but he read it days ago in the paper and failed to jot down the source.

And since we’re vaguely quoting science from the newspapers without attribution, how about this little beauty about hangovers from, we think, the Montreal Gazette, which came to us from our fine brother. Turns out, according to the doctor columnist whose name we don’t even know, the old hair of the dog method of hangover relief is entirely supported by science. Y’see, your glass of sangiovese gets broken down into mostly ethanol and partly methanol alcohol in your body. Or maybe it’s the other way around. We can’t remember this part. Anyway, one is the good alcohol and one is the bad alcohol. The bad alcohol is the kind that can make you go blind and crazy. Now, as long as you keep a balance in your system of good alcohol outweighing the bad, you are okay. Since there is way more good than bad in that glass of sangiovese, you are okay. The catch comes on those nights when you drink two whole bottles of it along with some brandy. Your very tired liver metabolizes the good stuff faster than it does the bad, so if there’s a lot of alcohol in you, you end up burning off all the good alcohol, leaving your body struggling with the evil, awful bad alcohol. The solution is to immediately consume more hooch, which will up the bad alcohol a little but balance it out with lots of good alcohol, and presto, you are better.

This little science fact is wasted, however, on both Mango Pudding Blues and his brother, since we have inherited powerful German-engineered livers. German livers that stomp mercilessly on all alcohol, good and bad. German livers that tie alcohol molecules to the bumpers of their sleek German cars and drag them down the autobahn at unbelievable speeds. Livers with steely wills and blonde hair. Loud fat balding livers who smoke big cigars and sneer a lot and sit there on the beach with a look of ruddy smug German entitlement that is infuriating. Livers that eat sauerkraut and big sausages boiled for hours.

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IN BRIEF

1) It’s Killer’s birthday today. She’s running around, gleeful, childlike. I ordered a cake.

2) Saw the doppelganger again. This time I felt hostility. I thought his shoes were drab, his trousers cut a bit short. He was wearing a ball cap. A ball cap! I suppressed a sneer. Affected nonchalance. He sped up to get further away in front of me, no doubt feeling my menacing air.

3) I saw, on Country Music Television, a black and white video of Billy Bob Thornton earnestly singing a bland new-country ballad called Angelina that was intercut with faux grainy faux home movie footage of he and Angelina Jolie frolicking around on the grounds of some mansion, and I thought to myself, this must certainly be the end of post-modernism.

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ENCYCLOPEDIA BROWN

How bookish a child was I? Well, once I was carrying a stack of books back to my neighbourhood library on a warm summer evening, trying to finish the final few pages of an Encyclopedia Brown book before I had to turn it in. Encyclopedia Brown was a boy detective who solved all of his cases by sheer brain power. Delightful. Anyway, I had this book perched open on top of the stack and I was reading it as I walked along the side of the library building and BAM! I walked head-first into a pillar.

THE STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA

At Mango Pudding Blues, we are completely finished our Christmas shopping (and wrapping!), our tree is up and decorated and has been for some time and things seem to be winding down at the office. We are feeling relaxed and red-cheeked about the holiday season for the first time in our lives. We do, however, recognize that for some of you, the holiday season might be stressful. For you we offer this little trick to amuse and distract you in the coming days: simply sing the lyrics to Will Smith’s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air to the tune of Bruce Springsteen’s slow and brooding The Streets of Philadelphia. Go on, sing it in your best imitation of the Boss’s parched backstreet croak;


Got in ONE little FIGHT an’ my

MOM got SCARED

Said yer

MOVin’ with yer AUNT

’n’ UNCLE in bel AIR

la la la la

la la la la

the streets of Philadelphia.

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