Blood Lust

I don't know if this film is quintessential Tarantino or if it just belongs to the weird 90s pastiche of murderous road movies, but then a lack of definability is exactly what has since vaulted Tarantino to his idiosyncratic strata of superstardom. True Romance is part violence orgy, part puppy love, and partly the reappropriation of cool as a concept. I feel like Tarantino makes a concerted effort at anachronistical "coolness," not unlike the teacher in high school who wore vaguely out-of-fashion clothing but got brownie points from the student body just for being aware that in doing so he was, by extension, commenting on their own fashion sense. And since it's Tarantino, there are a lot of convoluted plot lines that lead to an endless stream of bodies, and the adolescent concept of true love that gives the film its title and through line.

Aside from the obvious (Bonnie and Clyde, which I've never actually seen, and Thelma and Louise, which came out two years earlier and was directed by the other Scott brother), my main frames of reference for this film were Terence Malick's Badlands and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (to be honest, for the longest time I thought NBK and TR were the same movie). Badlands is a movie about a bored little girl on a farm who gets sweet-talked by a guy in his twenties to run away and live on the wild side for a while. The whole movie is undercut by a voiceover from that little girl about the meaning of life and her (inconsistent) reasons for doing what she did. From that voiceover, we get that, despite everything that happens, she's just a fucked up little kid looking for something that doesn't exist, and for that reason we feel something like empathy for a character who is morally on the wrong side of the tracks. True Romance cops the voiceover, as Alabama attempts to explain why she falls for Clarence, and why in the end she thinks he's "so cool" despite everything that has gone down.

But here's the thing: in Badlands, Kit was a bad guy, but the story belonged to that girl who followed him with deer-in-the-headlights eyes. True Romance is Clarence's own kung fu fantasy, and he doesn't come out as the badass he wants to be so much as an average dude in over his head, someone who wreaks a path of death and destruction that isn't so much his doing as it is fallout for his stupidity. He murders a pimp, which is asking for trouble, but he's never even confronted with the fact that his father takes the fall for it. By the end of the movie, I didn't care about Clarence's journey anymore: he would have been better off to stay home and play house with the pretty girl he already had in the bag. Hell, it was her that picked him up at the outset, and maybe that's one of the reasons her idolization occasionally rings false.

I don't really know how this movie compares to NBK, in many ways its bastard sibling. I vaguely remember hating NBK for what it wasn't, for its lack of insight. Of course, Oliver Stone isn't really one for introspection; his movies are more about values. And as bad people, I felt his protagonists(/antagonists) were in large part objectified. If there's ever an opportunity for moral ambiguity, it belongs in a movie about youth, angst and bloodlust, and as far as capturing the adolescent fantasy that spurs both movies, True Romance does a superior job. Tarantino and Scott do a brilliant job of describing how fun  it would seem to run to California with a suitcase full of coke, even if the bodies start flying before we have time to really revel in the hedonism.

In general, there were so many things to love about TR that I wished I'd enjoyed it more. For one, Gary Oldman. Holy fuck, Gary Oldman. Why couldn't this movie have been about your character?

What's that, James Franco? You want to play a sick, twisted, faux-black, dread-toting drug dealer with weird teeth? Alien is a housecat next to Drexl. Seriously. I haven't seen a lot of Oldman, but what I have seen feels like a callback to this amazingly frightening and devastating character who lasts far too short for the TR world. He's fast-talking, he's greasier than the underbelly of a Winnebago, and he absolutely emanates insanity.

In this paint-by-numbers script, Drexl is the inciting incident, the character who pulls Clarence from the mushy feel-good prologue (which could have made for an entirely different, smaller movie about the risks of falling in love with a prostitute) into the violence that will consume TR's world. But Drexl's appearance also the point where the film jumped the shark for me. Clarence spirits Alabama away and Drexl has no idea where she is. So why does Clarence go to Drexl? Why even go to the bank if you know you can't cash the check? Everything that happens in the movie is a direct result of Clarence knowingly walking into a bed of snakes, and when shit goes bad all I could think was...well, were you expecting a carnation?

Things gets weird. People show up. Some of them stick around, others don't. Plotlines return when they're needed. That creepy theme music invades your brain. A lot of people who were semi-famous in 1993 and are much more famous now get cameos. And then everybody dies.

And then...Pulp Fiction happened.

Identity Crisis

Well, that didn't take long. A month-and-a-half without a post and it's time to take a step back and decide: what is this blog? My previous site was specifically designated as a baseball blog, but that petered out as I realized there were a million others out there getting more exposure because they're infinitely better researched, or connected, or simply brought something to the table which was out of my ballpark. So I switched to this, something more amorphous. So what is this, then? Does it have a focus at all?

A while ago I stumbled across a site that was comprised simply of a guy sitting around and watching certain genres of old movies and sagely recapping how outdated they'd become (the internet in You've Got Mail, the cellphones in Annie Hall). It was a mildly hilarious blog and inspired me to watch several cringeworthy-yet-awesome 90's movies of the Can't Hardly Wait prototype (you know the ones I mean, the talky high school movies that pose as romcoms with a lot of geeks and a decent amount of John Hughes-Richard Linklater crossover). But the site has since been swallowed up by the internet and I'm not sure I'll ever find it again. Maybe permanently deleted, maybe paywalled, or maybe I just can't remember the stupid title.

Remembering that site, though - and how good it was - makes me wonder if I should turn this into a review site. It could be a structured one, where the website forms a kind of course outline to be determined in advance, or more loose-leaf, a general spot for me to recap whatever I just watched or what book I'm working through. Needless to say, they won't be pat critiques; what's interesting to me about a movie is how I relate to it, not how functional it is in the abstract. To be honest, I'm resistant to the structure of tying my writing to critiques at all, but I think I need some focus and the truth is that as much as I enjoy empty philosophising and relations about the strange people I encounter on a day-to-day basis, I get the sinking feeling that people don't enjoy travelling down my existential wormholes nearly as much as I'd like to think they do. Media is how we are taught to process our anxieties these days.

But I watch a lot of movies, and I read a lot of books. And while I primarily read or watch for value, sometimes I indulge in shit. And I don't necessarily mean shit like so-called "summer reading" or "blockbusters" (which are usually either terrific works of art in disguise or just awful), I just mean stuff that is surprising or weird. Picking up a book at Value Village that looks bad just to see if you can judge a book by its cover. Streaming a movie without IMDBing it first. 

Most recently, I read a nonfiction about the New York mafia in the 1980s. It wasn't a particularly great book, and I didn't feel like I came away from it with an intricate understanding of the subject matter or any great level of self-reflection. But it only cost a buck and I did enjoy it for other reasons - the light it cast on stock Hollywood mafia characters, the way the criminal underworld uncovered in the book reminded me of a similar underworld portrayed on The Wire (whether borrowed from fictions or a true-life underworld of its own accord), the external examination of a corporate system. But really, what I got from the book isn't worth a blog post on its own, and if I were to pose the question, "what would you like to read a review about?" I would expect John Gotti to wind up about 7,184th on the list. It was worth the hours of boredom it consumed on the plane, and the slight edification it provided for future endeavours...and that's about it.

On the heels of that, I watched Casino Jack, which is similarly about mobs, money and government corruption. Again, it was a true story, and like the Gotti book, the protag was hardly sympathetic, but I enjoy the film quite a bit less than the book. Basically, it's about a lobbyist who used his influence to swindle some people out of some money and invest in some offshore casinos, breaking some laws and some people in the process. While it's true that one of the hardest and most interesting things to do in fiction is to turn a bad person into your main character, the problems in the film ran deeper than that; not only was there no place to put your sympathies, there was no sense of continuity or structure, or, really, rising action at all.

(As an aside, can Kevin Spacey stop making these movies? At what point at the beginning of his career did someone decide that his average-suburban-dad was a perfect face for the mastermind villian in every caper movie ever? He's like classy Steve Buscemi, shmucky-looking schmucks who have carved out entire careers on being total assholes, when their best roles (Lester Burnam and Seymour, respectively) have come as the losers they looked like all along. I'm not saying I don't respect the niches they've carved out for themselves, I just think they need to do more arthouse stuff that shows their true abilities.)

The film was a sequence of bad people doing vaguely bad things related to purchasing casinos while alternating between being broke and flush, all culminating in a relatively unearned moralistic ending. While I get the analogy (dur, Jack was a gambler), the movie was missing the through line that would have put the dangerous game at the heart of the movie into some sort of life context, and maybe taken us along for the ride. There's a way to write a movie where the audience is hustled just as much as the marks in the film, even (and especially) if it leaves us with a sick sense in their stomach at the end; Casino Jack was (literally) sitting back and watching some jerkoff rationalize after he'd been caught with chips in his pocket. I would have loved to be drawn into the thrill of the scheme Jack was running, but he presents himself as a true asshole from the opening monologue and only finds any reprieve in comparison to his even filthier partner in crime (played by Barry Pepper, most memorable to me as the douchebag friend in 25th Hour, a slightly more sympathetic look at an asshole forced to sleep in a bed of his own making).

At their heart, both the movie and the book are reflections on the perversion of the American Dream; making it means busting heads and turning into the kind of monster who pays to get someone whacked in prison. Which is interesting in and of itself, and what it says about the world, but doesn't necessarily make for the most introspective reviewing. So what do people think? Should I review idle, picked-it-up-off-the-street junk like this? Or only the good/relevant/sage stuff?

Rubbernecking

nin - happiness in slavery by robertjgunn

About five years ago, early on in my writing program, I found myself desperately in need of inspiration, motivation and validation. I felt like no one in my workshop even understood what I was trying to write, let alone having any useful input on the results of my efforts; I felt like the stories being praised were skin pieces about romantic trysts in Europe when I wanted to write something more intimate and epic; I felt like my urbanized philosophical struggle was alien to my provincial peers. So one day I said, Fuck it. I know there's something out there for me.

What followed was a long day spent sifting through the fiction section of the local second-hand bookstore. I wasn't looking for names I recognized, because big names only pandered to the very literary circle-jerk I was railing against. I wanted something weird, cool, and independent, something that spoke to my personal inclinations as a punk/rebel/black sheep who was going to write his fucking bullshit no matter what the workshop suggested. And so I walked out with a little black book called "Zed," a blind buy if there ever was one, a book that I quite honestly figured was self-published and might inspire me to self-publish my own stuff.

As it turned out, it wasn't quite a consignment self-publication; it was a small-press novel that had actually received quite a bit of acclaim. Still, it was a weird little book, a sort of dystopian gothic sci-fi metaphor about survivalism, and it spoke to me in a way few books have. It seemed to scream out angst and it resonated as an impressionistic projection of something that I, at that very moment in my life, identified with emotionally. I'm not sure it would mean as much to me now, but for a blind buy during a particularly frustrated and alienated period of my life, it couldn't have been a better investment. After I read it, I googled its author, expecting to find it had come out of some post-adolescent metal chick who shared some of the same insecurities as myself. But what I found was a little unexpected. I found a blog that was a literal cry for help - not in some abstract psychological sense, but in the literal "I am dying" sense. As it turns out, Elizabeth McClung was a local lesbian with a fetish for Japanese anime and a terminal illness. I began to follow her blog with regularity, no longer as a fan of the novel but as a perverse voyeur.

Narrator: Hold on, I'll tell you; we'll split up the week, okay? You take lymphoma, and tuberculosis...
Marla: You take tuberculosis. My smoking doesn't go over at all.
Narrator: Okay, good, fine. Testicular cancer should be no contest, I think.
Marla: Well, technically, I have more of a right to be there than you. You still have your balls.
Narrator: You're kidding.
Marla: I don't know... am I?
Narrator: No, no! What do you want?
Marla: I'll take the parasites.
Narrator: You can't have both the parasites, but while you take the blood parasites...
Marla: I want brain parasites.
Narrator: I'll take the blood parasites. But I'm gonna take the organic brain dementia, okay?
Marla: I want that.
Narrator: You can't have the whole brain, that's...
Marla:: So far you have four, I only have two!
Narrator: Okay. Take both the parasites. They're yours. Now we both have three... 

After a while, I grew bored of the anime and felt uncomfortable rubbernecking. On some level, I think I began to question whether she was actually dying, with the way the specifics of her condition were so vague and the physical pain began to bleed into the existential. Whatever it was, whether boredom or cowardice or simply an inability to face down that level of misery, I gradually gravitated away from her blog and back towards my own interests.

At the time, I didn't realize there's a cottage industry of this sort of thing, people taking to the internet to record their last months, days, hours. And it hits close to home. McClung was a local writer. I'd never heard of Eva Markvoort until I read her obituary in 2010, which mentioned a documentary about a livejournal account called 65 RedRoses. I discovered that she was from Vancouver, but had attended the same university at the same time as I had. I'm not sure what her major was. Most likely we never shared a class. Perhaps we were enrolled in the same first-year lecture but she was too anonymous (or likely, too absent) to notice. It doesn't matter. I heard her accent on the documentary and I knew her. I'm sitting there listening to a dying girl talk about her small earthly pleasures and all I can think is: who does that sound like? The unique twang to her voice, Canadian in its upbeat tone but also a little BC hickish; it's the same accent that after seven years on the island I'm beginning to adopt, an accent that locals protest to me they don't have. And it's a reminder that sometimes sounding a certain way isn't a mark of otherness but actually an anchor to a time, place and sense of identity.

Eva had Cystic Fibrosis. So did most of her friends profiled in the film, and after a while of looking all these people up it becomes a depressing stream of online eulogies. And I realize that damn, these people are younger than me! Same goes for Laura Rothenberg, who wrote my first encounter with Cystic Fibrosis, a book that stumped me in my teenage years, back when death was an amorphous idealized thing that terrified me in its meaninglessness. Apparently she was 18 or 20 when she found motivation to write the book that I still, at 27, haven't yet. I have a James Dean poster on my wall, but do I really carpe diem? Does anyone? Rothenberg died at 22, an age when I was just discovering the world I thought I'd built around myself was a house of cards. If I were ever to find that motivation to sit down and focus, I imagine a brick wall coming at me at a thousand miles an hour would ironically be an enormous aid, but at 22 I still wasn't ready to live yet, let alone die.

On some level writing about this is cathartic. It reminds me of the close calls, the bad decisions or potential bad decisions which could have changed my life: getting into a car with a drunk on a fatal stretch of road; watching a close friend drunkenly climb onto a 14th-floor railing; hearing about an acquaintance falling off a building to his death. But I'm still here to think those through. These girls lived their whole lives with the guillotine, while we throw ours away willingly. It's enough to make you wonder.

The Basest of Men

So, apparently Rob Ford is crack addict who likes to go down on hookers and Kevin (not Justin) Trudeau is finally in jail. In other news, the world is populated by filthy con men and two-bit hustlers. Remember the ShamWow guy? Yeah, him:

God, I keep forgetting how much our world still rewards assholes like this, self-righteous money-grubbing douchebags who thrive on scams and bullshit. On the one hand, I tend to embrace the gutter in fiction, but somehow the news always seems to gain the upper hand. I think the irony lies in the fact that we expose human weaknesses in writing to find their softer counterpoints, while newsreels have no such moralistic aspirations.

I work in a job which requires a lot of face-to-face customer service. Long ago I learned to emotionally divorce myself from whatever crap gets thrown across the counter. If the store has made a mistake, I try to be apologetic and courteous. If we haven't fucked up or I'm not sure how we've fucked up, I try to reason with the person and talk them off the ledge. But my kindnesses extend no further than that. The odd totally irrational customer - the lady who throws her no-ketchup burger at the cashier because it came with ketchup, or the old man who recently haughtily dressed down my 14-year-old cashier for offering him a combo, before asking for one - spurs in me a certain level of emotional detachment. It's important to step back and see the humour in the situation; weather the storm without succumbing to it. Everyone loses control occasionally, of course, but the people who struggle the most with my line of work are the ones who become defensive because on some level they view their antagonizers as equals. It's important to see the fray for what it is while simultaneously rising above it.

And that's always what gets me about pop culture. It's the gutter, which is fine, because the gutter is human nature. But it's the gutter without perspective, people hounding together and screaming "He hit a prostitute! Scum of the earth!" without taking the opportunity to have insight on the situation and their own horribly coloured perspectives. Stepping above the game isn't about degrading other people when they succumb to their weaknesses, it's about stepping away for a minute and laughing at the whole divine comedy.

That isn't to say I'm against playing, of course. I use pool as a metaphor more than I probably should, but pool is a game that speaks to all our base instincts. It's simultaneously a game of the gutter and a game of royalty. Some people pursue pool as an intellectual pursuit while others consider it the basest "my cock is bigger than your cock" battle of supremacy. And if you manage to step away from it far enough, you begin to realize that sometimes you can play a game within the game. Sometimes you lose on purpose to the same guy every time you play until he starts to wonder if he's ever going to beat you on his own. Sometimes you make a show of sitting on the sideline and railbirding until people become nervous and want to see what kind of game you're hiding. Sometimes there are different strategies to hoarding the table, either by winning every game or by subbing in your friends until the strange people get bored and go away. But other times you want to play the strangers because you need fresh blood. It's one thing to win or lose any given game; it's another thing to have perspective on the control you have over that game's outcome and its collateral outcomes.

We have a new cashier at work; a reasonably intelligent, affable guy constantly bemoaning the affectations of the customers. It's not so much the rudeness that comes with the territory that bothers him so much as it is their idiosyncrasies, the way one customer will count out all his change while another will feel the urge to sit in the drive-thru and munch down his entire burger rather than pulling over. I always tell him to forget empathy while he's on the clock. I tell him to see the people ordering as nothing more than sheep to be herded through the cash register and to their position in line, but the other day he responded: "It's not that I'm trying to empathize with them, it's that for all my cynicism I have great hope for the human race, and this job depresses that."

I understood him then. I know we're nothing but gnashing animals trying to carve out a niche at the expense of our fellow competitors, but I also find that realization unfailingly depressing. At work, I force myself to focus on the collective rather than the individual. But goddamn, is that collective ever depressing.

Finally...

I can recall reading Ender's Game during three different seminal stages of my life: once, at age 10, as a kid's book; once at fifteen, as a revenge fantasy; and once, again, at age 22, because some acquaintances had discovered it and I wanted to engage them philosophically. The fact that it could factor into three so different periods of my life speaks to what makes it such a terrific book: good books mean one thing to many people; great books mean many things to a single person. Ender's Game was about the id and its hero complex, but it was also about high school, it was also about the Cold War, it was also about religion, it was also about the responsibility bestowed by authority, it was also about children, and it was also about empathy and compassion.

After decades of rumours and failures, the movie version has arrived. To its credit, it tries to hit every note. Every character is there, even the ones I'd forgotten. Everything proceeds at the breakneck pace mandated by the structure of the novel, an unimpeded march towards Ender's inevitable anointment as savior. Watching this anointment exposed so blatantly reminded me of my one critique on my third read: the book is too committed to its own mythmaking. For every artificial obstacle thrown Ender's way by his superiors, there's never any real sign that he isn't the chosen one. In the movie, we're told that he's been tormented by his peers in school, but when we see him he is in the process of ruthlessly eliminating the bullies. Harry Potter, for all of his messiah-like qualities (though it's been argued he's a derivative of Ender - this is a thirty-five-year-old source character), at least had to struggle with girls and crushes and a regular antagonist or two. There's no Snape or Draco Malfoy regularly pulling him through the mud because Ender, we're told from the outset, can handle anything. 

(Of course, Orson Scott Card is a Bible-belt Mormon, so it's probably not a coincidence that Card's Jesus is a little too perfect. Which isn't to say I give a damn about Card's moral failings. Regardless of what he may believe in his personal life and whatever views he may expound to the world at large, the book/movie stand on their own merits. He doesn't like gay marriage? So what? I'm a moral relativist at the worst of times. To juxtapose: I'm reading a novel right now about a filmmaker who's so committed to realism that he makes a snuff film, and it's possible that in real life you could convince me why such a thing should be boycotted, but boycotting a movie about war and reconciliation because its original author holds a single outdated political view? While we're at it, let's burn every movie from the forties because their producers were probably sexist. This isn't even a borderline case: if the informed viewer must to go in with the understanding that the story contains certain religious underpinnings, he can quickly move on to the story's many strengths.)

We receive generic exposition in Ender's voice-over, which serves little purpose other than to tell us this is Ender's story. But this is Ender's story; moreover, his coming-of-age story. We could have learned the world as he came to understand it, but the movie allows for no such subtleties. The voiceover comes back at the very end, as it always does, but this artificial attempt at world-building could have been scaled back to allow us closer to Ender. (Technically, there are point-of-view issues. The audience observes the adults conferring about Ender behind his back, which significantly reduces the dramatic irony of Ender's penultimate stand. The tension in the book comes because he's not sure why he's being toyed with, whether the adults are trying to break him or push him. Here, it's a foregone conclusion.)

In some ways - and you don't hear this one often - the movie struggled too hard to stay faithful to the book. The Battle Room (a training room, similar to a zero-gravity game of Quidditch mixed with laser tag) is a place for the kids to work out strategies and for Ender to quickly elevate from undersized nobody to commander. But at its heart it's a game, and it could have been filmed more like one. Picture a non-basketball-fan watching a 30-for-30 special on LeBron James where the only basketball shot was a slo-mo buzzer-beater, and you'll understand how unimportant the battle room sequences feel in the movie. Yes, that shot might have been the most important one but it only matters if you understand the ebb-and-flow of a regular basketball game for forty-seven minutes, and have some sense of how that particular game came to be deadlocked at the critical moment. We see Ender win at his games before we really understand the rules. If that's a minor flaw in the book as well, it's at least excused by the difficulties of rendering the mechanics of a game with words; here, there could have been ample opportunities to let the game speak for itself. 

In the movie, this gives off the impression of a guy who's really good at a video game. Meet the bullies, beat them up, level up to battle school. Be a petulant launchie, get promoted to a real team. Fight with your commander, become a commander. Etc, etc. But I never played video games in the way most did, so I always equated Ender's ascendancy with the work of a great Magic: The Gathering player (due to the timing of when I read the book in my life). Technically, Magic is a card game with a rulebook, but the cards themselves are constantly at war with the book. Almost any text on any card is a specification for how this card is allowed to break this or that rule. Creatures can't attack and block at the same time; vigilance give them the ability to do so. Non-flying creatures cant block flying creatures; reach gives them the ability to do so. Its very malleability is a main reason I've always struggled with Magic strategy. Spending hours figuring that perfect three-card combo feels like a waste of time as soon as you encounter a cheap deck that's properly equipped to break it up. Magic takes someone who can transition on the fly, figure out razor-quick combos without spending hours on the necessary computations. Card understands the human condition enough to understand that linear thinking is eternally limiting and so he makes the source of Ender's genius his ability to think outside the box, to understand asymmetrical clusters in Formic battle formations as something completely alien to human understanding, yet ultimately understandable and containable. His learning doesn't come only in the Battle Room but also in a quest video mind game that explores his psychological nuances.These aspects are present in the movie but they aren't explored in a meaningful way. Instead of breaking down the binaries for ourselves, we sit back and marvel at the boy genius. 

This was Ender's story all the way, but it could have belonged to him even more if the cameras had trusted him. Asa Butterfield does a good job of holding a stuff upper lip and maintaining composure, but the character is about more than staying composed; Ender is supposed to be the kid who was so good he broke the game, and Butterfield never exactly radiates genius (admittedly how exactly one would radiate genius is hard to say). After he's proved himself  and begun to lead, Ender is confronted with a handicap; he goes into a 2-on-1 situation. The point is that in a militant environment, you not only need someone who can master basic strategy, but you need some who can break the rulebook and go off the grid. If you throw him into battle against superior forces, he will find a way to come out on top, whether it's through cheating or ducking or using the enemies against each other. The is the essence of why the movie was always deemed "unfilmable"; not because the mechanics of the story taking place in zero-gravity were a problem, but because a pre-teen (Butterfield is about ten years too old for the role) had to carry the burden of being such a prodigy with the necessary weight and the skill.

None of which is to say I hated the movie. It does a great job of rendering Card's book for the already converted, and it's a fantastic visual spectacle. But at the end of the day, it's a companion piece.

Obligatory World Series Post

So. The Red Sox won the World Series. The Red Sox. With John Farrell. In the aftermath, I tried to articulate to a bystander what that means from the Jays' perspective: "For Canucks fans, it'd be kind of like Alain Vigneault winning the Cup with the Rangers this year. Only worse." But even that doesn't really capture it. It's not so much infuriating or gut-wrenching as it is a nod to cosmic irony, the kind of situation that elicits self-effacing laughter. The Blue Jays tried to pilfer a coach from their second-most-hated division rival, only to have him stab them in the back and take the rest of the coaching staff along with him.  How cute of you, the universe seems to say, to think yourself so mighty.

In a way Farrell winning was good, because it put all of my fellow Jays fans in their place for the offseason gloating, the premature photoshops Pyrrhic reminders that the last laughs come in October, not March. The Jays lost their coaching staff and tried to make up for it by adding millions in star power, and transformed from a 73-win team into a 74-win team; the Red Sox dumped their stars with their corresponding salaries, replaced them with role players and new coaches, and transformed from a 69-win team into 97-win team. Any way you cut it, the Red Sox came out on top and Farrell got the cherry on the sundae. If anything, this turn of event anoints the Red Sox the new Yankees as the real Yankees' empire crumbles, while the Jays begin to assume the mantle of the pre-2004 Red Sox, all foreboding and doom.

Coincidentally, just for the opportunity to watch John Farrell clinch and edge the knife in deeper, I wound up trading a shift at work. Normally that wouldn't have been such a big deal, except that the particular shift that I took back was on Wednesday morning - which just so happens to be my weekly hangover - and that particular Wednesday just so happened to be the day of our annual corporate audit. As things roll downhill, it all led to me working slightly out of position and out of sorts on our most important day of the year, which may or may not have contributed to my general manager offering me a transfer later that day. Everyone gets traded eventually, or so goes the dictum in sports, including managers, and by the time the Red Sox hoisted the trophy Wednesday evening my mind was on other matters altogether. 

And so it's back to square one for the Jays and, just maybe, for me. Re-evaluate strengths. Improve weaknesses. Pursue new opportunites and make difficult decisions about the people you've kept close and your own place in the cosmic scheme. Whenever your head gets too big, the universe will come back and bite you in the ass.

The Rabbit Hole

I met two random men on a two different buses last night. One was middle-aged, bearded and carrying a guitar case; the other was "probably the same age" as me. (When I pressed, it turned out he was four years older.) Both of them may or may not have just smoked a joint or something more, and seemed eager to tell me how much they had just enjoyed a Chris Cornell concert. Both conversations were incredibly vapid, as chance meetings with strangers tend to be, and  the first one culminated with the older guy pulling the unstrung guitar out of his case and holding up a signature of the man/myth/legend for all the bus to ignore. I felt a twinge of pity. Then I got off the bus, because neither of those clowns matter in the long run. But their random desire to bring me into their experience did leave me thinking a bit about my identity as pseudo-grunge kid, and the tools I use to define myself.

It seems lately my Facebook feed is being blown up by questions of identity. Gender identity, sexual identity, political identity, familial identity, job identity - all that adult shit. And despite the fact that I see no need to parade my station before the world in specific "life events," I have begun to see my own identity crystallize around me. There's a sense of community about Vancouver Island, a sense of community I wilfully ignored as a university student, but one that, having hashed out a life here since, has become more readily apparent. It's a small-town mentality: banter with your churchgoing sandwich-maker, discuss your life decisions with the dude you see on the bus every day, get to know your bartender on a first-name basis. These pockets exist the world over, of course, and like anywhere, there's a pool of strangers-cum-friends-cum-acquaintances who form degrees of separation. Beyond that, the municipalities blend into one another because we're isolated from the rest of the country by a moderately imposing stretch of Pacific Ocean. And within that ever-shrinking world, I've started to arrive at a crystallized stage. Now, looking back at my love for Badmotorfinger, I no longer need to be a grunge kid, or wannabe grunge kid, or any other subset of a various number of scenes. I don't have to play guitar to hold down a conversation with someone who has a passing interest in 90s rock; I'm no pool pro, but having a tab at my regular bar game is the next-best thing; I don't make enough money, but I have a job I like that I chose for unique reasons, and an apartment which provides the technological necessities for the life that I lead. When I walk around in jeans and a t-shirt and a neighbourhood regular calls me "sir," I no longer take it ironically.

But then I wonder if who I have become is more than just the sum of its parts, because in a world of my own making there's no room for new perspectives or experiences. I don't listen to Katy Perry because I don't particularly like Katy Perry, but today I stumbled across an article that documents her new record as a failed coming-of-age experience, and I enjoyed that. From there, I thought that maybe I should listen to Katy Perry - and then I did, and wished I hadn't. But Katy Perry isn't really the point. The point is the limiting of potential experiences, the idea of settling down without really living. The more comfortable I become, the more resistant to that which doesn't fall under my little sports/niche culture umbrella, and that worries me.

Pop culture is an enormous, amorphous, mostly unnecessary entity, but it's also kind of fascinating. And if Katy Perry is the queen of modern teen idols and I don't understand why people like her, how am I supposed to understand Miley Cyrus' bizarre (and maybe kinda meta/kinda cool) coming of age? (Why I should care is perhaps a more legitimate question, but looked at under that prism, sports are just artificial competitions with predetermined potential outcomes.) I may not give a shit about gossip-magazine shame culture, but I am interested in the dissection of art, and pop art is important in what its popularity says about the world.

But what are the damn kids saying these days? Last week, again on the bus, I ran into a pretty blond on her way to see an electronic duo who happen to hail from my hometown of Toronto. I asked her who Zeds Dead were. She stopped at my seat and stared down with her jaw slack, giving me the exact look I give people who tell me they've never owned a computer. I Googled them later and found out it's a pair of kids who started producing three years after I left, so maybe I would have heard of them had I stayed in Toronto. But then again, maybe I wouldn't have. It's the miracle of the digital age that one person's lifeblood is another's greek, but what else are we missing out on?