The Ambitious Kitchener/Waterloo BusWalk Tour

I’ve lived in Kitchener/Waterloo for over ten years. I’ve tried to explore both cities but I’m severely limited by lack of transportation, and I’m also repelled by the major centers and arteries that I see too much of anyway. If I have to walk along King, Weber, or Erb Street to get somewhere, I'll get bored long before I arrive.

Then it occurred to me: we have over twenty bus lines in this area, but the only one I ever take is line seven. I could take the bus to some out-of-the-way, unexplored part of Kitchener/Waterloo…and then walk back! Not only would I see new factories, parks, and lawn ornaments, but I’d also get the exercise I’ve been sorely lacking!

So that’s my goal. Starting with bus line one, I’m going to take the bus to the furthest point on the route and see what nifty stuff I find there. “Why,” you ask? Answer: it beats eating snack food and trying to watch “Performance.”

PS: Walkable Neighbourhoods

How "walkable" is YOUR neighbourhood? Mine's a respectable 70%. The really nice parks aren't close enough for my taste, but no matter what I want, I can find it within walking distance.

But can I carry a bookcase home on my back? That's another question.

A Myst Hypocrite

After all my bitching last week about virtual reality escapism, I'm wasting my long weekend by playing "Myst IV: Revelation." I bought it years ago but my underpowered video card and out-of-date operating system couldn't handle it. It's still a bit beyond my computer but not so bad that I can't enjoy it (without crashing like it used to).

I love Myst games because of the exploration, and because of the sort-of-logical arrangement of the worlds. You see some pipes and some switches and you dust off your puzzle-solving hat and, next thing you know, you're playing with levers and getting awfully frustrated. Myst is always great when it's logical...but when a puzzle relies on some bizarre visual clue that you may have missed it's just plain frustrating. I HATE walking back and forth endlessly, scouring my cursor over a 360-degree panorama trying to find a clue.

Since the worlds are so big in Myst IV, I'm doing quite a bit of that. But thanks to the built-in help system I am less frustrated than I usually would be.

Myst has never been so beautiful. These ominous weather systems are stunning, and it's fun to just "tap" things...every part of your environment has a sound when you tap it -- paper, wood, metals -- and I like to imagine the poor foley artists: "what do you think THIS shape and type of wood should sound like?"

I've finished the Spire age, and again I have very little patience with trial-and-error math puzzles and obscurely scattered notes. As usual I wonder why the voice acting is so terrible, and why so many Myst games feature villains who scream "No! No! No no no!" I guess if YOUR dad had locked you in an unpopulated Rube Goldberg-type world for decades, YOU'D do a lot of negating as well.

The graphics are stunning. These are games to be savoured. But why am I inside my apartment on such a nice day?

The Barthathon: "The Sot-Weed Factor" (Plus "Giles Goat-Boy")

After meditating on the nature of belief, rationalization, and personality in his first two novels, John Barth's third book -- "The Sot-Weed Factor" (1960) -- takes the "personality" motif to ridiculous lengths. This time around he's concerned with personal history: is a person just the sum of his or her experiences and deeds, and how do you know who a person REALLY is, both in terms of their inner thoughts and their actual physical identity?

It's annoying enough that the 800+ page novel features dozens of characters who interact in extremely complex ways. But then the characters begin to impersonate each other (in the case of Ebenezer Cooke, the protagonist, there are at least 4 different people claiming his identity at various times, sometimes simultaneously) and change their identities and stated motivations every few chapters...and THEN their histories and relationships begin to combine, twist, and alter radically right up until the end.

Keeping track of who is who, and who knows what about who, is like playing a month-long game of "Clue" where Colonel Mustard suddenly turns into Mister Green, discovers he's Miss Scarlet's twin, and unmasks Professor Plum as the REAL Colonel Mustard, who either never existed OR once saved Mrs. White and Mrs. Peacock from a pirate who was actually Mister Green in disguise, without realizing that Mrs. White was his illegitimate daughter. Only more complicated, and consistently written in wordy, hysterical 17th century vernacular.

This is done deliberately. Not only is Barth having fun with the nature of identity, he's also having fun with the "picaresque" style of historical novel, full of ridiculous twists, adventures, and coincidences. Barth can barely restrain winking at the reader now and then as if to say "you know I'm kidding, right?" As Cooke says at one point:

"What a shameless, marvelous dramatist is Life, that daily plots coincidences e'en Chaucer would not dare, and ventures complications too knotty for Boccacce!"

It helps to know a bit of early American history. There really WAS a poem called "The Sot-Weed Factor," written by a very real (but somewhat mysterious) Ebenezer Cooke, and many of the politicians and rogues in the novel were actual wheelers and dealers during the founding and establishment of Maryland. Plus you've got the character of Henry Burlingame, who not only was the lover of both Henry More and Isaac Newton, but also -- during a novel-length search for his origins -- exposes the REAL story of John Smith's adventures, both with Pocahontas and many other native women thanks to the magical eggplant ritual.

While Barth carries over many of his obsessions from his previous two novels, this is the first time he gives us Joseph Campbell's "elementary ideas" of mythology, sending his characters on an archetypal heroic quest. Ebenezer Cooke starts out as an innocent prig who -- through countless tribulations and quests -- finally becomes a "hero" in the end. For this reason, "The Sot-Weed Factor" is readable despite its constant digressions and game-play; you may not care for Ebenezer and Henry's arguments about justice, identity, and virginity, but you DO get a thrill out of their search for scattered documents, pirate abductions, shipwrecks, and attempts to save Maryland from a native/slave uprising. It helps that it's all very, very funny.

The book actually suffers from TOO MUCH plot, though Barth can skillfully hook you back in the nick of time. By page 400 you're tired of Ebenezer's endlessly tangled accidental interactions, but it's at that point when he finally becomes an active character and you begin to LIKE him. By page 600 the revelations are coming fast and furious; long-standing mysteries are solved and you begin to get a sense -- finally -- of a distant but satisfying conclusion.

The main weakness at that point, however, is that he -- NOOOOO! -- introduces NEW characters and NEW mysteries. Seriously, by that point I'd had enough and couldn't handle any more complications. But in the last 100 pages, Barth throws out the theorizing and the preaching and just gives us a good solid resolution. Thank goodness. If there's one thing Barth knows how to do, it's to weave complex themes and rollicking adventure into a single strand.

"The Sot-Weed Factor," imitating the books it's satirizing, is vulgar. Whereas "the" is the most common word in most books, in this case the most common word is "swive." Women are CONSTANTLY being "swived," in more ways than you could ever imagine. Men are repeatedly fouling their trousers. And yet, except for a few harsh scenes with rapinous pirates, it's difficult to be disturbed by the rough sex and the scatology...the 17th century language is so CUTE. "I'faith, I am beshit!"

Anyway, by writing this critically-acclaimed book, Barth had proved his mettle and given us the first of his many "heroic" novels (not to mention the first with substantial nautical terminology). It's a rich, impossibly creative, overly-complex work that is both satire and serious. And when you're done reading it you'll need a long, long rest.

"Giles Goat-Boy" (1966)

I'm sadly skipping this one because I just re-read it last year. It's a "twin" to "The Sot-Weed Factor," once again exploring concepts of identity, civilization, motivation, and heroism, as well as having another ridiculously complicated plot. Unlike "The Sot-Weed Factor" it has aged poorly, partly due to its Cold War subtext but mainly because it sounds a bit hippy-dippy-idealistic to today's jaded ears. It's very much "right on, daddy-o."

Since "Sot-Weed" and "Giles" are acknowledged twin books, here's a strange coincidence: the BACK cover of my copy of "Giles" went missing a long time ago, and the FRONT cover of "Sot-Weed" fell off last week. So they REALLY match up nicely now!

Films Go Wild, then ABBA Goes Wild

Movie-goers in the late 20s just LOVED to watch pseudo-documentary footage of safaris and expeditions, even more than they loved watching gangsters drive their cars around. On the release of yet another safari film -- "Simba: King of the Beasts" -- the New Yorker film reviewer suddenly cracks on February 4, 1928, and he gives us a wonderful catalog of jungle-film stereotypes:

What with one movie and another I have seen more of Africa than Trader Horn. Victoria Falls is as familiar to me as Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, thanks to the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, where they will not show pictures of battleships but where they will and do show at least twice a month a picture of Victoria Falls. Thirty-two thousand natives have cavorted before my eyes in honor of the Rain God, or the Sun God, or just for the fun of it. I have seen countless crocodiles slip into every known river in Africa, and then have watched most of them waddle out again. There isn't a monkey in Africa that has not flitted across some of the screens that I have looked at. Hartebeests, wildebeests, and allmenarebeests have shyly rushed across every horizon of the Dark Continent while I have peered at them from theatre seats. As surely as I know my bootlegger's name so surely do I know that a lion can be chased twice without its developing any hard feelings, but that the third time he (or she) will get irritated and eat you up. N'koko incoge ke wa kirria ambwini ngogudema. With the proper incentive I could lower Stanley's time for finding Livingstone by six months, three days, and one minute to change pictures.

I'm unable to find a reference for his "N'koko" native talk, so can only assume it's his transliteration of something he saw on-screen.

Then ABBA Goes Wild

ABBA made a lot of baffling novelty songs in their early years. One that really takes the cake is "What About Livingstone." Agnetha berates some poor people at a newspaper stand who are questioning the worth of the space program, and to teach them a lesson she shrieks out:

What about Livingstone?
What about all those men
Who have sacrificed their lives to lead the way?
Tell me, wasn't it worth the while
Travelling up the Nile?
Putting themselves on the test,
Didn't that help the rest?
Wasn't it worth it then?
What about Livingstone?

We never learn how the people reacted at the newspaper stand, unfortunately, but somehow the song was never a hit.

Loving "What You Waitin' For" by Gwen Stefani

I think it really is one of the best songs ever. The production is overloaded and cluttered, but it’s all so lock-stepped in that 4/4 “electro-clash” way that it doesn’t sound overdone. The keyboards are beautiful and buzzy and they sound ominous and epic, but they're contrasted with a tappy-happy hi-hat.

And then you’ve got Gwen Stefani, who is thoroughly annoying but can REALLY sing. Fun and thoughtful lyrics delivered staccato-style. Yips and hoots and orgasmic breathiness. The song is, basically, an over-emotional “GAH!” with an ugly glacial beat. And it works. Even when she’s obsessing about Japan during the middle.

I love this song and cannot get sick of it. It always makes me feel strong, fun, and ready to frolic.

"Life is short, you're capable."

An iTunes Word Search: "Hair"

Do people actually write songs about "hair?" I did a search on my iPod to find out.

1. Bad Hair (The Legendary Pink Dots)
2. Bernice Bobs Her Hair (The Divine Comedy)
3. Devil's Haircut (Beck)
4. Hair of the Dog (Bauhaus)
5. Hairless Domotron (Intercom)
6. Hairstyles and Attitudes (Timbuk 3)
7. Hairy Piano (Moodswings)
8. Hairy Trees (Goldfrapp)
9. Hanging By His Hair (The Residents)

I'm not sure what "Bad Hair" is all about, good luck figuring out Beck and Goldfrapp...any "hair" in their songs is more likely a stream-of-consciousness piece of beat consciousness than anything even remotely concrete. "Hairless Domotron" and "Hairy Piano" are just titles that sounded nifty, I think. And "Hair of the Dog" is just a hairless metaphor.

Which leaves us with three songs that are ACTUALLY about hair. "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is about a woman who cuts her hair in order to feel empowered, but instead feels insecure. "Hairstyles and Attitudes" is a typically irreverent Timbuk 3 song that attempts to link...well, hairstyles and attitudes. "Hanging By His Hair" is some sort of biblical reference to somebody who really did -- so we're told -- hang by his hair.

Beating Reality to Death with Your Fantasy

I love to visit secluded creeks and look at their beauty. Forget the shopping carts and beer bottles down there, I mean the slow, uneven erosion of moss-covered banks, discrete spots of sun and shade from the trees, and green-tinted water so clear that you can see the algae waving back and forth underneath.

In those places I hear birds flapping in stereo sound, left to right, and I hear the rustling of squirrels coming down from their nests to drink, and under that I hear the irregular bubbling of a stream that never stops, and suddenly – looking at the still and green-tinted world, listening to these subdued and overlayed noises – I think “wow, this is just like Myst.” And then I feel a little sad for all the hours I spent PLAYING Myst, when I could have been standing by a brook and LIVING the experience instead.

The same thing happens when a thunderstorm is coming, especially now that I can stand on my balcony and see the clouds getting old and black. I look out at the evil skyline and hear the wind hitting my eardrums…and suddenly I’m reminded of “Poltergeist.” It’s view so bizarre that it MUST be a special effect, and the shrill sound of air rushing through tight corners is a sound engineer’s dream. I find myself "removed" from reality briefly, confusing my experience with some movie I haven’t even seen in years.

I think we all do this more than we realize, in an age when our entertainment can so closely mirror our experiences. This is even worse when savvy marketers and producers create out-and-out fantasy and then TELL us that it’s reality, and we end up mimicking the behaviour of somebody in a commercial or a soap opera or a reality TV show. It’s one thing to associate a real-life experience with a simulated recreation; it’s another to embrace a total fabrication and make it "us."

Far be it from me to deride escapism: I play video games, I read books, I watch movies, I listen to music. But I CAN tell the difference between these things and the world around me, the parts of the world that weren't carefully engineered to "make an imprssion." I do my best to understand the differences between the real world – finances, work, friends, social interaction – and their re-created counterparts in entertainment or escapism. I DO know the difference between a babbling brook and a scene from “Myst,” so much so that when I DO feel that I'm becoming disconnected, I worry a bit.

I got particularly worried when I became obsessed with “The Sims” many years ago. I could create my own worlds and my own little humans and live vicariously through them. Then I realized that I was having fun watching SIMULATED human beings doing their dishes, while letting my OWN dishes pile up in the sink. That’s wrong. It’s denial and seductive and a whole bunch of badness that appeals to my most anti-social, desperate, and voyeuristic instincts.

And yet our world seems to be going further in that direction…the much-anticipated “virtual reality” worlds ala “Second Life” are here already, and while I’m sure they are quite social in their own way, they also contain so much fabrication and wish-fulfillment – fake abilities, fake fame, fake appearances – that I can’t help thinking that it’s another step in the direction of a “fake reality,” one that is more convincing than ever.

We humans LOVE to be fakers. Most of us are faking it, most of the time. But we can only go so far in our fakery before somebody calls us on it and we’re forced to come face-to-face with the world and ourselves, and therefore grow and change and adapt and – hopefully – improve, maybe so we can SHED some of our fakery, or at least understand it better. If nobody can call you on your fakery – in fact, if fakery becomes so normalized that your “zwinky” or your “avatar” is more real to others than your actual personality – then I predict that YOU will end up a maladjusted lump, sitting on a virtual reality branch with all the OTHER maladjusted lumps, some of which are probably bots.

I use an assumed name and spend lots of time and money to swap my gender, for goodness sake, so maybe I have no right to criticize. Hey, who am I to say?

Thank Goodness for Missed Experiences

The collapse of this bridge inspires awe. We just don’t expect structures to behave like that. And obviously commuters don’t expect to find themselves suddenly dropping sixty feet into the Mississippi.

I was in Minneapolis in May but I never went over that bridge. This, fortunately, removes me from the ranks of the armchair pundits and prophets. If I want attention, however, I’ll have to change my story so I can become a sort of long-distance victim/expert, the “jeez, good thing I didn’t go there in JULY!” or “I drove over that thing and it seemed so UNSTABLE!” sort of person.

We haven't had a nice vicarious long-distance suffering since the last school shooting.

You, Sir, are Trash

Lately, as the weather gets even hotter and the cheesy guys start taking off their shirts and sitting on their porches, drinking beer and blasting classic rock on the car radio, I can't help wondering as I always do: what makes a person "trash?"

Granted it's never nice to call somebody "trash," so let me say I reserve the term for people who are consistently bad or obnoxious. Trash, with all of its other attributes, gets in your face and refuses to leave. Trash is awful and thoughtless. Trash has EARNED its name, in spades.

These are the hallmark attributes of "trash" as I see it. You don't need to do all these things to be trash, and people who DON'T qualify as trash sometimes do many of them...but if this sounds like you -- particularly the NASTY stuff -- then you, ma'am, are TRASH.

• A "hard" look. Trash ages early and poorly, possibly from living a "party" lifestyle and working unhealthy jobs, and eating too much fast food. Bad skin and hair.
  
• A resistance to changes in style, if not a downright rebellion against updating the way they looked in junior high. Mullets, rat-tails, bottle-bleaches, "zoomer" pants, all of it cheap and out-of-date.
• Tinkering with cars. This love of tinkering doesn't extend to other mechanical devices...just cars.
• A complete lack of subtlety in every aspect of life. Trash doesn't whisper, it yells. Trash doesn't drive a car, it races and squeals. Trash doesn't care about shades of gray.
• Lack of self-reflection beyond the most base concerns. No analysis of personality or existential angst. Trash falls asleep very quickly at night. Trash knows that the only way to confront a problem is to punch it.
  
• Too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, prescription drug abuse.
  
• Classic rock and Eminem only, though sometimes the girls like cheesy gothic rock if they're feeling "kinky," and sometimes the boys will dabble in metal. Whatever it is, it must ALWAYS be LOUD. Bonus "trash points" if your speakers are in your windows facing OUTWARD. Hard-of-hearing at a very young age.
  
• No work ethic. In fact, a certain pride in not working, yet still drawing a cheque in some way.
• A certain accent. In southern Ontario the trash accent has blunt consonants and slurry vowels. Try speaking without ever quite closing your mouth. Drop the w's that come at the end of words ("show" becomes "shah"). It's a mixture of northern Ontario and Quebec. When you want to say "garage," say "GAIR-edge" instead of "gurr-AWDGE."
• Aggression. Love that physical contact. Love that yellin'.
  
• Lack of empathy. Trash NEVER worries about what might be annoying to OTHER people...unless they are trying to annoy those people.
• Spitting on the pavement. Why do you spit on the pavement? I don't know.
• Ill-chosen, ugly tattoos, fresh off the wall of the tattoo parlour.
  

One half of my family is trash, but I think a crucial part of their trashiness is due to alcoholism, not to mention a lack of education. They sometimes manage to "get it together," but whenever they spend too much time with other trash (or each other) they invariably drink too much, fight, and get into debt. So hey, I know what I speak of, here.

More Theremin in 1928

Further into the February 4, 1928 issue of The New Yorker, the talk of Leon Theremin's New York recital continues. After the initial one about pulling music from "the ether," another talks about Rachmaninoff's response to the show (intrigued but not delighted), and finally -- in the weekly "Musical Events" column -- we get a bit more substance:

Radio experts can tell you that Professor Theremin has taken the familiar howl of an unbalanced receiving set and persuaded it to play Schubert's "Ave Maria." The result, which seems to us more important than the mechanics involved in obtaining it, is a tone which varies from something like cello timbre to the vibrations of the musical saw.

The Theremophone is still in a transitory stage, we hear, and it has obvious disadvantages. As the flow of tone is continuous, it is impossible to avoid at least a suggestion of scooping, and there are not yet Teremophonists sufficiently skilled to play rapid or complicated passages... Nevertheless, here is a new musical instrument, which is based on the fundamental principle underlying all instruments and which may, in less time than one might fancy, become part of the orchestra. If this seems romantic, so once upon a time was the notion that the clarinet belonged in good symphonic society.

Romantic, yes. Clara Rockmore did her best to lend credibility to the instrument but it never joined the clarinet in regular orchestras. Theremins did show up in sci-fi film scores, and later in scattered pop songs...though much music retroactively credited to the Theremin was actually performed on the Ondes-Martenot, much to my personal disillusion.

I have seen Theremin and Theremin-ish instruments played; they keep on popping up at Legendary Pink Dots shows in one form or another. It's beautiful to hear and even more beautiful to watch, but does seem to lack diversity and still can't be played at any speed or accuracy (unless, again, you're Clara Rockmore).