When I heard, two years ago, that developers were going to tear up one of downtown's uglier parking lots and turn it into a town square, I was THRILLED. All the objections to the plan were silly ones involving apocalyptic parking shortages and supposed safety issues. The nay-sayers didn't seem to care that uptown Waterloo doesn't have a convenient and communal place for people to just sit down and relax, a place to congregate while shopping, a place to eat your food outdoors.
What I hadn't counted on was the fact that the town square designers were bone-headed morons. They tore up the old parking lot in front of Waterloo Town Square...and then they basically paved it over again, giving us a huge flat concrete area ringed with concrete seats, with a tiny little garden enclosed by -- you guessed it -- more concrete.
It looks vast and featureless and unwelcoming, but the biggest and most obvious problem is that there is no shade. I mean seriously people, what the f*ck were you thinking? Did nobody stand out there and notice that the sun beats mercilessly down on that area between 9am and 5pm? Didn't anybody say "maybe we should position an awning or some trees to block out some of the sun?" Or how about -- lord forbid -- GRASS to break up the heat reflection, or at least a water fountain?
No, the only additional feature they gave us was a metal butt-plug sculpture which -- you guessed it -- has been carefully positioned to provide no shade whatsoever.
This really is a sad bungling of a well-intentioned opportunity. The square appears to be vetted by people who never actually go outside and who have a disconcerting concrete fetish. The only other explanation I can think of -- and this is probably the REAL issue -- is that they built the square specifically for EVENTS, and therefore didn't want to muck it up with pesky "features" and "trees." The fact that those events only occur during eight days of the year must have slipped their collective minds.
So now we have a parking lot in uptown Waterloo that you can't even park on. During the day, six or seven stalwart shoppers sit along the edge, dwarfed by the emptiness. Other people sit on the plastic patio furniture that has been hastily placed in the shadow of the mall -- a shadow that doesn't even touch the square itself. The only people who enjoy the square are the skateboarders, who are managing to slowly remove those metal divots intended to keep them from having fun.
Waterloo Town Square's town square? An abject, stupid failure. A meeting place designed to repel people who might want to meet there. A two-and-a-half million dollar thud.
PS: I hear that the square "isn't finished yet," and that they're asking people for their opinions. My opinion? Rip up half of the carefully-laid concrete and put some grass and trees there, and then add seating in those areas. As for complaints about the skateboarders, well, perhaps you shouldn't have built something which screams "SKATE ON ME!" As it is they're the only people who seem to regularly use the park, so more power to them, they're filling a void. If the void wasn't there -- because people actually felt like sitting in the square -- then the skateboarders would move to another area of unobstructed concrete, because they probably don't want to skate on fingers and feet.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Voyageur!
Season seven of "The Daily Muffy" begins on Monday, July 7th with "Voyageur," a trip down Guelph's Speed River in search of fur and frolic! The adventure will commence here on Flickr.
These things are always a strange mix of anxiety and fun. Fortunately, when I did this on June 21st, I was gorgeously photographed by Shay and punted around by canoe-heroine Natasha. How could I NOT enjoy myself, especially on such a gorgeous day?
There are a few things to note about the shooting of this trip. The first is that I'm wearing the outfit which helped destroy my shoulder back in February...an outfit so terrifying that I call it "The Impossible Costume." Its odd back-centric doohickeys -- which I specifically remember having trouble with on that night -- left me in so much pain the next day that I can only assume it made my problem worse. By wearing it again for this photo shoot, I wanted to prove to myself that I CAN wear just about anything these days as long as I'm careful. I was, and it worked!
The second thing to note is that Natasha did not come with the intention to be photographed, so all the pictures feature only half of a canoe: the half with me in it. Rest assured that we WERE actually afloat, though I can't pretend that the Speed River is a particularly dangerous place to be.
There was, however, the danger of the canoe flipping over every time I hobbled into it. But Natasha is a pro and she kept me high and dry.
The third thing to note is that this was part of my "Shall I continue to do drag?" experiment. I needed to see how these pictures turned out, and to improve the experiment I even bought new eyelashes (the old ones were clunky, quirky, and more dry glue than lash). I'm thrilled that I can still burn up a dress and handle the harsh rays of the sun. Drag, we're still buddies, you and I.
Anyway, be sure to check out Flickr on Monday when the journey commences!
These things are always a strange mix of anxiety and fun. Fortunately, when I did this on June 21st, I was gorgeously photographed by Shay and punted around by canoe-heroine Natasha. How could I NOT enjoy myself, especially on such a gorgeous day?
There are a few things to note about the shooting of this trip. The first is that I'm wearing the outfit which helped destroy my shoulder back in February...an outfit so terrifying that I call it "The Impossible Costume." Its odd back-centric doohickeys -- which I specifically remember having trouble with on that night -- left me in so much pain the next day that I can only assume it made my problem worse. By wearing it again for this photo shoot, I wanted to prove to myself that I CAN wear just about anything these days as long as I'm careful. I was, and it worked!
The second thing to note is that Natasha did not come with the intention to be photographed, so all the pictures feature only half of a canoe: the half with me in it. Rest assured that we WERE actually afloat, though I can't pretend that the Speed River is a particularly dangerous place to be.
There was, however, the danger of the canoe flipping over every time I hobbled into it. But Natasha is a pro and she kept me high and dry.
The third thing to note is that this was part of my "Shall I continue to do drag?" experiment. I needed to see how these pictures turned out, and to improve the experiment I even bought new eyelashes (the old ones were clunky, quirky, and more dry glue than lash). I'm thrilled that I can still burn up a dress and handle the harsh rays of the sun. Drag, we're still buddies, you and I.
Anyway, be sure to check out Flickr on Monday when the journey commences!
This is My Humerus
People are always showing ultrasounds of their babies to suitably impressed friends and family. Instead of showing you an image of my life and happiness, I present you with an image of pain and dysfunction...yes, this is what my shoulder looks like on the inside:
I'm no doctor so I can't tell you what it means. All I know is, if the inside of your shoulder looks like this, your shoulder is F*CKED.
Today I went to the Guelph General Hospital to pick up a disk of my MRI results, partly because I'll need to give them to a shoulder specialist but also because I'm really darn curious. What sort of awful thing did they see when they looked at my cartilage in three dimensions? Did they scream? Do they still have nightmares?
Probably not. All I know is that once you view your body "in slices" like this, you cease to recognize it and you realize just how meaty you are. The only landmarks I can find in the images are the bones; everything else is just so much generalized gristle.
I'll let the doctor figure it out.
In the meantime, you might be wondering how to look at the inside of your OWN body. First you need to get an MRI, and then you need to call the hospital and ask them to make a copy of the data. They won't mail it to you (or your doctor) so you need to drive back to the hospital in a pounding rainstorm in order to pick up the CD.
When you examine the CD itself, you'll discover that it contains quaint Microsoft DOS files with eight-letter all-caps filenames. The included viewer cannot be run on your Mac, so either you spend the rest of your life trying to interpret the hexadecimal data in your "DICOM image" files or you download OsiriX, a free DICOM viewer for the Mac.
When you use a layperson-monkey technique of hitting OsiriX buttons semi-intelligently until something appears...well, unless you have a railroad spike through the affected organ or something inside you has exploded, you'll see animated slices of incomprehensible things which look mostly like a Grateful Dead lightshow.
I'm not saying that it isn't worth it, but if I thought I could diagnose my own injury by looking at these pictures I was terribly terribly wrong.
PS: On second viewing I believe that the big white thing in the picture -- the one on the left, partly overlapping the ball of my humerus -- is the oft-cursed "labrum," which in my case is apparently torn. It shows up so well in the picture because they injected radioactive dye into it. If that's the case, it's sort of neat that you can see it right through the bone.
PPS: The picture above is not from the MRI, it is an X-Ray they took immediately after the dye was injected. I think the wormy-looking white line in the middle is the path of the needle with some dye backed up into it. Yuck.
I'm no doctor so I can't tell you what it means. All I know is, if the inside of your shoulder looks like this, your shoulder is F*CKED.
Today I went to the Guelph General Hospital to pick up a disk of my MRI results, partly because I'll need to give them to a shoulder specialist but also because I'm really darn curious. What sort of awful thing did they see when they looked at my cartilage in three dimensions? Did they scream? Do they still have nightmares?
Probably not. All I know is that once you view your body "in slices" like this, you cease to recognize it and you realize just how meaty you are. The only landmarks I can find in the images are the bones; everything else is just so much generalized gristle.
I'll let the doctor figure it out.
In the meantime, you might be wondering how to look at the inside of your OWN body. First you need to get an MRI, and then you need to call the hospital and ask them to make a copy of the data. They won't mail it to you (or your doctor) so you need to drive back to the hospital in a pounding rainstorm in order to pick up the CD.
When you examine the CD itself, you'll discover that it contains quaint Microsoft DOS files with eight-letter all-caps filenames. The included viewer cannot be run on your Mac, so either you spend the rest of your life trying to interpret the hexadecimal data in your "DICOM image" files or you download OsiriX, a free DICOM viewer for the Mac.
When you use a layperson-monkey technique of hitting OsiriX buttons semi-intelligently until something appears...well, unless you have a railroad spike through the affected organ or something inside you has exploded, you'll see animated slices of incomprehensible things which look mostly like a Grateful Dead lightshow.
I'm not saying that it isn't worth it, but if I thought I could diagnose my own injury by looking at these pictures I was terribly terribly wrong.
PS: On second viewing I believe that the big white thing in the picture -- the one on the left, partly overlapping the ball of my humerus -- is the oft-cursed "labrum," which in my case is apparently torn. It shows up so well in the picture because they injected radioactive dye into it. If that's the case, it's sort of neat that you can see it right through the bone.
PPS: The picture above is not from the MRI, it is an X-Ray they took immediately after the dye was injected. I think the wormy-looking white line in the middle is the path of the needle with some dye backed up into it. Yuck.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
The Tommyknockers Knocked On My Door, Hung Around for Three Hours, and Then Clogged My Toilet
Stephen King annoys me but I recognize that -- under all the repetition and hackery -- there's a big slice of brilliance in him. No matter how bad any given Stephen King book is, the idea BEHIND the book is usually a whopper.
"The Tommyknockers" fits this description perfectly. I haven't read it since it came out, but I remember it being a relatively poor -- and over-long -- treatment of a fantastic plot. It's unsurprising that the mini-series -- which I watched today -- took out most of the good ideas, drastically simplified the plot itself, and tacked on a horrible ending.
Television scriptwriters really do seem to think that we (the viewers) are incapable of dealing with complex ideas. The truly great thing about King's original book was that the "Tommyknocker" aliens were terribly flawed and destructive creatures; they could do amazing things but were far too selfish and short-tempered to really thrive. This was presented as a racial trait in the novel, and was a sly mirroring of humanity's own foibles: we have great power and adaptability but we're also very primitive, and there's nothing more dangerous than a baby with a loaded gun.
This element added an indispensible level to the book...it explained everything and lent itself to a lot of great plot twists. But in the mini-series, of course, the aliens were just hissing bad guys who wanted to exploit humankind, an idea that reduced it all to a typical "invasion earth" story.
Another thing that television scriptwriters Absolutely Must Do is add a climactic straight-forward fight -- good versus evil! -- and then make sure that everybody's alright in the end, no matter how improbable such a thing might be. I was pleased to see that, in the mini-series, all the infected townspeople underwent an instant spa-treatment as soon as the aliens died...they even got magically-applied lipstick and mascara!
But the show wasn't ALL bad. Traci Lords is always fun, and the major set-piece in the book ("What's happening in the barn?") was even more gruesome on screen. Yay!
Still, I feel personally insulted when a piece of entertainment treats me like I'm stupid. I'm not, and I'm hardly alone in LIKING a bit of a challenge!
"The Tommyknockers" fits this description perfectly. I haven't read it since it came out, but I remember it being a relatively poor -- and over-long -- treatment of a fantastic plot. It's unsurprising that the mini-series -- which I watched today -- took out most of the good ideas, drastically simplified the plot itself, and tacked on a horrible ending.
Television scriptwriters really do seem to think that we (the viewers) are incapable of dealing with complex ideas. The truly great thing about King's original book was that the "Tommyknocker" aliens were terribly flawed and destructive creatures; they could do amazing things but were far too selfish and short-tempered to really thrive. This was presented as a racial trait in the novel, and was a sly mirroring of humanity's own foibles: we have great power and adaptability but we're also very primitive, and there's nothing more dangerous than a baby with a loaded gun.
This element added an indispensible level to the book...it explained everything and lent itself to a lot of great plot twists. But in the mini-series, of course, the aliens were just hissing bad guys who wanted to exploit humankind, an idea that reduced it all to a typical "invasion earth" story.
Another thing that television scriptwriters Absolutely Must Do is add a climactic straight-forward fight -- good versus evil! -- and then make sure that everybody's alright in the end, no matter how improbable such a thing might be. I was pleased to see that, in the mini-series, all the infected townspeople underwent an instant spa-treatment as soon as the aliens died...they even got magically-applied lipstick and mascara!
But the show wasn't ALL bad. Traci Lords is always fun, and the major set-piece in the book ("What's happening in the barn?") was even more gruesome on screen. Yay!
Still, I feel personally insulted when a piece of entertainment treats me like I'm stupid. I'm not, and I'm hardly alone in LIKING a bit of a challenge!
New UPhold Song: "Think"
My Canada Day song contribution is one just finished from 2005 called "Think." It really IS sort of appropriate to the day, as it was inspired by a man who screamed insults at me from a balcony during a long-ago holiday...he was one of the men who explode.You can listen to "Think" in its short, minimalistic, ambient glory here.
It sounds the way it does because of the technology I was using back then. I wanted to write a conventional song, but since I couldn't sing I decided to use a Vocoder plugin.
Unfortunately the only plugin I had was the one from Cycling 74's "Pluggo" bundle. While I grew fond of many of the "Pluggo" plugins (and many of their "Mode" plugins as well), they were terribly flaky and would sometimes refuse to work altogether. Their Vocoder usually only half-worked for me...you had to route it through their virtual "PluggoBus," and in the case of this song the bus would just randomly fade in and out.
I got so frustrated with the vocoder that I gave up on "Think" after only one segment of one verse. But this year, when I went back to listen to it, I realized that the vocoder fade was sort of nice, and though it completely ruined an attempt at "conventional" music it was a nice "experimental" touch.
So I stripped out the rhythm and the original keyboards and rewrote the track around the vocoder glitch. It probably turned out better than if I'd written some lame song about depressed persecution.
The lesson: keep all of your mistakes, even if you think you'll never use them!
Monday, June 29, 2009
New UPhold Song: "Devil Woman!"
I'm having a surprising amount of success resurrecting unfinished songs off my old eMac. Somehow, the roadblocks regarding these projects -- many of them begun in 2003 -- are easily being swept aside through judicious application of fresh ears, soft synths, and sledgehammer editing techniques.The latest resurrected song is "Devil Woman!" You can listen to it here if you're so inclined. It's based around a sample from "Pelican & Penguin" by The Nits, with a lot of sequencing from the obsessive "Damage" era, plus...well, just give it a try.
If I continue to be happy and easy with these musty old songs then I plan to release them as "Sruel Quay," a collection of rescued projects. Someday...
Saturday, June 27, 2009
"Damage" on CD Baby
One of the things I've been doing lately -- instead of blogging -- has been to set up my 2007 CD "Damage" on CD Baby for distribution.Woo-hoo, it's finally there, and it's very very cheap! You (and that's not "you" specifically, it's the "generic you") can go online and buy either the CD or the MP3s, and have a little bit of Muffy in your own home forever.
I warn you, though, that the CD was made during a particularly acerbic period of my life, when I'd decided it would be socially and emotionally beneficial to live excessively. "Damage" is the only wonderful thing that came out of that period, as it was recorded during moments of anguish, self-doubt, and obsessive twitchiness...and it's definitely apparent.
Still interested? It's here!
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Summer! Summer! Summer!
Today I had planned to take a canoe trip down Guelph's Speed River, as part of the triumphant (possible) return of the Daily Muffy. Unfortunately the forecast rather sketchily called for afternoon thundershowers, and my trip organizer -- who is a professional canoe coach -- said "Lightning + Canoe = Death." And she didn't want to die just for a bunch of goofy photographs. We had to cancel.
So on a beautiful day, with the Co-op car booked and a totally free itinerary ahead of me, I decided to drive to New Hamburg and take my mom out for a surprise lunch.
And it worked! She hadn't eaten! We sat on the empty E.J.'s patio and ate pulled-pork sandwiches and talked about her trip to England. Then we took a long stroll around Baden -- which neither of us have ever walked around -- and chatted with children and played with a small dog. Then we went on the "Castle Kilbride" tour, which was quite beautiful, though I was disappointed we didn't get to REALLY see the basement. And I think that when I accidentally touched the tour guide's hand she thought I was groping her.
A side benefit of this wonderful day -- besides the joyful sponteneity of just making it up as we went along -- was the driving practice I got in. I'm becoming more comfortable with the car and am no longer white-knuckled when I drive it, and with each trip I become more thankful to the Grand River Car Share: they are professional, sensible, and they suit my lifestyle perfectly.
Sigh! Here's to a wonderful summer day! I don't have a "Daily Muffy" to show for it, but I think I ultimately got something better.
So on a beautiful day, with the Co-op car booked and a totally free itinerary ahead of me, I decided to drive to New Hamburg and take my mom out for a surprise lunch.
And it worked! She hadn't eaten! We sat on the empty E.J.'s patio and ate pulled-pork sandwiches and talked about her trip to England. Then we took a long stroll around Baden -- which neither of us have ever walked around -- and chatted with children and played with a small dog. Then we went on the "Castle Kilbride" tour, which was quite beautiful, though I was disappointed we didn't get to REALLY see the basement. And I think that when I accidentally touched the tour guide's hand she thought I was groping her.
A side benefit of this wonderful day -- besides the joyful sponteneity of just making it up as we went along -- was the driving practice I got in. I'm becoming more comfortable with the car and am no longer white-knuckled when I drive it, and with each trip I become more thankful to the Grand River Car Share: they are professional, sensible, and they suit my lifestyle perfectly.
Sigh! Here's to a wonderful summer day! I don't have a "Daily Muffy" to show for it, but I think I ultimately got something better.
The Changeable Changeness of Change
The last three weeks have been bizarre. Nothing in particular has happened, nothing too shocking or surprising, but I can't help feeling that my world is moving pretty rapidly into a new place. What's surprising about this is that I'm pretty comfortable with the idea.
I've never really understood before the Tarot idea where the "Death" card actually means "change." I figured it was just a conceit to keep suburban housewives from screaming when they get their cards read. But when things are changing -- both your environment and you -- it really DOES feel a bit like death: a little bit scary and exciting and a whole lot of wondering.
Some things are going on that I'm not going to talk about here, and they're all interrelated so I can't give a full sense of what's happening on this end, but one of the cruxes involved is: how long am I going to continue doing drag? I've always known that there'd be a time when I'd want to stop, and I figured I'd just wake up one morning and say "No more!", but instead it's been a series of gradual waves of thought during the last few years. Every year I give the idea of quitting more serious consideration, and this year I'm really on the cusp of saying "Yeah, that's it."
Why? One reason is vanity. Each year it gets harder and harder to look good, and the failures are more and more apparent. The pictures of me which look attractive are taken from increasing distances. I keep thinking about the song that goes: "Nice legs, shame about the face," and all it takes is one terrible batch of photos to make me go "Ugh! No more!"
Another reason is reward versus effort, and the rewards are getting smaller. It's not that the WORLD has stopped rewarding me, it's just that those rewards mean less and less to me, and as the effort increases, doing drag starts to lose its point.
A third reason is the sheer pain of doing it. My shoulder isn't getting better and there's a possibility that it never actually will (I'm going to a shoulder specialist soon and will probably be scheduled for surgery). The ability to "look good" in drag involves having access to all those parts of your body that you need to modify, and I don't have access to some of those parts anymore. It's depressing and causes me a lot of anguish.
And finally, I've realized over the years that I'm GOOD at a large number of things, but I'm not GREAT at any of them (except for my job), and the reason is because I haven't focused all my money and energy on a single activity. "Doing drag" competes with all the other interests I have in my life.
But the thing is, drag is such a part of my identity that I've always been TERRIFIED of losing it. Who would I BE? This year, however, I can actually see myself doing without it, and I realize that my life would be a hell of a lot simpler and easier without it.
I'm not going to be one of those people who throws out all their drag stuff on a whim. If I do decide to stop doing drag, it'll be a gradual process, a "letting go." I'm still performing at next week's "OK2BME" Pride Prom, and today we were going to do a Daily Muffy (but it was canceled). What happens will depend entirely on where my life goes from here.
In any case, all this stuff is the major reason why I haven't been blogging lately. When my life becomes unsettled I tend to withdraw from creative pursuits (such as this one) and just do a lot of reading and game-playing (yes, The Sims 2).
I've never really understood before the Tarot idea where the "Death" card actually means "change." I figured it was just a conceit to keep suburban housewives from screaming when they get their cards read. But when things are changing -- both your environment and you -- it really DOES feel a bit like death: a little bit scary and exciting and a whole lot of wondering.
Some things are going on that I'm not going to talk about here, and they're all interrelated so I can't give a full sense of what's happening on this end, but one of the cruxes involved is: how long am I going to continue doing drag? I've always known that there'd be a time when I'd want to stop, and I figured I'd just wake up one morning and say "No more!", but instead it's been a series of gradual waves of thought during the last few years. Every year I give the idea of quitting more serious consideration, and this year I'm really on the cusp of saying "Yeah, that's it."
Why? One reason is vanity. Each year it gets harder and harder to look good, and the failures are more and more apparent. The pictures of me which look attractive are taken from increasing distances. I keep thinking about the song that goes: "Nice legs, shame about the face," and all it takes is one terrible batch of photos to make me go "Ugh! No more!"
Another reason is reward versus effort, and the rewards are getting smaller. It's not that the WORLD has stopped rewarding me, it's just that those rewards mean less and less to me, and as the effort increases, doing drag starts to lose its point.
A third reason is the sheer pain of doing it. My shoulder isn't getting better and there's a possibility that it never actually will (I'm going to a shoulder specialist soon and will probably be scheduled for surgery). The ability to "look good" in drag involves having access to all those parts of your body that you need to modify, and I don't have access to some of those parts anymore. It's depressing and causes me a lot of anguish.
And finally, I've realized over the years that I'm GOOD at a large number of things, but I'm not GREAT at any of them (except for my job), and the reason is because I haven't focused all my money and energy on a single activity. "Doing drag" competes with all the other interests I have in my life.
But the thing is, drag is such a part of my identity that I've always been TERRIFIED of losing it. Who would I BE? This year, however, I can actually see myself doing without it, and I realize that my life would be a hell of a lot simpler and easier without it.
I'm not going to be one of those people who throws out all their drag stuff on a whim. If I do decide to stop doing drag, it'll be a gradual process, a "letting go." I'm still performing at next week's "OK2BME" Pride Prom, and today we were going to do a Daily Muffy (but it was canceled). What happens will depend entirely on where my life goes from here.
In any case, all this stuff is the major reason why I haven't been blogging lately. When my life becomes unsettled I tend to withdraw from creative pursuits (such as this one) and just do a lot of reading and game-playing (yes, The Sims 2).
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