Neko Cake of The New Pornographers and a damn good solo artist as well.

If there were anything I wish I could do, it would be to sing; to have one of those voices is just so incredibly mesmerizing for whatever reason that it’s almost painful. It may be an odd sort of thing to wish for (as opposed to say, world peace?), I don’t know. I think it’s because I find that music plays such an important part in my day-to-day doings that I would love to be able to contribute my own voice to the voices of those who have the ability to shift and subtly mold the feel of every moment. My life’s soundtrack would be infinitely more complex had I the ability to kick in on my own without sounding like a cross between a pubescent boy and a midnight back alley cat fight.

I’m not entirely sure what kind of voice I would like… one full of soul and sensual fervor? One folksy and acoustically suited? One with indie quirk and a ‘fuck y’all’ kind of feel? Perhaps a heavenly mash-up of the three. Certainly not one so pristine as to be boring. Certainly not a church choir style. I take my vocals with a side of grit.

I’m not talking people who can sing.  Lots of people can sing.  I would argue that there are more people that CAN sing than that can’t.  What I’m talking about is that special quality of certain voices to pull and push, invigorate or depress…voices that have a pitch to their keen or a weight to their words that make them stand out.

A short (very short) list of some folks that just gots it, and taking suggestions as well:

• Natalie Walker during the Daughter Darling phase
• Kathrin DeBoer of Belleruche
• David Gray
• Emily Haines of Metric
• Yukimi Nagano of Little Dragon
• Regina Spektor
• Nathan Willett of Cold War Kids
• Ella Fitzgerald
• Beth Gibbons of Portishead
• Alison Sudol of A Fine Frenzy
• Mariza
• Lil’Wayne (seriously)
• Lacey Mosley of Flyleaf
• Isaac Slade of The Fray
• Sarah McLachlan
• Imogen Heap during the Frou Frou stage
• Maria Callas
• Brian Molko of Placebo
• Kate Miller-Heidke
• Caleb Followill of Kings of Leon
• Bjork
• Nichola Hitchcock both solo and Mandalay
• Neko Case
• Amanda Zelina of The Coppertone
• Tori Amos
• Amy Lee of Evanescence
• Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

I am prone to these transcendent moments most frequently while driving, particularly at sunrise in the company of a music playlist on shuffle.  You can’t force that kind of thing, it just has to happen.  Some mornings there is nothing.  Either the songs weren’t right or the angle of the sun wasn’t acute enough or something in the morning routine just threw off whatever connective nature might have existed when you first rolled out of bed.  Oh, but when you do get it, when the glint across the windshield is such that it gives the day a sense of pregnant purpose, and the music nestles in gloriously with frequency of the shivers whispering softly beneath your skin…

This is where I get all wistful and smile that little smile that even I don’t know what it means.  There is a settling and a calming, an easing of clenches and an exploration of aimless reflection that makes me think I could sit here like this forever.  I can’t call it relaxation really; there is too much tautness and expectation and a searching for a something that is unidentifiable and unattainable.  It’s a rapturous sort of meditation.

Other things of note:

I don’t consider myself a religious person but I find devotion and faith and the comfort of ritual fascinating.  I took as many Religious Studies courses in university as my double major useless piece of science crap would allow, and if I had to go back to school to study something interesting, it would probably be that.

I am currently obsessed with finding the most beautiful azan that there is to be found on the internet.  The Muslim call to prayer, recited with haunting respect and individual styling by muezzins, some of whose families have been doing it for generations, found me weeping uncontrollably at 3am one morning.  It’s soul stirring.   I posted a YouTube clip of Rahim Moazenzadeh Ardabili reciting in 1955 that I find particularly stunning.  I’ve also posted a resonant and glorious Qur’an recital by an 8 year old boy.  I’m pretty sure the neighbours have heard me digging through thousands of azans and probably think that I’m even more of a lunatic than they did before.  This link will take you over to the vid section of Dodgy.  If they make you cry, we should talk.  If you think “oh god the noise”, we should talk.  Heck, if you take the time to watch them, we should talk.  I would love to hear how they make other people feel.  Other things of a similar nature that make me cry: the bagpipes, female opera arias, buddhist monks, latin verse.

With prophetically good timing, Zip saw fit to deliver Cairo Time, a Canuckian directed flick, the trailer of which I have posted to as well. The movie was a middle aged, middle eastern Lost in Translation, set in Egypt, and as such if I could have clung to the television in desperation I probably would have.  It was a beautiful movie, and although I don’t think that either it, or LiT are astounding cinematic achievements, there’s just something about the story line and the delicious tension between characters that leaves me sitting on the couch in a state of profundity and grief that can last for days.  I suppose because I feel unsettled and a little unhinged.  It has also led to a love affair with Patricia Clarkson’s voice and soft commanding presence.  I remember her from Vicky Christina Barcelona (Vicky’s aunt) but Cairo suits her impossibly more than Barcelona.  Alexander Siddig, also A-OK in my books.

I did it in my birthday suit, as suggested by the lovely lady in the video, who really didn’t need to fake six pack abs, she had a very nice midsection.  I bet she gets up every morning at 5am for spinning class and has been on a 10 calorie per day diet prior to the filming of this video.  Begin to develop stomach envy, but determined to cheat my way to rock hard abs.   Problem #1, I could not see my abs around my boobs — does she not have this problem? –  so mirror was recruited to help.  The mirror seemed nervous about the entire ordeal, as did my feline audience but both were good sports.

Problem #2, I do not have a flat stomach, it undulates in strange and wonderful ways as dictated by the number of bowls of Lucky Charms I have packed away in the past week.  The lovely lady reassured me that this was an easy way to boost my self confidence and “own the beach” and that I need no longer be embarrassed by my crush(es) seeing a flabby bikini body, so I pressed on.  If this worked I would be the glory of the local surfing scene…as long as I didn’t actually step foot in the water, in which case my art would smear like Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” and I would turn into a circus freak.

Step one was tinting some sunblock a shade darker than my stomach skin.  Being of Northern European descent (ie. F*cking pasty), this was not difficult.  Application was interesting mind you.  Have you ever seen a woman who either has zero makeup skills, or hasn’t adjusted her sun kissed summer foundation for the grey doldrums of winter?  You know what I mean?  That jaw line horror of caked on liquid makeup that makes her face seem to float, in partial eclipse, over the rest of her body.  (By the way, it’s called blending ladies.  If your neck skin does not match your face skin, that is not a good or attractive sign)  Yes well I now had that problem, only the dividing line wasn’t my jaw.  Video lady suggested full body blending with special cleavage shadowing treatment.  I looked down at my cleavage with concern.  It is monumental even on the worst of days, emphasizing it more meant it was likely to devour me whole.  Still, perky video lady said it would be good, so away we go.

Step two was to take powder, again of a darker shade, and create definition with a few easy brush strokes and some quick blending.  The first part of step two encouraged me to “find those abs!”…I poked and prodded for about five minutes, gave up, and guesstimated based on logical anatomical placement.  I started with what I knew…one of my favourite muscles from vertebrate anatomy class: the rectus abdominus.  A paired muscle running vertically on either side of the belly button, it was a safe centre and something that would help map out my abs (which apparently should have been much more obvious on casual observation).  Enormous powder brush in hand I defined with a vengeance.  The powder really only strengthened the shadows formed by the rolly pollies, but it didn’t look bad per se.  Maybe I just need to…put. it. on. a. bit. heavier.  NO.  Good god no.  Wipe it off and start again.

Step 3 in my ab transformation was the application of shimmer, which would not only help to tie everything together but would make me the twin plaything of Edward Cullen, who also sports fake airbrushed abs and sparkles like the Pride Parade in the sunshine.  Alice and Jasper would soon be within my reach.  I follow the instructions but try to go as light as possible…twinkling on the beach is usually the sign of an S.O.S, not a hot summer body.  My tummy gurgles its annoyance and suggests we skip this nonsense altogether and go chew on a mango.  I promise belly its mango if it magically transforms itself into hotness.  The silence is ominous and the abs are looking more like street graffiti than natural anatomy.  There was not enough shimmer in the entire world to fix this.  I now looked like I had bronzed, defined belly fat.  Not the glorious six pack abs I was promised.  The lovely lady, in her pink and white polka dot bikini, had lied to me.  Disgruntled, I made a rude gesture and several disparaging remarks about her background decor.

How could she do this to me?  This experience has completely shattered my fondly held faith in You Tube as the bringer of truth.  I felt cheated and scorned…my existential paradigm was crashing down around me.  I was doomed.  I celebrated my downfall with an avocado milkshake and the wry, bitter smile of a newly born cynic.

Today I spent most of my free time reading up on frontal lobotomies.  Someone made a joke about having someone lobotomized so that they’d be less cranky all the time and I was about to respond with some cheeky comment when I realized that I didn’t really know enough about the procedure to be wise-cracking about it.  I set out to educate myself.  It was…interesting.  The complete and utter lack of knowledge accompanying the swishing of surgical instruments in brain tissue was terrifying.  The big debate seemed to be about localization…was it possible to pin a particular perceived behavioural “pathology” to an exact region of the brain, or was it more complex, something like an interconnected web of systems that collectively influenced and controlled behaviour?

The modern technique pioneered by two lovely American gentleman, one a surgeon, one a psychiatrist I believe, first involved what we all probably associate with lobotomies: the incision, the hole through the skull, the poking around, the sewing up.  One of the two gentlemen became concerned about the necessity for  a sterile surgery room, anaesthesia, and expensive equipment, something that poor families and many state asylums were unable to afford, rendering, in his opinion, the procedure inaccessible to those that needed it most.  He set out to modify the procedure, instead coming up with some special instruments that allowed him to pierce the thin layer of bone at the back of the orbital socket for access to the frontal lobe.  Yes, that’s exactly what you think it is…the instrument was inserted through the eye socket.  There are some horrifying pictures if you’re willing to Google them.  People who know me best know that I am squeamish about very few things, but that eyes are one of them.  I cannot watch laser surgery on tv, or any other procedure that involves poking, cutting, prodding or moving eyeballs.  Anyway, he began doing it as an outpatient prodecure in his office.  No surgical anything, no anaesthesia.  He used electroshock to essentially render the person incapacitated, held back the eyelid and with a tap, tap and a swish, swish, had severed the connective nerve bundles in a matter of minutes.  His partner, so disgusted with lack of proper precautions and the seemingly blasé way that the other fellow as doing brain surgery, distanced himself personally and professionally from the procedure.

It was all very fascinating…including lists of famous people who had been lobotomized (many of them artists) and the history of lobotomy in cultural perception.  The Howard Dully case was particularly captivating…check out a quick summary of it here.  A very odd topic for a Tuesday to be sure, but sometimes you’ve got to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak.  Way up there on my list of “random things that I have Googled”, but hey, at least it was instructional.

Also of an orange colour, I was reading up on Jersey Shores, because I just don’t understand why they’ve become such a thing.  They’re as orange as Oompa Loompas and only half as interesting.  I guess it’s like watching a trainwreck maybe, or an opportunity to simultaneously live vicarously and mock incessantly.  Sn00ki pretty much comes up to my waist, Jwoww has trademarked her boobs (good on her, I’m thinking of trying that myself) and all of the guys look like my personal nightmare of masculinity.  And they’re all orange.  How are fake tans cool?  How are super dark real tans cool for that matter?  You could never marry someone like that because you know that they’re bound to develop skin cancer at a young aged and you’ll be widowed in your prime.

Alyssa Milano is super jealous of those JS kids, so much so that she wanted to turn herself into one of them:

That was pretty much where the similarities ended mind you. White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008 winner) was crude, vulgar and a somewhat obscene look into the development of an industrialized nation from the tech heaven of Bangalore to the vast “Darkness” of back woods India. Although I could appreciate its merit and read it start to finish in a very short time, I felt that stylistically sometimes it was trying too hard to maintain a casual, blasé matter-of-factness in the face of illegal/abhorrent acts. It certainly didn’t have the sort of captivating grip of The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997 winner), which I read directly before it. I’ve wanted to read this book for years, and finding it in a bargain bin at a random Texan bookstore was one of the more satisfying buys ever. Not because it was cheap, but because it was a steal! What a fantastic, fantastic story. Violence, love, segregation, understanding, jealousy, opportunism, religious persecution, family ties, etc etc; it was told in a beautifully descriptive, almost lyrical style that for once (halleluiah) did not edge into overkill but served to illustrate the story with a skill and precise flow that suited the content.

Easily one of my favourite books that I’ve read in the past few years. Easily.

I also have a scrap of paper that says flavourless tomatoes. At least I know why this one is here. I hate flavourless tomatoes. There’s nothing worse than expecting this beautiful ripe tomato taste and ending up with pulpy acid water. At first I thought it was because local tomatoes don’t so much grow in the snow, so I must’ve bought some nasty hothouse monstrosities..but then I thought back and I never ever remember having flavourless tomatoes in any of the toasted tomato sandwiches that my mom used to make for me. Never ever. And this was in the 80′s in a northern town that wasn’t, and likely still isn’t, the centre for the locavore movement, so I’m pretty sure her tomatoes came from Mars as well. The only conclusion then, is that I am a deficient hot house tomato selector. This saddens me.

I’ve spent the day doing useless pointless things that most people would likely think is insane, like spending 3.5 hours arranging my wine cellar to make it look like I have less wine. It actually worked, so now I can buy more without the guilt of a packed room. I have well over 300 bottles down there, which sounds like a lot but considering that I gave away about 6 cases worth before I moved, I’ve done rather well keeping myself under control. It also gave me the opportunity to do a full inventory and to update my CellarTracker.com notes. If you have a decent sized (or hell, a small) wine collection and you are not on CellarTracker, or worse, do not get on CellarTracker after reading this, I will disown you as a wine buddy. I swear it. As of today CT has expanded to include GrapeStories.com, which is basically a much prettier interface with some social crap layered on. I have tested almost every cellar management website and nothing even comes close to the power of CT. Over a million and a half reviews, hundreds of thousands of wines, and now with an attractive interface. Please sir, can I have some more?

The rest of the evening was spent watching Kate Winslet…I mean Johnny Depp…I mean Finding Neverland. Yeah that Peter Pan movie. With Kate and Johnny. All joking aside it was very good. I cried. I’m only 5 years late in seeing it, which isn’t bad given my usual track record. I decided last month that I needed to do something about my hideous lack of cinematic breadth and have signed up for a Zip.ca account. Basically I pay per month, pick movies out of a list numbering in the tens of thousands, and they mail them to me. I watch them, mail them back, and they send me more. It’s a forced regimen of movie watching, seeing that the more I can watch in the shorter period of time, the more movies I’m getting for my money. It’s been a completely enjoyable experience. Send me movie suggestions! Yesterday I watched Babel, again eons behind the times, and thought it was phenomenal. I had fear, great fear, of a movie with so many story lines. It usually means that they will be so tenuously tied that the entire premise is idiotic, or that they’ll bludgeon you with entagled, complex connections until you scream “uncle! UNCCLLLLEEE!” Babel was neither of these, it was beautiful. Excruciating, but beautiful. I also cried.

Third movie of the past week was Sarkar Raj, or as it appeared to me, the Bachchan family affair. You’ve got Amitabh, the head of the household, showing massive acting chops and doing an altogether impressive job; Abhishek showing that it runs in the family and making me scratch my head just a little bit less about how the hell he managed to snag Aishwarya Rai (now Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, see the theme?) as his wife. She is also in the movie and for once isn’t playing a delightfully playful, giggly yet intelligent schoolgirl. Thank god. Because I like her and all (mild understatement), but it was nice to see her cast as an actual person as opposed to a caricature of one with a pretty face. Sarkar Raj, for those who think Indian cinema and quickly barricade themselves in the basement, doesn’t have a single moment of choreographed dance or singing, it was just good drama, relevant material, and excellent tension. And again I cried.

I think it would be more instructive to point out movies that I haven’t cried at. The list will be narrower and more meaningful.

Tomorrow: books, Evanescence, a visitor, and orange skin; not necessarily in that order or importance.

I watched The Devil Wears Prada the other week, which is what brought all of this on, plus I have a major awards show coming up in which I expect/hope to have to stomp up to the stage at least once, so while dress shopping and shoe shopping and doing all those fun girl things that all girls should love, it’s all I can do to try desperately to channel Meryl, so that I’ll look disgustingly fab in a potato sack, which is all they offer women who have more than one of the following features: height, big feet, big boobs, anti-waifish build, a vague grasp on reality.  There are few times during the year that I hate the fashion industry more than February.  If anyone knows where I can get an attractive pair of size 12-13 flats in the next week and that won’t cost me my left kidney in barter value, let me know because I’m dying here.

I finally got my iPhone, and am trying desperately not to turn into one of those wankers that feels the urge fiddle with it every two seconds. But man they sure are purdy. Given my extreme disregard for the well-being of personal electronics, I dished out some extra cash for an Otter Box, which, if I still manage to damage the phone through hard plastic and rubberized shells, means I’m completely hopeless. My poor phone looks like some sort of tactical command centre mind you, but I figure it will just play into my oft-held fantasy of being some kind of secret agent.

I finally went to see Avatar in 3D because I think I’m one of the few film junkies remaining on the planet that hadn’t seen it. After a 40 drive to the nearest IMAX theatre I was astonished to discover that the 3D IMAX experience was sold out for every single show today. Not only that, but I got one of the last tickets for the plain jane 3D show….the place was packed. I ended up five rows from the screen on the extreme left of the theatre, which means not only is my chin now resting permanently on my right shoulder, but I also have an immense headache from having pointy arrows shoved into my eye sockets for nearly three hours. Lest it be thought that I didn’t enjoy the movie, allow me to clarify: it was the best entertainment I have seen in a very long time. Say what you want about the plot being a rehashed Pocahontas wannabe for the environmental age, grimace in earnest about the predictability and sappy pappy love story…but really, I mean come on, let’s be honest, that bloody thing was immersive to the point of being invasive. It was beautiful. Every story, every legend, every myth brings with it bits and pieces from past stories, from other places, folded and molded into timepoint relevancy. As it was with the oral tradition, we continually tell the same stories, at different times, for different audiences, repeating the underlying maxims and internal struggles that makes these particular stories so potent and so resonant. Yadda yadda, really liked it, technologically stunning…mm hmmm.

I also finally tried a strawberry shake from Pho Dau Bo, Vietnamese soup shop extraordinaire. It was very very tasty. Why would a shake be so scary you ask? Because it has a couple of scoops of this (Dutch Baby Concentrated Sweetener & Whitener) delightful looking stuff in it. I could always see the can, and watch the Elmer’s Glue (other parallels exist but are much less polite) being scooped into unsuspecting patron’s drinks.  I tried to forget that my lovely strawberries had been bathed in a sloshing of thick, emulsive white gloop and focused instead on the fact that yes, the strawberry component did seem sweeter and whiter.  Huzzah.

Is anyone ever happy that the weekend is over?  Heck, I didn’t even get to cross “an afternoon of hedonistic luxury” off my list.