10 posts tagged “kj”

• I've almost started writing my thesis. By this I mean that there's a solid working outline, and I've taken a nice chunk out of the mile-thick reading list. I might just do this thing after all.
• Course selection is starting soon. It figures that I had to fight and fight to find four interesting courses to take this semester, but the winter (my grand finale) offers no less than seven things I'd like to take.
  
• KJ and I tried playing The Sims 2 when I visited her in Waterloo this week. She fussed over the decoration of the house. I spent most of my time trying to get our Sims to have sex. This pretty much sums up our relationship.
  
• This is pretty much the best concert month ever. As if Porcupine Tree (rides be damned. We'll sleep in a church if we have to) and Matt Good weren't enough, 5th Projekt are playing a free show at the Albion (four blocks from my house!) on the 9th. Who are they, you ask? I grabbed their CD from the reviewers' slush pile at the Ontarion last year, and it's one of two times in history that I've given a full five stars. I cannot miss this.
  
• Oddly enough, I think I'm more consumed by the University Bubble now than when I lived in res. It's Oktoberfest? Thanksgiving is tomorrow? There's an election on Wednesday? I know all these things, but it doesn't seem quite real.
  

Another full week without a single post. I lose at blogging, folks.

It's been a life of KJ and science fiction lately ("but I repeat myself," he says, dodging tomatoes). I've been hanging out with KJ in one form or another for the past six days straight, with various interludes of media consumption (Rebecca got me into Firefly, I read Fahrenheit 451 and A Canticle for Leibowitz, and a whole bunch of us had a riotously gorey Mortal Kombat tourney at Kate's place).

On that note, I'm definitely seeing something in KJ's allegations that I seem to be fixated with dystopia and the end of the world. Note the reading list above, then consider some of my other favourite books (Snow Crash, 1984) and even games (Fallout, anyone?). I don't know if it's just my pessimism about world affairs seeping into my tastes, or whether it's a particularly healthy thing, but I think I might try throwing a few more upbeat items into my reading list just in case. At least one person seems to be scared.

In other news, school can't come soon enough. I'm definitely looking forward to swapping some of the endless hours of bookselling for some time hanging out in seminar rooms (lecture halls, you say? Nope. My biggest class this semester is a lean 20 souls).

Another successful visit to Oakville this week, this time with more silly Wii action, lots of prowling around Toronto, a hot-tub dive, and a screening of Stardust.

I gotta say, Mr. Gaiman and his film folks did a damn good job with this one. Not much was quite how I had pictured it, but that was half the fun. Stardust was always the kind of story that would translate well to film, and the fact that they had a bajillion stars and a big fat special-effects budget certainly didn't hurt. It felt like they jumped around Harry-Potter-style at times (i.e. showing assorted scenes from the book in such a scattershot fashion that somebody who hadn't read it would be very confused), but KJ said she had no trouble following the narrative, so I guess that wasn't the case. One thing's for certain, though: Robert De Niro completely steals the show.

The other reason for my visit to the GTA was another Random House free-books bonanza. The swag ain't what it used to be, I'm afraid, but I still got some great stuff (global warming doom-and-gloom, some nice fiction, and IOUs for the new Doug Coupland and a few other hot fall titles). Naomi Klein and Christie Blatchford were also there, and both gave excellent speeches. I was certainly glad to have picked the morning rather than the afternoon show; instead of Ms. Klein, they met Bret "Hitman" Hart.

The negative conclusion to the otherwise-positive week? I think I might have caught KJ's sister's cold. I am a font of snot, spittle, and head pain. Not sexy at all, and I'm missing work to boot.

So yes. I just saw Muse, and it was awesome. Concerts being such overwhelming and scattershot things, and me being so very drained, we're doing this one bullet-point style.

• The venue: Arrow Hall, a block north of Pearson Airport. The hall itself looks like a dressed-up aircraft hanger, all naked beams and garage doors. Thankfully, the acoustics were gorgeous, and KJ and I managed to fight our way up to about six bodies away from the stage.
• The opening band was Cold War Kids, a bluesy Christian indie-rock act out of California. What a Christian band was doing opening for Muse, I'll never know (have you listened to "Megalomania?" Really?), but they played well and were far from the worst band I've seen.
• I hate Toronto highschoolers. The crowd was downright violent. Poor KJ almost got knocked over a couple of times when people started moshing, and there was a point where I lapsed into Angry Overprotective Boyfriend Mode and started flinging sweaty sixteen-year-olds left and right. Needless to say, we eventually had a nice bit of space to ourselves.
• I don't think I've ever been to a more visually impressive concert. The setup at last year's show was fancy enough, but they pulled out all the stops this time. Fancy lights on the drum riser, gigantic confetti-filled balloons, hilarious CGI videos in the background, dry ice, a laser-firing chrome guitar...any lesser band would face accusations of trying to overcompensate for a lack of talent. The coolest gadget of all? Matt's clear-topped piano that had pink lights blinking in a pattern tied to whatever he was playing. There needs to be a viola that does this.
• That said, there were certainly enough technical difficulties. Overenthusiastic dancing caused Matt to accidentally unplug his guitar at one point, and the roadies had to come out to do on-the-spot repairs twice. The wah-wah pedal on the piano also broke, leading to the infamously-taciturn Matt's longest sentence of the night: "Dammit, wah-wah's bust. Just a minute." However, had we not had to wait five minutes for them to go scrounge up a spare wah, we wouldn't have heard a hilarious jam on "Entry of the Gladiators."
• It looks like God doesn't want me to hear "Citizen Erased" or "City of Delusion," and KJ didn't get her favourite song ("Bliss") either, but I'm still pleased with the setlist (until I find out that tomorrow's show gets all of the above); there was a nice mix of old and new, and the long string of piano songs took the wind out of the moshers' sails. Besides, getting two encores negates all griping rights.
  

Encore 1
Soldier's Poem
Unintended
Plug-In Baby (with obligatory guitar-behind-head action)

Encore 2
Take A Bow
Stockholm Syndrome (with more tasty bonus riffing)

EDIT: We've got photos, people. Pilfered from MicroCuts:

Well, this entry was certainly a few days coming. Such is life, though.

Book Expo felt a bit more subdued than the mayhem of past years, but there was still some great stuff to be seen. I met William Gibson (looks unwell these days, but is super-friendly) and Guy Gavriel Kay (nice goatee!), which was the sort of recovering-SF&F-fan splooge that surely had the convention janitors living in fear. Naomi Klein was exactly the sort of benevolent presence I would have expected, and Jean Paré was a very kind old lady. I also got to hang out with Expo fixtures Robert Sawyer and Will Ferguson for a bit (a prequel to Happiness?! Definitely the best find of the show), drank an unwieldly amount of free booze (mimosas and keg beer are somehow the fuel of trade shows), and picked up a bulging backpack of novels, history and cookbooks. Oddest of all, Jean Chrétien was there to plug his upcoming memoirs. Love him or hate him, dude has charisma. He's much easier to understand without a microphone in his face, too. I had no trouble understanding him in either official language (though the monolinguals in the crowd seemed rather miffed that half of his speech was in French. Tough luck, kids). He also gets the best catering. Asparagus wrapped in smoked salmon? Weird, but damn tasty, as were the samosas.

Highlights of the haul:

• Don DeLillo's Falling Man
• Advance copies of Ferguson and Gibson's fall releases
• Martin Neufeld's (the original Hugging Busker) biography (yes, I got a hug)
• A vegan cookbook for KJ
• Klein's Fences and Windows
• Dr. Marcone's (the catshit coffee guy from Guelph) book
• The Heavy Metal Colouring Book (toooo funny)
• Assorted indie novels

Tonight was a fun one too, a wonderful break from all the work I've been doing lately. Our dearest Ailish is Ireland-bound, so we saw her off in a flurry of pizza and hair. It's really best not to ask.

Visiting Oakville this week was much fun. KJ showed me around the town, such as it is, and while I'm now utterly convinced that the place embodies everything that's wrong with our world, it makes for a pleasant afternoon of wandering. One highlight had to be the Treasure Island bookstore, which is slowly collapsing under the mass of the books within. That dude needs another floor, and at least two more employees.

We also got lots of gaming in. I had my first serious stab at a Wii (I'm mostly useless, but a pretty good bowler), we dabbled in Kingdom Hearts, and the entire Hine clan joined us for a good game of Apples to Apples. Good times all around.

My goodness, it's been a busy little while. I attended KJ's grandma's 80th birthday party, moved into a new apartment, celebrated my birthday in a loud and silly manner, and only now is life returning to some semblance of peace and quiet. But oh, it's been a good few days. Everything is falling right into place. 

KJ dropped by yesterday, bringing me a dose of her latest addiction: the computer game Civilization IV. I doubt I'll get as hooked on it as she seems to be, but it's a damn fun game. The game is known for its historical-hodgepodge empires, and we wasted no time following suit: my monolithic German Reich is a horde of Christian communists whose hand-grenade attacks are feared around the world, my capital city is centred around Chichen Itza, and I just destroyed the Greeks' civilization in the Arctic. It's good to be the king.

Speaking of kings and goodness, the bookstore is having another big management shuffle. One of the dudes we hired around Christmas just got promoted to an assistant manager spot, and Michelle (the general manager) finally got herself a job at the Home Office. This is going to be interesting. Ian strikes me as the kind of guy who could either continue to be awesome or be absolutely corrupted by his newfound power, and the loss of Michelle is as rotten for us as it is deserved for her (she's pretty much the best manager ever, and the only person I've had the privilege of working with throughout my six years with the company). I expect some grotesque office politics in the weeks to come.

A final note: the only thing funnier than a customer hitting on me like mad is running into the same customer a day later while my girlfriend and I are out shopping.

So really, the old blog is pretty much a dying beast, felled by the treble spears of Facebook, the madness of school, and a strange apathy on my part. I miss that part of my life, though, and I wonder if this glossy new façade will reinvigorate me at all. One of my summer resolutions (beyond lots of language study and trying to get into better shape) will be to try to update this thing at least every other day. The catharsis is soothing, and heaven knows I need to write a bit more often.

(have no fear: I still have every intention of continuing to check my LJ friends page to keep up on everybody. It's still a handy RSS-watcher, too)

So what's new? Let's stay true to form and do a good ol'-fashioned Brad Bullet post...

• Dr. J. "Hans" Bakker has agreed to be my thesis advisor. Projected topic: something to do with puns and wordplay as a form of "social currency" and barometer of prestige, but there definitely need to be a few more big words in there before I have a good title. Hans has an idea about incorporating his own pet topic, Peircean semiotics, into it, but we've yet to hammer out the details. I'm just giddy that I get to work with my first-choice professor, and that the terrifying academic milestone is about to become a reality.
  
• I spent most of last week in the receiving bay at Chapters, covering Kyle's vacation (to Norway?!). I had missed being back there. It's definitely a lot better than life on the sales floor.
  
• KJ and I have discovered the joys of homemade Asian food. We made a spectacular "monk's soup" on Thursday (udon, tofu, beans, and mushrooms in hot and spicy broth), and it was some quality stuff. As much as I'm in love with the Red Papaya, it's nice to know that I can make reasonable approximations of their food at home.
• After a week with my new laptop (one of these), I'm pretty damned pleased. Even the spectre of Windows Vista turned out to not be as horrible as I had feared. With the caveat that I'm neither a prolific pirate nor a heavy gamer (or otherwise a power user at all, really), the Longhorned Demon has thus far been a very livable OS. User Account Control (the chirpy security-guard software that Mac has had a great time lampooning in their commercials) is fine once you disable it, I haven't had any crashes yet, and it somehow manages to be staggeringly pretty without much burden on the processor. My only big beef is that some of the older programs I have refuse to run on the new version of DirectX.
• Thomas Pynchon is one crazy dude. Having finished The Crying of Lot 49, and having loved it, I decided to give one of his more typically huge novels a shot (all of his books besides Lot 49, which he once called "a short story with a gland problem," fall somewhere in the 800-1300-page range). Mason and Dixon is damn near killing me. The guy still writes like a fallen angel, but the sheer density of the thing is stunning. To capture the mood as he bastardises the tale of the titular surveyors, the whole book is written with all the tics and oddities of eighteenth-century English. I give you the first sentence:

"Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk wind off Delaware,– the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd-foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen, in a purposeful Dither since Morning, punctuated by the ringing Lids of various Boilers and Stewing-Pots, fragrant with Pie-Spices, peel'd Fruits, Suet, heated Sugar,– the Children, having all upon the Fly, among rhythmic slaps of Batter and Spoon, coax'd and stolen what they might, proceed, as upon each afternoon all this snowy Advent, to a comfortable Room at the rear of the House, years since given over to their carefree Assaults."

            The book is much more fun than all of that makes it seem to be, I promise.

• KJ sent me this link a while ago. Holy fuck. I can't believe the amount of detail that guy put into those, especially some of the Zerg and Protoss units. The Reaver and Mutalisk are unbelievable.