I should be working right now. No really.
I have an essay due for Canadian History (101-203B) on Monday. I actually have between 30% and 50% of it written already, since we were expected to produce some sort of draft a few weeks back. That puts me in pretty good shape, since I didn't start my ten page paper due for Introduction to European History (101-114B) until about 11:30 at night on Thursday, despite it being due at 9:30 Friday morning (believe it or not, I had it done by 3:00 and got a half hour more sleep then my friend Shikha who went out to party). Still in all, however, I ought to be working on it so I don't have to blow my entire day (or night) tomorrow, since I did spend most of today at the library and would like to kick out a bit tomorrow. Nonetheless, I am a master of procrastination (my room has almost never been as neat). But if having papers due imminently is what it takes for me to write in here, that's OK.
I was actually pretty productive at the library - or Death Star as I've come to think of it - today. I hated nearly every moment of course, but that's to be expected. The library is a shithole. On the way down, I passed the campus radio station CKUT and noted that there was, for the second Saturday in a row, a large and very loud group of Haitian protestors out front, singing chants, playing drums, shaking fists, and waving signs complaining about insults to the Haitian people and incitments of violence against their community. I had always had the impression, despite never having listening to it, that CKUT was a knee-jerk politically correct, shrill, semi-Trotskyite organization but they apparently managed somehow to make a whole lot of Haitians really pissed off. It guess it doesn't pay to form preconceived notions afterall. My favourite part of the spectacle, aside from the heartwarming observation that the Haitians seemed really to be having a fairly good time protesting despite it being a rather foul day, was seeing the steady stream of tow-headed, freshly scrubbed vegan faces peering helplessly out the windows at the scene below. Life in the suburbs just doesn't prepare you for this sort of thing. Anyway, it kept me amused while holed up in the microfilm room at the library.
The whole weekend won't really be a bust, of course. In a few hours, I'm going to go out with the Usual Suspects to one of our favorite St-Laurent dives, Miami. Should be a good time, even though two of the Usual Suspects are in Kingston this weekend (one of whom was also in Toronto last weekend; hard to keep her on the farm these days). Actually, I'm not sure that we'll all be together here again for the rest of the term; several of my friends are going home next weekend because of Passover or just being burned out; the next weekend is Easter and I'm going home. Afterwards it's Exam Period and everyone has their own schedule of comings and goings then. So who knows?
Could have gone out last night but everyone - including me - was quite tired. The floor fellows had a showing of some '80s teenage gore fest called Happy Birthday to Me in the piano room. Our residence actually stood in for a fancy pants prep school in the movie, which is why we were watching it. I only saw the last 25 minutes but it was enough for me to form a pretty definite opinion. It was kinda weird watching movie scenes while sitting in the very room they were filmed in but, on balance, I think seeing little Mary Ingalls ram a shish kebab through some horny stoner's head was weirder. Pa must have been rolling in his grave, that never would have happened on his prairie.
Oh speaking of rez, my two lovely roomates and I signed a lease for a charming 6 1/2 on rue de l'Esplanade at the corner of Mount-Royal, opposite Parc Jeanne-Mance. No cardboard box (or the pedestrian walkway at métro Champ-de-Mars that I have noticed is very popular with discerning winos) next year afterall!
Another friend has come online with a web page, so I figure I will link to it, though I warn you that, though I've been around it since the third grade and have gotten pretty used to it, his sense of humour is not for everyone. He's honestly one of the funniest people I've ever met but I can see some people being pretty put off, if not by his funny stuff than almost certainly by his seriousness. So check it out at your own risk: Skeletal Joker on the Internet.
I think I've probably said my piece for now. I ought to do a bit of school writing now that I've got some momentum but I think I may forgo it in lieu of something more fun. What the fuck, you only live twice.
Evan
P.S., there seems to be a tradition now of a Song-of-the-Week, so what the hell. Try "I Lost My Baby" by Jean Leloup.
Sunday, April 8, 2001 (11:29 am)
Hey another week, another dollar, eh? I'm really terribly impressed with myself that I seem to be getting back into the habit of writing these entries weekly like I started out doing in the beginning and have pretty much failed to do for most of the last year. Good for me.
Classes are done on Tuesday. I don't know why I'm looking forward to that so insanely, lectures are the easy part of college work. With lectures over, that means it's exam time, woo fucking hoo. I have an exam on Thursday for a class I honestly have not invested a whole lot of energy in. It's a prerequisite course and is just so fucking boring and pointless. It's not the professor's fault, I'm sure he didn't want to teach that lame-ass class either. This was the class I started my term paper for at like 11:00 the night before it was due. Probably get those back tomorrow, what a bummer. I've done some pretty cool drawings in those lectures, actually, which is OK since I swear half the class never shows up for the lectures at all. It's at 9:30 in the morning, what do they expect? (Yeah, I know that only in college would 9:30 be considered "early" but I'll bet I'm more exhausted most of the time than you, so shut the hell up.) I also have not really read a lot of the texts, which will be my main activity for today. Oh well, que sera sera. Friday morning I get to fly home which will be great. Mmm...Easter nums. My flight leaves Dorval at 6:10am, which means that I might as well just not go to bed. Can you even catch a taxi at 4:30 in the morning? I guess I'll find out. Anyway, that means that the next one of these entries may be from home. How novel.
Been watching crazy movies the last few days. Friday night we watched a bootleg Internet copy of The Virgin Suicides. Quality was really good, must have been ripped from a DVD, which I hadn't really realized was possible. Amazing. I didn't really like it at the time but the more I've thought about it, the more I think it may be worth a second viewing. Really disturbing and oh my God, was that really Kathleen Turner? Either they fitted her up with copious latex or she's let herself seriously slide. She didn't exactly talk with the voice of Jessica Rabbit, either. Wow, scary. I've been listening to Heart's "Crazy on You" a lot since then, I guess you could call that the song of the week even if it's not French for once (much of the soundtrack was by the French group Air, though). The "Crazy on You" scene was really amazing even if I'm not yet sure about the rest of the movie. Rent it (or steal it) and see for youself, though.
Then last night we watched Zabriskie Point but since Annika thought it would be fun to watch the Version française integrale, we collectively only understood about 60% of what was going on, not that there was a whole lot of dialogue or that we would have really understood it much better had we been watching it in English. What a weird fucking movie, I'm hard pressed to say I really liked it. The two best scenes - the desert orgy and the big explosion at the end - seemed to be totally unattached to the plot, such as it was, in any noticeable way. We anticipated the orgy scene ("Oh my God, they're going to have seriously incredible sex now!"), though not the appearance of all those other people, but the big explosion just sort of happened without us really noticing since by that time we had all pretty much ceased to pay very close attention to the movie. It was pretty hilarious how gratuitous it seemed as a result. Really weird. Oh well, at least Daria Halprin was devastating (good costuming). Ahh, the world before HIV.
It's been increasingly nice here lately. Spring began tentatively a few weeks back, we spent a nice afternoon walking around St-Denis, and then the city got two feet of snow just to remind everyone not to get too cocky, it's still Québec. Thanks. Then it began slowly to improve again. Friday night it felt it necessary to blow some snowflakes around for a while to look menacing but it wasn't for real. Made Caribbean Night in the cafeteria a bit outrageous, though.
Yesterday was gorgeous. I went for a big trip around the city by myself, which I haven't done in a long time. It was sensational. I walked around downtown a bit, stopped in Indigo and bought a book for a friend (which I had to carry around for the rest of the day) then headed down Ste-Catherine for few blocks, had some lunch at the Burger King across from La Baie. After that, I decided to take the métro to the Décarie strip and browse around my favorite computer store for a while, B.Mac on rue Paré in the Town of Mount Royal. I hadn't been there since January when I bought myself my sensational harmon/kardon computer speakers. It was fun, Apple has come out with a lot of neat stuff since then, none of which I can afford. I was ostensibly looking for new web page software since I want to redo this site but I played with all the stuff, the new titanium PowerBooks, hippie-style iMacs with CD-RW, the gigantic Apple Cinema Displays, and Mac OS X. Pretty good-looking, especially on the Cinema Display, but I think I'll wait until all my stuff is available native before I upgrade. I hear that Classic is pretty awkward. Plus, they haven't got DVD playback working yet either and my friends would kill me if I cooked that feature of my laptop. It was a pretty cool visit, even though I didn't buy anything and had previously gotten off at the wrong métro stop inadvertantly and then had to wander up and down semi-derelict dead-end streets for a while trying to figure out how to get from Victoria over to Décarie.
I decided I wanted to walk around outside more since it was so beautiful, so I took the métro to a more picturesque neighborhood. I ended up at the Université de Montréal on the northern face of Mont-Royal. I'm thinking seriously of taking a month-long intensive oral French course there this summer, so I thought I'd check it out more critically than I had before. It's a pretty nice campus. Really different from McGill's on the other side of the mountain, not least of all in terms of size. The bookstore was closed since it was a weekend, which disappointed me a bit since I rather fancied a U de M t-shirt to add to my college shirt collection, small as it may be. I read all the posters and bulletins around to get a taste of the campus vibe, found the library should I ever need it, took in the views, then wandered down rue Jean-Brillant to chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges, where I located the admissions office - also closed - and strolled down the main drag for a bit. Lots of people out and about. Walked west on Queen-Mary and gaped at l'Oratoire St-Joseph. What an absolutely colossal building! Then I decided I'd walked enough - also was tired of carrying my bag - so I caught the 165 bus, through all the twisty streets down the mountain and got off at Sherbrooke. I walked the last few blocks back to rez, admiring the extraordinary gentility of that stretch of Sherbrooke between rue Guy and McGill. Holt-Renfrew, Ritz-Carlton, Mercedes-Benz.... It must be novel to have a ton of money and hyphens. I thought for a minute of having a look in the art museum - the permanent exhibit is free, which is about as good as life gets - but decided to save that for another day, however much I always enjoy it. I was pleased to note, however, that the Hitchcock exhibit has been extended for two more weeks, so I may get to see it afterall. How nice!
Then back to rez for a nap, pizza, and Zabriskie Point. Ahh, life....
Until next week, Evan
Well hasn't spring sprung all of a sudden? All the snow in Montréal melted last week and the city is starting to turn green, except for one corner of McGill that has been transformed into a winterscape, complete with icicles and a skating rink, for some Katie Holmes movie being filmed in the city. Weird. It seemed to all of us who were wishing a not-so-fond adieu to the winter that little Katie could well have sucked it up and come a few weeks back when it was really very authentically wintery, and saved her studio many thousands of dollars in recreating the season in front of the dentistry building.
I'm actually in Toronto right now, at a friend's house in North York. We've had a pretty good time. Today I finally got to go up the CN Tower, after God only knows how many trips here. Last night we went to some late night Chinese bubble tea place just off Mel Lastman Square, on Yonge Street if memory serves. It was really good.
It's really quite odd hanging out in Toronto. It's sort of a blurring of worlds, since I've spent lots of time in Toronto but never really socially (though my friend's house is under the approach to Pearson, so there are some parallels with old times). This is also the first time I've ever seen a college friend outside of Montréal, it's sort of bizarre. I rode home with her Tuesday afternoon and am going to hang out here until Sunday, I guess, when Dad drives up from Pennsylvania to fetch me. A bunch more Montréal people I know are coming down here as well and we're all going to meet up downtown tomorrow for some Marxist convention. Should be even weirder yet.
Speaking of nutty left wing stuff, weekend before last I was up in Québec at the protests. That was pretty interesting - kinda discouraging all around, since I don't really like the government telling people who they can or can't do business with anymore than I like them telling people they can't exercise their free speech in the same city as a meeting of the most powerful people in an entire hemisphere. I just didn't see much there to sympathize with. I've written an article on what I saw, an abbreviated version of which will be appearing in the July issue of the libertarian journal Reason, which I think is rather exciting since I am a tremendous fan of the magazine. And since I am fairly sure that there are no jobs in Warren these days, perhaps free-lance writing is the way to go. Anyway, I would talk about what I saw in Québec but I'm rather tired of writing on the subject so I'll just tell you all to wait for my article to come out. Subscribers should get their copy towards the end of the month. I suspect that it will appear on the website sooner than later as well, and I'll link to it when it does.
So what lies in the near to distant future? Well I really don't have too much planned for this summer yet. From May 22 to June 14, I'm probably going to be taking an oral French class at the Université de Montréal, so I'll be back up there staying at my apartment. Other than that, there isn't too much worked out yet, though I'd like to do some traveling. (Dad and I have discussed a fishing trip to the Saguenay; he is also perhaps going to Mexico City this summer on business, which would be fun to tag along for; a few people I know may be going to Vancouver to visit some of our friends and I could probably get a free plane ticket out there; and I'm probably also due to visit Europe now that I can speak a European language somewhat passably. So those are all possibilities.)
Speaking of my apartment, boy am I going to Hell. We moved our stuff there on Tuesday and while my friend and I are cavorting around here in Toronto this week, our other roommate is back in Montréal cleaning out the catastrophe left us by the last tenants, without any furniture, while dealing with a summer school class. I feel really bad about leaving her so much in the lurch, she's certainly one of the last people in the world whose life I want to ruin, but our driver to Toronto was insistent about leaving Tuesday afternoon and so we did. I talked to her on the phone this afternoon and she said that she's sweeping all the dirt and trash into our rooms. I'll help her out as best I can when I fly or drive back up there in two weeks but in the mean time, I'm afraid she's taking one for the team.
Oh and by the way, before I finish off this entry, I sent out a mass email the other day with my new Montréal address. If you didn't get it and would like to have my new address, send me an email and I'll hook you up. In addition, I now have our telephone number - found that out during my phone conversation this afternoon - so anyone who wants that can have it too. Anyway, that about sums up everything I had to say. Until I write again (whever that may be; contrary to my best intentions, I didn't write during my trip back home for Easter, which was lovely by the way, so I may not this time either).
P.S. In my entry of March 18, I made a smarty-pants comment about Harvard students being too preppy to occupy administration buildings anymore. Well I spoke too soon, as you can read here. Mea culpa.
Monday, May 21, 2001 (5:21 pm)
Well, here I am sitting on my patio at my apartment back in Montréal, waiting for the grocery boy to come. I never did do an update from home (PA). I thought about doing one a couple times but realized that I really didn't have that much to say. Home was, well, home. Warren, Pennsylvania, yeppers. There was an election, an arson, an attempted rape, and Prom when I was back (and no, smart ass, none of them were connected). It also rained a lot. Yes, as you can see, it was a rollicking exciting time.
I saw a fair number of my friends when I was back, most of the ones I was the most eager to see. It was largely pretty low-key entertainment - went to a movie, hung out at Perkin's - the social hub of Warren teenagerdom, some frisbee, some time out in the woods, etc. Par for the course, I suppose. I wasn't actually back home for that long, after being in Toronto for most of a week, but nonetheless coming back to Montréal was a bit of a sensory overload. My roommate who has been staying here had a big party the first night with a guy spinning jungle and a ton of people whom I mostly had not met before (people from our building, friends of our friends, friends of her friends, etc.). It was all a bit much until my third glass of sangria, then I mellowed out. I'm still a bit out of my element, though, mainly because I can't quite get used to the apartment being my apartment. Partly it's just being new, partly it's just all my things being in total disarray, and partly it's that my roommate has been living here for three weeks by herself and sort of has a lot of the things set up and outfitted her way and with her money and energy, so I sort of feel like I'm mooching in a way. Still, it's nice to be here. It's a pretty cool apartment and in a really key quarter of Montréal.
Le premier jour de mon cours français se passe demain. Je n'ai jamais reçu ma lettre d'acceptation de l'Université de Montréal parce que j'étais idiot et j'y ai donné mon addresse chez moi au Pennsylanie au lieu de mon addresse à Montréal. La service postale entre le Canada et les États-Unis est horriblement lent! L'université a débit mon compte et je sais que je dois aller à 3200, Jean-Brillant demain matin; donc, ce sera probablament OK.
I finished The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel this morning. (I'd been reading it off and on since getting back to Pennsylvania.) It was quite possibly the most brilliant non-fiction I've ever read. It's always exhilerating to read something with which you are - and have been - in implicit agreement with, but written in a way far more brilliant and eloquent than you could possibly imagine doing yourself. I've been a tremendous fan of her writing for some time now and so this book has elevated her to a preeminent position in my pantheon of admirations (and you thought there was a shortage of tall, blonde female intellectuals). I would highly recommend reading it.
It was especially welcome to me after my three days of intense Marxist indoctrination in Toronto. I realized as I was sitting in the various lectures, blood pressure rising and temples beginning to throb, that I could actually explain with far more clarity, precision, and comprehension detailed Marxist analyses than the classical liberal perspective to which I actually subscribe. So I've been reading up since I got back: that book, numerous articles from old Reasons and elsewhere on the web, and several books by Friedrich Hayek. I don't know if my efforts will help me win any arguments or not - my socialist friends are damnable rhetoricians - and I don't know if I really care, I am confident enough in my views. The point is that it is very fulfilling, stimulating, and encouraging.
Speaking of these political matters, the July Reason has gone to press, or so I've been told, and thus should be available in a matter of time. I understand that there is a check on the way from them to me as well, for an unknown amount. So that should be nice. I'm not sure how long before the article will be uploaded to their website, but it can't be more than two months away, as they archive the complete text of each issue there after it has been replaced on the newstand with the new month's issue. I'll obviously link to it from here when it appears.
Well anyway, I have to go, to think about dinner (when our supplies get here). I'm a bit nervous about going back to school tomorrow, particularly since it is French and I haven't spoken or thought much about French in a couple weeks. Plus, it's a new place and I'm already facing a potential bureaucratic hassle. But I'm sure it will be very rewarding, if exhausting. Seventeen hours a week! That's two more than I had each week during my year at McGill, and that was across four or five different classes. But of course, this is only for three weeks. But the intensity should really serve to make me comfortable. I always dread going to French classes for the first time but so far I have generally enjoyed myself, so basically my angst is just self-torture. Not very productive, obviously. At any rate, I'll give you all a report sometime in the near future, perhaps in French! Until then / au revoir, wish me luck / me souhaitez bonne chance! Evan
Sunday, June 3, 2001 (3:21 pm)
It's raining outside. Quite hard, actually. It's the Tour de l'Île today, the big bicycle event here in Montréal and cyclists have been going by for about an hour now. I feel rather bad for them, having their event spoiled, though they do look like they are having a good time all things considered. It sounds like a lot of fun, actually, riding all over the city with a bunch of other people and no cars. If it weren't so miserable out and if I owned a bike, I would probably participate myself.
In a way, though, the weather is sort of appropriate. I've been feeling a bit down in the dumps lately. My roomate left Friday and a few other of my friends here are gone now as well, so it's a bit lonesome, but even before I'd been feeling kinda intermittently lousy. Right after my last entry, which I wrote when I was in a very good mood indeed, a bit of a personal crisis of sorts popped up and it really took the wind out of my sails for several days, and since then I've not been feeling so hot most of the time. I'd go on about it but frankly I don't really like reading other people feeling sorry for themselves on their weblogs so I think I'll spare you my own dribble. Besides, those of you I know well who are receptive to hearing this sort of stuff have already heard about it over the email, so you don't need to read anymore.
All things considered though, things have been going pretty well. My class is rather good, though my aptitude for it really varies with the day. Somedays I really get to yammering on and on and start to feel good about myself and other days I can't really speak for shit. I have to get up at 7:30 in the morning to get ready and catch the bus there, thus I'm usually rather tired as well, since I haven't had to get up that early regularly since high school. So I've been sleeping a lot when I can. I slept in until 11:30 this morning and then read an entire issue of the Economist before getting up and showering. That was nice.
Being in Montréal, even being down in the dumps, is still better than being in Warren, anyway. The weather has actually not been fantastic much for a week now but there have been a number of nice days. There are a lot of tourists here now, which is sort of interesting since I used to be a tourist here as well. Right now they are mostly young Europeans - particularly Germans - since of course school is still in session in the U.S. It seems like every bus I've gotten on lately has been full of German tourists, who I generally find absolutely insufferable. When I was 14, on my last vacation with both my parents, we stayed on Anna Maria Island in the Florida Gulf over Thanksgiving and one day drove to Sanibel, which Dad remembered fondly from his youth, when it was apparently very pristine and beautiful. Well when we were there it was totally crammed one end to the other with Germans. I swear we were the only people speaking English in the whole place. It was fantastically expensive and generally ruined. From what I have read, I am far from the only person in the world to be vexed by vacationing Germans, but it is still a rather bigoted view to hold (as well as a tad hypocritical, being a German-American myself). I generally like Germans in most other respects but I do wish they would be a bit less obnoxious when on holiday.
I went to the movies the other night with my friend Dorey on his last night before he went back to Boston. We saw Traffic. I had expected to dislike it based on what I knew of its position on the drug issue, and in that respect I was not really surprised. Despite all it's publicity for being radical, I found it to be really a very conservative film. Drugs were still depicted in a cartoonish, Nancy Reagan way where use equals abuse always (why was it never pointed out that the boyfriend character was doing just fine?). The assumption that something must be done remained the prevalent theme; the movie's radicalism was only in that it suggested that government interdiction was never going to counteract the market forces at work, and so the drug war should shift to preventing demand (curiously enough, for Hollywood, through faith and family). That drug use might be a personal choice that people should be allowed to make and suffer or not for was never suggested, nor was the immorality of the government's actions over the past twenty years at home and abroad (such as in Mexico and Columbia) more than hinted at, nor yet was the total lack of success that twenty years of attempts at demand reduction have had. I went through school, kindergarten with Reagan through high school with Clinton, during the first peak of hysteria and remember well D.A.R.E. (cops telling you how to do drugs), "Just say no,"Here's Looking at You 2000, "This is your brain on drugs," Healthy Kids Healthy Families, and so on right down the line. And let's not forget the anti-smoking crusade. Cigarette and drug use have fluctuated over the years, but never consistently with the application of government measures, whether persuasive or coercive. Everyone I know, myself included, here in Canada the same as at home, has tried cigarettes, alcohol, and various drugs and, to varying degrees, mostly continue to do so. I certainly don't want to glamourize hard drug use, which I have no truck with, but let's be realistic here. Smoking dope is not freebasing cocaine, but neither should legitimately be any business of the government.
Having said that, as muddled as its message was, the film had quite a lot of artistic and technical merit. I thought the part of the film set in Mexico was really absorbing and Benicio Del Toro's performance was absolutely riveting (he deserved his Oscar). I had only ever seen him before in The Usual Suspects, and though that is one of my very favorite movies, I personally found his character to be rather annoying. On the other hand, the Michael Douglas/daughter story line was, without a doubt, the most insufferable (plus, Michael Douglas is just not a versatile actor) and where 90% of the problems with the movie lay, aside from the three cheers I gave when Junior Cokehead told the drug czar to fucking wake up, drugs area easier to get than booze for most kids. Anybody living in America that doesn't realize that and how perverse it really is should get their head examined.
Speaking of which, that's a convenient segue to the Bush twins. Frankly, when your dad is the president and you're already famous for boozing illegally, you should not expect to walk into a restaurant with your two secret service goons and buy booze, and it's really rather dumb to try. Having said that, I feel sorry for both of them, to the extent that I feel bad for anybody in that sort of situation (i.e., anti-fun American university culture) but also because they really are being particularly restricted by virtue of who their father is. It seems like George Bush is working on fucking up everyone else's lives in some small way, why not his daughters' as well? But nonetheless, if they put their minds to it, I'm sure they can have a good, boozerific time somehow that won't be perpetually causing their father poltiical humiliation. Anyway the real reason that I bring this all up is that the place they got busted, Chuy's, is a place I have eaten many a time during my visits to Austin. So I thought that was just pretty damned funny. I wore one of their T-shirts the other day in honor of the event. [Update 6/4: Mark Steyn , the National Post's star Right Wing Bastard has written the only column of his I have ever totally agreed with on the subject and Virginia Postrel has weighed in with trenchant observations about Chuy's, none of which are really relevant to why I occasionally enjoy going there (answer: "Image of Elvis appears on tortilla shell!" Oh, and not incidentally, I'm having a beer right now, a legal one and boy is it good.]
Well, I'm totally out of space and have been writing for an hour (got an interruption in the middle, a phone call from Sue). Until the next time, when you should also get a new page design as well, being that it is high time for my annual site update. I'm also going to try and bring up to date some of the older content on the site at the same time, particularly in the Aviation section. Look for it in the next week or so.
(Song of the week: more Louise Attaque. "Fatigante" would not leave my head during the depths of my recent problems.)
Saturday, June 9, 2001 (11:18 am)
Hello all, how are you this beautiful Saturday morning? I'm considering renting a bike today and going for a little ride around the city since it's so nice, though it remains to be seen whether I'll actually get the motivation to do that since I am a bit tired now.
I went to see a late-night showing of Pulp Fiction at Cinéma du Parc last night, got back pretty late. It was a lot of fun, though. It's one of my favorite movies and I'd seen it on video probably a half dozen times before, so being able to see it on the big screen was fun (I was a bit young for it when it came around to the theaters the first time). I picked up a lot of things I'd missed seeing it before, like hushed dialogue and that the Buddy Holly waiter was Steve Buscemi. That's the cool thing about du Parc, the weird variety of new and old movies they show (that's where I saw Traffic). They've been doing the Indiana Jones flicks lately as well. Tonight and tomorrow night they are screening Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which is my favorite of the trilogy, so I may go. It's one of the few movies that I can remember seeing in the theater as a little kid. I guess it came out in 1989, so that was a while ago. That was the same summer that Batman came out. I remember seeing that in the theater as well, once at home and once when I visited Austin for the first time that summer. That was when theaters were just starting to get high quality digital sound systems, early ones, and it was pretty impressive for me at the time.
Speaking of late eighties/early nineties nostalgia, on Monday Nintendo is coming out with the Game Boy Advance. I have one of the beige originals that came out in 1989 (that was a pretty good year, come to think of it) and about twenty mostly classic pacs. I got it out a couple weeks ago and played it a little bit, brought it up with me to Montréal. I haven't really played it heavily in probably five years, so needless to say I'm fairly rusty, though I remember a lot more than I would have thought. I can still find two or three of the secret exits in Super Mario Land II, which I frankly think is damn good since I haven't thought about them in a very long time. Anyway, I'm thinking of picking up one of these new systems since they aren't very expensive and are backward compatible with the old games (my display is missing a few lines and the whole thing is generally kinda beat up). I'm particularly excited by the prospect of Nintendo rereleasing all the cool old Super NES games for the GBA. I guess that they've got Super Mario World in the pipeline, which is awesome. That's one of the few video games that I still adore. I guess Sega is going to bring out Sonic the Hedgehog too, which seems like it's breaking some sort of universal law or something. Weird. But it should be good, 16-bit gaming was some good years. I was at Chapters on Ste-Catherine last night reading a few gaming magazines (boy I haven't opened a Nintendo Power in a long fucking time, though I still have all of my old issues at home) and they were talking like "Some of you older gamers may remember the16-bit generation games like F-Zero fondly...." I felt really old. When I was a kid, the magazines talked like that in reference to Space Invaders or Pac Man, though I'd seen and played both of them, so the realization that some nine year old PlayStation wiz wouldn't have been around for the original Mario Kart seemed pretty bizarre to me. Hell, I had an original NES and remember all the old Mario Bros. games, original Zelda, Double Dragon, Battle Toads, Castlevania, and so forth, which practically makes me a fossil. It's a measure of the insanely fast technological progress we have attained that you can legitimately begin to feel old at 19 now. I'm starting to appreciate what my grandmother feels like when she surfs the Internet. (Speaking of which, wasn't 1989 also the year the World Wide Web was invented?)
Anyway, that's my little plan as it stands now. I found out how much Reason is paying me, and it's about five times more than I was expecting (I guess backing the capitalist horse does have its advantages; I wonder how much Adbusters pays). In fact, in the short term, my enthusiasm for getting a job is sinking, since a day's worth of writing has netted me the equivalent of about a month's worth of minimum wage burger flipping back home. I think I should write another, though I don't really have a topic burning at me.
I'm starting to get some plans for the summer here and there, too, which always make working hard (or so I gather). Nothing big, like some people I know. My roomate is leaving for three weeks in Spain and France on Wednesday, a friend from home is going to Ireland next week, another friend just got back from Italy, and my friend Liz just sent me the old "Hey, how are you doing, we should get together some time, by the way I'm leaving for Israel for a month tomorrow" email. Crazy. I wanna go somewhere far away and fun. My only travel plan is that I'm going to come up here again and spend a weekend in July with friends. I had to buy a roundtrip ticket to get back home next Saturday, so I have a leg back here reserved too. I think my roomate is planning on coming up and hanging out, and then she will drive me back to Toronto. She has also expressed a bizarre interest in visiting Warren, so maybe that will be a part of the trip as well. My friend Meredith from Vancouver wants me to use one of my family's free airline tickets to come out to see her, too, so I might do that as well if I can swing it and get someone else to come with me. So, while I really ought to get a job (such as even exist in Warren), my calendar is starting to fill. There'll be lots of chicken shit stuff as well, family visiting, parties, etc. that I will want to enjoy too.
Speaking of parties, yesterday was graduation day back home. The valedictorian was Matt Brennan, whom I'm pleased to call a friend. So congratulations to him. I've missed one grad party already by being here and I suspect there will be others this week, but maybe I'll be able to hit some when I get back next weekend, to the limited extend I know people in that class. That would be slightly fun. It was commencement at McGill yesterday as well, I saw lots of people wandering around campus in silly robes. Good fucking timing, Grand Prix is in town and there isn't a hotel room to be found for love nor money between Trois-Rivières and Cornwall. I guess all the families are being put up by McGill in residence. That pretty much sums up the inanity of the McGill bureaucracy. The whole town is basically paralyzed by this event - I was on Ste-Catherine last night and I could hardly even walk there were so many people out - so they think (or not) to dump a few more thousand on the scene. Insane. I should have rented out my roomates' rooms, like people do during the Olympics.
So yeah, I'm almost ready to return to Warren for a while. French is done on Thursday. Crazy, it went so fast. I think I've learned a lot. It's sort of bored into my brain in a weird way now, more so than before. I'm starting to have dreams in French and thoughts sometimes come to me spontaneously in French (I walk outside, it's a nice day, and I'll think "Il fait tellement beau!" instead of "Hey, it's pretty gorgeous"). I guess those are the two mileposts that after you pass, you know you'll be alright learning the language. I hope I don't lose my momentum too much by going home. I'm going to try and find some people to talk with, do lots of reading, listen to Radio-Canada over the Internet, etc. I guess I'll miss studying French for a few months, it's sort of a cool, low-impact way of spending your time. And I'll miss eating cheap, crappy pizza for lunch at La Caverne on chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges and watching Cops on the tube from Burlington. Oh well....I have memories.
Anyway, I've gone over again, so I guess I'll end here. I should get dressed and go out, see about the bike idea as well. I had wanted to talk about the British election a bit (boy I'll miss laughing at William Hague on the Prime Minister's Question Time on C-SPAN) and a bit more about the Bush girls, but I guess both can wait. Also, do note that while I have not yet got the new design that I promised last week rolled out - it is coming - I have completely redone the selection of links. So do check that out. Until next week. Evan
Monday, June 11, 2001 (9:49pm)
Here's just a quick little entry to follow up Saturday's. I went out to the Toys'R'Us in Anjou today (and I mean "out" - that was just about the furthest east I've ever been in Montréal) to see if they had a demo Game Boy Advance. They did, though none for sale (Canadian release date is Wednesday), which is OK, I wasn't planning on buying one today anyway (cheaper in the U.S. because of taxes). It was pretty neat. They had Super Mario Advance as the demo. It looked great, though I've never been a fan of Super Mario Bros. 2, so it didn't do a lot for me. The unit is a lot smaller than I had expected. Cool. I looked around at all the other toys too, which was a lot of fun. My parents would never take me to Toys'R'Us when I was a kid. There weren't a lot of toys that I thought were very cool, though. I was kind of upset by the Legos (bear in mind that Legos were, bar none, my favorite childhood toys). The models didn't look very complex, were mostly corporate tie-ins (especially Star Wars), which I think goes against the whole ethos of Lego (read Microserfs by Douglas Coupland to understand), and seemed terribly expensive. I did make a purchase, though - the French edition of Monopoly ("Allez directement EN PRISON. Ne passez pas GO, Ne réclamez pas 200 $"). That'll be fun. Anyway, must go. Talk to you later. Evan
Monday, June 25, 2001 (11:40am)
I've been trying to start writing this for ten minutes now but my young cousin is in the room scampering about and gurgling and grabbing things. Now we've got him in his pen watching the Baby Mozart, which he seems to like. There was no Baby Mozart when I was a youngun and I actually find these infant TV experiments to be somewhat creepy, though I must say that this is vastly better than the Teletubbies. I listened to lots of classical music when I was a baby (though also lots of Led Zeppelin) and I turned out OK, so I guess it'll be fine. He actually seems to be paying more attention to us than to the colorful images on the tube (though he seems to like this section now with the "Rondo alla Turca" pretty well). He's more capable of stimulating himself for lengths of time than any baby I've seen, which might well be an inheritence from his father who can sit on the front porch staring at the road for hours on end. Not a bad skill to have.
I'm back here in PA now of course, since last Saturday. It's been a pretty laid back week, I've mostly just been reading and napping and seeing a few friends. I've been meaning to clean up my room, but so far have made only small steps in that direction. There's hardly any floor visible under the piles of bank statements, old Air Canada in-flight magazines, books, airline ticket stubs, computer paraphenalia, laundry, and other miscellaneous detritus from the year. I suppose sooner or later I will have to deal with it all but since it has been ten months since I've had to spend more than two nights at a stretch in my room, its upkeep has not been near the top of my priority list.
My trip back home last Saturday was interesting. I discovered first of all that it is cheaper to take the taxi from my apartment to the airport than it is from downtown. I had always blindly assumed the $28 flat rate from downtown was a good deal during my time at McGill, but I made it on the meter from the corner of du Parc and Mont-Royal to Dorval for 3$ less, and it's quite a bit further. I thought at the start that my taxi driver was trying to rip me off by taking a weirdly circuitous route through Mile End and the Town of Mount Royal but it actually turned out to be more direct than I had thought. Who knew.... Then at the airport, I ended up getting my bags searched at the U.S. Customs pre-clearance. That's the first time in years of international travel by plane, train, and automobile that I've had that happen. I think the guy was expecting to find cigars or something, but since he didn't look under my dirty laundry or have a dog or x-ray machine, I'm not sure how he expected to find out. It would be a pretty inept smuggler who put the contraband on the top of his luggage, don't you think? Then my flight to Detroit was delayed by 30 minutes, which was precisely the length of my layover. I pointed this fact out to the gate agent, who was insisting to all the passengers that we would have no problems making our connections, that this flight was always early. I of course knew he was lying, I fly frequently enough to know when the airlines are setting themselves up to screw you, but I equally knew that if that was his line, he was going to stick with it and there was no point trying to get him to rebook me. I watched wistfully a direct US Airways flight departing for Pittsburgh and called my grandmother to let her know not to leave for the airport before 1:00 in case I had to call her back with a new plan. As it turned out, the flight left a bit sooner than (re)scheduled, about 20 minutes late, and the crew did their best to get to Detroit as fast as possible, which involved what I thought was a rather fast landing for all the time it actually shaved off. In the Detroit airport, I found that my connecting gate was about as far away as possible and sprinted there, literally pushing people out of my way. I made it just as they were closing the door. Fifteen seconds later and I would have missed it. I was in the terminal for about three minutes total and on the ground in Michigan for about ten. I never expected to see my luggage again but, miraculously, it made it, though with a large hole in the side which my jacket sleeve was hanging out of. That evening, I managed to meet up with a few of my friends in Warren. It was a fairly bizarre evening, every bit as disorienting in its way as my first night back in Montréal a few weeks before. These transitions are getting harder to deal with. To top it all off, we ended up watching Requiem for a Dream, the most horrifying drug movie ever, which was probably the last thing we should have been watching under the circumstances. I was very disturbed for several days afterwards.
Anyway, nothing has been as dramatic since then. Saturday was my dad's company picnic at Waldameer in Erie, a dubious pleasure as always, then yesterday we went shooting. Dad needed to sight-in his new 45-70 guide gun and we also popped off a box of .22s with his Marlin. I am really a hopeless shot (of course with the 45-70 and steel jacketed hollow points, one does not really need to be hugely accurate to shoot varmints or Nazis in the backyard), though it made me feel better that Dad is not particularly good anymore either (though at my age, he could probably shoot mosquitos out of the air). I haven't really done much shooting in a long time. In the evening, my grandmother had a cookout for her fifth grade students at her house, which I helped her with. That was a delight. Today I'm going to help her buy a computer.
I guess that pretty much brings things here up to date. Not much ever to say about Pennsylvania, I guess. My friends Toby and Brian left yesterday evening for Ireland, so they are probably frollicking with leprechauns by now. So I now have four of my best friends in Europe. I declare, life is horridly unfair! I've been getting regular emails from Shikha, including one this morning. She's in Sevilla now, having a good time. She says it is very hot in Spain. On Wednesday, she is flying to Paris, which makes me enormously jealous. I wish I were in Paris, not least of all with Shikha. I have no travel plans right now nor any realistic plans of getting any very exciting. I've got to check on the frequent flyer situation, my friend Meredith from Vancouver is beginning to resort to threats of physical violence to get me to come out. She could and would do so, too. I really want to go to Europe, though, and have decided that, come what may, I'm going to raid my savings this winter and put a small part of it towards a Reading Week trip to France. That's very doable and would be very, very cool. You read it here.
Well that's all I've got to say. Evan
P.S., the July Reason with my article on the cover is now available at newstands.
Tuesday, July 3, 2001 (11:36am)
Good morning everyone, and a happy Independence Day tomorrow to you all. I just finished reading the morning paper, as I do everyday though not always in the morning. It seems that since our local paper was bought by the owners of the rag up in Jamestown, the editorial page has taken several steps to the right, and now is just about teetering on the edge of pure reaction. Today, we readers were treated to an editorial detailing, on this the anniversary of the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the multidinous reasons that the south was the "good guys" in the war. This was not exactly an intellectual defense, either, à la, for example, Gore Vidal's Abraham Lincoln-was-the-devil schtick, but rather a conveniently selective listing of the constitutional doctrines then in vogue in the south, which are still with us - limited government, states' rights, free trade - and so forth. Now I think that these things are by and large quite peachy myself (having said that, I don't really see a clear preference between being ruled by one level of government or another except to the extent one derives its democratic representation a bit closer to the people, though in a large state like mine - 12 million citizens, or about 50% more than Sweden - it really doesn't make that much difference; authority is authority), but one must understand that the context now and the context then is really rather different. Alas, that subtlety was entirely lost on the gentleman, who instructed us, as an example of the reasonableness of the south, that with regards to the admittance of new states into the Union, the southern states did not want an equal balance of slave and non-slave states but rather only the opportunity for those states to decide for themselves which status they would prefer. Now quite apart from the fact that this is totally incorrect history, it ignores the fact that the issue at hand was not something like tariff policy or military campaigning, but the legal institution of chattel slavery - the buying, trading, and exploiting of human beings as property - a system no government no matter how superior in its democratic foundations has the right to allow. This line of thinking is, to my huge regret, not at all uncommon among certain swaths of the political spectrum with whom I often have occasion to agree on a number of issues, and who stake a claim, recognized by conventional wisdom and, conveniently, by the center-left elite, to the banner of libertarianism, thus tarnishing the name for those of us who are actually really concerned with issues of liberty and who have a world view not totally defined by the events of 1865 at Appomatox Court House. I am not one to give my political ideas name (to quote Ferris Bueller and I believe before him John Lennon, "I don't believe in -isms, I just believe in me.") but the L word is about as close as it comes, which often times isn't even really all that close, though it usually is, and it is awkward when describing yourself as having, say, "libertarian leanings" to have everyone think of rednecks with Confederate Battle Flag bumper stickers when in fact you'd rather they think of Friedrich Hayek or Dave Barry. (Virginia Postrel discussed this phenomenon well; scroll down to "Basic Liberties.") Anyway, enough said about that, though in related news I should announce that the July issue of Reason ("Free Minds and Free Markets") featuring me on the cover is now available for your complete perusal online, as well as still at your local bookstore (the major chain brands like Borders, Barnes & Noble, and in Canada, Chapters and Indigo all carry it, and I imagine many local independents would as well). [Yet another Reason plug: the August/September issue which I received shortly after writing this has an excellent article on the issue of southern secession.]
Wow, that was a long paragraph. I didn't mean to take up so much space in here with that diatribe. I try to keep the same policy regarding loud airings of political views on here as I have in avoiding the sort of pitiful personal jeremiads I often read on others' web logs. I don't think anybody really cares that much and it's just a way of showing off anyway (the political diatribes, not the whining). Of course, that pretty much summarizes the entire purpose of this web site, but never mind that. Speaking of which, though, I just read an article in some clueless publication, possibly Time, about how weblogs are the newest and hottest thing on the net. Now this isn't really a web log in the traditional sense of a daily update about what someone is doing, but I guess it is sort of close, just less frequently posted but longer and (hopefully) with more thought. However, I have been keeping it semi-regularly for two years and I based it on a now-defunct site of a guy roughly my age who had been keeping a similar - though probably more interesting if less polished - journal for two years before I filched his idea. So it really isn't that new of a thing (who knows whom Daniel got the idea from?). It's my guess, now that it has attracted mainstream attention, that the trend is already on its way out (most of my friends who have been doing this for a while, like the kid mentioned above, are either now out of business or seriously behind in their updates). I have no intention of stopping anytime soon, however, so have no fear. Scarcely anybody reads this now, so what do I have to worry about if it no longer becomes the hip thing?
(Speaking of Time being witless, though I'm not at all sure the weblog thing was in Time, did you know that they apparently have a policy of not printing dissenting viewpoints on global warming, as their editors - all of whom have excellent scientific credentials, I'm sure - have decided that it constitutes a grave enough threat to forego their journalistic obligations? What bullshit.)
So, then, what have I been up to this week? Relatively little, I have to confess. On Friday I went with a friend and his family (my stockbroker) to the Wynton Marsalis concert at the Chautauqua. I'm not really a huge jazz fan and know basically nothing about it, but this was really good. All the guys in his Lincoln Center ensemble were really good musicians and Wynton himself absolutely radiated cool in his purple shirt, necktie, and suspenders. In this one old Louis Armstrong favorite he played right after intermission, he was truely the Satchmo reincarnated. All told, about as good as culture gets that close to Warren. As a side note, we spent half the show trying to think of the name of a guy we saw in the audience whom we thought was famous. The consensus now is that it may have been Mark Russell, who does those ridiculous political comedy routines on PBS. I believe he is from Buffalo.
Then on Saturday Dad and I went to the Pittsburgh zoo. That was one of my favorite places when I was a kid but I hadn't been back in probably five years. It was largely the same, but there were a few new attractions. Principal among them: the African savanna environment has been redone so that the elephants and giraffes can walk around outside with the zebras and ostriches and mallard ducks (!), there is a new primate house (with eleven gorillas, plus a variety of other critters like gibbons, orangutans, and lemurs), and some new cold blodded friends in the snake house. There is, for example, now a komodo dragon (who also had his own outdoor enclosure), which I thought was great since I loved The Freshman. The puff adder who gave me mad nightmares as a child has been replaced with two monstrously huge Burmese pythons, either of whom could quite easily have squeezed to death anyone in the zoo, not least of all me, though I daresay swallowing would have been a bit harder. I was reminded of a morbid song we used to sing in elementary school about a man being eaten by a boa constrictor. The aquarium, which had always been my favorite part of the zoo despite being quite shabby, has been totally redone also, somewhat along the lines of the Biodôme in Montréal. The penguin exhibit there was the most vastly improved of all, and allowed for watching the penguins swimming underwater, which was absolutely a hoot. They look just like birds flying underwater, which is of course exactly what they are. The only disappointment of the day was that the rhinocerous was hiding. Quite a feat.
After the zoo, Dad and I drove around Pittsburgh a bit, managing not to get lost which is always an accomplisment in the Steel City. We cruised downtown and had a look at the new PNC Park for the Pirates, which looked as nice as it sounded in the news, and also at the progress being made on Heinz Field for the Steelers. Needless to say, these two new facilities right next to each other has redefined the layout of the north side a bit and we very nearly got disoriented on a whole new highway interchange. I understand that Mario Lemieux is now agitating for a new hockey rink to replace the admittedly downmarket Civic Arena, so it's only a matter of time before that part of town gets torn up too. Pittsburgh lives and breathes pro sports and that shithead mayor of theirs goes for any building project no matter how expensive or disruptive if he thinks it will earn the city props with all the other mayors.
I've also been watching a lot of movies lately, at least relatively speaking. I've seen Cecil B. Demented, The Way of the Gun, and, at last, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the last three days. Watching the last film was the only time in my life when I actually felt an urge for drugs. Not a strong one, mind you, but if someone had offered me a joint, I think I would not have refused. But, let me repeat, drugs are bad. However, I do always enjoy drug movies and I had greatly feared that Requiem for a Dream had ruined the genre forever for me. Last but not least in the news department, I had a dream yesterday while napping on the couch that I was back in French class. The dream was entirely in French - my crappy French and the prof's good fluent French. Bizarre.
Anyhow, that's all I know now. Shikha is getting back from France tomorrow (she's at Jim Morrison's grave today) and Nick is getting back toward the end of the week (whatever the first military transport flight he can get after his AC/DC concert in Hamburg). It'll be nice to have some more friends on the same side of the ocean again. Talk to you all later. Evan
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