This week in Culture: Bacteria & Literary Notoriety

Week 46 of the year 2006 was, as they liked to say in the 1930’s, a Duezie. First on the menu was bacteria culture, a.k.a. plain yoghurt. I normally hate yoghurt – I even hate saying it, as the word sounds like the gag reflex you’d make after eating too much of it. But it was a necessary evil in my recovery from a nasty bit of food poisoning I got on Wednesday night.

I had been felled by some bad Thai food and I payed for it with violent nausea, embarrassment (an occupied bathroom meant I had to puke in our backyard, to the amusement of the jubilantly vocal, onlooking Mexican spectators staying at an adjacent hotel), and a few lost pounds of body mass. Adding insult to injury, the big joke amongst my roommates was that I had been bested by only 6 dumplings, as I was not “man enough” to eat the full-size “family order” of 10 dumplings. All I can say is, ego be damned, praise baby Jesus I did not eat 10 of those things.

The silver, er, lining to my stomach issues was that I gave myself the day off for recovery on Thursday, spending some much-needed time at the apartment, stretching my shit out with alternating stints on Green Boy, White Lightning, and the Blue Bomber – our 3 couches in the living room.

Up-chuckery aside, the real cultural event of the week was the official Montreal launch of our boy Ryan Arnold’s published collection of short stories, titled “The Coward Files”. Ryan is my friend, the stories are funny, and his reading was hella solid, so we’re all proud of him, if a bit embarrassed by his continuing BO problem. Way to go, Arnie.


FS

Culture Fest continues. This week: hobbies!

Hobbies are a funny thing. For me, the word conjures up an image of a jolly retiree, dressed in train conductor's regalia, fussing over his painstakingly accurate model trains in his basement for hours on end, mumbling things like "well, the 8:30 train coming in from Newburg Station is running a little slow this morning. It looks like we'll have to shovel some more coal in her furnace." But everyone has a hobby, and whether it is playing with model trains, BASE jumping, or collecting supermarket circulars delivered on February 29th of any year, these hobbies can tell you a lot about a person.

I recently discovered my girlfriend's hobby over the weekend, and it was indeed enlightening: she seems to enjoy accompanying me to a house party and making out with a random guy in the bathroom at the end of the night, while I cluelessly wait by the front door, clutching her coat in my hand. This is funny to me, because my preferred hobby is to do the word jumble in the Saturday paper. Like I said, people do have different hobbies. Perhaps she and I have fewer things in common than I had previously thought.

Ladies, please kindly take a number, as this gentleman caller is single once again...


Viva la cultura!

Culture: It's not just Boy George's exclusive club.

So this blog has been up for 6 months as of today. And up until today, nothing had been written. This is shocking, I know. People who know me know that I like to get things done, and fast. Book an orthodontist appointment to fix my teeth (my Grandma says that they're crooked and they render me less attractive to marriageable Jewish ladies)? Check. Obtain a municipal parking sticker for my car? Check. Finally organize the photos of the Amazingly Decadent Dysfunctional Family African Safari Trip of 2001? Mark it X. Install a door for my bedroom? Done and done.

Yet despite my proven record of doing things, and fast, my blog has been experiencing some - and if you'll indulge me here, I am going to reference my favourite romantic comedy of 2006 - "Failure to Launch".

In fact, there have been exactly negative one entries since the launch date of this blog. You see, I actually wrote an entry which I thought was witty, urbane - Feder-licious even...but months later I began to doubt the funny and so I removed it altogether. Hence we have the minus-1.

But that is all about to change, because I'm back and I'm gunning for zero (entries). I have realized that if I commit to writing something on a weekly basis, then the blog will start to churn, and It’s really just that daunting, initial entry that has me sputtering at the starting line.

But what will I write about? What is my area of expertise? I am not traveling, my job is not exciting, and I rarely commit acts of noteworthy heroism – so what, really, can I write about? My answer is as follows: Culture. My city offers a rich tapestry of culture, and in this, my 27th year, I plan to write about it. Every week I’m going to do something interesting - or horribly dull – it won’t matter.

But you will hear about it. Perhaps I will go to a museum, or a botanical garden, or a discount pet shop. Perhaps I will watch acne-stricken virgins joust and nun-chaku in public, for the honour of a similarly acne-stricken maiden. I will report to you what I think bears reporting. And if I reneg on my promise of cultural reportage on any given weekend, and end up doing nothing? you’ll hear about my day anyway. Although I can tell you ahead of time that that day will probably involve me watching my roommate, Jake, watch 10 hours of televised football.

But I don’t mean to anticipate failure at such an early juncture, so without further ado, my first reportage:

Over the weekend I finally dragged my ass to the Canadian Centre for Architecture. For those who don't know, it is a relatively new museum in downtown Montreal, devoted to the study and celebration of all things architectural. It was the brainchild and baby (brainbaby? babychild?) of Seagram heiress Phyllis Lambert, who has, amongst other things, a funny-sounding first name.

The building itself is impressive, inasmuch as it was incredibly costly to build and yet looks surprisingly ordinary. I don’t understand where architects – especially those purporting to build a “Centre For Architecture”, go wrong in designing such an ordinary structure as the CCA, at a cost of millions of dollars, while other, beautiful creations, such as Montreal’s Orange Julip or the AMC Forum (just look at that white permanent scaffolding. It’s like going to see a movie inside the Millenium Falcon!) were achieved at a much lower cost. Truly baffling.

But on to the culture, as that is what you pay me for.

So the two exhibits on hand were boring. The first one was about some French environmetnalists who had studied the modern ecosystem. The question they asked us is: how do trees survive in the modern urban landscape? How do gum wrappers, soiled newspapers, old banana peels, and passing cars affect the natural elements of our landscape: i.e. trees, plants, flowers, etc. The answer? I don't care. Never have, never will. I think the real question they aim to ask, like all middle-aged French dudes, is "will this exhibit gain me the notoriety needed for a guest seat on one of those inane variety shoes on TV5? I always wanted to sing a Parisian love ballad in front of an audience and this would be my only chance, so to that end, I'd like your honest appraisal of the exhibit." Struggling musicians are hard to take sometimes.

The second temporary exhibit was a presentation about Simmons Hall, a dorm on the MIT campus that serves as a kind of anthro / socio / architectural study of it’s inhabitants.

If my understanding is correct, for their tuition fee of $30 000, MIT architecture students got to live in this funky building, replete with modular, mobius-style furniture, and were lab rats for studies that looked to explain why, for instance, the dorm's international student from Paraguay chose to occupy the western-most room in the building, while the uber-nerd from Chalotte, N.C. chose the room nearest the fire escape. The study set out to prove if there was any sort of pattern in their living habits.

Well even to my untrained, amateur eyes, I could deduce that yes, there was a pattern: regardless of the choice of accommodation made by a student, or what kind of furniture configuration they chose (bed on desk? or maybe desk next to bed and table by window? Potted plant opposite bed?) the results of this stupendously boring study were not worth the $10 admission fee charged by the museum. Sorry Alex, sister who attended MIT, your smartypants school is stupid. In addition, while I have no evidence to prove as much, i'm pretty sure their basketball team is below-average.

Viva La Cultura!!


FS