7 posts tagged “celebrity”
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, those were some eventful days! Yesterday, the ol' bookstore had yet another huge event. This time, it was Deepa Mehta and the star of her latest film, the lovely Preity Zinta (who is apparently a big frickin' deal in Bollywood; I recognized her from the movie posters all along my end of Gerrard Street). We actually got a crowd equal to the one Spike Lee pulled on Friday, with the ethnic mix prompting Mehta to make a joke about how the entirety of Brampton had come down to see her (Brampton being a suburb of Toronto that is so predominantly South Asian, people jokingly call it Bramladesh).
That was a crazy shift in general, actually. Tomasz the indignant alcoholic libertarian stopped by for another loud impromptu dissertation (man, that guy creeps me out), and we accidentally broke a shelf in half while trying to move it across the store (I'll not speak of the horror that was the cleanup effort, as I don't feel altogether comfortable trashing a coworker in a public blog, but suffice it to say that I had a nice told-ya-so moment).
Today, though, was an even bigger event: my first real day at the University of Toronto. I made it, folks. They can't get rid of me now. I landed on campus around 1pm (observation: St. George's Station has perhaps more stairs than any other I've seen) and headed to Robarts Library for that vital rite of passage, picking up my TCard. Predictably, the photo is terrible. As my esteemed coworker Vicky put it when I bumped into her out front of the ROM, "Jesus Christ, did you smoke a fatty while you were waiting in line?"
Class #1 was to be my Syntactics tutorial. I wasn't clear as to whether the class was supposed to happen today, so I waited in a magnificently old classroom in University College for half an hour. Sure enough, no class. I used the surprise interlude to buy my books. It seems that those are the only thing that cost less here; I got my entire roster for under $200.
Class #2 was one of my fanciful undergrad throwaways, a Latin course in stately Victoria College (pictured at left). The instructor is this hilarious Slavic (Bulgarian, I think?) medievalist with a self-effacing sense of humour and a gift for informative digressions. From the looks of things, it's going to be a great year in that class. It'll be an utter bird, but I'm going to learn a lot, too. I even made a friend, I think; the girl sitting beside me and I seem to get along well enough. More on that after we talk for more than five minutes.
Tomorrow? Writing Systems. Coincidentally, the girl who rang through my stuff at the bookstore is in that one. Hooray instant acquaintance?
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.)
Davidson himself turned out to be a lot of fun: charming, articulate, funny, and movie-star handsome. Funny, though, that all the papers describe him as "tall;" he's less than my 5'11, and a fair bit lighter. He still has that new-author love for meeting people, though, and he chatted with everyone as he signed their complimentary copies of The Gargoyle.
As for the book, though? I'm torn. The dude has a gift for lively, clever prose, and for combining conversational tone with some truly lush descriptions, but there are far too many places where his prose gets purple enough to make the Disney-cartoon gargoyles (remember that show?) in today's picture jealous. Likewise, his impeccable research into bookbinding, Middle High German, Japanese, Dante Alighieri, schizophrenia, and the physiology of burns rivals the kind of erudition you'd see from a Palahniuk or an Eco novel, but then he goes and makes garish historical errors like having a crossbow that fires arrows instead of quarrels or bolts (this isn't just my D&D-fuelled medieval-weapons snobbery talking; it's actually a fairly important plot point). Davidson's got potential, but he's also got a lot of room to grow.
On a happy academic note, I finally managed to get a Toronto student ID and pick my damn courses. It took a two-hour squat in the admissions building, but I'm finally officially one of them, and I have some damn fine classes to look forward to this semester. Phonetics! Syntactics! Writing systems! Historical Linguistics! Latin! I win.
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.
My celebrity link for the day: Scott Ramsoomair writes a very funny webcomic called VGCats (warning: much video-game-related nerddom. Even I'm too out-of-the-loop to get many of the newer jokes). Why is this remarkable, you ask? Well, he's from southwestern Ontario, and that's not an especially common last name around these parts. I talked to my parents today, and it turns out that he's the son of Dr. Ramsoomair who lives just down the street from my childhood home. Furthermore, he used to babysit me.
That is all.
