Words At Arm’s Length

1. “Good Arms vs. Bad Arms” – Frightened Rabbit

2. “First Communion” – Gang Gang Dance

3. “Sleepyhead” – Passion Pit

4. “Young Eucharists” – Parenthetical Girls

5. “XXZXCUZX Me” – Crystal Castles

6. “The Rip” – Portishead

7. “You Want That Picture” – Bonnie “Prince” Billy

8. “Broken Homes” – The Sleeping Years

9. “Little Bit” – Lykke Li

10. “Bendable Poseable” – Hot Chip

11. “Your Future Looks Bright” – Meho Plaza

12. “Top Drawer” – Man Man

13. “Raquel” – Neon Neon

14. “Dr. Carter” – Lil Wayne

15. “Tar Heart” – Zeigeist

16. “The Kelly Affair” – Be Your Own Pet

17. “Introducing Angels” – Destroyer

18. “Never See Me Again” – Vivian Girls

19. “Until We Bleed” – Kleerup feat. Lykke Li

20. “Gallery Piece” – Of Montreal

1. Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna

2. Parenthetical Girls – Entanglements

3. The Sleeping Years – We Are Becoming Islands One by One

4. Portishead – Third

5. Department of Eagles – In Ear Park

6. TV On the Radio – Dear Science,

7. Meho Plaza – Meho Plaza

8. Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight

9. Girl Talk – Feed The Animals

10. The Cool Kids – The Bake Sale

11. Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

12. Plants & Animals – Parc Avenue

13. Hercules & The Love Affair – Hercules & The Love Affair

14. Passion Pit – Chunk of Change EP

15. Lykke Li – Youth Novels

16. Vivian Girls – Vivian Girls

17. Shearwater – Rook

18. Deerhunter – Microcastle

19. Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Lie Down in the Light

20. Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles

Honourable Mentions

Why? – Alopecia

Antony & The Johnsons – Another World EP

Venetian Snares – Detrimentalist

Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago

Blitzen Trapper – Furr

Kleerup – Kleerup

Hot Chip – Made in the Dark

No Age – Nouns

Neon Neon – Stainless Style

Zeigeist – The Jade Motel

Well, the trailer is finally here:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/43685.html

Deep breath. Okay. Here I go.

It’s not that I WANT this game to fail, nor do I think that Dante or any other work of literature is above being put into video game format. Games can be artistic. Games can do all kinds of things. Which is why I’m wondering why the FUCK EA is turning the Inferno into yet another dungeon crawling slaughterfest with a generic musclebound protagonist when they could have just left poor Dante alone (it worked for Diablo).

Now, listen, I love violent video games as much as the rest of my gender/age demographic. Like, a lot. I get those “wow” moments when I see a sweet headshot or dismember aliens just like the rest of you. But here’s a little food for thought: You see in that trailer how anger and violence are two of the rings in Hell? Yeah, if the end of the game is anything other than the Cross-wielding protagonist writhing in the Pit for eternity then it’ll make NO FUCKING SENSE.

Dante’s Inferno should not be an action game. Sorry guys, it’s about a fucking poet who gets a GUIDED TOUR through Hell. Many philosophical revelations are had. Much sadness ensues. This is NOT the plot of an action game. This is the plot for Myst. Or a puzzle game (hey, not a bad idea!).

I get that violence in video games is the point for a ot of people. Some of us gamers don’t even play games where you can’t kill somebody or something. I get that. But games where violence exists only for the sake of violence can’t be the only kind of game out there. This season it’s taken me so long to even pick up one of the many AAA titles because there doesn’t seem to be much of a point beyond the BLAP BLAP BLAP. Left 4 Dead has sweet multiplayer, so that got my attention, but a lot of the other titles (Dead Space, Gears 2) had me excited for a brief spell than just made me say “meh”. The game that really got me this year was LittleBIGPlanet, because even though it’s a solid platformer, it’s so much more than that. It’s a creative tool on top of being ridiculously fun, and the community levels just show how much people have been craving a game like this.

So, do we need another first-or-third-person action game like Dante’s Inferno? Well, maybe it’ll be more fun and original than it seems to me, but my guess is that it’s going to mishandle the source material and have a few quirks about it that set it apart from the rest of the pack without doing much to push the genre forward. It’s wait-and-see, obviously, but this to me feels like a bad videogame-to-movie adaptation, only this time it’s the video game getting it wrong.

You know how there are places where you just feel right at home? That’s me at the Dance Cave. Some friends and I rolled into the ‘Cave last night and the music was pretty much amazing the whole night through. I got to play the beard on multiple occasions last night (often with hilarious results) and I just danced the shit out of it.

Another place that feels like home is Boom. Best breakfast place ever? Yes. Yes it is. No question. Their Two Egg Breakfast  is THE crowning culinary achievement of mankind. And the rest of the menu stacks up pretty favourably. One day I’m going to bring like $100 of disposable income and just make a pig of myself. Perhaps I’ll bring a friend…to watch the ensuing carnage.

When I made it back home from Toronto today, I felt oddly out of place. My grandparents were over for a visit and I just wanted to vanish into my bedspread for a few hours. Which I did, rudely enough. After the appetizer I went to rest my head and ended sleeping through the main course. Oh well, I’ll make it up on Christmas, somehow. ‘Tis the season, after all.

I already miss Toronto. Soon. Soon I’ll be there and not here.

we met as strangers do
and in meeting learned our senses
he was acrid and rough
with strange substances strewn about him
antimony and jade
which added nothing to his strangeness
that was in his look
the narrow, spiralling gaze
vertigo vision that saw around my paper frame
his royal highness
grousing and grumbling between meetings
coming up for air
to tell fish how to swim
and each grumble was to me a holy truth
that shone and shivered up my earlobe
until we lay together pacified
knowing the unhappy end
sated in an explosive embrace
and dispersing like shrapnel
across a dusty floor

I like fashion. A lot. I wish I had more money for the sheer fact that I want to be able to dress well every day and try new clothes and looks all the time. This idea is lost on a lot of people, mostly because they don’t understand the fun (and power!) of toying with one’s own personal aesthetic. I have my limits, of course, but I’m really willing to try anything. If I had the money, I’d have a new outfit every day.

That being said, I have a pretty checkered past when it comes to my day-to-day wear. Due to my consistent experience (see: clashing) with retail and Catholicism, I have been subjected to many uniforms, thus stifling my personal sense of fashion. Uniforms that aren’t military or for emergency services are almost always the most unflattering monstrosities and retail seems to perpetuate this the most (with the possible exception of food services). Here, in chronological order, is the history of my teenage and young adult life, told through the lameness that is uniform apparel:

Uniform #1: The Catholic School Boy

Grey slacks, white shirt, green sweater vest, black or brown shoes. I would wear this every weekday for four years. Completely non-functional. The sweater was always overly warm in a school that blasted its furnace day in and day out. The pants were too hot for the summer and provided zero insulation for the winter, and we boys didn’t have the option of shorts. A tangible example of Catholic self-flagellation.

Uniform #2: The Shoppers Drug Mart Special

Navy blue trousers, powder-blue button-down, which changed to royal blue, optional sweater. As The Only Guy at my Shoppers for a while, I got to be the fashion template for any and all male employees to follow (all the 65+ years old drivers, essentially). The store was always cold and the 100% polyester everything didn’t help matters. The pants looked horrendous with the slightest bit of dust on them, which was swell considering how much time we spent sitting of the floor to stock shelves. A clear case of quality taking a dive in the match against cost.

Uniform #3: The Business Casual

Only technically a uniform. Non-denim pants, dress shoes, collared shirt, no visible tattoos. Wouldn’t normally be problem except that all of the money I spend on pants tends to drift to jeans out of habit. This is an easily abused clothing rule and resulted in many questionably-dressed co-workers. The call centre standard, and the source of too many ill-fitting khakis.

Uniform #4: The Best Buy Blue

Khakis, blue Best Buy polo, brown or black belt with matching dress shoes. Surprisingly  not horrible, in the comfort department at least. The impossibly blue polo has the unfortunate side effect of making you visible from incredibly long distances, thus making you prey to desperate, confused and irritated shoppers. Also creates the assumption that you know everything about every product ever sold at Best Buy. A widely recognized look that induces pitying or mocking looks from onlookers on the streets.

Uniform #5: The That’s Entertainment Penguin Spectacular

Black slacks, shoes and vest, white collared shirt, and cherry on top: a black bow tie. So far, this look has elicited uncontrollable laughter from 3 out of 4 of my family members, and embarrassed looks from pretty much everyone else, including regular customer at the store. Attempts to subvert said uniform through minor fashion changes seem risky due to its impossibly rigid nature. The ultimate character-building ensemble: if you can bring yourself to wear this regularly and still maintain your self-respect, you can take pretty much anything.

This is a grim life portrait. Maybe something more uplifting for my next post…

Dear Life:

Please stop. For a day, maybe two. Just let me catch my breath and find my footing. Please?

No? Okay then. Moving on.

I suffered the wrath of one of my customers at Best Buy today, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. The woman was IN TEARS, screaming about our lack of Wiis in store. I took her aside to an empty part of the store (New Country CDs, natch) and calmed her down. She said she worked over 60 hours a week, couldn’t afford eBay prices and didn’t have the time to line-up outside of a store for 3 hours before opening. She apologized for getting upset and asked if there was anything I could do.

I told her no, that I couldn’t hold a system for her, as it was against store policy. So I asked her how old her kids were.  Between 13 and 16, she said. She told me how much her kids had been bugging her about getting a Wii, and I was just kind of flabbergasted at the whole situation. I said, “Ma’am, in my family, if we wanted something that bad at that age we’d wait for it. Tell them Santa might need a few extra days. They’re old enough to understand.”  It was like a light bulb went off behind her eyes. She seriously hadn’t even considered ordering one for after the Christmas rush.

Seriously guys, this is what the holidays have given us: public histrionics, high blood pressure and stressed out salespeople. Maybe this is the year, considering the economy, to shatter your children’s illusions about magic men who bring free gifts to kids once a year. Let them know where this shit comes from. Santa will forever remain a very overexposed symbol of what this holiday represents (consumption, Christian imperialism, fur coats), so let him be a symbol and not some fantasy to perpetuate your stress and your children’s illusion of where shit comes from. Have some dignity. Christ.

Wow, this post turned out to be rather bitter and pointless. Paul needs sleep.

Way back when, I made a post about Oz and the psychological implications of “fantasy world” narratives. Well, last night, I got together with my buds and we ended up watching Return to Oz with Fairuza Balk. It’s an amazing movie that’s way too complex for its intended audience. The movie is dark in a way that makes recent “adult fairy tale” and those Burtonesque children’s remakes look tame in comparison.

We start the movie with Dorothy, whose sleep has been sporadic and fitful since her return from Oz and the aftermath of the tornado. Auntie Em is seriously questioning Dorothy’s sanity, so much so that she is willing to force Dorothy to undergo experimental electro-shock therapy, which, at the time in which the story is set, is extremely dangerous. Girls were a much easier target for these types of experimental treatments because of their so-called “fragile mental states” and “bouts of hysteria”, so a girl like Dorothy, who claims that talking lions and men made of tin are real, and is supposedly receiving messages from an alternate world that she reached via tornado,  is an obvious candidate.

Cut to the hospital, and things start to get really messed up. What really gets me about this movie is the subtlety of it. There’s no way I caught what was really going on in these scenes when I was a kid. The doctor is clearly taking advantage of the desperation of poor people like Auntie Em and Dorothy to provide a quick fix to deeply-rooted psychological problems, all so he can continue his experiments on fresh specimens instead of what they call the “broken patients” that they lock in the cellar. Kids movie? That’s how it’s marketed! And the nightmare fuel has only just started to flow.

Dorothy is rescued from her first shock treatment by a well-timed blackout and a fellow girl inmate at the hospital, who may or may not be a figment of Dorothy’s imagination. They escape together, only to be chased to a nearby river during a rainstorm. Dorothy’s possibly-fake saviour drowns in spite of Dorothy’s attempts to save her, and Dorothy passes out on a floating piece of debris, only to wake up in Oz. There she sees that her childhood dreamland has pretty much been gutted, starting with the yellow brick road and ending with the Emerald City, with all of her old friends either missing or turned to stone. If Oz is indeed a reflection of Dorothy’s psyche, it seems the pathologizing of her fantasy life has turned it into a nightmare realm, and her innocent fantasy that aided her in asserting herself in the first book and movie have been usurped by distorted versions of the hospital’s inhabitants. Many of the dopplegangers that Dorothy’s psyche creates are disturbing, but in retrospect, the worst is how the “broken patients” are reinterpreted. While the people who work at the hospital get appropriately horrifying recreations in her mind, Dorothy only ever heard the screams of the “broken patients”, and thus can only interpret them as thunder, during the Doctor/Gnome King’s last (and unsettling) guessing game near the end of the movie. Pretty fucked up, eh?

The final mindfuck comes at the end of the movie. Once good has triumped and the people of Oz laud Dorothy’s performance and ask her to be queen, she says no, knowing that she has to return to her world at some point, and thus we get the appearance of Ozma, the “rightful ruler of Oz”. Who just happens to be identical to Dorothy’s drowned rescuer. Hrm. Ozma quickly steps in as this infallibe God Mode Sue-type character and sends Dorothy home, and gives her the ability to communicate with Ozma through mirrors so that she has someone to talk to about Oz. So: Dorothy, having briefly met a girl, being saved by her and then failing to save her when the situation was reversed, projects the girl as the ultimate ruler of her fantasy world so that she, Dorothy, can overcome her survivor’s guilt and somehow keep up her fantasy life instead of actually accepting the loss in reality. The final shot of Ozma is her in Dorothy’s mirror, hushing Dorothy and preventing her from getting Auntie Em’s attention so that Dorothy can finally prove that Oz is real. Through Ozma, Dorothy learns to simultaneously hide AND perpetuate her hallucinations.

And hey, guys, this is a live-action DISNEY movie. Fer serious.

This movie is actually pretty awesome, though. It’s incredibly well-shot, the score is awesome, Miss Balk showed some chops as a child actor and the supporting cast of villains is fantastic. Even a lot of the special effects hold up today because they were so well-conceived. My only gripe is the marketing, of course. We think Oz and of course the first reaction is either “kids movie” or “totally gay” (and hey, fair enough), but Return to Oz is so oddly nuanced that it really benefits from a more mature reading. Go rent or buy. It’s worth it.

Hey folks, you few who read my blog. I know I promised a lot of blogging after my last long-winded post, but circumstances in my life pretty much killed my drive to write. Holiday season is upon us, and my financial situation was putting enough stress on me to derail my plans to produce anything, which is funny, because in that time I had more time to write than ever. Go figure.

So, as of now, I’m currently employed at That’s Entertainment and Best Buy, the first day of the former being tomorrow morning. This is not the most ideal situation, as both places require me to work random shift times and thus I have to somehow co-ordinate the two. I’m sure I’ll manage somehow. The upside to these jobs is that at That’s I get to work with Becky, which will be nothing short of awesome, and at Best Buy I can drop in on Aaron when our shifts coincide. Best Buy is really fast-paced at this time of year, of course, so the shifts fly by. I basically just walk around for 5 hours, direct people to their gift of choice, and tell them that, no, we don’t have any Wiis or Wii Fit in stock, and all their children’s dreams of a Merry Christmas have withered on the holly branch. I feel bad for some of these clueless parents. They really try hard to get the hot Christmas gifts that all their kids want and look so frustrated and crushed when I tell them that Nintendo won’t be meeting the demand for their consoles, and the constant shortage of systems is part of their plot to keep people in a frenzy over their products. Worse is that once they get the key titles for the Wii (which I can count on two hands, pretty sad for a system that’s been out out for two years), there’s not much else to do with it, so it’s all a lot of effort for naught.

Anyhow, hopefully I can get paid enough to get my family and friends presents for the holidays, though I’m sure a homemade component will be added so my gifts won’t seem too paltry. I rocked out some baking for Luke and Kelly’s birthday presents yesterday and it turned out pretty well, methinks. Only 17 days left…

So last time I posted I mentioned something of a romantic spin on my life. That’s over now. There’s not much to say about it otherwise.

I still feel like I’m spinning my wheels at the moment, but hopefully that feeling will subside a little bit once I start getting paid consistently and can focus on something other than my credit card payments. I’m slogging through Mrs. Dalloway and deciding which video game I’m going to take on next (probably the new Price of Persia, I watched my brother play it and it looks sah-weet). The problem is that every time I pick up a book or a video game, I feel like I’m distracting myself. These are hobbies that I love, and now they just make me anxious. And my music-listening has taken a plunge too. Still so many albums backlogged that I just can’t bring myself to listen to yet. I keep returning to the familiar favourites so I don’t have to think as much.

Three hours and twenty minutes until my alarm goes off. Until next time, gentle readers.