IN (1)

A desert expanse waits outside the room windows, but that only encourages Carson to return to his INdivan  beside the others arrayed in a fantastic digital design. The  room, unlike the dystopic images from many of your choice of twentieth century films and novels, was bright, coloured in waves of pixels and windows to the outdoors. It was not unpleasant at all, and there was choice. There were real options for those of us who had not as yet fully opted IN. 

Carson had to admit at this point that he was likely more IN than not. He hadn't paid attention to this stats lately. He recalled Petra suggesting that this was the first sign that he would go all  IN at some point. Whether or not you simply felt that it took too much energy to check, or whether it was the fatigue that comes from continually confronting the possibility of loss, not knowing how much time you were IN indicated something, she said. "It means that you've got a preference. That you're leaning toward IN. That you go OUT for a break, but you know you're going back IN. That you're always measuring the time that way." This memory was from a while back. Carson can't be specific about it. He's rummaging about in his mind for the last memory he's had of a conversation with Petra. Was that it? Smiling, he thinks that he might try google it. Of course it will be logged, to be found somewhere ing the v-base. Every room had one. He turns from the window to Petra lying on her IN-divan beside him. He wants to touch her, to awaken her. Only his respect for the freewill protocols stop him. From withIN he's can invite her OUT, but she retains full right to her bodyspace.

You'd think that since most were IN for most of the time that the scan would not take long. Still the range of vocabulary people use during an OUTmoment is quite narrow. What word could he search that would be unique to that one conversation? His memory reels. Resisting the siren call of his INdivan he stands at one of the upright datadocks and keys in 'Petra.' Ten thousand and twenty-two results, beginning with the most recent whose first frame includes Petra and the form of a woman named Naomi. Carson realizes his error immediately. Now he'll want to know more. How many OUTmoments has Petra taken since the last one they had? With whom? Was she forgetting? Why wasn't he? He refines his search prompts: 'Petra,' and 'INtime.' 

As he waits he feels the room fill with the unison susurrant breathing of the INs. This was touted as one of the marvels of going IN, that to Carson had seemed so banal at the time. One brochure header he'd read went: "go IN, get INtune!" How long ago was that? His self-mem was in decline. Bits and pieces - pastiches - unassimilable bits. A headline or an image without context. How long had he had these questions? Didn't he have a recollection of the datadocks being busy? Of having to go IN if he wanted to get data-time? Why was he the only one standing now, in the bright light of the sun? Why did the white sun seem so near? And the sand outside - had it always so fully surrounded the room?

The desolation was expansive and gorgeous. Blue sky. Tan-red sand sifting in the wind around the trunks of trees that remained a miraculous green. He thought he remembered talk of subterranean irrigation. He thought he remembered talk of the appreciation of this new aesthetic: barren-lush.

          

2011: A good year

Monkey Bread

I baked cookies and Monkey Bread tonight. We don't know why it's called Monkey Bread. In the absence of a more apt name, we use the one everyone else uses. We hope no one is offended. I'm not sure that monkeys even eat bread - though this bread is pretty good, so I doubt they could resist! 

Here's what it looks like (though I baked mine in two loaf tins).

Here's how you bake Monkey bread. 

1. Mix the dough/add the goodies.

• Monkey bread lends itself to freelancing; you don’t have to follow a recipe.
• You can start with your favorite bread recipe. To fill a bundt pan, you will need a recipe that calls for about four cups of flour. Mix as you would another bread.
• We usually add several tablespoons of sugar for a little sweeter bread. For an egg-rich bread, add an egg or two. You can also add cocoa, dry fruit, or nuts.

2. Cut the chunks.

• The easiest way to cut the dough is to roll it out on the counter to a thickness of 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick and cut the dough into squares with a sharp knife or pizza roller. The chunks should be no larger than walnuts.

3. Coat the chunks.

• There are two ways to coat the chunks: dip the chunks in butter and roll them in a sugar mixture or make a buttery slurry and dip the chunks in the slurry.
• The chunks can be rolled in a mixture of sugar and spices and finely chopped nuts.
• Jam, maple syrup, or fruit syrup can be used as the basis for a dipping slurry.
• Nuts or fruit can be added between layers if desired. If you want to top your monkey bread with nuts, place nuts in the bottom of the pan since the monkey bread will be inverted onto a platter after baking.

4. Load the pan.

• You don’t have to use a bundt pan; any pan will do though tube pans and springform pans may leak.

5. Bake the bread.

• Bake the bread at 350 degrees or as directed by the recipe. Once baked, let the monkey bread cool in the pan for about five minutes before inverting on a platter. This gives the glaze a chance to set so that it does not run everywhere when inverted.
• Serve the monkey bread warm and fresh.

Ride report

in:          -7'C wind 45ks NW

out:      -14'C wind 15ks WNW

It's what you want

Holding it there on her lap perfectly wrapped in red foil with a gold bow, it’s weird how she goes on talking like she’s got nothing for you. Outside the snow falls like lace lifting in the wind. What if I just take it? you say. She smiles back. Do you dare? Well that’s the crux of it right there isn’t it, because these days everyone has the courage of their desires. Even without understanding this you'll do it. All you can do is watch.     

Ride report:

in:     (brought in the car for new struts)

out:  -12'C wind 10 ks S

How To Train Your Dragon

Colby finally came through! After several bait and switch suggestions that we would be watching How To Train Your Dragon, we watched it tonight. It was fun. The storyline was recognizable and simple (which is a good thing if you're watching a movie with Colby!), and the animation, as far as I could tell, was well done, even beautiful at times - I particularly liked the scenes with the vast moonlit ocean in the background (though those scenes were also the corniest).

I really don't know how to review an American-made animated feature, as compared to a live-action feature, or even compared to Japanese Anime. Are the standards different? It kind of feels that way. That is, the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (98%) and IMDB (8.2/10) are so over-the-top positive that I can't figure it out. I mean this isn't a bad movie, but it's not a great one. It's not innovative in anyway that I can see. It's pretty, and technically well-executed, but the story isn't worth much of a mention as being compelling or imaginative. 

Here's a list of some of the hacked tropes it includes: misunderstood, underdog son/hero; bombastic, unfeeling, violent, jerkface father; huge, odd-duck, mishapen sidekick (the Hagrid factor); the cute girl who finally understands; the bullies who finally understand; the creatures of the natural world misunderstood as hateful and dangerous, but actually loving ... except for that spawn of evil which lurks deep in the belly of the Earth (oh the conflictedness of it - to love the Earth or fear it - which will it be?); the "it all comes together in the end" ending. There are more. I won't mention the visually stereotypes of comfort (the warm lights of home) and dazzle (the crazy firefights) that abound here.  

There are also several missed opportunities of interesting revisions of the above tropes: a female hero? (why not?); a father and a mother that care, even if they're misguided (what the heck is going on with the lack of fully-formed two-parent families in animated films? - thank you Lion King and Coraline!); let's have all the children be less easily co-opted into the adult agenda (like Super 8). 

Anyway, as far as I'm interested in animated feature films, I will continue to pay attention to anime pieces like Princess Mononoke & Tekkonkinkreet. These movies stand alone as mature pieces of art and need not be treated with the kid gloves like most American animated features. The closest a Hollywood animated feature has come to compelling is the first 30 minutes of Wall-E, and that section of the film does it without dialogue! By the way, aren't voices done by "stars" one of the more problematic aspects of animation? Here the Viking father speaks in a Scottish brogue (Gerard Butler), while his son speaks a kind of slacker middle-Americanese (Jay Baruchel). Why?

That's enough. We had a good time with Colby. The movie entertained us. That was certainly sufficient for tonight. I'll stop with my griping already.

Ride report

in:       -10'C wind 20 ks N

out:    -11'C wind  12 ks N

Under no moon

George wakes up after a dream. It's 4:37. The night is cold and clear - stars but no moon. The temperature has fallen from above zero to minus 15. That's what they'd predicted, that's what happened. Under no moon. If I were brave now, he thinks, I'd get up and start writing. I'd write down this dream. I'd start with the large two-and-a-half-storey clapboard siding house with the veranda, and the family of five living in it. The trusting community wherein no one locks doors and the psychotic killer finds a place to wage his campaign of terror. The scene wherein the young girl, the middle daughter, cowers in the bathtub only to be found and without hesitation or soundtrack of warning sliced and hacked by the killer's strangely small sickle-shaped blade, her face and neck bearing the brunt of it, the blood minimalist in this scene as she kneels before him and then, still moaning despite the near complete removal of her face, falls forward on all fours at the killer's feet. Meanwhile the rest of the family, without George of course, has fled the house and stands in front of it, on the lawn, as though it were aflame, hugging one another, waiting. For what? The dream gives him this image as it closes, and he awakens: his wife and two daughters huddled in terror before his house while he, presumably from the front door, under cover of the veranda, exits. Who is the killer? he wonders. 

If he gets up now to write he'll make good use of the day. The dream is a gift. The exit at the end an obvious entrance into story. Into writing. You'd be reading it right now if George had heeded his own best advice. Rather though, he sighs, gets up and goes to the toilet, relieves himself, and returns to bed, the sheets damp from his sweat. Chilled now he pulls the comforter closer. He was hot, now he's cold. Beside him Rebecca awakens and says, "Can't sleep?"

"Dream," he says. "Nightmare. Stupid. A slasher."

"Ouch," she says. 

"You?" he says.

"No, just my neck. I slept funny I think."

"I should get up now," he says.

"Time?" she says, looking up. "Oh! It's almost five!"

"Yeah, I could get up."

"I can't," she says, "I should be sleeping on my back, flat. Not like this."

The radio wakes him at 8:13. He's had a second dream. This one's about being late for work. George doesn't want to think about it. He lies and waits for the ecstasies of the sports announcers, and then sits up, dresses, and heads to the kitchen to make coffee. It's Sunday, thank God. 

Ride report

Rode to Altona, then to Morris (for Steak'n'eggs at Burkes) with JS. Steven started out with us but 13 ks in his derailleur hanger broke and he called for a ride (and generously encouraged us to ride on). It was a good ride, though we'd misunderestimated the wind direction and speed - it was from the NW and so we had to ride into it for a good bit. Otherwise the temperatures were right, as was the breakfast and the company.

 

I'm trying not to eat after 8 pm

Today I failed. I had some tortilla chips just before 9. I couldn't help myself. They were so salty. So crisp. So unassuming in their nearly unseasoned state. They are, simply, my "I don't wanna eat much, but I wanna eat something" go to snack.

I solved the yen for something on my palette with a whisky tonight. That worked. Earlier I'd tried some pear flavoured green tea. That wasn't bad, but it didn't work, obviously. Read the confession above. 

Eating after 8, or worse after 10, has contributed to a long string of bad nights. I get to bed late because my gut feels leaden. So I read. Not a bad thing, but still, not sleeping. As the clock approaches 1:00 am I tell myself to stop reading. I turn off the light. I lie on my back. I wait. 

Sleep hovers somewhere up above the moon. Somewhere up and to the left of heaven. I lie on my back for maybe 3 minutes and then I turn and lie on my side - my left side, facing away from M. Another few minutes pass. Sleep begins to descend the ladder. 

I might as well be using a stone pillow. I turn a full 180' rotation to face M. Maybe spoon. It depends which way she's facing. This serves little purpose really. I know from long experience that I will not fall asleep while spooning. You can guess why. 

I sigh. I turn back onto my back. When I was recuperating from my broken kneecap I had to sleep on my back. At first this was hell, but like all things you are forced to do, you figure out how it can work and you make do. Soon you're used to it. Then you have a taste for it. 

Lying on my back is the most comfortable position for the wait, but by 1:30 I've lost faith in it too. So I'm back to my left side, facing south. My head to the east, in case you're wondering whether the energy's moving in the right direction. I think it is. Still, I've had to wait a long time for sleep to descend. 

Occasionally I roll onto my stomach. This is just a time waster. A position changer. It's interim at best. I will not sleep this way. I will sigh. I will face south. Then I will face M. I will consider spooning again. I will think maybe ... 

Of course that makes me sleepy, but not M. And she's already asleep. So this is not a fair way to solve my problem. Of course there is the issue of desire, and the work involved in cultivating it. One can't just charge in without some softening of the defenses. But I digress.

I'm convinced that my sleep troubles are gut related. Appetite-related. I don't often remember dreams, so I can't say that I dream more when I eat before I sleep. I can say that when I eat before I sleep, I sleep less.

By 2:45 it's near crisis mode. I get up. Go to the toilet. Use it. Wander back. Think about trying another bed. Ask myself why I haven't just stayed up reading. Ask myself why I can't write late at night. Ask myself whether I'm asking too many questions. Answer? Yes.

At 6:45 the radio starts in. Wow. I'm not ready for this. By 7:30 I'm up. By 7:40 I'm on my bike. By 8:05 (depending on the wind) I'm at work. I'm okay and all, but it's not ideal. I'm too fixated on the leisure of Saturday and Sunday mornings.

So I'm working on giving up eating after 8. I'm pretty sure this is going to solve the problem. I hate getting old. You have to start (more?) good habits. 

Ride report

in:      -15'C wind 25ks NW

out:   -13'C wind 15ks WNW

Discretion?

In two recent situations, I believe I exercised it.

1st - Between Movember and Nomomo two of us (sitting in a bar of course, still fully moustachioed and under a little bit of influence) dared each other to go to work looking like this, for one day:

I didn't do it. The better part of valour and all that. 

2nd - A week ago our good Winnipeg (and France and just all 'round good) friends offered to barter/sell us the first piece of handmade antique furniture (they're prolific and discerning collectors) they ever purchased - an 1860s pine cupboard and hutch from Quebec. We said yes, and here it is, taking its place in our kitchen (which saves me the trouble of building something half-assed and less than half as good!)!

  

Two wise decisions in a week! I'm on a roll!

Ride report

in:      -9'C wind 15ks SW

out:   -10'C wind 20ks W

Waiting for the Barbarians

South African writer J.M. Coetzee (pronounced kuut - see) wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1980 at the height of Apartheid. In 1983 he would write The Life and Times of Michael K which would win the Man Booker prize, and in 1999 he'd win that prize again for Disgrace. In 2003 Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Waiting tells the story of the aging Magistrate of an outpost on the edge of an unnamed civilization. Besides description of the landscape (it is an arid, inhospitable land) there is little offered to locate the reader. If you know, as I did, that Coetzee is South African, you assume that the action takes place on that continent. There's nothing wrong with making that assumption, except that it narrows the range of a novel that seems deliberately sparse on names, perhaps in order to widen its scope into a near allegory.   

Those in power at the centre of this Empire are convinced that a barbarian threat is imminent. They send an emissary, Colonel Joll, with some troops, to the Magistrate's outpost to scour the land for barbarians or those sympathetic to them, and interrogate them by any means. A logical and sympathetic man, the Magistrate doesn't see evidence of a barbarian threat. Early on he tells Joll this, which puts him under suspicion. 

When the troops return from an excursion with barbarian prisoners, Joll subjects them to brutal interrogation and torture. To help manage his own complicity in this the Magistrate takes in an adolescent barbarian girl whose feet have been broken during questioning. Though they share a bed and he bathes her intimately while she lives with him, he is reluctant, even unable, to consummate the relationship. Not until he goes on an excursion into barbarian lands to return her to her family is he able and willing to love her completely. Then, he lets her go back to her own people.

This has to mean something. An aging man of the Empire sympathizes with a young barbarian girl but cannot "enter into" her experience until outside of Empire and in her land. This all seems a bit rich. In fact, if it weren't for his horror at the politics of the Empire, we'd have to declare our hero, the Magistrate, a dirty old man who takes advantage of a situation. 

Even though his conscience seems to trouble him, he never regrets the primal, sexual nature of his relationship with this young girl, and to me this muddies the focus of the novel. When he returns to the outpost to resume his duties he finds that Joll has put an ambitious and vicious young officer in charge and the Magistrate is jailed for traitorous activities. 

The scandal of the Magistrate arises from his sympathy for the barbarians, especially his fraternization with the young girl. Although the Magistrates actions work symbolically, on a "real world" level they are problematic. Why use a cliche-ridden, and abhorrent to many, sexualized relationship as the central illustration of how civilization and barbarity must reconcile - or how what is civilized and what is barbarous are only constructs defined by Empire. Sure it all works, but it's just so unseemly and hard to defend. 

Coetzee however, explores this sort of relationship in Disgrace too. Here again the relationship causes the aging male's fall from grace. My question is simply this: though he sounds the right notes in portraying the moral ethical boundaries of sexuality, does the sexual conquest of a young female by an aging male really warrant this much attention? It may be the stuff of the aging male fantasy, but it's hard-going to suggest that this fantasy has merit on its own, much less as the focus for a parable on how relations between human groups fail. 

Further, this male-oriented point of view is already pervasive and problematic. For at least half of the readers out there, it's solidly "eyes roll back in the head and sigh" material. These readers (and you know who you are) will likely struggle with the sexual nature of the story simply because it's been told and told and told and, it's beside the point. Writers should explore large themes like the clash between civilizations, but perhaps not in a novel about an aging man who finds comfort and understanding in the body of a young female member of the underclass. 

Finally, didactic art is, at best, difficult to pull off. At worst it's a sermon disguised as a story. At best it's art with a message. There's craft in it, to be sure, but one always wonders why the writer didn't just publish an essay instead. 

Ride report

in:      -15'C wind 25 ks SW

out:   -10'C wind 25 ks WSW

       

Super 8

I hadn't heard about Spielberg's latest until a student started insisting that I had to see this movie. Based on this recommendation alone, I found it, and settled down to watch it with a few loved ones. Well it had me from the first strains of ELO, and then when The Knack started up, and then The Cars, and then they were driving that 2-door Buick Skylark - which reminded me of my friend's Chevy Malibu - I was completely transported back to my adolescence, and the friends and innocence of that time just before you're not innocent anymore - those moments when you're just becoming aware of one another as having motives beyond fun and building stuff and then tearing it down again. My friends and I didn't make movies (like the kids in the movie), but we tore banana-seat bikes apart and made them into proto-bmx things to ride around town on, late into the nights. We made model cars and trains and raced things, and watched Star Wars and Indiana Jones and Jaws and loved to shoot things and light them on fire. And we were just starting to think that girls might be interesting as friends of a different kind.

So when the train wrecks gloriously, stupendously, right in front of them when they're doing what they most want to do, and there's a girl there too, it's just rapturous! It's that small apocalypse that you escape to tell about - and it gets better in the telling. Except, in Super 8, it gets better and then worse too in the telling. Unaccountably, ominously, foreshadowingly, Cloverfieldishly worse. J.J. Abrams produces this movie, as he did Star Trek, and Cloverfield. The monster here might as well have hopped frames from Cloverfield to the train car from which it escapes here. 

Which bring me to this thing that successful directors do - they re-iterate (some call it homage) the work of other auteurs, and their own work as well. Auteurs do this sort of thing - you can see an Atwood or a McCarthy novel coming from a mile away - and it's mostly okay. I appreciate it that I can buy a Dylan album, and settle into the comfortable "re-runishness" of it. Shakespeare constantly pirated his own best lines. I find comfort in knowing what Ian McEwan will supply in a novel. The good ones however, like Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds, do more than just revisit the old riffs, they make something new, something fresh, something magnificently unexpected.    

I liked ET and I as soon as the kids in this movie start riding their bikes across open fields, the camera staying low to expand the horizon that overlooks a sleepy midwestern town, I started to expect that this was what Spielberg was re-serving. Which was fine. I love the "sharp fresh kids versus the blunt jaded adults" trope. It's a reminder to stay young and to act less (hopefully a lot less) like the narrow-scoped dopes that run the air force, the police force, or the school (at least they're dopes in the movies). There is a modicum of freshness here. The young male hero's dad isn't quite the dope we might expect. Neither is the biology teacher that seems responsible for initiating the whole shebang. Otherwise though, the adults deliver their stupid, unaware, uninteresting lines, and the kids wisely dodge them.

No, Spielberg's got nothing new to offer here: not in the relationships between the kids, nor between the kids and the adults, nor between the civilians and army guys. Further, he's got nothing new to offer to the alien-intelligence meets human-xenophia situation either. Not since District 9 (well okay, Cloverfield wasn't bad either) has anyone really tried hard to re-fresh this plot. Spielberg and Abrams, for all the money, technology, and ingenuity (got writers anyone?) at their disposal could do nothing more imaginative than an upscale, more spectacular, ET phone home. 

Where are the good sci-fi writers when this kind of film gets proposed? What could LeGuin do with these resources? I know I know, Spielberg and Hollywood don't really want to make us fundamentally uncomfortable at the end of a show that features adorably innocent, truth-seeking teens. Good point. So I'll just have to accept that after all that cash, and all those technical resources were thrown at the screen, what stuck were the first twenty minutes or so with its shazamic late 70s rock, its youthful imagination, its blossoming love, and its orgasmic train wreck. After that  this train gets back on that pretty narrow successful train-track feel-good formula. It mails it in. It's a nice to get a care-package now and then, but these cookies are stale.

Ride report(s)

It's worth noting that I rode from Altona to St. Joseph and then home yesterday (about 29 ks). It was about -10'C and the wind was from the North. I rode gravel and dirt roads, and this reminds me of my absolute love for my cross bike. There are so many more options for rides.

Today

in:      -25'C wind 10ks N

out:   -14'C wind 10ks N

It was an ABES night ...

... for a change. For the evidence head on over to here. Hahahaha! Funny, eh? No, seriously, head on over to here (but wait until this evening, when it's been updated).

There is no mo mo.
There is only now.

Ride report
in:      -9'C wind 16 ks S
out:   -6'C wind 20 ks S