Casual Walks

2007-06-20T17:16:00.000-06:00

Tragedy: On my bus from La Paz to Lima I had my camera stolen. This would explain a) why I haven´t really done any entries for all of Peru and b) why I find it hard to come back to it, it´s kind of a reminder of ALL the photos i lost. Anyways, I have one week left in my travels and have been having a great time, so I will do a proper post when I get home, when I have the time to invest in a text version. Then this guy´ll be back up as I had north within a weekend to the NWT to work for a summer! But more on that later, in the meantime I wish everyone all the best and promise to get this sucker back up and running when I have the courage. Cheers!

2007-05-26T13:35:00.001-06:00

CHILE!! and Ian reveals further ineptitudes in the blogosphere.

So, since last time I had such a hard time with formatting when I did a photo based entry, I'd planned to upload the photos all in one go and then comment from there. But blogger didn't like that. So now you have this disaster, all photos from various points of my adventure north from Santiago all the way up to San Pedro de Atacama, where I crossed into Bolivia. The Bolivian photos will come later.
Anyways, I head into the Bolivian jungle tomorrow, but I will try and rectify this and actually explain the photos later. Cheers!

2007-05-11T15:41:00.000-06:00

Ian Highlights How He's Possibly The Worst Blogger Of All Time By Posting More Photos In A Vain Attempt To Catch-up Which Inevitably Ends With Him Being Bored of Being On The Computer And Stopping Short Of Actually Catching Up

poetry¡veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada - pablo neruda
lit¡the joke - milan kundera

Hello hello, writing you all from smoggy smoggy Santiago (apparently this is the worst time of year for the smog, see photo, makes seeing the Andes in the background tricky). Since my last entry I've visited Bariloche, Pucon, Valparaiso, Isla Negra, and now Santiago. I'm off tomorrow for a five day jaunt before reaching San Pedro de Atacama which will involve a desert that has no record of it having rained ever, a penguin sanctuary, and one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll give each location one paragraph, try and get in a few cool things about each, and thus catch up!

Bariloche was amazing, a city nestled on this giant lake right in the Andes, on the north edge of Pantagonia in southern Argentina. The big events: ran into Laura, the girl who burst two tires on bikes in Mendoza, with whom I rented a car along with a few other friends to do the 7 lakes drive (see photos), during which she again managed to burst two tires, right in the middle of absolute nowhere. What a debacle, the spare in the trunk was more cruel mockery at that point. Thankfully Joey, a lovely Welsch guy with us who spoke the best Spanish, managed to hitch hike back into town some 40 minutes away on a little used gravel road and get things back together. But then the dick of car rental guy charged us 210 pesos because we didn't get the right BRAND of tire when we returned. We were all pretty steamed but since he had a copy of Joey's credit card we all paid up, so I needed to do something to burn off a little steam. That something was paraglide off Mount Otto and glide like a bird over the Andes! The mixture of adrenaline from the take off and landing and the absolute piece you get up top was incredible, I've actually started thinking I might try and take it up some point in the future in Invermere.

Next it was on to Pucon where I once again tackled rafting, but of the Class 4 and 5 variety and spent my birthday drinkng Pisco Sours (a Chilean or Peruvian national specialty, depending on who you ask) in the hotsprings and partying at a little Chilean houseparty thrown by our waitress from that night. The highlight, however, was triumphing over Volcano Villarrica, an active volcano which I climbed adorned in crampons, helmet, and with my might iceaze in hand. We gained 1400m in about 3 hours of deep deep snow and did it whilst the sun rose over the valley behind us (4AM start time, ouch). The top was unreal, I'd never seen a volcano like that before but you could hear an ocean like roar coming from the magma within and once in awhile lava came crashing up so you could actually catch a glimpse of it. Great stuff.

Alright, I lied about catching up completely, but I want to write a bunch about Valparaiso cause I absolutely adored it but, unfortunately, I just don't have the patience for it now. I leave you with a photo taken from Pablo Neruda's house in Isla Negra, a tiny quaint village I did a day trip to while in Valparaiso. Neruda, despite being terrified of the ocean, was abosutely obsessed with ships, navigation, and the general romanticism of a nautical life. Hence he actually built all his houses like ships, with small hallways, low curved ceilings, and floorboards designed to creak and be slightly slanted to give you the impression that you were actually at sea. This was his drinking boat, where he and his friends would sit and get toreup in the hot hot sun, since Neruda believed that it was better to be dizzy from drink than from seasickness. He even had bells to communicate with the real ships on the ocean since he considered himself the "land captain". For some reason when I saw it I imagined all the bayview boys in the boat, each of us wearing a paper pirate hat and getting ridiculously drunk on a landlocked boat. Then Rico threw Keith overboard, haha. Brought a huge smile to my face.
Anyways, I trust all is well with each and every one of you. I also want to say a huge thank you to everyone who sent me birthday wishes, I was completely overwhelmed by my wall on facebook! xoian

2007-04-23T09:58:00.000-06:00

1 Picture = 1000 Words? Sorry for the long entry...
music ¡ 1234 - feist, tango nuevo
lit ¡ ulysses - james joyce (40 pages to go! but those 40 pages consist of one paragraph with only one period)

Alright, simple format for the entry this time. I will simply upload photos and comment on them until I get bored, frustrated with the slow upload time at the internet cafe, or feel it has become to beautiful a day to be in front of the computer (it´s raining right now though...) And go check out Feist´s new track 1 234, I adore it. Alright, Giddy up (in absolutely no particular order).

Me trying to be artsy in a wine cellar. I thought it was particularly cool since this winery was named for a constellation and that looked like the moon rising. Adrian and I spent a week in Mendoza, a city very similar to Calgary in feel on the west side of Argentina, just short of the Andes. Whilst there we rented a bikes rode out to a winery to do a lovely little tour. What I learned: rosé isn´t a mix of red and white wine, but rather red wine that was left for less time in the grape skins, therefore taking on less colour (Josh, I feel like you´re shaking your head at my ignorance...) The more you know...

A more standard picture of our running crew, a British-Canadian alliance of winos. Laura, the girl on the far left, managed to have two flat tires - one on the way out and one on the way back. I only had loose handlebars.

The Hero of this blog, haha. Don´t I look epic? And yes I´ve grown a beard, but no I´m not doing promotional shots for the Discovery Channel. This is actually pre-whitewater rafting, another of our great adventures in Mendoza.

The Hero´s sidekick! Think Sancho Panza. Wait, that makes me Don Quixote... OK maybe not the best analogy. How about heterolifemate? Hmm, Jay and Silent Bob probably isn´t the best analogy either. Anyways, Adrian unfortunately left on Friday to go back to work in Cowtown. He is missed.

Us rafting! We actually got lucky in that because of the time of season they were able to take us on a part of the river usually closed off for being to nutty. We found ourselves in constant class 3ish rapids, bobing and weaving through huge boulders and obstacles, leftback, rightback, forward!!! Intense fun stuff. Our guide also took pleasure in trying to knock us out of the boat on less dangerous areas... he almost got Adrian something fierce, but as Adrian fell over backwards, eyes as big as dinner plates and having given up on survival, our friend Vassoulla grabed him and hauled him right back into the boat. Pure hilarity.

Our day at the track, the one I talked about earlier in another entry. Remember? Where I lost 30 pesos and Adrian won 50? Dammit, who brought this up again? Whoever trained El Prostituto is getting a strongly worded letter about not giving up in the final stretch, hear you me.

Centro Cultural Torquato Tasso, the venue where we caught a mindblowing Tango Nuevo show on Adrian´s last night. I can´t remember the name of the band, but Adrian and I both bought a CD so I´ll be able to furnish it later. More importantly, the show was just spectacular, a hybrid of tango, rock, and almost dissonance played with a passion that was matched only by the quality of their music. Simply stunning and a great way for Adrian to end his trip, if I do say so myself.

Oh, getting a quite a tab going at the i-net cafe. That´ll be all for now. There´ll certainly be more entries like this, especially when Adrian finds time in his 'busy' schedule (that´s right, i used quotations mr. ineedaweekinthemountainstorecoverfrommyexcruciatingexhausting2monthvacationinSouthAmericaawayfromallcaresstressesandresponsibilites, haha ) to upload his pics to facebook so I can grab 'em. I head out of Buenos Aires tomorrow, south to Bariloche, so that´ll be the next I´m heard from. I´ll also try and do a brief entry of what we did with ourselves in our last week in BA. Ciao!

2007-04-09T12:01:00.000-06:00

Culture Beyond Drinking, or, the Art of Gambling

music¡99% of us is failure - matthew good, fake empire - the national
paint¡alfredo volpi, felipe luis noé
photo¡heaven to hell - david lachapelle

Hello all! Been a bit of time since my last blog, a lot to tell, but once again I will trytrytry to restrict myself lengthwise.

Well, after becoming conoisseurs of the Argentine nightlife Adrian and I moved onto more cultural things this week (while still, of course, maintaining the most ridiculous sleeping hours known to man... before 3am here is nothing short of a miracle on a quiet night). First, we made our way to two galleries this week, El Museo De Bellas Artes as well as the MALBA. We also had a brilliant day betting on the horse races at the Hippodromo in Palermo, and then the next day found ourselves on a walking tour of La Boca and Palermo with a newfound local friend.

Our day at the tracks was absolutely lovely, sun shining brightly, some great swiss and english ladies by our side, as we bet on horses with majestic names such as Mr. Horse and El Prostituto (the proud son of Fat Farm). The Hippodromo was actually really cool, old majestic architecture that felt right out of the movies. Ironically, we weren´t allowed to take any photos (really for no good reason, which makes me think that they had certain clientelle who had no desire to have their photo taken) but luckily I got a video of one of the races (does anyone know if I can post video on blogger?). The excitement with each race was sweeping and you can hear the Argentines screaming and going absolutely nutty for their horses in the background as they got to the finish line (¡VALE!). As for winnings... well first I bet based on how cool I thought the horses name was. And I lost. Then I bet on how cool their parents names were. Lost again. Then I even considered previous results. And kept losing. Finally I decided that all my instincts in horseracing were wrong so I took my criteria and reversed it, therefore betting on the horse who had the crappiest name. AND I lost. Then Adrian won 50 pesos and I was bitter. Haha. All told I only lost 25 pesos (about 10 bucks) but it was a great day all the same.

The other big adventure came from a night where we had been out for Tango lessons with a few girls from the hostel down the way, but arrived halfway downtown only to discover that they had been cancelled. So we wandered about to find a restaurant and ponder what to do with the evening. As is constant in Buenos Aires we were being handed constant fliers for various places as we walked down the street and at one corner a guy tried to give us the fliers and we gave the automatic, handsupnofoulnogracias to him. However, we stopped on the corner and started talking and next thing we knew he was chatting with us, trying to guess where we were from. Turns out the guy has quite a knack, cause he nailed the Brits and the Dutch guy we were with. However, he thought Adrian and I were German, we laughed and corrected him (I think we were just happy not to be mistaken for Americans for once) and we got to talking. Anyways, he was super friendly so we exchanged numbers and said we´d hang out sometime. In the end, Julio (the guy) and his wife wound up taking us around La Boca and the markets in San Telmo and it was fantastic! Our own personal tour guide who´d worked in La Boca and knew literally everyone working the street (the Tango performers, the guys handing out fliers, the gift shop owners, and they were all ecstatic to see him!) and a whole bunch of staircases that to funny gift shops but had windows with great views of the entire area. He really only spoke Spanish, so it was great practice for me though unfortunate for Adrian who was tuned out most of the time unless he realized that Julio and I were making fun of him in Spanish... lol. Ended the day with a local restaurant where he knew the owners and had a nice meal, really great people (he´s even going to hook us up with tickets to the huge Boca-River football game next weekend). It was funny, Adrian and I half spent the day waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to ask for something, but really he and his wife were just great people, pure and simple. And to think it all started with us refusing a flier...

In case you´re curious what La Boca is, it´s actually a cool little neighborhood that had a huge flood of immigrants around the early and mid 20th Century and saw a flourish of Tango culture, which has now become incredibly touristicy during the day and a hotspot for the Buenos Aires mafia at night, who mostly hang out in the barrio across the river. The bright colors that the houses were all painted based on the boat on which you arrived in Buenos Aires, giving an indication of both your nationality and departure. There´re also many crazy statues made of all sorts of famous Argentine figures that´re littering the streets (for example you may recognize football star and local god Maradona). Really a cool little spot for a sunday afternoon jaunt.

I may have to hold off on my little discussion of the arts this entry, since I´m low on time at the internet café and all (collective sight of relief...), but I´ll just say that the paint and photo were all from those galleries and really stunning, especially the chance I got to get to know more artists from this region. This guy Noe was particularly striking, everytime I saw a work that really struck me I´d go forward only to find it was him once again. As for the tracks, here in Buenos Aires I find myself completely removed from new music except at the internet café where I can stream tunes while doing things like writing a blog. Some links to check out if you wanna hear the tracks or learn more about the art: volpi lachapelle noé the national matthew good (for good you have to sign up to the site community).

Anyways, all the best to everyone and please write me! I´d love to know what´s going on at home (like the leafs missing the playoffs! haha not that calgary made it in in any spectacular fashion...) I leave you with a little photo of the Argentine military taking down the flag at the giant Obelisk downtown. Adrian and I assume it must´ve been laundry day. Ciao!

2007-03-31T12:41:00.000-06:00

Dear Nick,

This was the view from my apartment in Buenos Aires last night:

What´s the view from your apartment like? Oh yeah, Nexen.

hahaha

xoIan

2007-03-28T12:30:00.000-06:00

Iguazu, I love you! and The Life in Buenos Aires

lit ulysses - james joyce

music major label debut (fast) - broken social scene

How appropriate that I be reading Joyce right now (400 pages in!). The wandering Bloom/Odyssean hero screams of me right now. Epic (in that mixed, muddled sense Joyce would´ve loved). But in its purest sense, epic, the perfect word for the falls.

Taking a bus up from Buenos Aires to Iguazu Falls, Adrian and I spent 4 nights kicking about the falls. One day on the Argentinian side, one day on the Brazilian side and, most importantly, one day by the pool. The hostel, you see, is a converted Casino that still very much feels like a little paradise. I even got used to coming home to a nice game of water volleyball with breaks for beer at the poolside bar. All this for a hostel!

More importantly, the falls themselves were amazing. On the Argentine side we did a little tour where we got a rainforest tour in a jeep, a boat ride up the river to the mouth of the falls for a drenching and inspiring view of the falls (the pressurized water and mist cleared up adrian´s ear!) and then walked about that falls for the rest of the day, hiking to the tops of all the drops as well as getting an awesome view of the aptly named ¨Devil´s Throat¨. As for the Brazilian side, you got a view from a little further back that allowed you to get a sense of the falls as a whole, plus it wasn´t as intensely crowded. However, one of the coolest suprises of the falls were the butterflies... they were everywhere! At times you felt like you were walking through fluttering clouds and they gave Iguazu this fantastic romantic edge that just couldn´t be beat. I´ve enclosed a couple photos to give you a little idea of how breathtaking it was, but be assured I have tons of photos should there be interest.

An overnight bus home later (greyhound could seriously learn from Argentine buses, our chairs became giant beds and we were served wine and a hot dinner, champagne after dinner, plus had movies constantly playing for us on the screens), and we were back in Buenos Aires, this time staying in the neighborhood of San Telmo. After a few days of panic searching (it seems things were more booked up than we anticipated) the horseshoe up our asses bailed us out again and we found ourselves with an aprtment in the heart of Palermo with a gorgeous view from our balcony in one direction, and from our living room that has floor to ceiling windows that open up completely in another direction. Adrian and I now find ourselves taking Spanish lessons and growing accustomed to the little pleasures of our day. For example, each day around 6 we indulge in a wee matte, a Argentine/Uruguayian tea that in its preparation and consumption is very much a social event. Imagine sheesha in tea form (and yes, with the nicotine, or we think anyways). Here´s a picture of us enjoying it, you can see the little matte cup with the metal straw... each time when you drink, you add a little hot water. It has a very strong, bitter taste, though it becomes quite releaxing after awhile. Adrian spends his days musing on how he can find a way to ship back kilograms of matte to himself in Calgary. All those of you who worked with me at the JCC, you´ll also notice that I´ve had to be equally macgyverish with this stereo to get it to work with my tape adapter...

Oh yes, I almost forgot to comment on the ridiculous club life around here. Well, Adrian and I, after a long day of house hunting, had no choice but to go out clubing 3 of the last 4 nights. The clubs around here are very simply the most hedonistic things I´ve ever experienced in my entire life. The nightlife starts at 1am (and that´s the time you arrive if you´re a loser... lol) and goes on until sunrise, and after that if you really want you can find after hours clubs that go until lunchtime. The last club we were at had 4 rooms, one of which was giant outdoor foam party (this wasn´t a special night, this is everyday), one room which had a ¨green room¨photoerotic shoot going on, and another which had the stars from the latest big brother pulling people up from the crowd to dance with them and what appeared to be strippers. The other room was techno. Anyways, I´m doing a poor job of describing it but just make it the most ridiculous club you could imagine and you´re probably somewhere in the neighborhood. So much fun though, our Canadian clubs look positively childish and repressed in comparison.

Music wise I find myself listening to Broken Social Scene a lot again, mostly because their latest album is the departure point for the thesis I pitched to Ryerson that got me the scholarship listed last entry. Perhaps I´ll explain my thesis in another entry. In the meantime, everytime I leave Spanish class I always seem to want to listen to Major Label Debut (Fast), probably because the song´s upbeat and happy tempo seems to match my mood so perfectly these days.

Haha, another long entry. Something for you to read at work though, right Nicko! Don´t you worry, I´ll be sure to make my next entry in Dear Nick form so you can enjoy it more thoroughly.

hasta luego Ian

2007-03-23T17:56:00.001-06:00

Good News!!!
Just a quick update for a few pieces of interest. First, we got our apartment! We´ve got this great place in Palermo Viejo, around where Mr. Jorge Borges penned some of the greatest works of all time. The view is spectacular from our balcony and the landlady (a very cute 30 something former Spanish chef) has filled the living area with old books and games. I adore it. Check it out here.
In other great news, I recently heard back from Ryerson regarding doing a Masters in Communication and Culture. They accepted me... and then offered me a scholarship for 15 grand! That´s quite the offer for a guy who´s thesis stems from a reading of the latest Broken Social Scene record and will include such Canadian staples as the Trailer Park Boys. It´s like someone´s going to pay me to listen to indie rock and watch hilarious TV! All win.
Anyways, Adrian and I are famished after running around all day on no sleep (good night out last night) and no food (not so great day today) to get things in order so we could move into our apartment today, so we´re off to our favourite cheap restaurant we found in Palermo when we were here the first few days. I promise to write a big entry soon, as well as get that Dear Nick entry up I promised. In the meantime, in the spirit of ¨Circle¨´s comments on the last entry and his love for brevity, I´ve decided to post a poem that came to me in a divine flash of inspiration. Rhyming chose me.

The World´s Most Concise Anti-Nick Poem Ever Written
by Ian Dahlman

Nick?
Dick.

fin

xoian

2007-03-17T12:49:00.000-06:00

New Format
Newly introduced into Casual Walks will be a new format of entry. The series will be entitled ¨Dear Nick¨ which will follow a series of letters addressed to our favourite jerk backhome and thus will try to be as jerky as possible in every facet of communication. To Nick´s delight they will also be concise. Jerks tend to be to the point... lol.
Otherwise we´re enjoying scorching hot weather up here in Port Iguazu, our hostel has a pool which has made for some delightful afternoons. Oh, and we also saw Iguazu Falls (one of the 7 wonders of the natural world) from Argentina yesterday and from Brazil today and were completely blown away, I´ll try and get the pics up when I´m on a more decent cpu at an i-net cafe in Buenos Aires (we head back there tomorrow to try and find our appartment).

2007-03-12T16:04:00.000-06:00

Josh says I should blog more, he's right... or, Week 1

lit | beautiful losers - leonard cohen
paint | torres garcia
music | jaime roos

I've decided I will blog once a week minimum. I feel this is very ambitious, given the beautiful sunshine, cheap beer, and vibrant city life swirling around me (jealous?). Today may be a shorter entry, as this damn computer in the hostel makes a squuuuueaking noise every time you press a key on the keyboard. I feel I'm annoying every single person around me. Hopefully they understand.

First and foremost, what we've done (since we're largely playing this by ear). So far: half a week in Buenos Aires, a ferry ride across the river to Uruguay, one night in Colonia, and now we come to the end of a half week in Montevideo. We've had one day of torrential rain sandwiched by near constant 30 degree weather. I'm now ridiculously tanned, thanks to the beaches of Uruguay.

Despite a near constant run of injuries to Adrian (his ear is blocked and sore, he has a blister on his foot, and he split his toe on a Montevidean pier... to mum: Adrian sends many thanks for the very thorough first aid kit) we've quite literally had a horseshoe up our collective asses. Buenos Aires was spectacular, and when we return we're still very torn between two neighborhoods in which to rent an appartment: the more bohemian, real, but somewhat isolated San Telmo, or the more refined, connected, but vaguely sterile Palermo. The good news is that we've actually met people living in both neighborhoods through various random hostel connections, so wherever we wind up we'll be hooked into a community there, which I think is the most important thing. However, we likely won't be back in Buenos Aires for another half week, as from here we now head north to Iguazu Falls before coming back down. Since our hostel was in Palermo last time, we're gonna grab a hostel in San Telmo this time and get to know the area a bit more, then make our decision. Otherwise our time in Buenos Aires was largely spent meandering the streets at leisure, hanging out in some incredible parks (the one in San Telmo was so cool, nice forest with this crazy mix of locals playing chess, a little amphitheatre, and an almost surreal, greek-templish looking gazebo) and then partying with the hostelers at night. We've also taken to playing checkers most nights over our first beer, to which I'm happy to report Adrian looses quite regularily (though he seems to have the advantage at Shithead (a card game)).

As for Uruguay, our first stop in Colonia was very cool, a former port town that used to house a great many pirates and is a UNESCO world heritage site, but really only interesting for an afternoon. We walked the lovely cobbled streets, snapped a few photos, but wound up heading off the next morning to Montevideo.

Our time in Montevideo has been stellar, but since this is running on, I'll summarize the highlights via a cultural lense. We saw the constructivist Torres Garcia's works today in a great little gallery, my favourites were his various portraits of big figures in Western culture, such as Socrates, Velazquez, Dostoyevsky etc., they were very contorted and swirled with absolute personal involvement with them, mirroring the way an artist interacts with their works personally, which I thought was fantastic. As for music, Adrian and I were lucky enough to be chilling yesterday afternoon on one of the city beaches in Montevideo when we noticed that they'd blocked off traffic on a major road behind the beach and had started constructing a massive stage on the beach's edge. So in broken spanish I convered with a very friendly Uruguayan roadie (I was so suprised, North American roadies always seem surly) and discovered a band called Jaime Roos was playing a free concert at the beach at 930. So Adrian and I made the effort to come back to catch the show, to find about 8 to 10 thousand people gathered on the beach to watch what is apparently a huge band that has been around and stupid popular for 20 years close down the series of summer carnival concerts that have been going every weekend for the past 2 months. The crowd was incredible, the energy ridiculously contagious, and we found ourselves dancing on the beach to what I would say sounded like the latin version of a pop-jam band (imagine Dave Matthews had been born in Montevideo). Great show and those moments when you took a second, looked around you at the ocean of a crowd and got a sense of what you were experiencing were priceless.

I'll end with what I've been reading on the beaches... I just finished up Cohen's Beautiful Losers, a great Canadian novel that I think EVERYONE should read. The treatment and confounding/combining of spirituality, sexuality, and enlightenment is stunning and you'll have moments where you'll find yourself stupefied by the beauty of the imagery and prose, or ridiculously stunned and personally challenged by what you're reading. A great achievement. I've now begun another epic (I've been in that mood lately, having read sheppard's ha! and pynchon's gravity's rainbow) and have begun reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I'm only 30 pages in and I'm already enraptured by the prose, plus it helps that I'm coupling my reading with the TTC lectures on the book, almost as if I'm back in Uni taking a course, only lying on the beach while doing so. Mmmmm.

All the best to everyone, look for a new posting in a week's time (you can set your watches to it! assuming you're ok with your watch sometimes being late and a little rambling at times). Also, I'd like to put a shout out to all the new e-friends I seem to have on facebook. I promise I'll get round to writing on everyone's walls to say hello, though you'll have to forgive if I'm a little new to the proper etiquette of it all. Ciao!

2007-02-27T13:38:00.000-07:00

Phoenix Rising... and then flying to Buenos Aires

lit | ha! - gordon sheppard
film | pan's labyrinth - guillermo del toro
music | division day - elliott smith
tv | the wire - david simon

It's back! Well, after months of sheer and utter neglect, I've ressurected my blog. Now it has been an uber-long while since I've shared with all of you, so for those of you out of the loop, here's where I sit in Coles notes. First and foremost, I'm less than a week away from the very reason I brought this blog back up... my flight to South America Sunday. The plan: my buddy Adrian and I will be flying into Buenos Aires and renting an appartment in Palermo district (of Jorge Borges fame). We will be in and around Argentina for a month and a half, with trips up to the likes of Iguazu Falls and Urguaian beaches across the river. After 6 weeks Adrian heads back, but as for me I'll be pushing onwards for a total of 4 months, focusing most likely in Chile and Peru but by no means limiting myself that way. I have some vague notions about what I'll do, but for the most part I'd just like to drift, read, sightsee, and work on my Spanish for four months.

As for the more real and less surreal part of my life, I'm currently in the midst of making up my mind on schooling for September. Essentially it boils down to 3 options: law at UBC, law at McGill, or graduate studies in media and culture (with a thesis likely on canada and cultural identity, all steming from an analysis of Broken Social Scene's latest album and their label, Arts & Crafts) at Ryerson. And I have no idea what I'll choose (or even if I'll have all 3 choices, though I did get a positive from UBC law a few weeks ago!). I had originally thought I'd make this decision before I left... but alas no. If I come to terms with anything, I will post it here first. Promise.

As before, I still fiercly believe that culture defines our reality, so I will continue to post about the works that're messing with my perception at that time. Over the last little while I've been devouring literature, but most impressive has been this book I'm reading now, a piece called Ha! that describes itself as a 'self-murder mystery' that examines the suicide of Quebecois author Hubert Aquin (one of Canada's great writers, though he'd say he was Quebecois, his book Prochain épisode took down The Life of Pi to win CBC's 2003 Canada Reads competion). Fascinating stuff, done by bringing all sorts of mediums (interviews, fiction, art etc.) together and ends up giving you a sense of his suicide as a work, not to mention the issues of cultural colonization, love, and the virgin mary. I'd thoroughly recommend it and it's definitely more accessible than it's 850 pages would suggest (the font is bigger...). Division Day was a recent discovery thanks to an old KCRW radio session I found of Elliott Smith from a few years back and I love the haunting lyrics about the inevitable seperations we all suffer, but how he then manages to end the whole picture with "beautiful division day" - the beauty of such an intense moment in a relation, even if it is the end. Given my history, I guess there's no suprise I adore it. As for Pan's Labyrinth, I saw a damn many movies this past few months, what with it being Oscar season and all, but this was by far my favourite. A film that dares to have essentially two films within, a horrific war tale and a fantasy tale, with both stylistically infringing and imposing on each other in style, coming to similar moral messages regarding authority, had appropriately enough a double effect on me. And so vivid, I found it dominating me days later... quite simply a must see. Finally, I managed to epically get through all 4 seasons of The Wire and I have to say it is absolutely one of the best social experiment / commentary shows I've ever seen, absolutely worthy of the title of great literature given by the critics. Seriously check it out.

Haha, and to think I promised I'd try and keep things shorter this time round. Well, luckily for you I will have to since I'll only have internet cafe access to computers this time around. Anyways, I wanted to mention that I'm now on facebook (which I may start using for pics, I dunno) and also on last.fm, so you can get ahold of me that way too. My life is permanently on display in cyberspace for everyone to enjoy. As for e-mail, purewest83@hotmail.com and idahlman@gmail.com both work, so take your pick!

I look forward to hearing from everyone as I travel, and be sure to check back for updates, pics etc! ciao.

2006-11-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

never mind, all sorted (thank god) and my password is now a disaster of nothingness so screw you hackers!!

I will be getting this thing back up and running again shortly... but until then!

2006-10-15T18:08:00.000-06:00

dunno if anyone still reads this... but my MSN has recently been hacked, so if you get any weird messages from me IT'S NOT ME!!
I'm in the process of getting a new address etc., all the new details will be posted on here in the coming days.
Cheers
Ian

2006-05-26T08:55:00.000-06:00

Chapter 4 - Belle Paris

music|white collar boy - belle & sebastian
lit|da vinci code - dan brown
film|C.R.A.Z.Y.

Alright, this'll be a fairly short one as I have my first exam tomorrow, and we honestly didn't do too much besides recover and wander Paris. But there're still things to tell, such as for me to rant against the da vinci code (though it would seem almost every major movie critic has beat me to it, check metacritic, some of the reviews near the bottom end are actually pretty funny ).

It was my birthday (May 3rd - don't worry if you forgot it or didn't know it... my bro's got two years of forgetting it under his belt and I still love him, somehow) when we arrived in Paris, with the original intent of staying only for a couple nights. But then Helene suprised me with my birthday gift... two tickets to see Belle & Sebastian live on May 5th! What a great girl, the funny thing is she really hadn't heard much of them (and of course my iPod was crashed but I couldn't show her) but did know I liked them, and was able to easily remember the name since it's also the name of a very famous children's cartoon in France (from what I'm reading it was a Nickelodeon cartoon, but I'll be damned if I ever saw it... but French TV is typically a decade or so behind America anyways). As for my birthday night, we spent it on Montmartre, looking out in the gorgeous weather on the Parisian landscape. Unfortunately, all the photos turned out miserably, but take my word that it was truly spectacular.

As for the concert two nights later it was great. Get your hands on their new album, The Life Pursuit, it's definitely worth a spin, got a bit of a new pornographers vibe. The song of the night was white collar boy, which I had played ad nausea at the appartment while my iPod was still in working order, so much so that Helene was convinced that it'd been a hit in France since she'd heard it so many times. I seem to recall Muff dubing me the King of the 10 track playlist. Or maybe it was Jeffy. Peu importe.

The rest of the time? Well, I got to revisit the Pantheon since my last visit two years ago had been an extremely hurried one. This is the fairly modern church where you'll find Foucault's pendulum (showing us the world really does turn) haning from the cupola, as well as the tombs of many a great Frenchmen, including Mon. Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola etc., (Zola, Hugo, and Dumas, the great writers, were tomb roomies) and a great view from the roof. A couple pics, one of the great Voltaire's tomb (he's the only one that got a neat statue) and of me frolicing amongst the pillars.

Helene and I were really bushed, so we stopped in this cool little cafe run by the Mosque it was attatched too, absolutely serene little garden where you sat and enjoyed some arab tea. It was glorious.

The rest of the time we just explored Paris by foot, and chilled out at Helene's sister's place, and had coffees and beers with a bunch of Helene's friends scattered through Paris. It was while chilling out that I finally, after years of resisting, read The Da Vinci Code. Why had I resisted? My point was that I'd read that type of novel a hundred times before, that it wouldn't challenge me nor make me think, and I would be nothing more than a consumer of pop trash left at the end with an empty feeling of having nothing interesting to think about. Why did I cave? Because this belief came into direct conflict with another of my beliefs - the book is always better than the movie, I like to read the book first, and the movie had Audrey Tatou (who, as an adopted Frenchmen I'm not allowed to dislike), Tom Hanks and Ian McKellan. So I sucked it up and read the bloody thing one afternoon. First of all, let me get any praise I had out of the way. The plot wasn't bad, got me caught up anyways, and of course I was a fan of the symbology detailing. But the writing was the equivalent of being struck over the head with a blunt hammer repetitively, so much so that it jarred me several times from the flow of the book. And in the end, I was greeted by that empty feeling of having absolutely nothing intellectual to chew on, and I felt unbelievably unsatisfied. Though Muff does make a good point in that it does give a good shot to the Catholic Church, but as Philippe Solers (French writer, married to Julia Kristeva, I recently triumphed through his book le secret for my 20th Century Literature course) points out, it's now in fact become far more revolutionary and countercultural to be Catholic (in France anyways, and I think judging by the success of the book, you could say the same in America).

That was essentially our trip, we came back to Clermont absolutely haggered and wound up sleeping our faces off for at least a couple days before classes started up again... and now I'm within a week of leaving Clermont! I'm hoping I might do a day as a photographer in Clermont for the blog, I also was up on the Puy de Dome last weekend and hiked around, it was fantastic. But as for now, my plans sit this way: a week and a half with Helene in the Tours region (her hometown) as well as on the coast at St. Palais (during which time the 'rents'll be visiting me in France), and afterwards I've also booked a week in southern England, near Exeter, to visit my buddy Olly, who I haven't seen since my exchange. From there? Well, I'll post more when I know more.

All the best.

P.S. - A quick film recommendation, a great film called C.R.A.Z.Y. came out here in France, it's a Quebecois film and is increidbly well done (and I was proud to discover all the Quebecois words I learned in Canada and had thought useless in France were suddenly useful again, Tabernac! Did you know that they had subtitles for the French audience for 40% of the film?)... but I'm starting to get the impression (as shameful as it is) that it's easier to see a French Canadian film in France than in anglophone Canada. That's something that needs to be changed...

2006-05-22T08:09:00.000-06:00

Chapter 3 - All the Glory That Is Amsterdam On Queen's Day (and then another 4 days afterwards and Noordwijk briefly at the end)
paint|wheatfield with a reaper - van gogh
photo|world press photo 2006

Insanity. We arrived in Amsterdam to find a huge party just getting under way on the streets. We hurried to our hostel, the flying pig, ditched are stuff, and descended on the streets. Again, imagine the most crowded, happening club you've ever been in, mix it with a fair atmosphere, put it on every street in Amsterdam, and mix in liquor (and of course drugs, this is Amsterdam) to boot. The highlights of the day included Kiran bungee jumping in the heart of Amsterdam (along with a big dutchmen who was so fried that day he forgot he had bungee jumped the next day... luckily we had it on video for him), and a crazy techno stage with some damn good music. The vibe was pretty much just a continuation of the insanity of the night before, tons of different stages with different vibes all around town, and plenty of boat parties floating up and down the canals of Amsterdam. I've put up a few photos to give you a sense, but I won't bother trying to describe it (I think I did my best last chapter and failed).

The next day hurt. But everyone knows the best way to get over a hangover is to actually go and run around a bit, get the blood flowing, work the garbage out of the system. So Helene and I rented a tandem. Wow. Like I said in the 'prologue', the hardest part of a tandem is not being in the front, it's being in the back. Especially with a lunatic of a driver with a history of car crashes (of course female)(joking helene!) in the front, taking you down sidestreets so insanely crowded that she takes the tram tracks, only to find that a tram baralleling right towards you and no way to get off the tram cause there're people everywhere...! Yes that did happen, but it wasn't nearly as dramatic, I got a video from the back while we were on a less crowded street (didn't have the courage to try it on the insane ones), but it was a blast, even if the crappy dutch bike seats had my ass sore until I was in Paris. It was also a great way to see Amsterdam, and Helene and I came back with rosy faces and huge smiles to the hostel, where everyone else seemed really hurting from the night before, in full recovery mode...

I'll mention the red light district brefiely here (since it's probably been played to death in every tourist guide every made for Amsterdam) only to say walking down the streets is one of the most surreal experiences you'll ever have. No video / photos are allowed, but you essentially have these windowed doors in the front where you have woman dressed in lingere (not necessarily pretty I might add) doing all these subtle little things to attract your attention. If someone is interested they open the little door, negociate, and then disappear into some backroom, and then the curtains are drawn (the boys even saw a wife negotiating for her husband)... Seeing woman like that, reduced to little more than trinkets in a vending machine, was actually pretty sombering. Yes I realize that the woman were better off that way, with full medical benefits and a clean safe environment, but to see desire packaged that way made me feel like the world was turned upside down. A shear emotional reaction, but I wasn't a fan. On a lighter note, if you were ever curious how our culture came to equate XXX with pornographic material, it's because it's the prevalent feature on the flag of Amsterdam. It's kinda funny when you go into the churches of Amsterdam to find the XXX emblem beautifully immortalized on every pillar. I've also posted a photo of a bronze we found on the sidewalk (at least we were allowed to take pictures of that).

But more important was what we found inside the church in the middle of the red light district. There was a huge display of all the winning photos of the world press photo competition for 2006. Each picture was placed with a little explacation of the event that occured this year... and they were all breathtaking. Honestly take an instant to browse that website, and get a sense for what a crazy year it was, or even browse the past year and see just how crazy this world is each and every year. Also gives you a sense of some of the big stories you might've missed too... If I ever make tons of money, I'll order the books for each year, the highlight of Amsterdam for me and to think I only stumbled on it by accident.

The day after that was our chance to go to the Van Gogh museum, which had a surprisingly small collection from what I'd imagine. But it was still worth the visit, and I had two big favourites. The first was wheatfield with a reaper, where I got to see a wheatfield that had the same complexity as the sky in Van Gogh's famous stary night, wind swirling and twirling every piece of that field. The other really interesting piece wasn't one by Van Gogh, but rather Gauguin, another famous painter, who did a portrait of Van Gogh painting his favourite, sun flowers... in winter. This is somewhat of an enormous shot at Van Gogh, with whom he spent 3 or 4 months trying to start an artist commune in France before getting completely fed up and fleeing to tropical islands (it's also interesting to note that it was for Gauguin that Van Gogh cut off his ear...) Anyways, the story is Van Gogh could never paint from imagination, he always needed to have his subjects in front of him. And Gauguin spent hours trying to convince Van Gogh to paint from imagination but he never could, and hence this painting of Van Gogh painting sunflowers in winter, a direct shot at his artistic ability. The most interesting part of this story is that a few years later, while Van Gogh was insitutionalized for his mental illness, he finally took Gauguin's advice and painted one painting completely from imagination. The result? The Stary Night, his most famous and celebrated work.

The final big stop on our Amsterdam tour was the Heineken brewery / museum. If anyone ever designed a museum specifically designed for students, this is it. Three beers are included in the tour, with a bar halfway through and at the end of the tour, as well as a gift (which turned out, of course, to be a Heineken bottle opener). Had some crazy rides, such as the experience of being a Heineken bottle of beer, as well as explaining their history, how beer is made, and tons of interactive stuff do like being a virtual DJ or giving you time to browse through a huge library of Heineken commercials while lying back in hyperfuturistic lounge chairs equipped with a personal screen and stereo. Really fun, and a must see for anyone in Amsterdam, the funniest thing was seeing a French family go through with their 2 year old who was dancing about, and who was even pouring beer by the end of the tour with the Heineken barmen (that kid is gonna be soo cool when he's older). The second funniest thing was that Heineken brewery also had Dutch karoke... you can see the disaterous results here (the irony of course is that me, who knows zero Dutch is belting her out but Helene, who knows at least how to pronounce the words correcty after a year in Holland, is barely audible). I must say that this museum was pretty damn effective propaganda, I find Heineken has found a very special place in my heart despite being just an above average, pretty standard beer.

In the end, after so many days in Amsterdam we were sick of the city, so we wound up going to the flying pig's beach hostel in Noordwijk for our last night. Of course, the free shuttle bus was late in the day and early the next one, so we didn't get all that much time there, but it reminded me of Royan (where I studied French in the wall) a beautiful holiday town with enormous beaches. I have to tell you the, sea air did some good after so long in the city. We got a photo on our evening walk, and the next morning we set an early alarm so we could enjoy the beaches a bit before leaving... only to have been so exhausted that we slept right through it and were in a hurried panic to even make the shuttle bus back to Amsterdam to catch our train. Oh well, another visit I suppose, but we did get to see some beautiful tulips on the way out and back.

Anyways, after that we headed to Paris... where Chapter 4 will pick up. Cheers.

2006-05-17T10:34:00.000-06:00

Chapter 2 - Garage Sales and Techno, a.k.a. Queen's Night
music|in the reins - calexico & iron and wine

And the saga conitinues... Actually, it occured to me that breaking my adventure into chapters isn't making my entries any shorter, but rather is giving me poetic lisence to blab on more than usual. Sorry. That being said, I think I'll stay the course. It's far easier to apologize and to continue doing what you're doing. Y'know.

First, let's introduce the city, and then the hodgepodge of people I wound up passing the majority of time in Holland with. Utrecht is a charming Dutch city south of Amsterdam with a beautfiul little canal running right through the centre of town. This was somewhat of a homecoming for Helene, as this was where she spent her exchange semester last year. We were hitched on the idea when we discovered that Kiran, a friend of my close friend of Shannon who were both on exchange in Utrecht the same year as Helene (this is the sort of the convoluded connections that to me meeting Helene), was coming back to Amsterdam for a wee visit, to enjoy the glories of Queen's Night. Coming with her from Toronto was her friend Leah, and in Utrect we also met up with a bunch of Kiran's friends that she made hosteling in Poland. Kate, an Aussie who'd been in Europe for a year or so, bartending in Austria among other things, and two Brits, Ashley and Sean, Ashley being a policeman and Sean the guy on the dispatch radio for the cops as well. Here's a photo of enjoying a nice simple communal meal cooked in the hostel kitchen of.... pasta and tomato sauce. Oh hostel life. Meet the gang!

So we arrived in Utrecht, and I have to say the first thing that struck me were quite simply the bikes. Rows upon rows, whole three story parking garage's dedicated to bikes, bikes locked to every rail pole and fence imaginable, and the constant impression that, walking on the sidewalk, you were going to be run down by a dutch bicyclist. These things are far more scary, not like cars, you can hear those fuckers coming, bikes are silent killers! Helene tellls me that everyone gets hit at least once while in Holland (she, of course, had been hit twice). Here, meet the bikes, meet the canal, meet Utrecht.

Our first night was a thursday, the traditional student party night, and Helene was dead set on reliving a tradition of the year before : that of partying hard at Tivoli, the local student club, concert venue. OK, it's here that I must exorcise my one regret from the trip. We arrived that day, and Helene took me see the canal strip before we ate, drank, and prepared for the night. And by fluke, an Iron & Wine / Calexico concert had been rescheduled for that night! I was incredibly excited, but no one had heard of them and the 30 euro pricetag wasn't all that enticing. Plus the concert started early so the club could function as a nightclub that night... I had one chance to convince everyone we should go, my iPod, to play some of the album they put out together and get everyone on board. AND... my fucking iPod crashed, right there and then, and it's been COMPLETELY fucked since. So needless to say we missed the concert, but I would've really liked to have caught it, and so In The Reins sits as my music for this leg. Give it a listen, you won't be disappointed. Luckily my concert bug would be satisfied in Paris, but that's two chapters away...

Anyways, we had another problem for that night, in that our hostel had a curfew of 2AM. This curfew was luckily lifted for the next night's Queen's Night celebrations. However for that night, the Tifovi didn't really get going till around 1:30, so we had two options - come back to the hostel and recharge our batteries, or give 'er everything we had until we could get back in to the hostel at 8AM the next morning. In the club, the girls and guys opted for plan b, but Helene was dead set on staying out (especially in that by coincidence literally all her friends from the exchange last year had all come back from all over Europe to the same club at that moment for the celebrations). So Helene and I had to find somewhere to crash. And that's where Benjamin came in. Meet Benjamin, partying with Helene (I'm gonna get shot for posting that pic). Benjamin, a native frenchmen now living in Utrecht who was buddy's with Helene last year, was gracious enough to lend us the mattress on the floor in his one bedroom appartment to crash the few hours between 5AM and the opening of our hostel. However, Benjamin got more than he bargained for, cause the English boys, embarassed at being shown up by their arch rivals the French, and a boy from the 'colonies' on how to party, came flying back in full form an hour later to giv'er everything they had. It was a great night, but poor Benjamin wound up putting all of us up in his one room appartment, and took so much good hearted abuse on the 45 minute walk to his place from the club that I think he may have regretted his generosity at several points on the walk home (the rendition of La Marseillaise was particularly touching). The video of us all stuffed into this little room, strewn about and completely wrecked is classic, hopefully the boys'll get that posted soon. But a big thanks to Benjamin for puting up with us.

The next day was a severe recovery day and we needed to prepare for the big celebrations coming that night, so what better way to do it than get some street Vietnamese grub and go hang out in a beautiful chuch courtyard. The peace was definitely appreciated. Next thing we knew, it was time to gear up for Queen's Night, the Dutch celebration of the Queen's b-day. Not the current Queen, changing days continuously would be too confusing, so they took the late-Queen mother's birthday (why the Queen mother? dunno, makes about as much sense to me as mayo and fries), and stuck with it. Little would prepare me for the giant street party that broke out, somewhat similar to my memories of the Red Mile but even nuttier (and less breasts). It was a mix between concerts, techno, percussion groups, dance groups, choir groups, plenty of beer, density on the streets like the busiest club you've ever been to and... garage sales? Yes, it seems that this is the only night that the Dutch do garage sales, and all through the streets you could see people with blankets laid out trying to sell the most useless shit in the entire world. Also, everyone is completely outfitted in orange, a strange choice considering the country's flag contains aboslutely no orange whatsoever, but when you discover that when the Netherlands got their independence from France in the 19th Century they were governed by the House of Orange, it all starts to come together. Plenty of Heineken (which is cheap cause it's domestic!) and celebration all night, just a crazy good time. I've uploaded my clearest photo of the scene (most of my photos are pretty dark) of a crazy choir group that was singing their hearts out, just to give you a sense of what was going on. Again, I got some pretty good drum troup videos, anyone knows how to upload videos onto blogger let me know.

Well we partied all night again, and the next morning it was time to slowly pack our bags and head to the nation's capital to celebrate the actual holiday, Queen's Day, in the heart of Amsterdam. I leave you with a little photo of the most recognizable of Utrecht's landmarks, a giant jackrabbit. Why a jackrabbit? Why not? But if Holland was ever interested in distancing itself from the central point for druggie, alice in wonderland type tripouts, I think this staute would have to be first to go...

Actually, I better upload one embarassing photo of me to keep the scales even with Helene. They were giving out free crowns in the club we were at Queen's night, and I couldn't help myself. Until next time!

2006-05-17T08:57:00.000-06:00

Chapter 1 - 'Don't Make Me Run, I'm All Full Of Chocolate', or, Brussels
sculpt|mannekin-pis - duquesnoy
paint|the death of marat - david
drink|chimay beer

The first leg of my spring break took me up to Brussels to visit a close friend of Helene's from her exchange last year in Utrecht, a great guy by the name of Guillaume, who took us in for a couple nights and became our own personal tour guide for the the three days we would spend there. That's what so great about the friends you make everywhere around the world, sometimes you lose touch and you never know how or where you'll meet next, but it's always great times when you do. A quick reiteration to my many friends scattered everythere, there is always an open invite to come and hit-up Calgary whenever you fancy it. Just say the word.

After getting aquainted, our first night was dedicated to sampling the many fine beers that Belgium is famous for. If you know anything about Belgium, you'll know they're particulary famous for three particularly glorious culinary accomplishments: they're home to the best beer, waffles, and chocolate in the world. Well, instead of going to the ridiculous bar that had 2006 beers on tap (and a menu like a phone book, to quote my buddy ed) we went to a smaller pub that had 'only' 200 beers on tap (here's a wee photo of the menu just so you get a real sense of what 200 beers means). The great fun of course, was for all three of us to order a pint of something different and then try each other's beer. I'd always been a fan of wine testing but this trumped it for sure, and I whilst doing so I had hazy recollections of the great beer testing day I had not so long ago at the Spirits of Oakride chez moi (eh Rico?). Only, of course, with a little more of an international feel. Also, I was fortunate enough to have Guillaume educating me on Belgium beer, the most famous being the illustrious 'trappistes' of which only 7 exist in the world, 6 of those being Belgian (yes I know the link is in french, but here's an old friend who never let me down in French translations in highschool). My favourite of the ones I tried was the Chimay bleue, and I could wax poetic on it's fruity aromas a la faux Muskoka barman, but I think it suffices to say it was one incredible beer.

Day 2 began with a wee wander, which took us to the breathtaking Grand Place, a place that Victor Hugo is quoted as calling one of the most beautiful places on earth (and as a current adopted Frenchmen now, I'm required to take everything said by Victor Hugo as holy sacrament). What was absolutely striking was how each building was a beautiful in it's own way, but different from the one next to it and showed some startlingly different architecture, and the in some spots these incredible buildings looking like they were literally leaning on one another, and if I were a little more of a paranoiac I might even suggest they were conspiring... Certainly gives the square an incredible, vibrant feel, an almost cartoon-like characteristic. I took a video circular sweep of the entire square, but unfortunately I've no bloody clue how to upload videos, so here're a few pics. The one of the building all by itself is L'Hotel de Ville (city hall).

After the square we satisfied two addictions... we satisfied Helene's unbelievable sweet tooth by getting some belgian chocalate. So expensive (we're talking a euro a pop) but so delicious... you can see how Mr. Bernard Callebaut got to be so damn good at what he does, all he had to do was grow up in Brussels! Next, we satisfied my sometimes insufferable fine art tooth (as some of you may attest from my previous mass e-mails on Italy) and went to the Musee des Beaux Arts, where I saw one of my favourite neo-classic works, David's The Death of Marat. If you ever wanted a case study on propaganda, this would make a great one. Marat, a member of the Paris Convention during the Revolution (when it's capitalized it means to a frenchmen that it's THE revolution, otherwise known in the rest of the world as the French revolution). A Jacobin and close friend of Robespierre, we was assisnated by a Royalist Charlotte Corday while soaking in the tub, which he often did for hours on end to treat a disfiguring skin disease from which he suffered. So the Revolutionary government commission David (also a member of the Convention) to paint a portrait glorifying Marat and the Revolutionary project. And here it is. You'll notice that the disfiguring skin disease has disappeared, and rather you now have a Christ-like figure, bathed in dark somber light. I found myself feeling the same emotion you do standing before a typical religious depiction of Christ's suffering (another form of propaganda, but let's not get started on that road). But truly an extraordinary work of art, so happy to have gotten to see it, especially as I didn't even realize it was in Brussels.

The other interesting art nestled in Brussels is Manneken-Pis, a little angelic statue/fountain of a young boy proudly peeing what can only be described as freely in the middle of Brussels. Easily findable (just look for the huge group of Asian tourists), the statue was cute, but was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First, right next to the fountain a Chocolate shop, which wisely took advantage of it's location (see photo), I was more struck by the rampant rampant commercialization by all the shops close by, which a lot of tourists seemed more interested in than the fountain itself (like buying a deck of cards with the fountain dressed as a different european figure on each card). The other interesting thing was that most tourist had absolutely no interest in seeing it's sister statue: literally a girl squating to pee freely. Just looking at the two photos I think the comparison is stark, the girl is behind bars next to graffiti tags nestled in the back corner of a back alley (actually very close to the 2006 beer place), and the little boy is glorified out in the open with throngs of tourists and top-notch maitenance. Is it really that much more romantic and artistic to have a penis? In the peeing world, I suppose so. But I suppose only if you're a young boy. Somehow I don't think it would be as charming with a middle-aged man.

The final adventure of the trip came the next morning where, before an 11:45 train booked to Amsterdam, we squeezed in Brussel's famous Atomium. The building's story is the same as the Eiffel Tower's essentially... assembled for the World Fair when it was in Brussels, it was deemd to cool to destroy (or to profitable a tourist attraction to destroy, either or) and now sits proudly on the edge of town. It looks really like an atom, only blown up to gigantic silver proportions. The problem for us was that the train station was clear at the other end of town, and the Atomium didn't open until 10:30. It was once said that the Dandy approach to seeing the Louvre would be in full sprint, finishing in 7 minutes. Well imagine that approach applied to the Atomium, we flew from ball to ball in that thing, and even got the front desk to have us skip the line to take the elevator to the top (the looks we got...) Actually, in the end the coolest thing about it was seeing the siloulette's of repairman hanging off these giant silver balls 300 feet in the air with climbing gear. Anyways, we wound up running with our giant backpacks from the Atomium in full sprint and I'm pretty sure, judginge from the looks we got, that most tourists who witnessed the spectacle were sure the Atomium was going to explode in a mere instant. At least I'd showered that morning, my usual anti-shaving attitudes while traveling certainly would've given me a terrorist like air. We wound up making our train with 5 minutes to spare, with wich we used to buy a Belgian waffle (or 'gauffre') and scarf it back breathlessly in the train station.

Alright, next chapter is Utrecht... hmm, maybe I'm feeling inspired enough to start it now! A huge thank you goes out to Guillaume and his family for their hospitality and kindness while we were in their neck of the woods. Guillaume, you know you're more than welcome in Cowtown (that's Calgary in silly western slang) anytime.

2006-05-17T08:31:00.000-06:00

Spring Break!!

Allright, here's the story. I needed to put something up, especially as my beloved Calgary Flames have fallen from the playoffs, and seeing my last post now is just like pouring salt all over a wound (stupid karma). Begrudgingly, my cheers are now backing the last Canadian team standing, the Edmonton Oilers (well, it could be worse, it could be the Leafs). God speed Edmonton, make Alberta / Canada proud.

Well I've had a quite the adventure over the past few weeks, 12 days of travels that took me to Brussels, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Noordwijk, and Paris. Rather than post one giant entry, as has been my tendancy, I've rather broken the trip into Chapters which I will post as they are completed. This will be my procrastination project, which I will do in lieu of studying French, as I have exams approaching in a week (which ironically won't actually mean anything at all in the big picture, more just a way of personally testing my French).

Sometime soon, I will also make a post about what I'm planning to do with my summer, as it is still somewhat unclear. I could be in St. Ives, China, or anywhere on a giant list of UN internships if they're interested in my profile, or even back at home sweet home. I've posted a picture that sums my life up nicely, anyone who has ridden on the back of a tandem bike (as I did all through the streets Amsterdam) will know the feeling. Essentially, you can't control anything, and that in itself is an absolutely surreal feeling. All you can do is sit back and enjoy the ride, pedaling as hard as you can the whole way. You give everything you have without knowing where you're going. I call this photo 'Life'. *tear*. lol.

Finally, I'm putting a demand out to all those I've lost touch with to write me and let me know what they've got planned for the summer. You never know, our paths could cross in the strangest of places...

All the best.

2006-04-18T10:30:00.000-06:00

Play Like It’s 1989

C’est le temps de la revanche. After taking slack from Canuck and Maple Leaf fans for years, oh how the tables have turned. Since no one knows what’ll happen in the playoffs I thought I’d take this little moment to gloat, and though I have to admit I’d cheer for a Canadian team over an American team any day, I’d also give anything right now to see those arrogant smugs wiped off those silly Toronto faces. If you’re a Toronto fan, feel free to send me pictures of yourself pre and post season, and I’ll be sure to post them in my next blog. Promise.

Readers, if you’re in the same mood as me, here’s a wee Instigator cartoon that’ll bring tears of laughter/joy to your eyes. To quote my buddy Ed “… the Leafs are done, which is one step in the right direction for the civilized world.”

Alright, that’s enough, let’s not forget Karma. However, I will say one thing. Honestly stepping back as an objective observer, I like the Flames this year to go all the way. Why? Because their strengths are exactly the kind of qualities that win Cups. A team concept, a hot Vezina/MVP-calibre goalie and most of all, more heart than any team in the entire league. Any one of those things can win you a Cup all on its own! I keep reading over and over again how the Flames weakness lies in their lack of scoring, how they don’t tally enough goals to be a threat in the post-season and how this’ll haunt them down the stretch. However, I think people need to start looking at it from the other angle - Sutter and the Flames have managed to make a defensive approach successful in a league where changes have been made expressly to encourage offense. Scoring is the highest it’s been in years, penalties for clutching and grabbing are being called left right and centre and the Flames, with the 4th lowest goal scoring in the league, pulled in 103 points. This is by far one of the most startling achievements in the entire league this season.

Simply put, offense wins games, defense wins championships, and Calgary far and away has the lowest goals against of any NHL team. Not to jinx it, but this could be the year!

As for the east, I’m cheering for the Habs. Why? Ask yourself which team was the only one to win a Stanley Cup in the Montreal Forum besides the Canadiens, and you’ll have your answer. Besides, how epic would a Kipper-Huet duel be? This is the stuff legends are made of.

In honour of this year’s momentous achievements and the ones I see coming, I’ve posted a few photos I downloaded way back in 2004, when I was all the way in Scotland staying up late at night listening to the Flames’ Cup run on online radio. I get excited just looking at them.

GO FLAMES GO!!

P.S. – What’s this I hear about the popo cracking down on the red mile? Say it ain’t so!

2006-04-13T10:28:00.000-06:00

Le Gros Connard
So... here's a good story for ya. Yesterday, I popped into the internet café early so as to send a document to my prof that I'd been writing the night before. I went online on MSN while I was at it, but of course, since it was 11AM here it was uber early in Canada, and still kind of early for everyone else, no one was really online. So I minimized and forgot about it, carried on with my day, and left without closing it.
Fastforward to 7 o'clock at night, and Hélène goes online at the university to find me 'online' (I was actually at home) and began talking to 'me'. And 'I' reply etc. etc., you can see where this goes, pretty quickly she figures out it ain't me (by the guy's horrible english) and demands that he close my account right away, to which he replies that he refuses, why close a good account, and besides it's an easy way for him to have hot women message him, or something along those lines. Anyways, Hélène comes home, grabs me, and we head straight to the internet café where we catch the dick readhanded with my account and give him HELL!! It was sweet, especially hearing Hélène really go off on someone in French (plus I added my two cents from time to time... that's all I really have in French, it's suprising how hard it is to get angry in a language that is not your own). It was awesome, he cleary thought he wouldn't get busted on it, and to get reemed out for being such a dick he felt great shame (or so it seemed to me). Luckily, he claims not to have fooled with my e-mail, and I found no evidence that he had (and luckily there was nothing personal on there anyways).
But here's the thing, if any of you talked to me on MSN yesterday, at any time, IT WASN'T ME! Just so that's clear, he seemed like a real creep so who knows what he might've said. Actually, I'd be curious - if you talked to 'me' yesterday, feel free to upload the conversation into the comments area, could be amusing.
So who's the gros connard? Well him obviously, and I'd like to make a moral statement that if I ever found an open MSN online at an internet café I would shut it off. But the thing is I'm le gros connard also, so let this be a lesson to you kids: always shut off your fucking MSN!
All the best.

2006-04-05T09:35:00.000-06:00

Student Strikes and Fairy Tales

film|mensonges, trahisons… et plus si affinité
|2046
lit|l’enfer – rené belletto
music|mon h.l.m. - renaud

I took a quick look on CBC this weekend, and I saw that all the fuss about the CPE here in France had finally made the international news. Hélène hasn’t had class in two weeks, and as for me, well, besides blocking my way to the damn computer lab once in awhile, all SUEE (International Student classes, i.e. me) are allowed to continue. I think we’re just not worth the hassle. I’ve also discovered the easiest way to cross the blockade is simply to speak horrid French with a heavy American accent (which probably isn’t all that different from my French anyways, but you get my drift). However, the way the blockade inevitably adds five minutes to my journey to class… which of course means I am now regularly five minutes late for class. C’est la vie.

The best part of this blockade has been its impact on my work. At the high school where I teach English the students have occupied the school (like something straight out of the 60s, sit-ins with bongo drums and guitars etc.) and the teachers are on strike against the CPE as well. Translation, literally one week after I actually began teaching classes I am now on strike, and I will still receive my bursary. Score!

So Hélène finds herself on premature vacation, and I’m finding work to be a lot less work than I originally imagined. There is going to be a huge nation wide strike Tuesday, so nothing will be open and no one will be working. In French culture, this concept is also known as Sunday + downtown protest. Simple really.

The whole debacle behind the CPE is really quite interesting. Essentially, for the last 10 years the French youth unemployment rate has been about 10% higher than the national rate, and so after much toil and trouble the government is proposing this solution: to encourage employers to take a chance on young workers, the CPE will give them the right to fire them without cause during the first two years of employment. This of course addresses the problem of a lack of experience, but not the problem of the marginalization of youth in French culture (and has actually made them feel even more marginalized), and the youth have responded. So the question is whether the government will repeal the law, and if not, how the population will respond. Stay tuned.

So with our new found free time, Hélène and I did a wee bit of hiking the other day with a few of our friends around Clermont and partied a wee bit too. I’ve included a few photos for your viewing pleasure (including one of us profiting from low cost French wine, and of the introduction of the Crazy Creek to the French community).

As for those of you who are still in Canada, do not miss the Matthew Good solo acoustic tour! It’s killing me to know it’s going on while I’m away!! The setlists look great, and even better he’s telling stories, going on rants, and taking shots with the audience all the way through with as much passion as ever. Plus he’s playing Can’t Get Shot In The Back If You Don’t Run – love that song! If it ain’t sold out, go get tickets, so that I may live vicariously through you.

I’m proud to announce that I’ve triumphed over my second French novel, which wasn’t half bad, a detective story that prides itself on breaking every rule that detective stories typically use. Nothing mind blowing, but y’know, it was 400 pages long, so I was proud of myself for getting through it. As for film, I’ve seen so many movies these last little while, but two cool ones I saw are listed above, a funny comedy about a writer who writes celebrities autobiographies for them (my favourite is when he’s having a meeting with the captain of France’s football team, and he asks him to write his autobiography “like Baudelaire”, and then hands him a copy of the The Flowers of Evil telling him “don’t worry, I’ve highlighted the good parts”) and then the other being a really crazy film from China, worth watching for the visuals but the story is interesting too. Finally, I’m starting to get into French music because we’re studying it as poetry in class. French music is striking for it’s lack of real harmony, but deep lyrics which I still have trouble completely understanding. M. Renaud is a good example, he just adores slang. But the song Mon H.L.M. is somewhat a portrait some of the awful personalities that exist in France, and of couse, some 30 years later, nothing much has changed. My favourite is the beauf – slang for beau-frère or borther in law – which is kind of a sleezy Frenchmen who works out a lot and has slicked hair, who is very conservative, and loves to vacation in a sort of trailerpark / camping environment. I suppose think Julian of the Trailer Park Boys, but French and not as funny.

Finally, Hélène and I both just returned from Tours after spending the weekend there, where I took in some more incredible castles, such as the castle that inspired Sleeping Beauty (Ussé), and the castle where Leonardo DaVinci is buried (Ambroise), and finally another castle built on water (Azay-de-Rideau) which was really cool, but not as cool as my favourite, Chenonceaux, which I saw my first visit to Tours. I’ve enclosed a few photos, including one where it looks like I’m lost in a fairy tale. The nights were also great. Friday night we grilled up a storm over an open fire in a Cave of a friend of Hélène’s parents. This was literally somewhat of a summer home dug out form the soft rock of the area, perfect because inside it’s always the same temperature and thus great for storing wine, partying etc. Our Saturday night was really fun, we spent it partying down by the Cher river where a whole bunch of students and artsy type people (as well as street people) were gathered to celebrate essentially nothing more than it finally being warm enough outside to party. There were people playing all sorts of instruments together, just giving ‘er and not carrying about anything, which created a great atmosphere but some gawdawful music. Imagine Broke Social Scene gone terribly, terribly wrong. But it was a great time, it was too bad I didn’t have my camera with me to get a pic, between the setting, the atmosphere, and the characters wandering about it was definitely something else.

As for the more artsy posts I’d promised last time around, I haven’t really gotten around to it, but I will sometime soon, lately I’ve been too busy writing damn compte-rendus and chapters for a French novel (seriously, but we’re writing it all together as a class, I’ll explain another time).

I’m also sending in my application today for an internship with the United Nations (!) so everyone keep their fingers crossed for me. Also, write a message to me dammit, I’d love to hear from ya! In the next posting, you can look forward to crazy stories from Amsterdam, as we’re spending our spring vacation celebrating Queen’s Night and Queen’s Day there! Supposed to be the craziest party that Amsterdam has all year, so I’m really looking forward to it (and if the difficulty we had tracking down a hostel is any indication, it should be a blast). Until then…

2006-03-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

Delays etc.

So it's been ridiculously hard for me to get to a computer, especially with my university and all the universities in france being blocaded to protest the CPE... the equivalent of the French SWAT squad the CRS was used to regain control of la Sorbonne, which had been occupied by students for a week. I had classes cancelled for a protest, I feel like a real frenchman! Anyways, below is a blog I wrote a week ago, and I'll try to get more up soon. All the best.

Edit: SWAT's a little strong, it's just there national security police force, though they do have SWAT units.

Funny: So today I went to use the computers at the school, tried to go in, but I tried to go in and the man told me it was blocked. I, like a good Canadian boy, said oh sorry, have a nice day, and headed home. Well, I tell Hélène the story, she breaks out laughing so hard she's in tears, and tells me you can just tell them to fuck off and walk through. So she just 'escorted' me into the computer room now... she hasn't stopped laughing all day.

2006-03-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

Poet and You Didn’t Even Know It

photo|speaking with hands exhibit – guggenheim, bilbao
lit|la vie devant soi – émile ajar (romain gary)
tv|arrested development (with french subtitles)

The past week has been, quite simply, a week of firsts. For the first time I, petit a – visited Lyon, petit b – wrote my first poem in French, an alexandrine nonetheless, and petit c – finished reading my first French novel in French (le petit prince I’ve decided, though still brilliant and one of my favourites, doesn’t count).

Let’s start with Lyon. Seeing as Hélène had a week of vacation and that my life is a vacation, we decided to spend the past weekend in Lyon (where the hell is that?). Now don’t be fooled, though for a Canadian mind that looks like a miniscule distance from Clermont, for a French mind which centres on Paris (and therefore has no high speed trains going east to west) that journey takes 2.5 hours plus. No shits.

It was worth it though, Lyon has a reputation as being France’s most beautiful city-besides-Paris, and they weren’t fooling. With a wicked cool basilica on top of huge hill that overlooks the entire city (and right next to a 1/3 reproduction of the Eiffel tower, which I thought was an eyesore), Roman ruins, the best silks in France (I’d say Europe, but I don’t know that), bragging rights as the birthplace of Antoine St. Exupery (and his airport), and even a nightlife centred on barges that’re docked along the Rhône, one of the three rivers that run through Lyon, it just seemed to have everything going for it. One awesome city, and if I can land an exchange there sometime in the future I definitely will. I’ve included photos of everything on that list, and I would make it a must stop for anyone pulling any X-Europe travels sometime soon.

I’m going to go on to petit c next, if only to indulge in frustrating form and reader expectation. I finished reading La Vie Devant Soi for my 20^th Century Literature class the other day, and have to say I was really impressed – first with the book, and secondly with my ability to actually understand the book. A great story about a young Arab named Momo, a son of a whore, who is raised by an old Jewish lady in Belleville (district in Paris), in which I was happy to see all my favourite postmodern devices at work. What was most interesting though, was the history of the author himself, a man whose very life is probably the epitome of the shattering of identity. What’s recently come out, after his suicide in 1980, is that this man lived a triple life. Publicly he was Roman Gary, a celebrated Gaullist, Résistant, and ambassador who in the 60s was viewed as an old fart, a simple relic of de Gaulle’s lies, despite having had great success in both literature and Hollywood (he won the prix Goncourt and had several films made from his works in the States), not to mention that he was married to Jean Seberg. Essentially, he wasn’t being read or respected by the baby boomer public at the time. So he created Émile Ajar, a Frenchman living in Brazil, gone into exile for having practiced abortion in France before it’s legalization in ’74 (I’ll also mention that Frenchwoman get reimbursed by the government for their abortions, which my prof jokes has made it a fairly common form of contraception – he has a friend who has had 7! This was extremely shocking and disquieting for the plethora of fairly religious Polacks in my class, hear you me) who also happened to be a writer. And without surprise, Émile Ajar was very successful with the leftist populous, and even won le prix Goncourt for La Vie Devant Soi (an author is actually supposed to only be allowed to win the prize once a lifetime). So Romain was actually forced to hire his cousin to pretend to be Émile Ajar for interviews, photo ops, and the public at large (since he was getting too big to be only imaginary anymore). His cousin however was a man who, rather than become a creation of Gary, just told his whole boring life story as that of Ajar whenever interacting with the media and intellectual community (imagine a country bumpkin telling his life story as if it was that of Victor Hugo, lol).

But this wasn’t the first time he’d pluralized/fractured himself either. Before he came to France he was actually Roman Kacew, a young Jewish Polack who during WWI, was uprooted and moved all through Russia in his childhood (thanks to Russian policies towards Jews), during which time his mother was forced to whore herself to survive. They then returned to Poland at the end of the war and Roman was reunited with his soldier father, but ended up moving to France after his father left him and his mother (after relentless beatings) for his mistress. Gary never mentioned any of this while in the public eye in France, not even that he was Jewish, and he in fact created an entire backstory of his “real” childhood, complete with aristocratic relatives in the employed in the arts etc. etc. When you really get into his history, you see that this was a man so fractured that he had no real sense of his own identity. And the book I read, La Vie Devant Soi, is now being read as Gary trying to finally tell the story of his childhood, which he had suppressed, in the then current setting. Fascinating stuff, and there’re even more crazy stories from his life, like how his mother wrote a whole bunch of letters to be mailed to Gary each week after her death, so that he wouldn’t know she was dead until after WWII (kinda creepy eh?). If you’d like to learn more (it may seem like I overindulged here, but I haven’t even scratched the surface) here you go.

Finally, petit c. In my French writing class, we learned what an Alexandrine was, an old form of poetry used by every French poet right up until Baudelaire (who’s poetry really showed why, after the decline of Romanticism, poems couldn’t be written that way anymore) and then was finally destroyed by Rimbaud. The Alexandrine is full of silly rules about the sounds that’re allowed at certain places, number of syllables etc., but I won’t bore you with that. However, we were forced to write a quatrain in Alexandrine to help us first to understand how it operates, but also to understand how ridiculously hard it is to write that way. Our possible topics were an orange, our beds, or the effects of drinking a bottle of vodka. I chose the lattermost.

So needless to say, this was über-hard for me, but I toiled on it and finally cranked it out by the end of the week, and came in to class all proud of my new creation … only to discover that he didn’t want to collect them, but only wanted us to learn from the damn experience! So rather than let it go to waste, I present to you the glory that is my French poetry (I apologize if there’re any mistakes, there definitely could be).

De Vodka et Amour, ou, Deux Choses Qui Peuvent Vous Rendre Mal Au Cœur
Mes jambs s’enffondent, comme pâtes mouillées,
J’ai envie de parler … je me trouve muet!
Ma tête tourne sans un signe d’arrêter.
C’est l’amour? Hein, non! Je suis juste bourré.

Brilliant, I know. For those of you who might’ve missed it, mal au cœur is how the French say they need to throw up. Clever title, eh? Yeah, I thought so too, lol.

Finally, I was looking over an old poem I wrote (an honest poem, hopefully a little better than the one above) and thinking about a photography exhibit I saw in the Guggenheim in Bilbao (another must visit for everyone), and I wanted to try something, which’ll be my next post, so keep checking back for that one soon. I also have one other thing I might try having fiddled with my camera and the bathroom mirror (minds out of the gutter people), so keep your eyes peeled for that one too. Until then...

2006-02-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Bienvenue en France!, or, How I Failed To Post Before Leaving Canadian Soil, or even, How I Failed The Brevity Test Miserably

music|elevator love letter – stars
lit|beloved – toni morrison
film|les bronzés 3

Where to start? Perhaps at the beginning, I find that’s usually best. Though, as you can see, I failed even at that – for all of those that were excited for stories and photos from the past year, I’m sorry. Perhaps another time, when I’m feeling not only nostalgic but desperate to share my nostalgia with the world. In the meantime… FRANCE!

Well, first I must say that my journey was ridiculous as usual and culminated with an epic battle between a Canadian boy and the Parisian Metro. Complete with giant 80L overnight backpack and a Washburn Juggernaut guitar duct taped to a rolling suitcase (yes, I was trying to avoid excess baggage charges), I had to take the Metro into downtown Paris, switch trains, and then take another Metro before I even got to the train station that would take me to Clermont (these are echoes of my first painful journey to St. Andrew’s - why can’t my train ever leave from the AIRPORT?). This dentistesque (as in a trip to the) process culminated when I managed to get my suitcase stuck in the automated doors at the subway exit. As I desperately hauled on my suitcase it became clear that either the suitcase or the metal doors would have to give… it wasn’t a fair fight. A broken suitcase buckle, an awkward sprawl, and many skewed glances later I had triumphed (barely) over the Paris Metro, and had made it onto my SNCF train to Clermont-Ferrand.

If the journey wasn’t easy, at least I’ve been able to settle back into French culture with little more ease. Hélène’s apartment is great, right on Rue de Port, a largely pedestrian road on the edge of the old downtown. It’s exactly like what old French streets look like in Hollywood movies. A lot of my French came back much easier than I’d imagined, given the rust I had trying to talk to Hélène while I was in Calgary, and to boot after testing I was placed in the highest level of French at the University (well, for foreigners anyways)! This means that if I pass (at this point I’m not sure how big of an ‘if’ that is), I would have the equivalent a first year in an arts degree in a French University. Not too shabby considering the miserable state of my French in early October. I’ve also begun an apprenticeship (from Hélène) in the art of French cuisine - as my dad says, that’s the one thing the French know how to do right. I present to you my first coup in French cuisine – a spinach, tomato, and goat’s cheese quiche. And it tasted good too! So no one’s allowed to make fun of my cooking anymore, dammit! Tonight I’m making crêpes… baby steps, always baby steps.

I also managed to get onto the ski hills last weekend in Clermont. They aren’t quite as glorious as Canadian skiing, but they’ll do. However, there’s a possibility I might get to spend a week of my vacation in the French Alps at a condo that Hélène’s ‘rents own, and in that case I’ll be able to justly compare the skiing between continents, so I’ll hold off until then (I really am a lucky bastard… but then I can’t compete with the week muff had… I’m surprised he’s able to walk with a horseshoe so firmly lodged in his colon!). An interesting note: the system of ranking slope difficulty (which I thought was universal) is a wee different, and instead of going easy (green circle), medium (blue square), hard (black diamond), über-hard (double black) like our system does, it goes über-easy (green), easy (blue), medium (red), and difficult (black). A wee difference, but I thought it spoke volumes – at least at that hill anyways.

As for my lenses this week – first off, I finally got around to reading Beloved, a book I’d been meaning to get to for ages but never had the chance before the plane ride. I’ll put it this way – the back of the book has a quote from the L.A. Times that reads “A masterwork…wonderful…I can’t imagine American literature without it!” Personally, I now can’t even imagine all of literature without this book. Easily the most powerful piece I’ve ever read, nothing short of a masterwork of the Western world, and the layers of postcolonial and feminist readings that can be done on it are astounding. Everyone should read this book, and I know some of you read it in high school but perhaps you should give it a second go if you didn’t like it… I know I wouldn’t have had the mind to appreciate this book in Grade 9. Go read it!

Two days before I left Calgary, I was lucky enough to be able to catch (for my third time) the Stars live, and as usual they were just beautiful. This got me back on listening to them constantly (a phase I went through in fourth year, as the Winchesters can attest to), and got me back on my favorite song of theirs, elevator love letter. The lyrics have been rolling around in my head for ages, and what’s so special about this song (and the Stars in general) is its sheer honesty. This song itself is about being too intellectually involved with love, of being stuck where you love more with your head than your heart. The verses echo with an overactive brain – “cause I don’t know how to love” – so that when you get to the chorus it sounds like a beautiful, desperate plea. Imagine the body as a building (as most of western architecture has used the body as an image for the building, this shouldn’t be too difficult) – where would the office be? The head of course. So listen to the chorus lyrics:

“my office glows, all night long”(can’t shut off the brain)

“it’s a nuclear show, and the stars are gone” (stars as natural beauty, natural emotion, being drowned by nuclear lights, something that came from applying the mind to the world,of intellectualizing nature)

“elevator, elevator, take me home”(if an elevator left from the brain, where would it wind up? The heart. Home. Appropriately enough, the album is named Heart. Listen to how Amy Millan sings elevator…)

A song all about trying to change someone’s approach to love from brain to heart. And even more beautifully, the track before Elevator Love Letter on the album is What The Snowman Learned About Love, and the one following is Heart. From learning to heart. An extraordinary accomplishment from an extraordinary band.

And on the bad side of art… I caught Les Bronzés 3 with Hélène yesterday, and would have to say it was one of the shitiest movies I’ve ever seen (but to be fair, I haven’t seen Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo). However, between emphatic apologies for the movie from Hélène, I understand the first two films are cult classics in France, so I’ll be sure to watch them despite the atrocity that was the third. Pretty clearly a money grab, from what I can tell. It’s too bad really, every French film I’d seen to this point (L’Auberge Espanol, Les Poupées Russes, Tanguy) had been fantastic!

Ha, brevity. Who was I kidding?

(Ian, you blowhard!)

2006-01-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

The Maiden Post - it begiiins...
music|casual walks - matthew good
lit|the story of my life - giacomo casanova
film|the power of nightmares

Well, if you've found your way here, you can see that I've forsaken the mass e-mail in favour of the blog. I'm actually pretty excited about this to be honest, though I don't know how often I'll update, how thorough I'll be, or really how comfortable I am making a voyeur out of those who somehow stumble upon this website... but I suppose that's the nature of the beast. What I do know is that this past half year it took way too much to send out my former massers (especially when you're paying for every instant of i-net time), and this is my solution.

So where am I now? For the past month I've been in Calgary, recharging and enjoying doing essentially nothing but reimersing myself in Canadian culture, devouring novels, music, and film, playing some squash and guitar, and in between listening to TTC lectures (I missed the feeling you got walking out of a REALLY good lecture, when you feel as if someone has let you in on one of the world's vital secrets... so I found a stay at home substitute). As of late, I've also been recovering from a traumatizing iPod crash... learn from me, backup every track on those little guys, cause they can betray you when you least expect it (and to boot no one really feels sorry for you either)!

I begin this blog with a new adventure fast approaching on the heels of last year's peregrinations. For those of you who I've done a miserable job in keeping touch with, my last year in coles notes is as follows - spring was spent in London Ontario where I finished my degree (I've now got a B.A. in psychology and comparative literature and culture, as you can see my future is set), spent my third glorious summer in Muskoka instructing swimming and bartending, September brought about a western Canadian road trip to visit old friends, and by October I was studying french at the CAREL institute in Royan, on the French coast just north of Bordeaux. Before flying home for Christmas I also managed to indulge in a small Spanish tour largely centred on the art and architecture I wanted to see, and thus took me through Barcelona (Gaudí), Madrid (Velazquez, Goya, Picasso), and Bilbao (Gehry's Guggenheim).

That paragraph is a miserable gloss and I cringe reading it, since it does absolutely no justice to anything... but before I fly out I will attempt to post one more entry from Canadian soil, which will cover this time and appropriately be named "A Year in Ian" (but let's see if I can top that...)(god I hope I can top that).

Anyways, my new adventure will begin in 6 days when I fly to Clermont-Ferrand, France (where the fuck is that?). Clermont is a city of about 130 000 people and is located pretty much in the centre of France. It was founded in an extinct volcano mountain range and is home to the spectacular Puy de Dôme (see right) and, less spectacularly, also home to Michelin Tires. I'll be learning French at the Université Blaise Pascal (named after the famous mathematician who was born in Clermont - you may remember this from studying binomials in high school), and at the same time receiving a bursary for conversing/teaching English to students at a local high school (8 hours of work a week = 400 - 520 euros a month... life is good). This'll go on until about mid-June, and to be honest what I do after that is still a mystery... so your best bet is to come back to this website once in awhile, because you never know where I'll wind up (or what stories I'll have to tell on the way).

I've always had a fondness for personal correspondences, and I would love to get myself going on them again. So please, whenever you feel the urge (maybe even after reading this post... c'mon!), fire off an e-mail. However, I'm still anti-boring-summary e-mails - you all know the ones I'm talking about - "I'm here, doing good, saw this, hope everyone's good, love soandso". So here's what you do - you send me an e-mail telling me a funny story from that week! Or something cool you found out! Or gossip! Or a rant! Or some philosophical musing! Or just a funny photo you took the last night out! Cause those are the things I miss the most from my friends, the little day-to-day things. Besides, there're always stories that just aren't suited for everyone! Just be sure to have fun writing the correspondences, because that'll guarantee that I’ll have fun reading it too. So please, e-mail away, purewest83@hotmail.com.

As you can see at the top of my blog, I’ve included what art I’m digging into at that time. As Oscar Wilde pointed out, it’s reality that imitates art, so this will always give you a sense of exactly what kind of lense my reality is being distorted by at that time. Plus, I can pretty much guarantee I won’t be able to hold off from commenting a little on them, maybe trying to entice you to give them a shot (or possibly to ward you away from them too).

My blog is named after an old Matthew Good demo, a very simple and subtle acoustic track, where the lyrics really pull at the heart of peregrination and transience – and hence seemed an all too appropriate title for my wanderings these days... a state of being that likely won’t change for another year and a half or so. As for the track, anyone who has done any kind of wandering without knowing where they would wind up will connect with this track. Promise. In film, I’ve had a chance to watch a ton of movies this month, and the one I found the most fascinating was this BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares (thanks muff for the recomendation). It chronicles and parallels the rise of neo-conservatism and Islamic fundamentalism from similar roots in mid-20^th Century America, and really gives a historical and philosophical background to the culture of fear we see prevalent today. For a boy that likes to intellectualize everything, this three part documentary was fantastic. Finally, I’m currently reading Casanova’s (in)famous tales of his life as the greatest bon vivant that ever lived, and I have to say that besides his notoriety as a lover, Casanova was quite the intellectual as well. Not only was he a man extremely well versed in Italian poetry, but he was also favoured by the likes of Voltaire and Catherine the Great – these aren’t usually the things that come to mind with the name Casanova. Plus he managed to travel and live for at least a year in all the major cultures of Europe at his time, and do extraordinarily well for himself wherever he went - he really should be an idol in many ways besides his promiscuity. This is definitely worth a read, despite the strange looks you may get from those who understand Casanova only as the most proficient lover/slut that ever lived. And as for you people who caught the Hollywood flick and figure you don’t need to bother with the book – well, unless the movie included a ménage à quatre with two nuns and the French ambassador to Venice, then I can guarantee you’re missing a lot (if not all) of the story.

Finally, I’ve been particularly fascinated lately with how text and image interact, and since I’ll be trying to constantly upload pics on here from my trip, you may see me experiment with it at the end of my blog once in awhile. I’ll end today with something like that – I found an old photo while cleaning out my room the other day (these are the kind of things I do these days). It’s a seven year old photo of a gorgeous sunset I saw in the Rockies when I was sixteen, and you can see the dirt and smudges that have collected on it over the years, as well as the holes in the photo from the many times it’s been tacked on my wall (click on the photo to really get a sense of it). The state of the photo itself just seemd to scream of one of my favourite poems, and so I share it today. Anyways, if anything interesting strikes you regarding these little fiddlings, I would love to see hear about them in the comments. Take care everyone, and all the best to everyone as always.

P.S. – à tous mes amis français – je suis desolé que tous mes blogs seront en anglais, mais peut-être j' écrirai en français de temps en temps (c'est évident que j'aie besoin de la pratique)… mais pour maintenant peut-être ceci peut vous aider (on m'est aidé à beaucoup d'occasions). Je vous souhaite tout le meilleur du monde. Ciao!

P.P.S. - I promise to work on that whole brevity thing.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-Robert Frost, 1923

2006-01-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

welcome