Archives of Weblog additions, 1999–2000

In many cases, linkrot will have set in and links may have broken.

Note: You’re reading the earliest postings to what would later become my personal Weblog. In effect, you are reading my blog prehistory. (List of old archives)

From 1999.06.15

• The dashing, virile, and apparently not-entirely-unbrilliant Guillermo Verdecchia has been commissioned to write a film script. Exactly which script, and for whom? (The name Guillermo Verdecchia also conjures the novella by Yann Martel, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamattios. Maybe Guillermo could do a staged reading.)
• What occultish engine drives the Redhead Cluster Phenomenon?
• This site will soon be located at www.joeclark.org. But why does the other Joe Clark need not one but two Web sites, eating up the .com and .ca domains in the process? Why has the first site been abandoned since 1997, while the second brazenly tells you “This website has been temporarily suspended"?
• Has the Toronto Star’s chief sportswriter/hypocrite Randy Starkman managed to coin two further euphemisms for homosexualism in describing Mark Tewksbury as “zany" and “toothy"?
• Just why is Anne Golden’s report on homelessness gathering dust? Could it possibly be due to the province’s and the feds’ refusal to cough up money? Isn’t it odd, then, that the cost of relocating 5,000 Kosovo refugees to Canada – no less than $100 million, according to government statements – is higher by a full quarter than even Golden’s most pessimistic estimate of the federal government’s contribution to ending homelessness ($86 million)? Apparently the needs of existing Canadian residents are of a lower priority than those of foreign nationals.

From 1999.06.28

• Peter "Meerkats" Merholz’s blog page is something of an inspiration, though we disagree with the typography.
• Veganism is old hat. It’s time to come out with something really radical: radicchïsm. Embrace the bitterness! Savour the pearlescent white/gradated burgundy hue! Grate a whole head and make a risotto. Live a little, for God’s sake. (Cashier, uttered in an annoyed tone as she picks wilted ends off leaves: “What’s this?" Me: “Radicchio.” “How much is it?" “$4.99 a pound,” I reply, wondering why she can’t recognize it and doesn’t know the price.)

From 1999.07.03

• Why do so many straightedgers – even the vegans – opt for tattoos? Why is the only type they use a form of blackletter? When did blackletter become shorthand for punk or straightedge? (For extra credit, explain why Neuland became synonymous with African-American literature.)

• Number portability: Imagine never having to change your telephone number again. Convenient? Mais oui. Orwellian? Somewhat. Then again, telephone numbers are Orwellian. Caller ID identifies you to whoever you are calling. Cellphones, when activated, track your location, as O.J. Simpson knows all too well. So the concept of an unchanging telephone number is not such an ethical leap, at least for an industry and its attendant regulators who permit any and all technological advances without due concern for user safety.

  Phone numbers are changing worldwide in any event, but for fixed telephone numbers to really work, they have to cause whatever phone is nearest you to ring; you should not be required to stay close to a landline or a cellular telephone. If you own a cellphone in the 604 area code and visit Toronto, you can make free local calls by dialing area code plus phone number, but if you make the mistake of dialing a 1 first then you will be dinged for long distance. Anyone in Toronto who wishes to call you must incur a toll even though you are within the local calling area. Now imagine how this works in Europe, with dozens of telephone companies and dozens of sovereign nations. Indeed, 388 has been set up as a new pan-European country code, though not actually put to use. (Details.)

From 1999.07.12

• Maybe comics do work on the Web, though perhaps animation and colour could be used, too.
• What is more enjoyable than that perfect quarter-hour when your cup of tea kicks in, your magazine is interesting, and the passersby make you feel enriched for staring out the window at them, ignoring your interesting magazine?
• We learn that typical men all have their thing, which must be safeguarded at all cost, even the cost of family duties. Some examples: Noodling online; the car; model trains; the weekly basketball game with old chums; The X-Files, particularly in multiple daily repeats. Typical men resent the intrusion into their personhood by family, cleaning the house, dressing for any reason other than warmth, and other unmanly distractions. Their personhood is outer-directed, in contrast to the interior lives of women and inverts, meaning that the stresses of family and cleaning house can be combatted only by pouring more energy into their thing. But that engenders further resentment. This outer-directedness also gives us insight into extramarital affairs: Women think very clearly about their impediments and annoyances, while men direct those thoughts outward into action.
• Why do otherwise compassionate people set absolute limits on their compassion? Such as helping out a person or group only X% rather than helping out until the problem is gone? Isn’t this the same mistake made by television news, which fails to continue reporting a story until it is absolutely finished, preferring to stop when it cools?
• Stunning use of onscreen type: The VW Beetle Turbo Turbonium commercial, mixing the Volkswagen house font, VAG Rundschrift, with just the right green colour and animation that assumes we can keep up with everything, which we can.

From 1999.07.22

• Very much in favour of the ongoing runlolarunification of pop culture.
• Marital strife: I’ve been the other woman before, so you’d think I’d know this, but finding oneself in the middle of some other couple’s marital strife gives one the strong feeling that one ought to be anywhere other than this. Except that there are no other choices: Stuck in the middle with you is the only place I can be.
• Dispassionateness is mistaken for coldness.
• “Sony goggles simulate 52-inch monitor.” Wheel reinvented. Virtual Vision glasses are old hat. But the concept of wearable captioning still has legs.
• Dish liquid is not interchangeable. Do the dishes for more than an hour a day every day and you figure out soon enough that Ivory works and Sunlight doesn’t. And that the only reliable soap pads are 3M Nev-R Scratch, though they seem on the verge of being phased out and can be found only at Sun Valley these days.

• Rambling speech by Ian McDonald:

  A personal theory of mine is that the music that stays with you all your life is the music you heard when you achieved social mobility. When you got the car, when you had a bit of cash, when you could get out and about and actually socialise on your own, as an independent person. The music you heard then stays with you all your life. [...] I grew up with the Stranglers and Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello, that kind of 1977–78 punk ethos is what stayed with me. I was very lucky. If I had been born three years earlier, it would have been ABBA.

  Hey, fella. Quit your dissing.

• Christopher Hitchens on Mother Theresa:

  During the Divorce Referendum the Irish Catholic church threatened to deny the sacrament to women who wanted to be remarried. There were no exceptions to be allowed: it didn’t matter if you had been married to an alcoholic who beat you and sexually assaulted your children, you were not going to get a second chance in this world or the next. And that is the position that Mother Teresa intervened in Ireland to support. [...]

  But Mother Teresa was interviewed by Ladies’ Home Journal [and] she says that she heard that Princess Diana was getting divorced and she really hopes so because she will be so much happier that way. [...]

  [I]t would be O.K. if she was going to forgive everyone. When she went to Bhopal after the Union Carbide industrial accident killed thousands, she kept saying “Forgive, forgive, forgive.” It’s OK to forgive Union Carbide for its negligence, but for a woman married to an alcoholic child abuser in Ireland who has ten children and no one to look after her, there is no forgiveness in this life or the next one. But there is forgiveness for Princess Diana.

From 1999.08.05

• Universal Studios alleges that linking deep into its Web site violates its copyrights (story 1; story 2). Nonsense. Facts cannot be copyrighted. A URL is a fact. It is exactly equivalent to a bibliographic reference in a scholarly journal that quotes text from an article and refers you to a specific page and even column (which is also done), and/or uses Latin terms like infra. In the case of deep linking, usually we’re not even quoting from the destination site, merely listing an address. “Copyright protects only an author’s original expression. It doesn’t extend to any ideas, system or factual information that is conveyed in a copyrighted work” (emphasis added; reference). The exact text of URLs is not sufficiently distinctive or creative to warrant copyright protection, either; it’s also too short. While the Web page itself will likely be copyrightable, its address isn’t – any more than your phone number is copyrightable.
• However, HTML leaves authors somewhat incapacitated. Do you know about anchors? They’re links within a page. (The contents listing of this page uses anchors.) You have to specifically set them up in advance for them to work. What we need is a way to link to a specific section within a page after the page is finished and posted – for example, leading you directly to the specific words on the page you want to quote. The URLs would end up looking like <a href="page.html##Facts cannot be copyrighted. A URL is a fact#"> or something similar. It gets tricky when the destination text uses reserved characters like quotation marks. Still, it is attainable.
• .org is morally superior to .com.
• Props to the rather beautiful Mappa Mundi, but their cause is hopeless. Even Feed and Stale cannot vanquish Salon, which certainly cries out for vanquishment.
• There is nothing at all especial about lemonyellow, a Weblog. There is even less to justify a New York Times profile. Indeed, weblogs – you are reading one, in effect – are reaching the point where they defeat their own purpose. There are so many blog pages that one feels as though he’ll miss important links if he doesn’t read them all.
• To what can we attribute the enduring fabulousness of “Walk Like an Egyptian" des Bangles? It can’t be simplistic nostalgia, of the sort seen everywhere these days because tastemakers are now in their 30s and a song like that was omnipresent in their university years. Could it be simple cleverness? Isn’t that what we demand from la musique pop?
• Databases created by humans are the ones that really work.
• We are impressed with Street Tech, particularly its review of what is apparently a collapsing-spring keyboard. Those of us who typed on computers in the 1980s remember IBM’s loud-clicking keyboards with tall, molar-like keys. The spring inside the keys was mounted at an angle. As you pressed straight down, you felt progressive resistance, then suddenly the spring buckled and the key went kerclack. Two clicks per keystroke. It seems that is the correct number: You always knew if you had actually pressed the key or not. I had read that Lexmark, which was saddled with IBM’s old keyboard business when the former was spun off from the latter, sold the collapsing-spring technology to a company that later sat on it. With USB keyboards all the rage for latter-day Macintoshes, for the love of Mother Theresa, will someone please produce a fully Mac-compatible collapsing-spring keyboard?

From 1999.09.20

• Sorry, but Thomas Dolby has it wrong.
  1. Wired News has him saying “The music industry is now going to have to own up the fact that the flocking of people to the Web as a venue for music is really an expression of the fact that the Web... is a much better venue for that activity than a large chain store in a shopping mall."
  2. Actually, no. A large chain store has the value-adding features of tactility, atmosphere, and other people. “The flocking of people to the Web as a venue for music" is about cost. Online, people want everything for free, and by and large that’s exactly how they get it.
  3. On the topic of standard record-industry financing, Jaron Lanier is quite right in saying that “if advances were stacked up against finance deals in other industries, they’d look a lot like usury – except that they aren’t even loans: once they’re paid back, the label still owns the master. There is simply no worse conceivable form of financing."
  4. But two wrongs don’t make a right. Online, MP3 fans have no interest in paying musicians for their work. So if we destroy major labels, or if they die off à la dinosaurs, we should not get all excited about the system that will replace them. That system amounts to free music all the time. Sure, you may have listeners; you may even have fans. But you will not have an income.
  5. MP3 use is not revenge against the labels. That’s what artists say, and they’re projecting. It’s revenge against having to pay for music. Whoever figures out how to make money from online distribution will actually do so. Everyone else will starve.
• A single line from the Martha & the Muffins song “Swimming" has stuck with me for a decade and a half: “We’re afraid to call it love. Let’s call it swimming."
• I see the braintrust at Bell Mobility is making a vice out of a vice once again.
  1. Bell, the widely-despised Central Canadian phone conglomerate, is notorious for providing fewer features at higher cost for its cell service, which is why Clearnet and even Microcell have been cleaning their plate. (Clearnet’s stupendously apropos use of Helvetica Ultra Light – or Thin – and the seemingly matter–antimatter combination of blue and green work wonders. So too does its reliance on imagery from nature, like blossoming flowers, hummingbirds, and leaping frogs, to sell a technology [pace Adobe].)
  2. Now, for Bell Mobility’s pager service, ads exhort us to learn numerical codes, which we then mentally map to real words. There’s even a contest going on to create further codes. Talk about shoving a technological limitation down our throats (Cf. Milhouse signing himself into a video game as THRILLHO), and what’s worse, the concept is too distastefully akin to 1970s-style American CB radio codes.
  3. Listen, kids, get your arses in gear and learn about short message service. Read the Wired cover story on Nokia (not yet online) and give up making us deal with your outdated technology. And a final question here: What happened to alphanumeric pagers? If I wanted to send the message “I love you,” why wouldn’t I write it out? Why would I be in love with someone so cheap as to buy a purely numeric pager?

• From Feed:

  If a single development can be said to have triggered the recent surge of consumer interfaces, it is – appropriately enough – the rise of the MP3 sound format, and specifically the panoply of user-created “skins” available for MP3 players like WinAmp. As a grassroots interface design movement, the “skins” craze is probably second only to the rise of the web itself in its scope and diversity. MP3.com currently lists thousands of alternative skins for the WinAmp application, created by almost as many armchair interface designers.

  [Next a brief synopsis of Brian Hayes’ dissection of QuickTime 4.0’s interface.] However much I agree with the sentiment behind Hayes’ critique, there’s still something slightly doctrinaire about it, something that neglects the energy and inventiveness of the skins craze, with its endless variations on the consumer interface theme. I think this explains the somewhat mixed feelings I have about the consumer interface as a genre. I appreciate the design flaws of the QuickTime player, but I still find myself enjoying it – if only because it looks so much more elegant that the gray, abstracted windows that otherwise populate my computer screens.

  We’re living in an age of mass customization, as Gaetano Pesce noted. Seven Cycles will custom-build you a bike, and you can check its gestation online in real time. Any online bookseller will sell you any combination of books (yes, that’s an example of customization: brick-and-mortar bookstores can sell you only what’s in their real-world inventory, though online bookstores can’t always ship all your selections together). Computers become an extension of the human mind, which includes a visual cortex; some of us want our computers to look special. The Mac OS, for example, is allegedly a tried-and-true, complete system in and of itself, but it still permits you to alter the desktop background, load random desktop pictures, and run desktop DVDs; there’s also the Launcher, a sort of Mac OS for Kids. (Years ago, I wrote about the progenitor of desktop customization, Wallpaper. It’s been bubbling up through the collective subconscious for a while.)

  Customization is an accessibility issue: Some visually-impaired people simply cannot tolerate, say, a white screen. Furthermore, screen readers interpret visual interfaces differently. For certain disabled users, customization of the UI is the norm, not the exception.

  My own computer is relatively highly customized, but I don’t go as far as, say, Kaleidoscope permits. Still, I don’t want a single detail changed. Once I decide on an appearance scheme, I keep it. This is where skins come in: I can select one I like and never have to think about any other interface. I do it my way and leave everyone else alone. In the QuickTime case, Apple (read: Steve Jobs) should have cut the hubris and offered us Classic and Neo interfaces. Jobs is understood to be push–pull on interface issues: He gives us the Appearance control panel but only one Theme – Apple Platinum, the Mac OS 8.5 default. The ostensible reason? Tech support prefers not to deal with the complexity of multiple different Macintosh interfaces that are unidentifiable and undiagnosable over the phone.

  I buy that reasoning, but intelligent, experienced users should be able to select their own preferred interface, and commentators should refrain from praising one as “much more elegant that the gray, abstracted windows that otherwise populate my computer screens.” If you like it, go for it. You don’t have to like mine, and neither of us has to remark on the other’s choice. We’re not talking about a New York Times profile here. (Interesting discussion of commercial potential of Themes. The Allegro Themes Project offers dozens of Mac OS Themes.)

• One was quite stunned by JoAnn Wypijewski’s article “A Boy’s Life" in the September 1999 Harper’s (unavailable online). Though it could have used one more editing pass to make it absolutely crystal-clear, the story makes a very strong case that the killing of Matthew Shepard was not per se an act of overt homophobia but one of failed manliness.
  1. Much remains unknown about the Shepard case. Just why was he talking to Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney? Was it, as Camille Paglia suggested (and Dan Savage supported), a quest for rough trade? ("Does anyone really believe that Shepard, educated in Switzerland, thought those two barely-literate hoodlums were gay or that he left the bar with them for cozy tea and conversation?") But gay boys are often lonely. They prefer male companions. The more idealistic of this group tell themselves that friendships can and do transcend sexuality. (Why shouldn’t it? They want everyone to accept them irrespective of their sexuality; what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.) So getting to know rough boys from the other side of town might make sense in a misplaced Woodstockian way. In reality we choose our male friends in part because of their sexiness – or rather, our straight male friends, if we have any; inverts are notoriously bad at getting along with straight guys, who are much less of a problem than lore would suggest.
  2. Wypijewski: “[S]ix years ago no one called it a hate crime when the body of a gay UW professor, Steve Heyman, was found dumped by the side of a road in Colorado.” Steve Heyman is influential in my career, such as it is. He phoned me out of the blue in, I think, 1992, and asked me to present a paper on homoeroticism in sports media at the American Psychological Association conference in Toronto in 1993. Heyman had read my article in the Village Voice on the topic and cottoned to it. He also invited the other Usual Suspects of the Toronto gay-sports demimonde, Brian Pronger and Helen Lenskyj. The session went over well, and we repaired to a bar to decompress afterward. But Brian and I could not really figure Steve out. We had made fun of his name, pronouncing it hippy-style as “Hey, man!"; we couldn’t understand what an out psychology professor could possibly be doing in Wyoming. It seemed dangerous even then. Later I received a letter stating that Steve was dead. I rang the university; I was told that, when Steve drank, he drank big, and that probably had something to do with it. But his body was dumped on the lee side of a tall fence alongside a highway. Someone had gone to all that trouble. While it was certainly at least a death by misadventure, to this day it smells fishy. Was Heyman’s death a prefigurement of Shepard’s? Was a quest for rough trade also at play?
  3. I’ve been thinking more lately about my dead friend Ron Kelly. Circa 1989/1990, when AIDS Action Now<bang>, the activist group that was a half-arsed analogue of ACT UP, was going strong here, one of the few boys who took a liking to me was Ron, who stood about 5’6" and could easily have been hung up on a wooden coat hanger. Blond, glasses, moustache, and a really big mouth. Widely despised by the hateful lesbiana demagogues who dominated the other not-quite-as-good-as-the-Manhattan-original provocateur group de l’instant, Queer Nation. (“And don’t give me any of your condescending comebacks, ’cause I’m a little guy and guys like me get beaten up first!” Go, Ron!) I was too young and green to truly get Ron. I didn’t know what to make of his frequent phone calls, in which he showed a genuine interest in me. I don’t think there was anything sexual at work. (Or maybe there was; I’m blind to that wavelength most of the time.) Ron was upfront about knowing he wouldn’t beat the big A; he didn’t mind the disease as much as the chilly reception by should-be defenders like ACT and AIDS Action Now, neither of which supported his human-rights complaint against York University. I witnessed the AAN politburo’s iciness and disdain firsthand, and will never forgive them.
  4. So are the small fags at the bottom of the totem pole? Especially now, when interchangeable depilated cookie-cutter 180-pound steroid monsters are the only acceptable face of Our Diverse Communities™? Are small straight guys even worse off? When they fall short of manhood, it’s a surprise; when inverts do so, it’s expected.
  5. UPDATE: Wypijewski runs a quote from a documentarian explaining that, with greater understanding of homosexuality, straight guys start to second-guess themselves – not that they’re queer or anything, but it’s the second-guessing that creates a hesitation filter (one of my neologisms). What was once automatic now is delayed by a heartbeat as you wonder if it really ought to be automatic. Richard Rodriguez poked at this phenomenon in Salon: “The men who murdered Matthew Shepard are not, I think, typical of most heterosexuals in America. But their anger against him is, I think, telling. They hated Matthew Shepard not because he was a loser in America, but because he was winning. And who knows? Maybe that’s what they desperately needed to disprove to their girlfriends."
  6. Wypijewski tells us that McKinney and Henderson’s need to avoid wussiness – or at least the accusation of it – and their difficult upbringings, not incidentally including drug abuse and fetal alcohol syndrome, act together as a more complicated, harder-to-pinpoint, more powerful substitute for the homophobia levied at them. Is she right?

  Descriptions of the Heyman case here; obituary, carefully sanitized; tribute by a friend.

From 1999.10.19

What is spam?

• The whole thing started when I checked the individual Weblog pages listed at dmoz.org – nearly all of them – and E-mailed a message to all their owners noting that our sites were all compiled on the dmoz.org page and asking them to look at my site and link to it if they wished. I made a deliberate choice to keep all the E-addresses visible; hiding them constitutes spam, in my opinion.
• I received a number of messages telling me to get lost, alleging that showing all the addresses is spam (then why are all the addresses easily found on the various pages?), and coming off, in general, as hostile and unfriendly. I thought we were all in this together. On the other hand, blogs exist as opinionated annotated lists of links; it is our right to link to whomever we wish. I just dislike being treated as though I were Microsoft. I requested a link if you felt like adding one; I did not feel you up while we were in line at the supermarket. Get a grip.

• Over at saturn.org, Jack down in Georgia wrote:

  joe clark e-mailed a bunch of weblog editors a few months ago and requested a link to his site. he didn’t bother to hide his recipient list, and then when people replied and complained about him compromising their privacy, he was the one acting insulted. now he writes about it on his website[...]. well, joe, you’re getting your link now. folks, the bcc function in the e-mail program of your choice is there for a reason: to hide the recipients of your messages so that others don’t steal the addresses of your friends and family to promote their crappy product. don’t listen to joe – use bcc.

  (The self-effacement of lowercase is Jack’s own.) I did not “request a link.” The exact words were “I’m suggesting you look at my own Web site (230 articles!) and blog page (the homepage, of which there are three, depending on your browser preference). You may find me worth linking to.” Further: “Note that this message discloses everyone’s address; we’re all in this (or on that dmoz page) together, and I do not mean this E-mail as spam – rather, it’s a way to introduce myself and make the standard request to check-out-my-site-and-let-me-know-what-you-think-of-it.” This hardly seems like harassment, pushiness, or bad netiquette. People who don’t want their addresses revealed in messages mailed to them need to get offline; it’s like studying French literature in translation. It’s a contradiction in terms.

• Oh, but that wasn’t all. Back with Jack:

  i suppose joe also feels that getting junk mail from a small-time spammer is going against the integrity of one’s web userhood unless one also gets their mailbox flooded with the giant list of the e-mail’s recipients. i don’t think we need to go over this again.

• So what is spam? Is it a simple equation, unsolicited = spam? If that were true, then we wouldn’t put E-addresses on our Web sites. We want people to mail us.
• Moreover, my message was noncommercial in nature and was clearly related to the recipients’ interest – in Weblogs. I was not mailing a toner-cartridge advertisement to a diabetes support group.
• Another correspondent pointed out that “overlong lists of addresses literally crash some mailers. You should never run a single RFC822 header out past 255 characters if you can help it. In extreme cases, even if the mailer does not crash, you are forcing people to download a 100K E-mail just for the privilege of reading a 2K blurb.” (The addresses occupied 1,103 characters – just over 1K, but markedly over 255 characters.)
• That same correspondent mentioned “if any of the addresses thus listed were intended to be private, you have given them away. If you simply compiled publicly-available E-mail addresses for weblog authors, this is not such a big problem, although it’s easy to see why there’d still be some concern over the ‘convenient compilation’ aspect – all anyone has to do is Reply to All and they, too, are spamming a bunch of bloggers.” Someone who runs a Web site and doesn’t know not to hit Reply to All needs to get offline.
• A more workable definition of what I did is meatloaf: “Unsolicited personal mass mail. Usually created by someone who collects personal E-mails from discussion groups, parties and such to add to a group mail list. Then one’s personal rants and raves are mailed off whether or not the receiver cares for what’s inside.” Except this wasn’t a rant.

• Marty Landman recounted on webdesign-L that:

  I mean I routinely get commercial-type E-mails from other designers and such in our field who found my site and E-mail me a flyer or offer of services. And after joining the local Chamber of Commerce I started getting snail mail from other member businesses. It’s unsolicited mail, but it’s not unethical, right? I don’t mind that so much and in fact am preparing to do the same thing myself. I think it’s just normal marketing, like cold calling, as long as it’s really a one time thing this indicates that it’s not a mass mailing but has some care taken to not continually bug me.

  Testify, brother.

• And my experience, it turns out, was not unique. Randall Vlahos told webdesign-L:

  I tried exactly this sort of thing about 2 years ago... visited about 200 websites – mostly ISPs and hosts – and dropped about half of them an E-mail offering my services (using their mailto: link or form). I think I must’ve gotten at least a half-dozen very nasty replies, along with several weak attempts at mailbombing (i.e., someone making up insults and hitting “reply" a few hundred times). In the “anti-spam vigilante" camp there seems to be little grey area: Either it was solicited or it’s spam. Pretty much discouraged me from any future attempts at this kind of “targeted" marketing.

• Further, my rather mild criticism of lemonyellow ("There is nothing at all especial about lemonyellow, a Weblog. There is even less to justify a New York Times profile") provoked polite but teeth-baring rebuke from Ms lemonyellow herself and from a famous Web architect. lemonyellow seems to have entered the canon of overrated artists and works. I do, however, take the Web architect’s point about alamut’s being influential in its impressionistic style; lemonyellow, I am told, is in the same vein. alamut lacks lemonyellow’s pomposity and gratingly recherché tone. In fact, I like alamut so much I would probably like the author. So I have nothing against the genre – I just don’t like lemonyellow.

• Another blogger – a bloggertrix, actually – writes:

  Your comments struck me as sour grapes more than anything else, and completely unnecessary. Lemonyellow caught the reporter’s eye somehow and for some reason, she decided to do an article about Heather. Full stop. That you or I were not written up is no reflection on our sites at all. It’s not material. And it certainly doesn’t call for you or anyone to put down Heather’s journal. If you don’t agree with the reporter’s assessment, the appropriate response, in my opinion, is silence.

  And how did I respond? The same way you would: “Then take your own medicine and leave me alone. Critics should never just shut up because they are contrarians. In fact, half-arsed, ill-conceived self-censorship demands like yours are the sort of thing that prods us to speak more rather than less.”

How do you hide addresses, you ask? The cheap way is to type your address in To: and everyone else’s in Bcc:. Or just give the list a title, like Webloggers, add a colon and space to that title, list all the addresses with commas between them, and end with a semicolon. Example:

To: Webloggers: whitney@houston.com, motorhead@backstreet-boys.com, mary@poppins.org;

which will resolve to the form To: Webloggers: ;.

From 1999.10.25

• Sasha, the sex columnistrix in Eye’s Love Bites, may be a bit unhappy and/or may not have had the unremittingly rewarding, assured, self-directed, unblemished, and venturesome sex life the Isadora and Savage types imply having had.

  Two months is not long to go without sex. I recently went four, and I’m in my sexual prime (although I did survive thanks to a little magic from the good people at Hitachi). [...] Meanwhile, there’s no way I’d be willing to spend my honeymoon the same way I spent my deflowering: in excruciating pain with my FRANKIE SAYS RELAX T-shirt wrenched over my head.

  My heart kind of bled for Sasha when I read this, which rarely happens. I still get all wordlessly melancholy when thinking of it, and I am rarely wordless. Sasha is a real find. She knows her stuff, and, above all, is a naturally talented writer, itself a rarity. We approve of her revealing her own vulnerability and imperfection in an advice column, which by definition are set up as loser-poses-question-to-omniscient-oracle. Takes more guts than Dan Savage’s slang-ridden recitations of the oracle’s previous sex acts, let me tell you. We want Sasha to be more successful, however she would define the term.

• It is not readily apparent that Rob Zombie is a rather handsome man, even if he does have one of those noses that’s so long its tip moves when he speaks. This fellow – formerly “tapped" to write and direct the third Crow picture, who spent his entire youth watching old and/or horror movies – produces what are absolutely the worst music videos ever, worse even than Sonic Youth’s $1.99 cover of “Addicted to Love.” Yet we need more robzombification of pop culture. He’s a good fuck up the arse to loosen us up, I have to say, if you’ll excuse my French, which I usually avoid here. And indeed, the swirling surreal guitar overture to “More Human Than Human" is singular and will live forever alongside “How Soon Is Now,” even after its welcome was worn out a little in a half-dozen Hollywood trailers.
• We bought the recent Attitude, the uneven British gay magazine. (No online presence. Even its holding company, Northern & Shell PLC, doesn’t have a functioning Web site, though norshell.co.uk has been registered.) The ish features Mr. Gay UK, Mark Ledsham, in what are without question the most ravishing photographs of a nonathlete I’ve ever seen, and I collect ravishing photos of (non)athletes. (Photos posted here, presumably without permission.) I sort of walked around shocked for a day after seeing them the first time. Mark rendered olive-skinned and is dirty, as if brushed with lampblack. (Ledsham looks different in every photo. So few Brits are attractive, even the blacks. The Irish and Scots are another story.) The sheer black Gucci briefs, necessary for his modesty, are all the more erotic as a result. The shooter, Michael Baumgarten, has ascended to my pantheon. (I am something of a photography queen. I collect hundreds of published photographs, in many cases for genuine research purposes – like general sports photos, homoerotic sports photos, and injury photographs, all of which will be fodder for an upcoming book. I’m also one of the few not directly involved in the industry who reads Photo District News, the trade mag. I actually researched a story for PDN once, but that vessel foundered on the rocks when sources wouldn’t talk.)
• My dermatologistrix, Babs Ho Ping Kong, claims I have nice skin. But I have a hard time defining just what she means.
  1. We tend to imagine complexion as encompassing both visual and structural features (e.g., rosy-cheeked and without acne). We make the mistake of imagining skin as a flat, two-dimensional membrane, like a dried dollop of candle wax on your tightly-woven woollen blazer. You can scrape off the wax no problem, because it is not intrinsic to the wool. We imagine complexion similarly – as a form of surface appearance, even if, in the case of acne or moles, we are reacting to the surface appearance of something that ranges deeper into the skin. When the craggy Toyota Celica Supra Mark II came out in 1982 (useful page, or look at the photo directly), Japanese engineers described its flanges, flares, angles, and doodads as “surface entertainment.” We still think that way about the skin. (Those with sharp eyes and a passion for this sort of thing can, up close, detect the depth of moles and other three-dimensional signs. Some of my absolute fave complexion types are slightly brownish, with a sheen and many dispersed moles. Matt Damon has this complexion, though rather fair of skin.)
  2. But one structural feature, hair, disqualifies that section of skin from consideration as “complexion" altogether. A man with any kind of beard growth ceases to have a complexion by definition, or his complexion suddenly restricts itself to the forehead, nose, and upper cheeks.
  3. Part of this stems from the habit, however understandable it may be, of limiting the concept of complexion to the face. It’s usually only in summertime, when some of us walk around in tube tops, miniskirts, and the like, when we get a chance to consider larger portions of the acreage of the skin under the rubric of complexion.
  4. I am readily swayed by the complexion of the face and the body. I trace that all the way back to grade school; one boy, a Caucasian with dark-olive skin, was stuck with a mole the size of a sand dollar on his cheek (and a name that rhymed with mole), while a later boy, also Caucasian, was even darker, prompting me to tease him with a certain epithet used by racists against blacks. (We only mock what we love, after all.) The teacher intervened and explained that he was merely “dark-complected,” failing to mention the rest of his appearance, which, in 1999 terms, would suit him to an Abercrombie & Fitch layout, were that company interested in any kind of white guys but Aryans. It is understood that I can precisely calibrate any entry on the human dimension of redheadedness on sight (in fact, usually before he rounds the corner), and I know everything about their freckles, plastic skin, and eyelids. ("But I thought this site was about typography<slash>captioning<slash>biketrials<slash>usability<slash>telecom!" you blurt. Well, it is. This week, it’s also about skin.)
  5. If I like you particularly much, which, I assure you, is rare an occurrence, you and your complexion may be deserving of my highest term of praise: SexKittenySoft.
• Years ago, I tried to write the words (the book? the libretto?) for a two-page illustrated magazine feature to be entitled “How to Spot the Miatafag.” We would use X-ray or explosion diagrams, of the sort found in auto magazines, spec sheets, and repair manuals, to view and diagnose CDs in a player, the contents of trunk and glovebox, wardrobe, hair, and the like. Never did happen. But, in a curious case of time-delayed synchronicity, the Bradlands, another site showcasing someone who can actually write, gives us this:

  Now Alex is terrified that someone would notice the discreet rainbow bumper sticker on his Miata and, rather logically, put two and two together. Two and two, in this case, equalling “big old queer.” [...] “If you are so concerned about being out at work, why did you put the sticker on your car in the first place? It’s a gay pride symbol. We want the straight people to know about it. Hell, putting a rainbow flag sticker on a bright yellow Miata driven by a thirty-something single man is practically redundant anyway.” Alex, however, doesn’t think of the rainbow flag as a gay pride symbol. To him, it’s a way of finding the tribe, of flying underneath the radar and being able to pick other gay people out of the crowd. Or the traffic jam, as the case may be. Sort of like a signal flare for guys with non-functional gaydar. If you can’t fly on instruments, you’ve got to look for landmarks. “So you put the sticker on your car in the hope that, oh, I don’t know, what? Hunky single men would see you tooling along the Dan Ryan Expressway, notice the sticker, signal you to pull over and ask if you’d like to get together for coffee sometime?”

From 1999.11.19

• Hey! I’m important! A nomination of a famous Macintosh user I submitted to MacCentral was successfully posted! This must be the same kind of thrill writers get when they see their work published. It’s only happened to me 380-odd times, so I’m a bit rusty.
• The single “Ends” by Everlast (strum it; sit there and have RealAudio take over your machine) sums up the ’90s. The measured, chillingly-dispassionate opening delivery and the tightly restrained harmonies during the chorus, oddly reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys, evoke despair and bad news. Misbegotten, overly literal video ruins the whole thing. (Everlast resources on the net are an absolute mess, as is the absurd URL of his official site, ForeverEverlasting.com. How many of his preliterate fans, barely old enough to mimic his facial hair, will spell that right?)

• I had a friend I’ve known for the better part of ten years. One of the few inverts in town I can actually talk to, because he at least is smart and sharp and keeps up with the media. (Sweaterfags at Woody’s are disconnected from the world. I suppose there’s no other way they could be, since they fund their nights out via paper routes.) He remained my friend even though his friends, of the A-list gay drug scene, thought me hopelessly square, a sentiment shared by two consecutive bfs.

  The friend disappeared off the face of the earth three different times, for a total of nearly four years, due to unemployment, marital strife, depression, and drug abuse, and I did everything in my power to make him aware that, to paraphrase Jon Bon Jovi, I’d be there for him. And I was. I thought about him constantly. But he and bf number two used every means in their disposal to avoid me – caller ID, spy cameras in his lobby, looking the other way. He resurfaced twice, briefly, and then re-submerged, giving me the Bells of St. Mary’s self-doubt of “What did I do wrong?”

  One day, near the end of 1997, I bumped into him at University and Dundas and we made reacquaintance. Back in our heyday, we talked on the phone as much as five times a day, exchanged frequent snatchmails, and occasionally had RL, f2f encounters, which in retrospect he was never wild about. I guess I was easier to handle as a virtual friend. But in late ’97, we resumed all the old ways of communicating, and I watched as he secured himself in his current job, found a new bf, located a good place to live, and reverted to the man I liked so much before.

  Then things tanked for me, and a phone message with the words “You’ve fallen off the event horizon again. You’re too busy being happy to keep up with me" triggered icy radio silence of a sort quite unlike the previous three periods. Now he knows what he’s doing and is hanging me out to dry. My intrinsic qualities and everything I did over the last decade, in particular my steadfast loyalty, do not count anymore. Have you treated someone you know like this lately?

• The music video “Detonator" by Mocean Worker, alias the delectable Adam Dorn (interview), causes me frustration. (Sit there and have RealAudio take over your machine; sit there further and listen to the remix. Link to the actual video here.) Adam and his buddy directed it, and the central passages, reminiscent of the Hawaii Five-O theme, are half-arsedly cued to barrier-test footage. Since I went through engineer school with the plan to crash cars for a living (though actually, improved seatbelt designs were my thing, since I always was a design queen), I was happy to see my old friends, the anthropomorphic test devices, bashing into airbags and A-pillars again. But the synchronization is off! Partly as a result of using slomo footage (car-crash cameras film at hundreds of frames per second), it is not always clear when the car well and truly hits the barrier – to the unitiated. As soon as the car comes to a stop and begins to bounce backward (remember, it’s action–reaction), that’s the moment the staccato drums and strings should be synchronized to. Watching things ever so slightly out of sync drives me nuts.
• We strongly support TFO’s application to be carried on basic cable in Quebec. Some of its shows are dull as dishwater (Panorama, come on down!), as befitting an Ontario educational station, but Volt is itself reason to watch the network. Besides, Quebec nationalists (‘Je n’ai jamais visité le Canada’) have to learn that they don’t own the French language, and that Francophones outside Quebec are their equals and not, as is assumed, threatening counter-evidence to the alleged dangers faced by the French in Canada. (Update: TFO lost.)

From 2000.01.17

• Will I ever get around to writing a design analysis of why the Motorola MicroTAC 650 is a disastrously inept, macho industrial design whose rank unusability could only spring from the mind of a Texan? Or would you prefer to watch real-life home videos of a guerrilla troupe snatching real people’s cellphones and smashing them to a pulp?

• I rode the optimism/pessimism sinusoid all day and repaired to the Suction Cup at Jarvis and King, intent on snaring my preferred window cubbyhole. Old baby-boomer guy is seated there; moreover, tucked into a seating position next to him that I didn’t even know existed, one noted this mid-30s fellow staring out the window. A stakeout, I immediately thought. For the next hour or so, they muttered back and forth about whether person X walking into the building at the northeast corner matched the guy’s height or not. Darkness fell; worries bubbled to the surface about getting a good picture.

  Younger fella made a number of calls on his shoephone with reference to someone named Schreiber. The shoephone number he gave out began (516) 459, equating to Nassau, New York. (I am a phone-number freak.) Another message he left IDed him as working for RKO German television. Ultimately the pair gave up, after the old guy fielded the younger guy’s complaints about the weather, parrying with the anecdote that his son can’t wait to repatriate after a year in Australia. The duo could not quite figure out where to go to visit CTV; the three of us decided it was the Eaton Centre destination, and I spent a long time in speech therapy with the young fella on the word Yonge. “Is that Schreiber you mentioned Karlheinz, by any chance?" I asked. Yup.

  In the language of Steven Bochco cop shows, I made them.

• How do you pronounce kielbasa? keelBASsa? KEELbasa? Or, as I suspected, KEEoobasa? This issue burned steadily for weeks. One found himself at Europe Bound snarfing up about-to-expire Clif Bars and the blustery, guyish blond cashier, with big round glasses, spoke in an accent. “Is English your first language?" “No.” He wasn’t biting. (Story of my life.) “What is?" “Polish.” Aha. Asked him why he picked Canada, where he’d been for twelve years. I came over all shy and did not pop the question, but on a return visit, I kicked out the jams.

  – You’re a native speaker of Polish, right?

  – Yeah.

  – How do you pronounce kielbasa?

  – KEEoobasa.

  – What?

  – KEEoobasa.

  – How do you spell it? With an L or –

  – An L with an apostrophe.

  – An L-bar?

  – Right.

  The L-bar character, called weh (I think; see picture), is most famously found in Lech Walesa’s name (the second L). It’s pronounced as an English W, and not like an English L or a German W.

  But on visiting the shop today, I learned, to my disappointment, that “the Polish guy" no longer worked there. I had been looking forward to his bristly hair, glasses, and attitude. Norbert is apparently his name. It would be.

  [Update: On a subsequent visit, there he was. Turns out there are two Polish guys working at Europe Bound – or were. The one I like is Robert, not Norbert.]

• The Naked Chef is watched on TVO. (Related book.) Jamie Oliver, the jeune chef, epitomizes Beatlesque moddish foppishness, and with his energetic slapping of ingredients into big bowls and unabashed, headstrong, coordinated, practised, and above all fast mixing of greens and pounding of dough with bare fingers, Oliver evokes David Hemmings in Blow-up. (Ebert.) Has the mod æsthetic echoed through the generations more strongly than we thought? It’s manful fashion photography, manful cookery.
• 1, 10, and 11 January 2000 are the most binary dates any of us will ever know: Whether you write them as
  • 000101 or 010100
  • 000110 or 100100 or 011000
  • 000111 or 110100 or 011100
  they still amount to a string of ones and zeros. (Don’t wreck it with a four-digit year!)
• The concept of the placeholder Web site doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. If you own a domain name but don’t want to post a site yet, don’t post a site; that’s preferable to any kind of space-filler. It’s especially questionable when the culprit is itself a new-media firm, like Extend Media, né Digital Renaissance, whose site now amounts to a spash page telling us to come back on the 27th. (And forget the cooljobs address, which, it must be noted, isn’t even a mailto: link in the graphic. That address is rather akin to the specially-coded postal addresses used by Hollywood talent agencies: Mail sent to that address has to originate from a rube and can be discarded unread.) I’m just wondering what good ol’ Scoutie was thinking. What’s wrong with keeping your old site online, with a request that we tune in on the 27th for the new-and-improved?

• Martin Amis on Diana Trilling in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America:

  At one point I made an incautious remark, illiberal in tendency – an undergraduate remark. Mrs. Trilling cracked her teacup into its saucer and said: “Do you really mean that? Then what are we doing here? Why are we sitting here having tea with this person?" [... Later,] I quickly re-identified the kind of unease that a woman like Diana Trilling is always liable to provoke. You have to watch what you say when she’s around. I mean this in the best sense. Mrs. Trilling is not touchy or snobbish or oversensitive; she is just intellectually vigilant, snake-eyed. In her company you are obliged to move up a gear.... No, she isn’t the most soothing of companions, but you end up chastened and braced, and there is much laughter and enlightenment to be had on the way. [...]

  "Growing old is hard. Growing old alone is harder,” she said. “You become more sensitive with your friends. You wonder whether you are being asked out because of pity. There is an increased dependence on routine. I won’t leave the bed unmade in the morning. I won’t stand by the refrigerator and eat a boiled egg. I want to, but I don’t.”

• You realize, of course, that to make dotcommerce a genuinely universal activity, we have to make it safe and easy to buy something over an Internet terminal at a busy public library, with lousy equipment and someone looking over your shoulder? And forget about credit cards as the sole payment method.

• We did Lava on du Collège on what is allegedly invert night, Sunday. (No cover, OK? Inexpensive. Walked there.) We only do Lava because we wish fervently to do James, alias “the legendary DJ James St. Bass,” strawberry-blond, fawny-eyelashed, big-calved. If one is to lend credence to intelligence gathered elsewhere – from his friend, while James bopped his head with almost Cirque du Soleil–calibre gyroscopic limberness as the rapturousness of Rage Against the Machine washed over him – I’d have to be missing a few teeth and have slightly lopsided ears and pour cement for a living to ignite anything resembling interest, but I was adjudged to have made an entrance and to be “cute in an arts-student kind of way.” Arts student. James. Please.

  Chez Lava, we drank our tomato juice and could identify most songs played by the “legendary" James. Why were so many from the 1980s? The kicker, of course, was my entrance. I made sure to make a good one. Received a wave in reply. (He recognized the hat. Actually, I own three.) Next to me at the bar was a man of questionable masculinity and his gf unit – chaste, one assumes. James apparently has some fabulously showy and ostentatious rapper–drum-n-bass-d00d invert friends, of the sort who don’t believe in labels, man! and would pick your pocket at the Comfort Zone. Why did the other table, populated by five black and one white customers (an unusual mix in this neighbourhood), keep asking for slips of paper to write on? I hit up James for more Moby, but the woman’s intuition sent me on downtown before he got around to it.

• What is to be done about the feeling of incapacitation, of amorous hangover, of melancholy and disappointment and trepidation, the morning after the night before? Except it doesn’t last only the morning, and one can’t get any work done, leaving himself open to accusations of mooning and shiftlessness, which, like Wheels on “Home, Sweet Home" on DeGrassi, results in having the carpet whipped from under the feet.
• One reason to stay in Ontario, or at least to sign up for satellite TV, is of course Volt on TFO, a program I have actually appeared on. A youth show with a lot of brains and moxie, Volt also runs the bestest music videos. Last week “Mais qui est la belette?" by Manau was broadcast (mistitled “Mais où est le belette?") and its catchiness stuck with me. Apparently it stuck with the producers, too, because they reran the video this week. Manau turn out to be a Celtic French hiphop formation. Quite the combination. I know what le loup and le renard are (the wolf and the fox), but is there such a thing as a belette, or is it a neologism that gives the whole song a reason for being? (Lyrical extract: ‘J’entends le loup, le renard et la belette. J’entends le loup, le renard chanter. [...] Mais dites-moi alors, mais qui est la belette?’ Or listen to a RealAudio snippetette.) Recommended.
  • Note the following rejoinder from a French national:

    And Joe, about the French band Manau... I can’t stand them! That’s music for kids or for “mediocre minds"; there’s no creati[vity] and I still don’t understand why you saw them on TV when there are many great French [songwriters] and musicians. The lyrics of the song are not even theirs, that’s a traditional song with hiphop on it! A ‘belette’ is a weasel. The song says “I hear the wolf, the fox and the weasel; I hear the wolf, the fox and the weasel singing... But who is the weasel?"

  [See Volt: The maudit anglophone fan page, and the way I was set straight about Manau.]

• I catch glimpses of contemporary French life in such music videos, on TV5, and of course in the signal historical source, La Femme Nikita, and wonder what it is really like to live there. Unimaginably expensive, and of course if you speak French with any kind of accent everything you say is immediately discounted. Rather like what happens in Quebec.
• Skipperworld is a new online-art experiment using Flash, straight HTML, and audio. The story concerns a hustler who meets a client with the most demanding request imaginable. Written and produced by Jared Mitchell of Toronto, the sequence “stars" a fellow named Ryan Bereyko as Skipper, the hustler. He’s described as an actor in an article in Fab (not online), though in reality he’s one of the self-possessed busboys at the Black Eagle. Skipperworld has a few technical breakdowns along the way and badly needs an editor, along with a designer. Skipper himself speaks in too many dialects to be credible, and the final realization that he is a kind of prism of whatever he encounters sounds a lot like something an intellectual would write rather than a hustler would think. Somewhat realistic sex scenes, and a broad suggestion of necrophilia. How very un-Toronto.
• Actually, it’s been something of a bad week for snuff films, having seen Strange Days, featuring the dreadfully miscast Rafe Fynez and the worst African-American actress on the market today, Miss Angela Bassett ("Waiting to Emote"). Jack accursed Valenti threatened South Park with an NC-17 rating and actually stuck one on Happiness, but Strange Days’ scene of actual rape and murder, shown in loving close-up through the criminal’s POV, did not alter the film’s R rating. And enough with the Rodney King allegory. What was Louise Lecavalier doing in that movie? And then there is of course Vincent D’Onofrio. (Strange Days has nothing on the worst snuff films in cinema, Silverlake Life and It’s My Party. But the virtue of being not so bad a snuff film is dubious at best.)
• Sarah Clarke posted this gem on the Stephinsongs mailing list, dedicated to Stephin Merritt, the oddball pop singer: “I also bought the BMX Bandits, and some Stereo Total and some Yukari Fresh. The J-pop types seem to only consist of Cornelious and his bunch of pals, but for me, Yukari Fresh is the monkey to be wanked.” And so that phrase officially enters the canon.
• More Sarah: “The Human League do ever so truly bitch my ass. And Stephin’s voice really suits their songs as well. God knows what bird they’ll get in to do the birds bits, though. Perhaps it’ll be Britney Spears."
• My objection to Britney Spears is by no means linked to her jailbait videos, since the last fellow I liked was jailbait himself, but that she’s unintelligible. Only by accident did I figure out that a refrain from her jailbait single has her claiming “My loneliness is killing me.” It’s so overproduced and postprocessed and replete with reverb that it grates like the resonating voice of a B-movie robot: my.lone.li.ness_is.kill.ing.me.
• Microsoft makes the bold claim that Internet Explorer 5.0 for God’s computer will offer full compliance with Cascading Stylesheets version 1.0 and HTML 4.0, the first browser ever to do so. Mozilla, alias Netscape 5, is claimed to support CSS 1.0 completely, but it hasn’t been released yet and its development is notoriously backlogged. There are two objections to Microsoft’s announcement: MSIE 5 is just as much vapourware as Mozilla, and there is no mention of just what kind of user interface was developed for the pesky, abstruse LONGDESC tag, something that’s close to my heart as an accessibility obsessif. (It’s sort of like adopting a mile of highway. Some of us adopt orphaned HTML tags.)

From 2000.02.09

• OK, so I’m at Lettieri on Queen killing time. A nearby table features three mid-30s fashion plates, complete with hot-pink mini quilted parkas, pink-highlighted hair, and pink-faced Nokia shoephone. While flipping through a binder of clipping files, the leaderette volubly declaimed on Floria Sigismondi’s still and video photography. Sure, we love her. We loved her best in Rusty’s video “Empty Cage” where she portrayed a fur-coated holdup vamp. (“What are you reading?” “Dostoevsky.” Incomprehension. Perfectly pregnant pause. “The only Dusty I know is Springfield.”) But jeez, not so loud, please. At their adjoining table were five equally voluble guys. Something kept telling me to look at them, but I dismissed them out of the corner of my eye as layabouts. Quite a while later, I notice that the two tables are suddenly talking to each other. One of the lads, in backward-facing Harley-Davidson cap, is Hugh Dillon of the Headstones, who, four years ago, had unmatched charisma and stage presence. He had most recently been seen stalking into a bookstore in the Beach, with good hair but less of an essence of command than his constant anecdotes about plowing men would suggest. (“So I’m zipping up and the guy wants to cuddle. What a fag, eh?”) It is apparent that the studies in pink and the layabouts are planning a music video. The pretty-in-pinks brought the lads to some nearby clothing store in the (vain) hope they’d see something they liked. “Hard Core Logo,” one of the chix says. “Haven’t seen it, but I’ll watch it tonight.” “Don’t bother,” Hugh replies.
• I then stand outside and read a newspaper waiting for the eetcarstray to arrive. A lad in a hopelessly fashionable Elmer Fudd cap (flaps, one side lined with fur, over ears and brow, with flaps clasped delicately under the chin) approaches. It’s a producer from a local network whose previous show was appalling, and I told him so. Apparently he’s researching some kind of segment for a current-affairs program on clothing styles, and I seemed to fit the bill, probably because of the hat. which does get me noticed. We go back and forth a bit, and I mention I saw him collapse in an S&M documentary. Maybe he should have followed Hugh and the pinks. But just then, a chick in a pink (again!) tuque and mukluks is spotted just down the street. (Strangely, snatchmail sent to this producer bounced back. Yay, team.)
• (Now with update) We watch the DeGrassi (Junior) High reruns, having seen all of them in the original airings, with atrocious Canadian or good U.S. captions.
  • Maturity, however, adds new understanding to the series. It seems now that the actors were, on the whole, laboured, wooden, halting, overstudied, or stiff in their delivery. I’ve been looking for dialogue that strikes me as failing the true-to-life test (would teenagers really say that?) and haven’t found any, because Schuyler and Hood ran each script by the actors beforehand to remove unnoticed adultisms. But the shows replicate the same mistake of every other youth series: Everyone takes his or her turn speaking, and everyone knows exactly how to respond to every remark. In real life, people’s utterances overlap, and there’s a beat or two while we think of what to say. And in the history of the entire show, only one male character had any credible virility: Scott, who beat up his gf unit, Kathleen.
  • Both series are rather low-contrast and washed-out; poor film-to-video transfer?
  • We also watched the DeGrassi reunion shows on Jonovision. Pat Mastroianni wouldn’t shut up, and he plugged his Web site, which carries the randiest URL I’ve ever heard: patmeup.com. Stefan Brogren was looking old – older than when I saw him walk out of Bar Italia two months ago. Kind of swooned over Bill Parrott, who portrayed Shane and has charisma in spades. The DeGrassi survivor with the most upstairs is clearly Darrin Brown, who played Dwayne, the bully with AIDS; why has Darrin been slaving away as first, second, or third assistant director since then?
  • Michelle Goodeve, better known as Ms. Avery, answered the question “What would your character be doing now, 10 years later?" with this shocker: She’d bundle up her favourite student, Caitlin, and they’d fly off into the sunset on a biplane. Mee-ow!
  • Update: The other day, after a particularly grueling conversation about Web design, I repaired to a franchised coffee bar, of the sort destroyed by corporate art in Clight Fub, for a cup of tea, killing time until the inexpensive showing of Señor Ripley began. Who should be in line with a long list of drinks to order but... Darrin Brown, alias Dwayne on DeGrassi! I asked him what the heck he was doing working as first or second assistant directors. Hey, it’s what I do, he said. Well, do you have aspirations? I asked, stopping myself from using “don’t" rather than “do.” Sure, he sez. And then the question, à propos of the Jonovision episode: Where was Wheels? No one knows, he told me. As troubled in real life as on the show, I say. A good 20 minutes later, he leaves bearing a tray laden with nine postmodern coffee drinks.
• The inappropriate laughter of film intellectuals: Cinéastes want us to know just how damn smart they are, and want us aware that, though they’re sitting alone at, say, a second-run screening of Princess Mononoke, they get things we don’t. So they laugh at unfunny moments. Or, at Show Me Love (gag!), a row of intellectuadykes, with their squared-off black-dyed hair and narrow squarish eyeglasses, show allegiance to the trials of the young Swedish protosushïst, the kind of allegiance that we just wouldn’t understand, by tittering during moments of banality. You know, we tire of film intellectuals. They’re constantly telling us that films devoid of engagement, intrigue, personality, or voice are somehow superior. Then we start feeling guilty for not having broadened our horizons by watching them. (Spy put it best. “Powwow Highway – I finally rented it.") In a recent case, I was taken in by La double vie de Véronique, in every way inferior to the analogue caustically derided by film intellectuals, Sliding Doors. I would have been better off standing outside in the cold watching some really good eclipsing.
• So what do I propose as an alternative view of the cinema? If we can’t be intellectuals, what should we be? Intelligent. Cut the pretense.

From 2000.03.02

• The Redhead Cluster Phenomenon was in forceful effect today: Seven in total, including one with brilliantly green eyes and a gf unit in tow, another with great clothes and a strong neck and a preference for the New Releases bin at Rotate This, and a Cruiserful of strawberry blonds.
• At du Collège and Spadina, a man with something approaching chestnut-brown hair, plus fawny eyebrows and orange toothpicky stubble striving for the denotation of goatee, champed visibly at the bit to cross against the light, walking three or four paces right into traffic. He cradled a takeout coffee, and a red plastic bag blossomed out of a side pocket. We all waited, as obedient Torontonians, for the white silhouette to illuminate. Reaching the other sidewalk, there was a great smooch, and I looked back to see the impatient brunet hug a woman as if he’d been awaiting this moment for years: Wet lips on the side of the neck, holding each other longer than is fashionable, buttressing one another against the rest of the world. I imagine the laser beams radiating between them across the busy street while the palmprint flashed at us. I imagine them because I didn’t notice them. There’s an order to the comings and goings of the world (hence the Redhead Cluster Phenomenon), but, save for identical twins, we walk the earth alone. As if I need to be reminded.
• Omigosh: I have finally been mentioned, in a complimentary way, in someone else’s blog: Adam Twelve. Mwah.
• What are the odds of walking past three separate Alfa Romeos in one day? (The Alfa Romeo Cluster Phenomenon?)

• I’m accustomed to processing a lot of visual information, having been a typography queen for nearly 25 years. I am occasionally impressed by Web design. I am rarely stopped in my tracks. Just days after dismissing Poz for its pastiche of design tropes, I run across a site that shows us how borrowing ought to be done. And it’s a personal site, by Douglas Pearce of D.C. With his grids, faux-3D type backdrops, and severe asymmetric design, he’s got all three feet planted in the ’30s, ’70s, and ’80s. The out-of-focus author photo on the homepage ties everything together and cements the gestalt. There’s more going on here than the sum of the parts.

  And it gets better, since he’s coded Java and DHTML that, if experienced in Netscape and Netscape only, tend rather to stun. The killer, though, is Doug himself: Not only is he a fan of the Magnetic Fields, visually sophisticated, accomplished, articulate, and, at roughly 23 years of age, he’s gorgeous. The doors of the castle swung open when I used Netscape as a key, rather like Myst, and the defocused auteur photo was revealed in its razor-sharp state. So I just sat there for a while in awe. I am rarely awestruck. Impressed, sure, with the neurons audibly firing in my mind. But this – triggered by the whole package, meaning not just his looks but his site’s – is the different sensation, of a sheet of screen-door mosquito netting materializing in front of my face and gliding straight through me, slicing my mind up into tiny rectilinear tubules, like the old Spy cartoon (At Home with the Modelling Clay People – “Mommy! Mommy! Grandma passed through the wicker chair!"). Things like this hit me in slow motion, immobilizing me first then slicing and dicing me.

  I suppose a dinner date would be out of the question. To slobber in public would be outré.

• The single “Enemy" by Days of the New is maddening, because it falls barely short of brilliance (and needs to be longer by a full minute). No discernible guitars, and the shameless deployment of gimmicks found in disposable techno numbers – doubling back on lyrics ("I don’t want I don’t want to be your enemy" – punctuation doesn’t do it justice here), sampled sped-up handclaps. Portentous delivery, apparently by the 20-year-old prodigy who is Days of the New, Travis Meeks. Some plumbing of the depths of masculinism, which, even in this late age, surprises when articulated by such a deep voice. (Like the shock of reading dickface from Filter telling Stolling Rhône he’s a large man, and thus needs a large cellphone handset, then, a few weeks later, reading his recollection of necking with Trent Reznor, which the latter could not “handle.") It seems that addressing someone as “little man" is understood as a convenient, quick-n-easy, cost-effective way to put a guy down. ("Enemy" is pretty old now, but it’s still being played on the radio – on hoary old Q107, no less.)

  Though compared to “Personal Jesus,” “Enemy" is more in the tradition of the dance remix of U2’s “Desire,” still fabulous 12 years later. We need a greater cross-pollination of dance and rock. Rammstein is not enough!

• The ratfink is back. He, presumably his bf unit, and someone else obviously more fabulous and worthy than I all sidled past me at a certain unlikely watering hole on Saturday. I played it cool. 59 seconds later they left, wordlessly. I will live to do him harm.
• Further shallow content: Listening to Triple J radio down in Oz reveals just how similar playlists are in English-language countries. The most exotic thing I heard was an old MC 900 Ft. Jesus single. And jeez, did the DJtrix ever sound tired, unhappy, etiolated, and indeed on the verge of tears as her shift was ending at 6:00 A.M.

• Our word of the week is blouson, which must be pronounced only a certain way: BLUE-zahn, with primary and secondary stress, respectively. Aréna Hommes Plus uses the word a pleasing four times in the first half of its issue 99:

  1. "For £150–£750, key pieces are figure-hugging shirt-blousons"
  2. "With the casual wear we see the old modern classics rolled out – funnel-neck knits, chinos and blouson jackets"
  3. "but did their goodwill stretch to a Yank called Richard in a red Bloomingdale’s blouson? Not in 1989, it didn’t"
  4. "he combines shiny blousons and sleek, flowing white trousers with a YSL skin balm"

  Perhaps someday I will own one.

  Our word for next week is faux-naïf.

• Further to the ethos displayed in Disco thrash! Surfcore!, you can now play the game of randomly permuting available domain-name keywords. My favourite is eCementing.com, but nearly every reload produces an otherworldly, hilarious, or startlingly-plausible combination. UmbrageStreet.com; TurkeyBecause.com; eCoriander.com.
• I’ve had to defect from Poz.
  • Formerly the best gay magazine that wasn’t a gay magazine, Poz was beloved for its ecumenism: Absolutely anything and anyone related to AIDS was covered, and without judgement or second-class status, and in the proper vernacular. Southern ministers, junkies, porn stars, everyone: We’re all in this together is the implicit message, reinforced by the unique graphic design, where, for years, virtually every character in the magazine was set in Baskerville. ("All Baskerville all the time.” I tried on several occasions to write an article on the graphic design of Poz.)
  • We particularly adored the columnists, who rubbed shoulders amicably. Shawn Decker, a Boy Scout hemophiliac, contributed two invaluable words to the English language: positoid and negatoid. (Which one am I?) Decker’s Web site is delightful:

    Homo – I loved American Beauty, I have to say.

    Hemo – I’m very happy to hear that, because this movie gets two enthusiastically-plasma-pumping veins up from the Thinblood.

  • But Poz suffered a redesign last year that attempts to be au courant. As is so often the case with graphic design perpetrated by inverts, it’s a disaster, borrowing tropes left and right, like Poochie in print. I am not even going to bother name-dropping the designer, who deserves not merely to be fired but to be banished to a Neville Brody cult.
  • Poz is a readability and graphic disaster, and editorial content is now rarefied, removed from the real world, unrepresentative. Particularly irksome is the magazine’s new subtitle: “[Because] we’re all over AIDS.” Poz has squandered its signal assets and reduced itself to a stale irrelevancy. At the risk of bathos, I would add that Poz simply is not fun anymore. AIDS, like disability, is too grave an issue to be taken quite this seriously.
  • Has Poz become corporatized, like every New York AIDS activist from the ’80s?
• I have been set straight about Manau.

  • Previously, I wrote:

    Last week “Mais qui est la belette?" by Manau was broadcast (mistitled “Mais où est le belette?") and its catchiness stuck with me. Apparently it stuck with the producers, too, because they reran the video this week. Manau turn out to be a Celtic French hiphop formation. Quite the combination. I know what le loup and le renard are (the wolf and the fox), but is there such a thing as a belette, or is it a neologism that gives the whole song a reason for being? (Lyrical extract: ‘J’entends le loup, le renard et la belette. J’entends le loup, le renard chanter. [...] Mais dites-moi alors, mais qui est la belette?’ Or listen to a RealAudio snippetette.) Recommended.

  • A French national writes:

    And Joe, about the French band Manau... I can’t stand them! That’s music for kids or for “mediocre minds"; there’s no creati[vity] and I still don’t understand why you saw them on TV when there are many great French [songwriters] and musicians. The lyrics of the song are not even theirs, that’s a traditional song with hiphop on it! A ‘belette’A.  is a weasel. The song says “I hear the wolf, the fox and the weasel; I hear the wolf, the fox and the weasel singing... But who is the weasel?"

    Me, implicitly.

    I know how I erred in my original posting: Making a big deal out of a little. Like what the crypto-fags at the Big Steel in Moncton did 20 years ago, when one of ’em left a note, handwritten in a very expressive, outspoken, filigreed swash, attached to the new Steely Dan LP, Gaucho. You gotta listen to it! Because it’s so damn cool! And we’re so excruciatingly fashionable, and, by definition, superficial, that we’ll endorse anything with a patina of cool. (Though don’t ask me who thought “Hey[,] Nineteen" was actually cool.) Next time, I’ll be more careful. Do my research. Hear the album. Besides, I’ve seen ‘La tribu de Dana’ and it was – how you say, in English? – a dud.

  Period ending 2000.05.04

  • I think this fellow is looking for joeclark.com (or .ca):

    Dear Mr. Clark; I would be very interested in learning if the Conservative Party is joining the Canadian Alliance? It is very frightening to infer that this would happen. The Conservatives have been a respected party with a few downfalls here & there but please do not allow this respect to diminish by joining the Reform Party (under the Alliance name). Sincerely concerned. The Watsons of B.C.

    I’ve never actually received this kind of misdirected E-mail before. Bit of a surprise, huh? (Given that the official sites of the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark haven’t been updated in months or years, what are the odds that he reads E-mail at all?) Incidentally, joeclark.org is coming.

  • Glad to see even the hoary old grey lady the Times has finally assimilated the prose equivalent of go-go boots, the extended Spy-like adjective chain: “Maxim also featured buxom starlets in wet T-shirts or strategically-torn fishnet unitards on its covers."
  • Parallel universes exist (now with UPDATE).
    • I attempted to visit Lily, my fave sushi joint, where the tencho Aoki Lu is himself a veganist and knows my tastes. I walk in and see entirely-unfamiliar faces and kimonos behind the counter. Ano, Aoki-san-wa doko desu ka? I asked the waitress. He moved Lily downtown, and the restaurant in which I stood was in fact now named Hayama. Like Ronny Cox taking over the Enterprise, we’re supposed to pretend all is normal. And indeed, little else had changed: Same physical plant; nearly identical menu, with, if anything, more misspellings for your dining dollar; same wait staff.
    • And, on weekends, frustratingly enough, same clientele. As I explained to the two successive boy–girl couples to my right (the first with a redheaded male, the second a young sushi-bar habituée saddled with an apparently-mute Semitic husband), on weekends the place is overrun by the motion-picture industry, with late-30s girls in dramatic haircuts and adipose baby-boomers squeezed into bomber jackets accompanied by their wives and kids, the latter of whom will be ignored altogether as the boomers turn into boozers and order everything on the menu containing roe.
    • And nearby at the counter one espied an early-40s guy in a teal mock turtle with his “friend,” a woman of a certain age with expensive layered clothing in subtly-varied shades of taupe, khaki, and gold, fashionably-cut dyed hair, and full-on Sylvia eyeglasses. I hear him utter the word Moby.

      – Yeah. I’ve gotta get Moby. All the guys in the office, my friend, in his office, the 20-year-old guys, they’re all listening to Moby Play!

      – Yeah, I gotta get it next time I’m at HMV.

      – I’m thinking I should get it for down when I’m in Fort Lauderdale.

      – For that and Santana, I’m trying to get my CD burner to work, but it takes 98 not 95 –

      – You got your burner?

      – Mm, but it only works with Windows 98 or NT, and I’ve got 95, but I’m upgrading my laptop and it’s supposed to work with the USB.

      – Mm.

      – And I can burn it in –

      – Does it take as long to burn a CD as to, like, listen to it?

      – Well, almost. Like, you take Santana. Not every song is good, right? so you can just drop the two you don’t like and it makes it faster.

      – And he’s a white guy! He’s white!

      – I know.

      – He’s everywhere. On every commercial. Like, on Sex and the City, which I’ll be watching later –

      – Great show.

      – there’s this Kahlúa ad, and the music sounds like backward music, and it’s Moby!

      We then endured a dissertation on the incredible! infrastructure Japanese teppanyaki restaurants boast at every table ("a gas line and a fire line [sic] and water and sewage – and that’s at every single table" – or so his friend, “a straight guy,” in the restaurant industry tells him).

    • So I cruelly mocked the man to the talkative chick, who goes “I didn’t know a lot of men watched Sex and the City.” “Well, he’s not exactly the butchest tool in the shed.” Pause. “And I imagine most of the guys who watch Sex and the City are watching it for the hair and makeup.” “On the women?" “Well, there aren’t a whole lot of men on that program. Except for Chris Noth, and Carrie’s nebbishy gay friend."
    • UPDATE: Weirdly, a week later, at Slack Alice, who is seated at the table next to me with his... date? Why, yes, Mr. I Gotta Get Moby. His date says to him: You were going to talk to me about my eyes. One man piled his hand on the other’s on the tabletop, and the date strained to compensate for his unattractive male-pattern baldness.
  • I’ve met him at least three times, and he’s seemed unhappier and more let down by life on each occasion. He’s divorced, aging, overweight even for his endomorph frame, a smoker, in decline. His band are has-beens, even to a former fan like me, who ran a mailing list about them. And now Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens is running for the New Jersey senate as a Libertarian. More tellingly, according to an article, Pat now is running a different sort of campaign. Long known for the Smithereens’ willingness to play corporate events, now Pat will play in your bedroom if you round up 100 friends at 25 bucks each and turn over 80% to Pat. For such a hefty tithe, you turn your home into a shrine to Pat. “I probably do better financially touring this way,” Pat tells us in the article, which also explains that, rather akin to a vanity press, if you provide Pat DiNizio with lyrics and $350, he will write and record a song for you. If I sound disillusioned, I am.
  • A single sentence in Karl Taro Greenfeld’s Speed Tribes sums up Japan, doesn’t it?

    Kyoko, who smoked a cigarette beside him, hosted a TV Asahi trend-update show.

  • Merwin Mondesir certainly is, at least these days. It’s the upper lip, and the heavy beard growth, and – an absolute first on a black guy – the fascinating and beautiful tattoos. But on his show, Drop the Beat, I chafe at the fake way he and especially his uptight costar (seen, unfortuitously, on Tim Hortons commercials inserted into the very program) bop their heads and arrhythmically wobble their arms around in response to the grandeur of hip-hop. Please.
  • My 389th article was just published (in Performance – no discernible online presence), an on-the-job profilette of the receipt verification officer at a Canada Post plant. Translated into French, no less. 389, 389... I used to say I would never hit 400; that may have been pessimistic.
  • The Internet broadcast site 1Groove.com, part of theIceberg.com, baffles me.
    • Just how are they making any money, with no advertising whatsoever? They’re incurring possibly slight, contentious, but very real expenses licensing CIUT’s overnight time slot, and sluicing out broadband is still a costly undertaking. It is not easy to learn about 1Groove or any other outpost of theIceberg or Iceberg Media, its mysterious holding company; both operate virtually in secret, despite having lassoed nearly every big-name Toronto DJ, including Don Berns and despite apparently being publicly held. (A Maclean’s article I read [not available online] listed some prominent companies as investors.)
    • In any event, I love the Thursday-night drum-n-bass programs, and am very impressed by Sunday night’s ambient show, Sound:Escape, with Kresh and Robbie. Kresh’s silken-smooth voice and indefinable accent melt me. He actually asked us to enjoy an ambient performance. When was the last time a DJ cared for your enjoyment?
    • (I do, however, wish Kresh spelled his name à la française: Crèche.)
    • I think ambient music is underrated – an assertion I stand behind even though none other than Brian Eno invented the genre. It isn’t all “floaty" and ethereal; actual beats and rhythms are possible. The æsthetic seems to revolve around a progression through time, a very slight propulsion such that you are unaware that time has passed once your ambient set is complete, yet you have not undergone vigorous disco-dancing during that period. Ambient music has a Doppler effect on one’s life: Time compresses, you move slightly faster, but you’re barely aware of it.
    • Drum-n-bass, on the other hand, slices, dices, and juliennes time (and time signatures). Just as clicks in Bantu and Khoisan languages seem to float above the surrounding phonemes, jungle music zips back and forth with such unpredictability that individual beats feel momentarily timeless, one of the many temporal–lexical–conceptual paradoxes this genre produces.
    • Drum-n-bass became popular without anyone’s noticing; as Simon Reynolds put it, with appearances everywhere from television commercials to 4×4 beatboxes squealing tires as they round the streetcorner, drum-n-bass is invisible and omnipresent. Actually, his exact words were:

      In America, jungle has gone from ultra-cool obscurity to omnipresent subliminal banality (used everywhere in adverts, MTV links and as get-the-viewer’s-pulse-racing, newsflash-coming background music on TV news programmes), without any intervening period of pop breakthrough or even hipster consensus.

    • Later I will discuss the local dnb vocalist ("toaster") who delivers from the source, as in the only source of art, which I only rarely have tapped. The concept came from Michael Stipe, in fact. I always get in trouble when discussing this; people grow antsy at the supernatural overtones. But I’m telling you, there is a source and one local fellow has direct, on-command access to it. (He hosts a show on 1Groove, but just as, in some legends, vampires cannot see themselves in mirrors, the magic does not translate through the airwaves.)
    • I do like the concept of chill-out rooms. My idea of a good time at a concert is to stand stock-still and take it all in. Indeed, I do some of my best thinking in loud rock concerts (with necessary hearing protection, natch). Rather like the inverse of autism, the flood of stimuli tends to focus me.
  • Ryan Gantz over at Sixfoot6 is a better writer than photographer. I enjoy the manly sensuousness of his journal entries: Sitting in a towel eating breakfast; growing aware that he likes his coworkers; packed into the car on road trips across Arizona.
• I had written:

  There seems to be a meme spreading ever more broadly, one that’s tied closely to the alleged ticking-over of the millennium clock. In the 2000.02.19 Toronto Star (article unavailable online), Alex Law describes the Chrysler PT Cruiser’s designers as having “come up with an exact replica of a vehicle that never existed.” This seems cognate with the description of St. Etienne, Air, Cassius, even Pizzicato Five as producing soundtracks of nonexistent movies, soundtracks of films that have not been filmed, “imaginary soundtracks.” It seems that an archetype can steep into the culture – an archetype with no examples, a fact that doesn’t stop us from calling something an example. A song, or a car, can derive from a feeling as if from a mother.

  I told you it was a meme. Œil hebdomadaire runs an interview with two Dutch musicians, Gerry Arling and Richard Cameron, who’ve put out an entire album of faux-soundtracks: Music for Imaginary Films.

Updated: 2011.08.12