24 posts tagged “bookstore”
King of Coxwell no longer, I'm now mostly settled at the my enormous new Bradlands on Greenwood. Only upon returning and getting all of my stuff into the place did I realize how fucking massive it is. I used to be all covetous of Jess' giant northwestern hipster lair, but darned if this place isn't almost as big (albeit underground). Full-sized fridge, 8-foot ceilings, and still under $600; I'm damn good at this real estate thing.
Of course, I've barely spent any time at the new place. After my first sleep there, I was back 'home' to Guelph for a much-deserved vacation. First up was a wonderful New Year's party down in Ayr with the HQ/Longhouse/Toko gang (apparently the latest social epicentre for that crowd is a downtown apartment christened "The Lion's Den," which is possibly the coolest place they've found yet), which was a much-needed dose of festive insanity. I don't think we've ever had such a fine spread of food at one of our shindigs, either: there were samosas, fancy cheeses, mushroom caps, an ungodly amount of shrimp, and even some awesome mojitos.
The next day saw me back in Guelph, making ratatouille with Rebecca before we made the balls-rattlingly frigid hike down to Kate's place for video games (let it be observed: I'm still the king of Mortal Kombat, but not so hot as a robot with guns) and liquor (things I wasn't expecting to enjoy: Coke and Fireball).
Now I'm back in Toronto, having one last stretch of full-time shifts before returning to class on Monday. Things have been stupidly busy at the store, but there have been enough laughs and cameo appearances from friends to sustain me.
Finally: I have a date on Tuesday? She works in insurance and is a brilliant photographer and is gorgeous and just generally has her shit together 1500% more than I do, but apparently she likes me? Fingers crossed, everybody.
Possibly the best out-of-context professorial quotation of the year:
"I don't know; I can't really sex a turtle from over here."
On that lovely note, it looks like most of the skull-crushing Fall 2008 semester has come to an end. Most of my classes are done (having lived out their full natural lives, he says, with a sympathetic wince towards York), and the only remaining coursework is a few undergrad exams. The syntactics one tomorrow has me a bit spooked, but the others should be walks in Queen's Park.
Life has been hectic but predictable otherwise. Recession/depression/eschaton aside, it's been a booming holiday season at work, and the holiday season is somehow actually less stressful here than in Guelph. I suspect that a lot of it is the wonderfully drama-free staff; last Thursday, the entire night shift, even the manager (granted, one of the cooler, less ex cathedra managers) went out for post-shift pitchers and had a grand old time. I can't even fathom that happening at my old stores. I also seem to have a new gaming (or at least game-swapping) buddy in one of the new fiction girls; she's lending me Ico after having heard me rave about Shadow of the Colossus; I in turn am introducing her to Fallout.
Speaking of work-related awesomeness, my dearest colleague Vicky's birthday party was also this weekend, and that was absolutely awesome. Engineers, it seems, party like engineers wherever you go, and that pizza-, Wii-, and beer-fueled bash was no exception. My Toronto social network continues to expand, which is always heartening.
In music news, Steven Wilson is still friggin' awesome. I just got his solo album Insurgentes, and my mind is duly blown. Wilson is generally in about five wildly divergent bands at any given time, and it looks like he's taken this opportunity to say "Dude, I'm going to be Porcupine Tree and No-Man and Blackfield and Bass Communion and the Incredible Expanding Mindfuck all at once." Pretty chime-y guitars and random electronic noises and beautiful vocal harmony and horrifying industrial squelches and (hey, why not?) a friggin' koto all feature. He even gets people like Tony Levin and Jordan Rudess to guest-star, and somehow manages to get Rudess to play a reasonable amount of notes per bar (unlike, say, that live "Lazarus" debacle where everyone's favourite keyboard wizard decides to swamp the quietly pretty acoustic ballad with as many cascading arpeggios as he can manage).
Also: apparently I'm in a band again? Besides my honourary membership in the fictional Myspace-only lower-floor-of-Indigo band (every instrumentalist who works in the basement is automatically a member, and "we don't need music! We just are."), I'm now in the world's foremost twin-viola-wielding prog/electronic/alt duo with the encyclopedically-knowledgeable music savant from our store's CD/DVD section. We have between us two violas, four guitars, a banjolele, a pretty sweet synth, two soaring tenors, a small studio setup, and absolutely no idea what we're getting ourself into. We will rule the world. All we need now is a name. Current suggestions tend toward the animal kingdom; he likes Sacred Bovine, whereas I think Ungulate is an inherently funnier way of saying almost the same thing (and almost rhymes with undulate, which might be close to the desired effect of our music). Either way, it's going to be very hard to resist the temptation to give us some heavy metal diacritics. You know you'd listen to a band called Ừñģǔłäŧə.
Thursday was another one of those ridiculous brush-with-fame mayhem days at the bookstore. This one was interesting, if only because our celebrity guest was notable less for his fame than for his staggering influence. I'd only heard of him in passing prior to his arrival, but Canada's own David Foster is apparently a forty-year going concern in the music business, and has been the producer for a ridiculous amount of ginormous pop acts. The guy discovered Céline Dion and Michael Bublé, for crap's sakes (treason, really, but I digress). Funny thing is, despite all the wealth and the glory, he's definitely in the top five for the most down-to-earth A-listers I've met. I find it hard to judge the celebrities' moods on tour; if I had to keep their schedules, I'd probably be surly too. Mr. Foster, though, is my nominee for writing How To Flog Your Products Without Being a Dick. He even brought some random budding songwriter from the signing line over to our piano and gave him a few tips. Hats off, sir.
As an aside, I also got to have a brief chat with Ben Mulroney, who is apparently an old friend of Foster's and was brought in as an interviewer. The man is orange, bright Star Trek orange, but also a really nice guy.
I also finally finished reading the Illuminatus! trilogy today. It's interesting stuff: a solid introduction to the hilarity of Discordianism, a ridiculously far-reaching and entertaining conspiracy satire, but also a weird product of its time. It's amazing how even a late-70s novel feels really dated and odd, though this one in particular was so rooted in the drug culture and wonky politics of its era that it's hard to imagine it any other way. At least now I more fully understand references to Erisian nerddom fnord.
Well then. That was a weekend to remember! Rebecca came up to visit again, with all the usual merriment and chaos.
Because everybody at work has been on my case about not having been there, we made the trek down to the mighty Salad King for yummy Thai goodness. Strikingly, there are only two salads on the menu; I have no idea why they call it that. However, the food is excellent (about a billion different Thai curries and stirfries), and the almost cafeteria-like setup (gigantic stainless-steel communal tables, shared benches, etc.) pretty much force you to make new friends. I can also report that Thai beer tastes...pretty much exactly like North American lager. However, it is Approved by the King, which surely means lots.
After that, we moseyed on down to Richmond and John (having to elbow our way through a crowd out front of Muchmusic, as apparently the cast of Twilight was in the building, and Twihards were blocking both Queen and John Streets) to climb the longest escalator I've ever seen (holy shit, four stories!) and see Quantum of Solace. I really don't understand all the critical hatin' on the movie; it's not "great cinema," and it wasn't quite as innovative and awesome as Casino Royale before it, but it was still a solid, entertaining action film. The new Bond girls were winners, the fight scenes were great, and even some of the oft-decried Mark Forster arty touches (oil is the new gold!) were pretty spiffy. I was satisfied, anyway.
For Sunday, I threw Rebecca at Jess for the day so I could go to work, and what a crazy shift that was. It was the perfect storm: the Santa Claus parade, the buildup towards Christmas, and a huge sale. The crowds were massive, and the lineup at my till never really ended. Thankfully, I was in such contagiously good spirits that not even the grumpiest of customers really got to me or got mad at me. In fact, the day would have gone off without a hitch had one of the head cashiers not made a counting mistake earlier in the day that made it look like I was hundreds of dollars off on my final totals. Cue a minor panic attack, until we dug the truth out of the back of the safe.
To conclude the awesome weekend (actually, this was the raison d'être for the weekend), Rebecca and I reunited at Lee's Palace (with a hilarious cameo appearance from Jess!) to see a concert at Lee's Palace. The opener was painfully, painfully bad; his voice was passable, but his songs were hopelessly cheesy and bland. After that, though, came a band I got into in the first year of my undergrad and still love: Ours. They aren't so much a band as a vehicle for the three-and-a-half-octave post-Buckley insanity of Jimmy Gnecco's voice, but damned if it doesn't all come together brilliantly live. Such a huge voice coming from a man who is probably less than 120 pounds (starvation? Heroin? Theories abound) just doesn't seem possible, and his chosen backing band is both tight and hilariously versatile (trumpet and bass at the same time? Why not?). I might've cowered in fear during the outro of "Murder," and all the songs from the first album (i.e. the ones the audience might've actually known) brought the house down. Why the hell is that band not more famous?
In fact, Ours was opening for somebody more famous: Lukas Rossi, that eyelinered dink from reality TV. Thus, I did something I've never done before: walked out on a show. It only took two songs (and the predations of a disturbing amount of local cougars trying to get closer to the stage) before Rebecca and I fled in terror. At least I got my money's worth from Ours.
Today was another one of those crazy celebrity extravaganzas at work. This week, because it's TIFF season and the who's-who of Hollywood has descended upon us, the event stage on the lower floor of my store has been a revolving door for bigshot directors, authors, and actors building up hype for whatever's playing at the theatres around town. I arrived at the store just as Sue Monk Kidd finished flogging The Secret Life of Bees, and after that, we went into full sandbagging mode to prepare for a huge event with Mr. Spike Lee.
Large-scale events like that always feel like a symphony with multiple conductors; the managers, the publishing reps, the hired security, and the celebrity are very rarely on the same page. This one had an interesting added wrinkle: Hollywood groupies. The gaggle of "with Spike" people milling about and micromanaging was downright maddening. Despite that, the event went off without a hitch. Major props go to our guest interviewer George Strombolopoulos, whose entourage was only one person, and who is every bit as affable and friendly as he seems on TV.
Also: there is nothing creepier than your subway train stopping, noisily and for no apparent reason, on the underside of the Bloor Viaduct. WTF, TTC?
(BBQ.)
Friday was quite the shift. Somebody decided that Stephenie Meyer's abusive-vampire-boyfriend (but he SPARKLES!) fairy tales deserved a Harry Potter-style release party, and goshdarnit, we did one. And thus was the colossal bookstore transformed into a crazyass party for teenagers, including a dancefloor, mocktails, Guitar Hero, ghoulish makeup, inflatable Twister (!), and a fuckin' Aston Martin parked on the patio just because Mr. Sparklyvampire apparently drives one. I actually had a lot of fun, though. I spent most of the night ensconced behind the special orders desk, safely outside of the mêlée and generally having nothing but good news for my customers.
Of course, the combined destructive force of 500 nubile highschoolers is nothing compared to that of my mother. I had a family get-together to attend in Waterloo on Sunday, and that was quite the experience. We started off by going to the new Mandarin buffet in Kitchener (I had never been to one of those beasts before, only heard tales. It's pretty much the perfect storm of heinous gluttony and gratuitous Orientalism. I quiver in fear), and then the whole clan retired to my parents' place, where my step-uncle's story about his search for his birthparents was met with my mother all but exploding about how she never wanted me opening up that particular can of worms. Possibly the only thing that could have made the resulting firestorm more awkward (kudos, of course, to Uncle John, whose Zen serenity didn't even crack) would have been me mentioning that I did open up that can of worms two years ago. Said request was blocked, though, so it's probably a moot point and something I should never mention to her.
On a brighter note, this final month of the summer looks like it's going to be full of all kinds of hilarity. The big publishers are having all kinds of galas and preview days, I have at least two out-of-area-code field trips in the works, and damned if I haven't finally found some jamming buddies.
Things:
- Yet another aging legend left us on the weekend: Mr. Conductor and Cardinal Glick himself, George Carlin.
Free-speech warrior, keen social commentator, and general scatological
goofball, his legacy should be so much more than the "Milwaukee Seven"
skit that gave him such infamy. Still, I hope that, as his soul was flung to the roof, never to return, he managed to growl out one last "cocksuckers!"
- Speaking of cocks, culinary tragedy struck the Bradlands today. I dropped my vaunted bottle of Cock Sauce, coating my floor in a fine layer of fermented fish. Despite all efforts to clean up, I have a feeling that that curious is-that-South-Asian-cuisine-or-an-oversexed-dorm-room smell is going to be here for a while.
- Oh Lord. I, Lucifer was awful. The plotting wasn't bad, but the prose was hideous; Duncan's Satan was pretentious without the wit to back it up. On the bright side, with Daniel Craig and Ewan MacGregor starring in the film adaptation, the film stands to greatly improve on the source material.
- On Sunday, Indigo had a big charity softball tournament. That was actually loads of fun, even if we got knocked out well before the semifinals. Our team had some ridiculously good players holding down the defensive side of things, and even I got my moment in the sun with a dramatic base slide. Never slide without pads, folks. I can't move my knee more than 90 degrees right now, lest I tear open the paperback-sized scab. It's pretty badass.
- Speaking of moments in the sun, what the hell was with that hailstorm on Sunday? Hail? In Toronto? Geez.
First off! Holy crap, it's a lion webcam. A LION WEBCAM. I don't even want to admit the amount of time I wasted watching the cute little cubs feeding and the lioness expressing her disdain for everything and everyone. I love animals.
So. Graduation. That was a night to remember, to be sure. I got to see a strange medley of old friends, and the alphabetical seating arrangement miraculously put me right beside my old sociology soulmate Cait. President Summerlee's speech was suitably funny and inspiring (but he was wearing shoes! What the hell?), and Chancellor Wallin is far more stately and matronly than you'd expect. I take back every "is that your final Chancellor?" joke I ever made.
Speaking of jokes in need of abrogation, I was originally a little irked by the choice of honoris causa speaker for my ceremony; while the folks in the afternoon session got to hear Roméo Dallaire, we got somebody who was only listed as "the former finance minister of Afghanistan." That seemed like the perfect storm of boredom and small potatoes compared to the good General, until I looked at the rest of Dr. Ghani's résumé. He probably still wasn't the most relevant choice for a crowd of nutrition and sociology students, but that was a pretty cool speech.
Pride comes before the fall; the ensuing afterparty was nothing short of epic. Cait and her crew invited me downtown to Doogie's for one last disaster, and it was a perfect night: tons of my friends in one place, great music from the one-man bar band, and the let's-make-this-one-count vibe that defines a good goodbye party. I have the feeling I'll never live down making out with that random pierced girl during "Tonight, Tonight," but I blame the celebratory mood.
As if I didn't have enough nifty stuff to write about in this entry, today was Book Expo. The mighty swag festival, like the industry it represents, is having a bit of a lean year, which meant the lightest haul I've ever left the Convention Centre with, but I still had a great time and got some very nifty loot. Meeting Jay Ingram was a treat (turns out I know his daughter), I scored a copy of the new David Sedaris to get signed when he's at my store in July, and those crazy Scottish condo-flipping guys from television were fun to meet, too.
Currently on my nightstand: Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer. I refuse to judge it before I've read a bit more of it, but it's got a cult following over at the office, so I remain optimistic.
I used to think that the subway was the greatest thing ever, but that's only because I'd never tried biking to work. It only takes about 25 minutes (as opposed to 20 for the subway, give or take), it's great exercise, and it's a relatively safe coast straight up the Danforth and Bloor. The Bloor Viaduct, with its hideous-but-important Luminous Veil, is about as much bad mojo as I could hope for, but the view is gorgeous.
For the size of this town, the power of coincidence still amazes me. My fellow cashier and I were chatting away about scoring free food on the Harvey's Free Hamburger Day last Sunday, and a customer in a suit walked up to the tills and started asking all kinds of questions. Did you buy anything to go with your free burger? Are you now more likely to eat at Harvey's versus other burger joints? We were a bit confused with this man's deep interest in our lunch until he admitted that he was a marketing director for the chain.
The procession of interesting guests at the store (since I've started: Mark Abley, Mayor Miller, Mark Steyn, and a bevy of second-string fiction authors) continues tonight with a reading by...Cherie Blair? When President Clinton came to town two years ago, he was flanked by Secret Service; I wonder if Mrs. Blair, QC, will bring MI6.
