17 posts tagged “cityscape”
I swear my phonology prof was under the influence of something today. That was one hilarious session. In addition to discussing the joys of stress placement algorithms, we also learned about ice cream, the Italian public education system, and Alabama Slammers (orange juice, Southern Comfort, amaretto, and sloe gin, apparently, which sounds like something I should try this summer).
Speaking of booze, yesterday was a terrifying day to be out on the town. I was too busy to take part in the St. Patrick's festivities myself, but I was downtown for just long enough to have to help some lost girls find a subway station, and then on my own ride home to be pelted with flung pamphlets as some drunken asshole had a fit and started throwing things. I felt sorry for police and security folks.
Other things. Um. Watchmen was pretty much what I expected. They nailed the 80s aesthetic super-well, the celebrity "cameos" were pitch-perfect (the opening-credits montage! Wow!), and Snyder's fetishistic devotion to capturing every tiny nerdy detail in the panels (and even adding a few of his own, e.g. Ozymandias' "Boys" folder on the computer) was fantastic. Alan Moore was right, though. The damn thing is unfilmable. The movie was a messy distillation of a much larger work, and I'm not just referring to the ending (which, while actually kinda clever, was still a travesty). I can't imagine how confusing it would have been for those who haven't read the book.
Also, if you haven't seen this yet, you need to. Some Israeli DJ watched thousands of those goddamn Youtube music performance videos (guitar in the bedroom, drums on the porch, trombone recitals, keyboard lessons, singing in the bathroom mirror, etc.) and layered them into some brilliant, brilliant music. My mind was blown.
So I met my first cokehead banker yesterday. I opened one of those newfangled tax-free savings accounts (kinda handy! I sure don't see a catch, and neither does my dad's financial advisor, apparently), and the branch manager who took me into the office and did the paperwork had the most obvious over-long pinky nail I've ever seen. Stay classy, Toronto.
Also, I have the biggest Internet crush on this girl here. Quirky, cute, talented, funny. I highly recommend her ukelele-based cover of "Dream a Little Dream of Me," performed in front of her open refrigerator.
Of course, as I develop such geek lust for an online folk singer, my own guitar playing has gone heavier than ever. I spent a couple of hours yesterday learning Opeth tracks, and I've been piecing together a messy riff-fest of my own that's certainly a lot less melodic than what I usually write.
Finally: my phonology professor's Italian accent makes her sound like she's saying "mattresses" instead of "matrices." It's pretty damn adorable.
So on Wednesday I got knocked to the ground by two enormous German shepherds. Thankfully, it wasn't the dire mangling you'd expect; it felt more like a clever prank. The first dog came up to me all a-slobber and did its best I'm-too-cute-to-ignore face at me. Naturally, I reached down and started scratching him behind the ears. The other dog, hitherto unseen, vaulted out from behind a snowdrift (how about that snow, eh? It's the kind of blizzard that makes random people strike up conversations, if only to have somebody to kvetch to) and pretty much jumped right on my back, taking advantage of my posture and sending me sprawling into a snowbank. If dogs could laugh, that's what these ones were doing.
The new semester is trundling along nicely. A recurring theme with my profs seems to be the inscrutability of accents; my sociolinguistics prof was red-faced when I rose to her challenge to identify her accent (she's right in her opinion that linguists, being both a multicultural, multilingual bunch and particularly phonetically self-aware, are trickier to pigeonhole, but "born in the American Midwest, educated in New England" is hardly exotic), while my phonology prof has so carefully clipped and moderated her speech as to be practically post-accent; her name is Italian, but her (infrequent!) solecisms are Germanic ("das Handy" for "cell phone"). The game is afoot.
This weekend also marked the loss of my IKEA virginity. I needed a monstrous bookshelf to round out my apartment furniture, so (summoning Jess for some help and spiritual guidance) we made the trek up to North York for some affordable Swedish furnishings. The place is pretty much what I expected: cavernous, sleek, modern, full of unfortunate Swedish names (Skänka frying pans being my favourite), and with the most bizarrely generous customer service model ever (there's a friggin' shuttle bus that drives you the half-kilometre between Leslie Station and the store). The meatballs, though? Kinda icky, until you drown them in lingonberry and gravy.
Also: holy crap, Sheppard Line. I've heard a lot of grumbling about what a cash cow that line was, and how the local condo developments never really materialized, and it looks like it's all true. Those stations are baroquely huge, gorgeous, but basically empty. At least it made it relatively easy to cart around an enormous bookshelf, running it onto train cars like a battering ram.
(to carry on the in-joke: fuck Bessarion)
Today's phonetics mêlée had me visiting whole new corners of campus. Random thoughts:
- The E.J. Pratt Library, Vic College's squat little study space, is fucking gorgeous inside! Wow! Ultra-modern, bold colours, nice layout: it's like something out of a Bond movie, as terrible as that simile is. Why can't that be the one with the extended hours, rather than the béton brut monstrosity that is Robarts?
- St. Michael's college contains a church with a massive bell tower. Thus, as we entered the exam room at 7, bells tolled. Not ominous at all, no sir.
- There's something inherently wrong about walking through Queen's Park and the century-old flagstones of Vic College, taking in the history, only to pass basement windows filled with the blue glow of a Pepsi machine.
Also: that Leslieville landlord has not called back yet. Dammit.
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.)
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.
(My Russian friend Marina tells me that Kasparov's joke after the smackdown was something like "I am glad to see that Putin and Medvedev are willing to raise their level of political discourse!")
Back in this hemisphere, I hit the Indigo first-aid kit for the first time this weekend. The cause? A customer's fingernail. I don't know what the hell is in the water here, but some woman at cash who took her bags from me in a rather abrupt manner managed to split my finger open from knuckle to knuckle in the process. There was blood everywhere, and my manager still doesn't believe my story. Let's blame it on the full moon, shall we?
Also: If you're going to live in Toronto, never google your own address. I found out all kinds of neat things, and I now know which of the area's kajillion Indian restaurants are worth my time, but I now also know that I live about half a block away from a suspected terrorist cell where they arrested a mail-bomber last year. Goddamn.
So I saw Iron Man a few nights ago. It wasn't the cinematic orgasm so many of my friends have made it out to be, but it was a pretty damn solid movie, certainly the best of the current epidemic of superhero flicks. Picking a troubled hedonist like Robert Downey Jr to play a troubled hedonist like Tony Stark was an inspired choice, and Jeff Bridges made a damn good evil tycoon. Even Gwyneth Paltrow, who normally bugs me on a level I can't even explain (this was true even before she married Chris Everything-That-Is-Wrong-With-Modern-Rock Martin), was a cute sidekick and convincing redhead.
Most of my life lately has been work. I've been pulling forty hours a week at the flagship, and I'm still in love with the place. I even have a German-speaking buddy on staff, which has been refreshing practice. Oddly enough, I also find that the stockbrokers and socialites actually have a more manageable sense of entitlement than the bitchy suburbanites we had at Guelph and Waterloo. Oh, Toronto, will you never cease to boggle my mind?
On the urban exploration front, I finally lost my Kensington virginity a few days ago. What a neat little neighbourhood! I went hat shopping, enjoyed the best burrito of my life and laughed at the crass service at Big Fat Burrito, and wound up demoing a doubleneck guitar for some of my fellow customers at the pawn shop. On the way home, I also popped by Yonge Street for some bargain-hunting and found an awesome alternate solution to my home electronics problem: why spend $40 on a cable to connect my laptop to my TV for movies when I can buy a $45 used Playstation 2, play movies on it, and be able to play some games? That's a victory, I think.
So I've been in the City of Toronto for one week. Goddamn, I love this town.
- The downtown Indigo store I'm working at is pretty much perfect. The scale of the thing is taking some getting used to (two floors, each bigger than the Guelph store, and sales volume in May like what we did at the height of December), but the staff are all hilarious and awesome, and the managers seem really cool. The interesting bit is that it's the "flagship" store of the chain, meaning that the CEO is a frequent visitor and we get all kinds of crazy-huge events. My very first shift included an hour and a half of security detail for professional neoconservative grumpypants Mark Steyn (good Lord, is that man ever a blowhard. When I had to tell a heckler to quiet down, I did so with apologies because I agreed with his jeers). Apparently this is the Indigo where the rich and famous shop, so I'm sure I'll have many more celebrity stories in the months to come (current tally: two MuchMusic hosts and a guy who I think was on Due South).
- I love the TTC. I live about ten kilometres from the bookstore, but thanks to the almighty 22A bus and the subway (Coxwell Station is really too giggle-inducing a name. At least three people have said something to the effect of "HAHA, BONER" when I've tried to explain my locale), it only takes me ten minutes to get there.
- I have friends in town! I got back in touch with Erika, a former coworker from my Chapters Waterloo days, and she dragged me out to the Golden Griffon on Runnymede, an adorable pub with the most incredible burger menu I've ever seen (8 possible meats, 35 possible topping combos. The mind boggles). The two of us and four of her friends got rather shitfaced while we reminisced, and walking her home caused me to miss the last subway, so I got to have my first experience traversing the entire city of Toronto via the 24-hour streetcars. I highly recommend this approach.
- The local No Frills (300m from my door! YES!) has the most incredible selection of Indian things. I love my neighbourhood.
- I ran into Gooch on the subway on Thursday night! What the hell are the odds?
- My one beef so far has been the difficulty getting Bell to hook up my damn Internet. It was supposed to be done by Friday, but now they're sending one of their lackeys down next Thursday to poke around in my walls. This means that all of my Internet usage over the past week has been mooched wireless in public libraries and coffee shops. It's a good opportunity for urban exploration, mind you. Beaches Public Library is a lovely restored fossil of a thing, all red paint and black wood, Coxwell-Ashdale is much more suburban and bland, and the big Toronto Reference Library downtown is an epic, sprawling thing. This post comes to you from a Coffee Time on the Danforth (thankfully a nicer one than my old oh-shit-I-missed-the-bus haunt at Bay and Dundas).
- I have the next two days off? Wow. Now accepting suggestions for places to explore.
