Closing Time

Hi all,

Dead Metaphor is now past its prime, a fate that also befell Miss Jean Brodie. Please visit my new blog, which should be up and running by May 1, 2009. It will be a little shorter, a little sweeter, but never a little Tweeter:

littlespeck.blogspot.com

Much thanks,
M.

The Breaks

In a recent copywriting class we were given five minutes to complete a writing assignment: Describe a person standing over someone who’s sleeping.

In my tale of horror cum laude, the snoozing man’s ears were sliced off by his irate wife, who despised their resemblance to half-popped popcorn kernels filled with thick wax like a fine creamery butter. The nickname she bestowed on her poor husband? Orville Headenbocker.

Rereading my work later, I knew I needed to take some time off from plumbing the depths of my own brain, to outrun the earliest, rainiest days of March, that fierce lioness.

Vancouver Art Gallery: How Soon is Now

Contempo art turned playground – I left the VAG feeling as if I’d really connected to something, and I’ve said that only twice in the 10 years I’ve been going there. Interactive art, something more acutely sensory, walks a fine line, and I think the Smiths-appropriated title, above, aptly describes the exhibit’s conceptual spirit. Plus, it was just plain fun to sit inside a multi-floored wooden cabin/art piece within the gallery, for nothing more than the aural pleasure of listening to the creaks of surrounding footsteps, that homey “Here’s Johnny” appeal.

Metropolitan Opera, live in HD, in Richmond: Madama Butterfly, now with BK Joe

Anthony Minghella’s version of Madama Butterfly is a beautiful and relatable example of austere minimalism. It’s not plain and simple but simply gorgeous, underscored by emotional desperation and powerful performances. I hadn’t bought a ticket before for any of the Famous Players HD broadcasts from New York, simply because I hadn’t considered the inclusive nature of what the Met’s trying to achieve by reaching out to opera fans and the unwashed masses across North America. The behind-the-scenes action during the intermission was in itself worth the price of admission.

Downing BK Joe from the concession, during the first intermission, was not the fine wine I imagine was flowing out the Met doors, even in this economy. But I drank it, and I enjoyed it, and I don’t even drink coffee.

Nia: If it’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

I took my first Nia classes over my lunch hour last summer and enjoyed them well enough to sign up this again this month. What I can’t decide is how much I enjoy Nia, or why I keep returning.

Nia combines movements from nine forms of dance and martial arts. The free dance periods, which embody the flakier, New Age-y elements of Nia, are what leave me so uncertain of my intentions. All I know is this: I always break a sweat, and I’m far less gracious and disciplined on my feet than I ever expected. To learn more about this shadow self, I show up and shut up.

Tea at the Hotel Vancouver: What’s with the Wasabi Peas?

A mad day downtown led me to the Hotel Vancouver for a large pot of standard Earl Grey, a copy of the weekend paper, and a chance to pretend I’m a lazy guest whittling away the hours until my flight home. I love hotel lounges and have been on a quest for a few years now to determine which one I’ll most enjoy hanging out in when I’m no longer working full-time. Given today’s economy, that could be next week or at age 70. It’s never too early to prepare.

People watching and complimentary snack bowls are two of my favourite things about hotel lounges. On the day I was at the Hotel Vancouver, the people were dull and listless but the snacks were hot, hot, hot. Why choose wasabi peas for an afternoon nibble? How does any beverage complement horseradish? When did the “taking of a toast and tea” turn into the “taking of a tea and pea?”

Old Movies: I Was Alive When Some of Them Were Made

After rewatching The Graduate, an insatiable need for movies from the 1960s and 1970s began eating away my life, hour by hour. Annie Hall came and went (three times), followed by Cabaret, and then Harold and Maude (ultimate favourite), and then Look Who’s Coming to Dinner (twice), and then Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. A childhood nickname, Mel’s Diner, now has proper, non-sitcom based origins. And I especially love Alice’s take on child rearing – just abandon youth in hotels and occasionally beat them upside the head.

Out of this fun-time wrangling, one thing became certain: It’s just not enough. I booked a flight home to New Brunswick for Easter, where I will then voyage even deeper into the dark, quiet centre of the earth - I’ll help my mother clean out the basement.

Old Bones

My February flew by in a rush of present participles:

Escaping — Took a day trip to Seattle to view Lucy's Legacy at the Pacific Science Center. In collaboration with the Houston Museum of Natural Science and Ethiopia's Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the center is displaying, rather controversially, the 3.2 million-year-old bones of the gal we know in the West as Lucy — named after Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds — within the much larger context of Ethiopia's rich, diverse religious and cultural history.

After wading hip deep through crowds, I gazed inside the dim glass coffin at what remains of the old dame, this creature that was not an ape and not a human, and marveled at our lost, or barely half-found, collective history. Next to me, two women also stole a peek. One elbowed the other, clearly exasperated at the sight of a few scattered old bones, and said, "There, I hope you got your $20 worth." We're evolving nicely as a species, as always.

It's on until March 8, when the little Australopithecus will return to Africa and will likely never be exhibited in public again. I recommend giving her your regards, should you be in the area, and being thankful that she wasn't found in the 1990s and known as Britney or Courteney Cox Arquette.

Avoiding — Attending workshops is a wonderful way to not do actual work while on the official clock. I signed up for Process Mapping, a day-long session that ended with participants building paper airplanes, complete with an assigned test pilot. We'd made our first set of airplanes earlier in the day using a flawed set of instructions, and then we spent the rest of the day learning how to revise our process so it made more sense. This was enlightening in more ways than one; a participant admitted tearfully that her department hasn't revised most of their processes since 1982, when people understood how to change typewriter ribbons.

In our timeline for constructing the planes, each minute was the equivalent of one week, so that one month was only four-minutes long. I was the stapler. I had to staple the folds in the nose after the plane was folded. In this fast-paced world, I waited in line for supplies for seven weeks. I threatened mutiny to the person playing store manager, who said, "We don't mutiny here; we go on stress leave."

Just as in real life. A week later, I decided to skirt this fate and spent time learning the ins and outs of responsible optimism. We were given ways to balance a positive attitude with a reasonable outlook, without feeling emotionally stifled. If anything makes me want to take up smoking again, it's being hopeful and responsible at the same time.

Demi God-ing — In my weekly copywriting course, I was given five minutes to anthropomorphize a footstool. Three millions years of evolution brought us to this point. So, I gave it life, animated its upholstery. It was ingenious, really, and I'm so sorry I don't believe for one second in Twitter or I'd rock your lives in 140 characters.

For this week's assignment I retrofitted an ad by creating copy for a photo and target demo that I'd pulled separately from a hat. The two didn't naturally jive, and so I found myself using foreign terminology as a glue, in the form of the word "haters". My ad was designed to convince young, rural drop outs to find their own path using a self-directed learning service. "Forget the haters," my ad claims, "You CAN have the life you've only dreamed about."

Where am I going? Will I be back?

Setting people on fire — After eating Japadogs and viewing Neil Gaiman's creepy Coraline (in super 1950s 3-D action!), I made the simple transition from street punk to upscale drinker and landed at the (cough) gentlemanly lounge in the Sutton Place Hotel, not three minutes before the mighty Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar or best picture. A small crowd had gathered around the television, while I panicked needlessly over whether the server had noticed me arrive and would remember to feed me the complimentary nuts.

As I indulged in what will be one of my last Manhattans of the season, the candle on the table burned out. The vigilant server brought a platter of three tealights to replace around the room. At some point in the exchange, she tipped her head sideways into the tray.

It all happened so fast. My brain didn't process that her flaming head was an indication of danger, or even fire. She pounded it out in four short slams, leaving a grizzled mass of smoky grey in her otherwise well-groomed side ponytail. The room stank.

I felt the need to adopt her. Instead, I tipped her very, very well.

Now tip me: If anyone knows of a sake that, when warmed, doesn't taste like cardboard doused in rubbing alcohol, get in touch.

Icons, or I-cans

Absolution – the word flashed through my mind toward the end of Big Beautiful Dark & Scary, a cacophonic descent into post-9/11 fear and madness, as arranged by Bang on a Can All-Stars, a self-described “electrified chamber ensemble” out of New York City.

Good fortune landed me free tickets to this last event of the PuSH Festival, at the Chan Centre on Sunday night – an aural romp with an ingenious collective of experimental musicians, the sort who know the rules by heart, always sifting and discarding, and then rearranging the remains with flourished mischief, tampering with boundaries real and imagined.

I swore demons fled the moaning cello, drummed out by heavy percussion and drained by the whining electric guitar. In contrast, I felt lulled by dissonant crackles and fevered high notes, rising a little less frantic above the whir and spin into a more benevolent state, swayed by a directionless sense of forgiveness. The woman seated in front me, far more grounded, wiped away tears.

During the brief intermission that followed, the dazed divided themselves between the wine bar and Vancouver’s new mayor, Gregor Robertson. After that kind of musical mayhem, an association with the man who helmed his own Happy Planet couldn’t hurt. An assortment of artistically inclined woman wore paths in the concrete around him and his patient wife, while their dates, the Men, pushed up their heavy black-rimmed glasses in defeat and updated their Facebook statuses via Blackberry.

Afterwards, the somnolent first chapter of Eno's Music for Airplanes swept us away to destinations we’ll never reach, again and again, and then before Thurston Moore’s suggestive, ovation-rousing Stroking Piece #1 came hope for the talented masses. Lukas Ligeti's Glamour Girl came about as a result of a donation. Anyone who contributes to Bang on a Can, whether it be $5 or $5,000, is given the opportunity to compose a piece, and any pieces the group likes becomes part of their repertoire. “Some are even keepers,” clarinetist Evan Ziporyn said, answering an unspoken question on behalf of his audience.

Ligeti was one of the lucky, possessing skill, artistry, and his birthright from a musical family. Glamour Girl's African sub-pop themes wove in and out like a snake, as if listeners were twisting through stalls at an large, outdoor fair, different bands at every turn, each instrument connected and yet somehow independent of the whole sound. It was difficult and remarkable, for both musician and listener, with the percussionist, for example, moving smoothly between two sets of drums, a gong, and chimes.

My experience with this year’s PuSH Festival is based on only two events, and both are charmed by their invocation of cans – the one above, and two Fridays ago, 13 Most Beautiful. . ., where a scant selection of Warhol’s restored screen tests from the mid-1960s were thrown in creepy, disembodied relief over the very living forms of musicians Dean and Britta.

Chance had also brought me to this performance. A friend, a true Dean and Britta fan, bought tickets for what she assumed was a concert. She didn’t check further details. I agreed to accompany her but was lazy – the when, where, and whats of the event remained entirely unknown. I arrived at the venue, exhausted after work, and completely ignorant of everything except for my name and shoe size. I was surprised to be handed a program and to see so many young Asian men with bleach blond hair.

Dead ringers. The place was packed and hot and stoned, and the music – at times rocking, sultry, yearning, eery, unencumbered – nailed the visuals, those souls floating before us in mundane black and white, who agreed to participate willingly in self-exploitation and not much else.

Bathed in configurations of light and shadow, 15-minute cravers such as International Velvet, Baby Jane Holzer, Billy Fame, Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, Dennis Hopper, and others were suspended in time and space, some poised, some artless, one drinking a Coke, one brushing her teeth, one not even blinking for almost four minutes. The stories behind the faces are always infinitely more interesting, only occasionally less so. One girl went out for cigarettes in the 1980s and never returned. One danced himself out a window, Mozart blaring in the form of a siren song. One morphed into a cheesy movie starring Sienna Miller.

My friend initially wanted to bail after the first three or four screen tests on account of “the music is good, but not much is happening.” That’s the crux, right there. It extends as far as the eye can see, right down to the most astute Twitters or Shreddies Diamond packaging. Where’s the line between superficial, meandering claptrap and stimulating, informed art? Does it even matter?

In Warhol’s case, who can say? He existed, as did his silver minions at the Factory, and so Dean and Britta summed it up well in their non-literal translations, recycling images and inventing music and reinterpreting it all as part of, well, the ever on hereafter.

Like an Onion Girl

My director has an intricate Balinese carving on his living-room wall, a found treasure from a trip to California that reminded him of early years spent abroad. The mural depicts, to mythological extremes, the ongoing, everlasting, never-ending battle between good and evil. Light versus dark, positive versus negative — perhaps even, in a less polarizing way, women versus men. After all, this week was notable for identifying even more of the classic Mars versus Venus, that women’s armpits smell of onions, while men’s smell of cheese — and certainly not the kind which evokes a delicate Port Salut.

An optimist, I suspect, would suggest sticking shaved slabs of Philly steak in there and calling it a sammich. Deliciously carnivorous! But, prone to a condition that falls several feet short of optimism, I can’t translate body odor into a satisfying deli lunch. This may also explain why I’ve turned away from assured happy endings, as found in Pride and Prejudice, and toward that novel’s inevitable reconfiguring as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The latter takes the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel and inter-splices certain passages with, according to Amazon, all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.

What's eating Mr. Darcy? Is it pride? No. Is it prejudice? No. It’s the living dead.

With the January weather continuing so button-down grey and sedate, even my usually upbeat, forward-thinking director bit from a glum cookie. His quibble was with the mainstream media, an easy target, and he asked why bad news — the market, the multiple murder-suicides, the madness — figures so prominently in our collective consciousness, while good news is trivialized and made to be less than it is, as an eye roll or a Hey, Martha! tucked away for habit’s sake.

I took this as a personal challenge — not in rethinking mainstream media practices — but in linking my director with an appropriate support group. Business in Vancouver offered a quickie solution:

Stay Positive Vancouver, January 28, 2009, 7 AM: Stay Positive Vancouver was formed by a group of local business people to combat the negativity that seems to have taken hold of the marketplace. Come out and network with a group of progressive and positive business professionals. $15, 109 W. Esplanade, N. Vancouver. Contact xxx.

Try as I might, I couldn’t simply email this to him without first exploiting it for my own snarky enjoyment. What makes them feel so positive? I wrote. Is it bilking participants out of $15? And who’s really feeling positive at 7 AM? I’m lucky I’m even conscious.

Now that’s a ringing endorsement. Karma, it turns out, is a bitch. The very next morning I received an email from HR promoting their free health initiatives for February. On the docket, a lunchtime workshop entitled Responsible Optimism:

When adversity and challenges arise, we can either respond with optimism or gloom. Optimism, however, leads to health. This workshop addresses the benefits of optimism and the characteristics of optimistic people. It also offers tools for adopting a more optimistic, positive outlook on life.

It sounds dreadful. I signed up. And I signed up a willing coworker to not only ensure I attend but to ensure others know I’m attending. That way I can become their self-appointed moral superior and measure their moods with happy, slavish abandon.

These lunchtime workshops are the ladylike armpit onions of my work life. They try real hard to be pretty and stink so much. I’ve attended two over the past year: How to Receive Negative Feedback, where I ended up giggling away the hour with a like-minded curator, and this week’s How to Manage Your Time Effectively. This particular workshop wasn’t a priority for me, but I was signed up by a coworker after I told her that discussions on managing time are merely a way to waste more time. This angered up her blood, which is how I came to be sitting next to her at the workshop, staring blankly at the time management instructor and her accumulated bulleted points, especially after she linked procrastination with guilt and, eventually, death.

While others scribbled notes, I reveled in my rebellious, cavalier attitude and counted all the latecomers. Those with time management issues can’t really be expected to be punctual. This general criticism, as I’ve come to note, is relatively fluid. After all, in any campus-wide communicators meeting I’ve attended, most everyone, including myself, turns up in medias res, making bold eye contact with the speakers and forcing Food Services to wheel in a second coffee cart.

Frustrated, I took a variety of my life’s yins and yangs to a friend, dropping them in her lap as she chewed her seitan salad and joined me in Random Acts of Tea . My friend is a survivor, facing down her addictions and demons with a warrior’s grace and force. She had already placed a copy of The Art of Peace between us before I’d said a word, and had me musing on aikido, where protecting the self comes from not inflicting harm on attackers, real or perceived.

My friend has a job at one of the city’s major art galleries — “the last vestige for the chronically unemployable,” she claims — where she stands Zen-like for eight-hour shifts. She’s a quiet, impartial observer – sometimes offering directions, never opinions. She just is. One lucky day, a man came out to her. He had to get it off his chest.

I found myself longing for that kind of connection, encounters surrounded with the space and time to plan my own mind. And I'm certain this requires, say, a trip to Bali, as it will never be forced upon me during a lunchtime seminar. Not unless I first go Zombie and eat someone else’s lousy brain, because I can.

In a Fog

After 19 consecutive, non-record breaking days of fog, the world known as Vancouver has almost instantly regained sharp edges and angles, and no longer appears to be drifting off aimlessly in all directions.

For every scheme suggested to me to prevent my own silent, slow fade into the ether — the prospect of Carmen, or Billy Twinkle and other PuSH Festival shenanigans, or a lecture on the historic importance of buttons — I performed a third-rate show of ambivalence. Why confront the atmosphere when it's so much easier to lie flat and induce brain coma by 6 PM?

Excuses can comfort, but they make for weak anchors. And that's how, one Saturday night, I traded the familiar, steadfast fog of Vancouver for the heady, alluring fog of Richmond.

When arts and culture, with their assured promise of well-being and personal growth, failed to rouse me from my stupor, a friend suggested physical exercise. I ignored her for several hours, then conceded on the promise the activity would involve my new hand-knit beret, which required market testing. Would it make me seem kicky and youthful, or a cougar-granny in a tam? With that, my friend pulled out her brochure of the new Olympic speed-skating oval and suggested we do our civic, taxpaying duty and give it a whirl.

My friend conscripted five individuals for the skating plan, which unwittingly launched a comedy of errors, of sorts. Driving in three vehicles and arriving from three different directions, we all became lost, even though we had plenty of maps and good intentions. With no landmarks to guide us, the fog distorted our understanding of the surroundings, bad news in the dark; Richmond, on a clear day, is a strange, delicate form of logistical LSD. Eventually we came together, stood in line, and made it to the front just as they ran out of rental skates, conveniently enough, in all our sizes.

Fine. Sniff. We walked upstairs to watch other people skate. Looked fun, round and round. The building itself has interesting aesthetic features, particularly the ceiling made out of pine beetle wood. As I emailed later to a friend, "We went not-skating. Here are photos of the ceiling."




Reflective.




Plans thwarted, I knew I should have stayed in bed.




No, it's not a portal to a better place.

What happened next is the crux of the comedy of errors, of sorts. My friend was hungry, and we'd spent all of a half hour staring at a ceiling, so another friend suggested we drive "down the road" to a pub near the heliport, the Flying Beaver. We all drove "down the road" in our three separate vehicles, this time going in one straight line, and once again we were lost. In fog, "down the road" is a purely subjective direction.


When we finally sniffed out the pub, which really is in the middle of nowhere, we found ourselves in an alternate universe. Outside, all was white and still. Inside, the place was packed, and it was grand party central. Blinking, we sat in the dead centre of the room, next to a fireplace, and ordered the popular evening special, the Big Ass Beer.


As one bout of incredulity breeds another, just as we settled in, the evening's host announced a pub-wide, hours-long game of Name that Tune, with tables participating as teams. We crossed our eyes in horror. And decided to go for it. When the host came around to introduce us, a friend labelled our team the G Spot, her reason being that we were easier to find in a mess than expected.


I surveyed our competition, then looked up to deconstruct the decor.

Earlier in the week, I'd gone to a workshop at UBC's School of Journalism hosted by Nicola Jones, the acting essays editor of Nature. The renowned science journal, which began publication in the mid-1800s, had confirmed my brain-fogged notion at the time that disseminating ideas, academic or otherwise, is a ridiculous, almost useless crap shoot. Nature, for example, has a 90% rejection rate, and of the articles accepted for editorial review, two thirds of those are also denied. Eagle or fish?

Regardless, we named a lot of tunes, and danced on cue, and were even coerced into a conga line. We ended up in third place out of ten, outdone by a table of aptly named Beaver Eaters sitting beside us. They had a Girls Gone Wild-esque team mate in spandex, willing to do anything to win. Damn sex appeal. Two out of the five members of our party were wearing turtle necks. We'd thought we'd be skating.


What a blur. The night was entirely unexpected, a needed dose of unforced spontaneity. I later worked it through my mind, wondering if it really happened at all. Nobody who went spoke of it for days. Had we simply conjured ourselves a happy little place at the end of the universe?

The Main Drag

Tromping through the snow-sludge, I returned to work this week, grateful in some ways that the forecast for rain and plenty of it meant I wouldn’t need to decode my Institute of Higher Learning’s (IHL) puzzling regulations on snow days for employees, the less-than-descriptive Policy 68.

Very simply, Policy 68 stipulates that IHL will remain forever open and that employees are expected to risk life and limb to attend work, but that everything may be cancelled upon arrival, and good luck. The policy goes no further. It doesn’t cover questions such as, What if I choose to stay home?, or Why bother coming in for no reason?, or Once I arrive for no reason, how do I make it back home if I get snowed in on this godforsaken campus?

A friend made the obvious joke: It should be called Policy 69. But a 69 in any context implies at least a taste of mutual pleasure. Policy 68 is far more apt; it’s a near-screw, not a complete blow off. In other words, it owes you one.

Other vague terminologies soon surfaced. I received a survey from an outside consultants’ group asking me to rate what needs to improve in IHL’s organizational structure so I can move up the commitment curve. The survey left only four blank lines in the reply space, so I recycled it. Next I received an odd request from HR: Would I consider a voluntary position as an ergonomics rep? I’d never heard of such a thing. Other than meet occasionally with people who are forced to sit in uncomfortable chairs, what would being an ergonomics rep entail?

I still don’t know. I found IHL’s ergonomics program online and was confronted by a slew of incomprehensible language, beginning with, Our ergonomics program helps to improve the interface between employees and their jobs. I considered taking the training course out of a mixture of curiosity, irritation, and boredom, and maybe to see if I could rewrite their content, but then I remembered how I dodged a procrastination bullet last year by not attending the conferring of an honorary degree. Similarly, how could becoming an ergonomics rep really make the world a better place for anyone?

Just when I needed a true belly laugh, Hollywood answered. Kim Cattrall sashayed by for an hour-long public chat with Jerry Wasserman. That kind of prime cheddar was a tempting treat, the kind that sticks in the throat and may require the Heimlich. All the free tickets were gone before I’d even dialed the number, and so I was relegated to walking by the theatre, looking for rabid Sex and the City fans in stacked stiletto thigh-highs. A poster of Cattrall as a crowning glory gleamed in the window, as much as something can be said to gleam in the midst of pervasive gloom. The building appeared as grey and empty as the soul of her former TV show.

Rumour has it, the old curmudgeon who lives in the apartment above me once penned Cattrall's valedictory speech. This man at one time was a well-connected Member of Parliament, and how he ever landed in well-worn low-rise rental apartment is anyone’s guess. Maybe he’s cheap, but I think he perceived a need — to remind his fellow tenants that we’re all idiots. He leaves notes: on the dumpster, Close the lid, you idiots; on a shopping cart abandoned in the back alley which he dragged into our lobby, Don’t steal shopping carts, you idiots.

I spent that Cattrall-less afternoon by taking a Charity Village workshop, to prepare for an upcoming strategic planning retreat with no red carpet frills, only a potluck lunch. According to Charity Village, I now understand the fine line between vision statements, mission statements, goals, and objectives, which are all easy to gauge in theory but difficult to write about in practice. My goals often grow missions, and my objectives become immeasurable.

Charity Village champions the use of a facilitator in any strategic planning session to allow participants to contribute on equal footing. Our unit of four wouldn’t necessarily need to bring in another person, but I couldn’t resist asking my director what would happen in case of a dispute. We don’t ever really have any disputes, at least none that we voice to each other.

“That’s when I’ll bring out the liquor,” my director said.

I couldn’t have dreamed up a better answer. Liquor will be our facilitator. I hope we conjure disputes out of thin air, several shots over.

Anesthetized by his promise, I went blank after what happened next. My director announced I would be receiving a small merit-based raise to complement the annual 2%, retroactive to my anniversary date. If I had been hit in the head just then with a wayward Frisbee, it would have bounced off without my notice.

I don't quite understand why exactly this is happening, but it served its purpose: For a brief moment I wondered how I could retrieve the survey from recycling, asking me about my commitment curve.