The Strangeness of Art

I'm awake at 7am on a Saturday because my living room chairs are being delivered "bright and early," on the heels of my coffee table, end tables, and cute mini-dining room set. After these chairs arrive I will have acquired all essential furniture. Then I can start on phase two: storage of books and DVDs.

But during phase two I'll be considering...artwork. What to hang on my huge bare walls? I don't want to go and buy anonymous mass-produced prints simply because they're the right size and colour. I want to have things that MEAN something to me.

I'm looking forward to this puzzle, actually, because having something to hang above my couch isn't essential to my happiness, so it could take YEARS for me to find the right thing. Years of finally having a reason to buy the pieces produced by artist friends, I hope.

Oh, so many options!

There's a Knox Store Convenient to Every Social Rendezvous

For several months in 1929 the "Knox Store" had been warning New Yorker readers about the folly of wearing the wrong hat. In these advertisements, the unlucky fellow would show up at a football game in a tophat, or at a piano recital in a bowler, the point being that only Knox can keep you stylish and "proper" for every event.

None of these ads have been interesting enough to post...until this one from December 21st.


Why is the child running away and crying?

Far better for the heirs to know at once that there isn't any Santa Claus than to render them permanent idiots by his sudden appearance in the Wrong Hat, just because you rather fancied yourself in the part.

So if you're playing Santa this year, make sure you wear the correct Santa hat...otherwise you'll turn all the little heirs into permanent idiots.

Beautiful!

Bell Canada Punches Me in the Nose

Remember me saying that "Everything went smoothly with Bell Canada during my move?" Well, not quite everything, it turns out.

Tonight I got a call informing me that I had an outstanding bill of over $200, and I was like, what? I hadn't gotten any bills in the mail, and I've even registered for ebills to prevent just such a thing happening. Of course I'm happy to pay my bills, but why wasn't I getting them?

So I went online and logged into my Bell account, which happily informed me that I owed no money. But then I noticed that it was displaying my old address, and that the last bill was from June...so obviously my account information had CHANGED.

My next step was to call Bell's notoriously awful outsourced technical support. First he wanted to verify my identity by using the new customer ID and account number THAT I HAD NEVER BEEN SENT. After we got around that little problem, we discovered that the final number in my postal code was incorrect. In his words: "You gave us the wrong postal code, which is why you haven't gotten your paper bills." My response: "I gave you the RIGHT postal code, and you entered it incorrectly."

I asked him how I could access my new account online, and he said "I'm not an expert on that, you'll need to email our support team or have an online chat with them. There is nobody you can talk to on the phone."

Then he tried to sell me Bell's cable service. I told him he was about to lose a customer entirely.

Armed with my new account number and customer ID I was ready to pay the bill online, but first I wanted to see what exactly I was paying for. So I registered for a new account at Bell's website...but it wouldn't let me complete the form because "Somebody is already using that email address."

OF COURSE! THAT'S ME! THAT'S MY OLD ACCOUNT! IS IT UNHEARD OF FOR PEOPLE TO CHANGE RESIDENCES BUT KEEP THE SAME EMAIL ADDRESS?!?

I logged back into the old account and went through the laborious process of deleting it. Finally I managed to create a new account, and when I tried to hook it up to my billing information so I could see the bill...guess what? It wants to know my "bill date." And guess where that information is?

On the paper bill. Which I never received. Because they screwed up my postal code.

Remembering what the awful tech support guy had said -- that there's no way to get website help without using email or a chat window -- I searched the entire Bell site for contact info regarding account issues. Nope! Nothing.

So I tried chatting about "Billing" instead, and got a very slow (but fortunately human) typist who -- after the fifth identity check of the afternoon -- finally gave me my "bill date."

I entered the information. I clicked through a bunch of confusing windows. I finally clicked on the link that's supposed to show me the bill I have to pay...

..."Since your account is new, it will take at least fifteen minutes for this information to become available. Please check back later."

Fifteen minutes. Long enough for me to say: yes, Bell often sucks for two reasons: outsourced technical support and tangled bureaucracy.

I am still a customer. Barely.

UPDATE:
I finally get into my bill and what do I see? THE BILLING ADDRESS IS STILL MY OLD ADDRESS. So buddy was telling me that I wasn't getting my bills because my POSTAL CODE was wrong, but I'm REALLY not getting my bills because THEY HAVEN'T CHANGED MY F*CKING ADDRESS.

What part of "I'm moving" didn't they understand?

Of course I discovered this at 7:04pm, and their support lines close at 7:00pm. Right on the button. They won't answer the phone...no doubt they're too busy sending stuff to my previous address, you know, the one I switched my phone service from.

Michael Moorcock's "A Cure for Cancer"

Michael Moorcock's novel "A Cure for Cancer" is broken up into small chapters, each one headed with a lurid tabloid-style headline which may or may not relate to the text. The chapters themselves are all of a single tone: laid-back and deadpan and absurdist, featuring dead-eyed characters who do random things to other dead-eyed characters within static sets; there are lots of vehicles and rooms that are an awful lot like the vehicles and rooms which came before.

While the tone remains the same, the direction of the story changes every few paragraphs. Characters will be contemplating something, and then suddenly there will be a bombing or a battle or maybe just the arrival of other characters, and then everybody moves to a vehicle, and then they're someplace else, all in the span of four or five paragraphs. Because of this lack of focus, you never know what's going to happen next; when people get into a vehicle you don't know where they're going until they arrive.

More importantly, even when they DO arrive, you don't know WHY, because the characters are all identical and none of them have any motivation. You cannot tell the hero -- Jerry Cornelius -- apart from anybody else. You have no idea what anybody wants, feels, or believes. The characters just ARE, and when they talk, they speak in a free-flowing semi-witty banter which has all the sense and purpose of two plastic balls rubbing together:

"And how did you leave Europe?" Captain Brunner unbuttoned his uniform jacket to show a yellow shirt of Sea Island Cotton.

"Much as I hope to find it." Jerry pushed his dinner away and took another sip of his Californian Riesling. "It's an uphill struggle."

"Perhaps it always will be, Jerry."

"One door opens. Another closes."

"Isn't that for the best?"

Jerry raised a jet black hand to a jet black face and rubbed his right eye. Captain Brunner smiled.

"The illusion of power," said Jerry. "It sometimes seems too sweet for words."

"Or actions, for that matter."

"Sure."

It's all f*cking like that.

Very few books annoy me to the point where I put them down after 100 pages, but "The Cure for Cancer" is one of them. It seems to me to be Michael Moorcock's great big joke; a combination of moddish flippancy and William S. Burroughs' disdain for linearity. Separately, those things are good enough when done well...but when put together it's like experiencing somebody's really boring dream.

I enjoyed (most of) Moorcock's Elric stories, and I liked his first Jerry Cornelius book well enough ("The Final Programme"), but "A Cure for Cancer" is so wanky and featureless that I fear I'm "off" Moorcock. There are so many great authors out there...do I really want to spend time and money on the guy who wrote this awful book?

Well, yes. Because I think I recognize what Moorcock was trying to do, and I suppose I respect him for at least trying. I'm also sure there are people out there who love "A Cure for Cancer," just as there are people who love William S. Burroughs.

So I'll give him another chance. But I'm warning you, Michael, that the next one had better be good...

Cold Coffee Makes Cold Hearts

The last time we joined the Edicraft company, they were saving marriages with easy-to-make toast. But apparently that wasn't enough.

She poured. He tasted. She smiled. He scowled. She wept. He left.

What is the latest sin of the 1929 bride?

And thus was another romance drowned in a cup of pallid coffee. Higher courts have ruled that grounds in the cup are grounds for divorce in every state of the Union...

Yes, the folks at Edicraft must have realized that divorces happened even for those who owned the Edicraft Speed Toaster! A new innovation was required to keep men from scampering at the breakfast table...

...the Edicraft Siphonator!


(Mistletoe not included, and best not put inside the Siphonator anyway).

"Electric, automatic in operation, massively-modern in design," the Edicraft Siphonator was...well, a coffee maker. The advertising copy fails to state why it's so darn great, except for mentioning that it has a "left-hand tap" which dispenses hot water for tea...or for diluting the coffee you've poured out of the right tap.

So on Decemeber 14, 1929, the Edicraft people had found a new way to keep marriages together. But what, I ask, of the undercooked pancakes?

Fury. The Barracks. Zsa Zsa. Animal Behaviour. Sociology.

I am absolutely DETERMINED to keep my house in tip-top shape. Since I've moved in I have been developing routines for everything that requires maintenance: watering the plants as soon as I come home, cleaning the bathroom and kitchen once a week, making sure dishes and pop cans move steadily to their appropriate places...in short, organizing everything so that cleanliness and maintenance are easy to accomplish.

I haven't gotten the dish-washing routine figured out yet, and most rooms are still so unfinished that I can't get a handle on them, but for the most part I've been thrilled with my progress.

Then, today, I came home and discovered that my beloved cat has been peeing all over my basement crawlspace.

I positively f*cking SNAPPED. To see (and smell) all of my most meticulous attentions thwarted by what seemed (at the time) to be a flippant and whimsical disregard for her litterbox...well, I suddenly understood domestic hatred. I understood how people can -- momentarily -- wish that their loved ones were dead.

It was amazing. As I crawled around in the basement wiping up more and more fresh cat piss, I seriously wished that Zsa Zsa would die. I believed that if she died I would feel only relief. She kept trying to sneak back into the crawlspace, and I kept throwing heavy objects at her to drive her away. Finally I managed to build a barrier that should keep her out, and I told myself that if she peed ONE MORE TIME outside her litterbox I'd take her straight to the vet and get her put down.

As you can imagine, she studiously avoided me for half an hour, and by the time she reappeared I was ready to make nice, and by way of coincidental apology she peed in her litterbox shortly afterward...not even in the tin pan I keep outside the litterbox door, which she usually uses.

Tomorrow I'll buy white vinegar and see if it works as well as the Old Wives say it does, and if that fails...well, I hear that stinky concrete can be sealed, though I don't know how (or at what cost).

In the meantime, though, I'm a little bit shaken at my ability to see Zsa Zsa as nothing more than an inconvenience. I think I understand -- a tiny bit -- those people who go into screaming fits when kids bicycle across their front lawns. I suppose that investing a huge amount of money, hope, and emotion into an inanimate object can skew your priorities a bit.

Dance Heads Make Me Slightly Ill

I just stumbled across something called "Dance Heads."

Maybe everybody's already been exposed to this gimmick...it's a booth which superimposes your head over a dancing body. It ends up looking like somebody just vomited on an early-'90s computer-generated cartoon. With heads.



This amazes me for several reasons. First, it's the most gaudy disposable kitsch imaginable, resulting in a hideous patchwork of colours and concepts. I can only assume that it's SUPPOSED to be that ugly, in the same way that bobbleheads and car commercials are deliberately annoying: if they had any class, people wouldn't notice them.

Second, it's expensive.

Third, the people who do them -- and there are a lot of them on YouTube -- invariably look embarassed and way too sober, maybe because they realize that it isn't nearly as fun as the obnoxiously chipper avatar says it's going to be. And also because they don't know all the words.

What's interesting -- but not surprising -- is that most of the men in the YouTube clips have chosen GIRL BODIES. So at least Dance Heads has cathartic potential.

Solicitations!

Ever since I've moved away from my parent's house, I've lived either in grotty student housing, behind a controlled-access entryway, or on the other side of an inconspicuous doorway. I have rarely suffered the onslaught of door-to-door solicitation.

That just changed.

On Monday I got the "chocolate bars for kids" hard sell from a gang of precocious pre-teens. I was so entertained by their pushy ring-leader -- a little girl who yelled "SHUT UP!" at the boy who tried to muscle in on her sales pitch -- that I happily gave them my money.

Today was the "sponsor a third-world child" routine, pushed by the best salesman I've ever had the dubious fortune to meet. This is how he started:

"Hey, you're wondering why I'm standing at your front door. I'll give you $50 to punch me in the face! Seriously! No, I'm just kidding, only some guy down the street threatened to punch me in the face. Really! No, no, I'm only joking, that's not true. Anyway..."

When -- in response to a question -- I confessed that I don't watch television, he asked me who my favourite author was. "William T. Vollmann" came to mind first, and that's what I said, but by suspecting (correctly) that I had gone all highbrow capital-L Literature on him, he came back by saying:

"I'm a big fan of Vonnegut myself. Have you read any?"

"Oh...just 'Slaughterhouse Five' and 'Galapagos,' I'm reading some Nabokov right now--"

"Yeah, Vladimir! Great stuff! Anyway..."

This guy did such a fabulous tap-dance that it almost hurt to say no. But that's the thing about good salespeople...they're like fortune-tellers, instantly able to switch tracks and gloss over the subject they suspect you're most interested in. I'm sure that if I said I watched a lot of sports, he'd have been able to come up with a list of pretty obscure players.

Still, not many people can throw "Vladimir" at you.

Anyway, this makes me realize that -- for the first time -- my door will be a target for Hallowe'en trick-or-treaters. Small communities of anonymous condos must be GOLDEN for kids on Hallowe'en. But I've never handed candy out before and something about it...well...scares me.

I like the fact that I can't conveniently curl up and ignore the world in my house, but am I ready to face dozens of children? Do I know what to say to them? Do I know how much candy I'll need?

Right now I'm torn between "Hand out candy" and "Turn off the lights and read in the basement." I'm sure I'll waffle between decisions for a long time to come...

The Saga of the Bathroom

The previous owners of The Barracks had interesting taste in colour and style. The kitchen -- in stuart gold (HC-10) -- almost smells of sunflowers, planted on the great plains (CC-334) of the prairie dustbowl. Meanwhile some of the walls are a depressing mocha brown (2107-20) and the master bedroom is a downright murderous terra cotta tile (2090-30).

The bathroom, however, is in beautiful smoked oyster (2109-40), and while the rest of my furniture whizzes hither in trucks and trains (except for my living room chairs, which apparently are being upholstered by narcoleptic turtles), the bathroom remains the most finished part of the house.


And look at that bathroom light! They previously had a beautiful fixture in there that perfectly matched the decor...but only took sixty watt "chandelier bulbs," within nearly-opaque frosted glass, mounted high on pedestals which cast shadows on...well, everything.

Getting "into face" is difficult enough in the best of lighting, but if you can't even see yourself without a flashlight...well, you'll end up looking great in the bathroom, but you'd better STAY in the bathroom for the rest of the night. No, it was definitely time for a brand new super-bright light.

So my mom and I (you'll read that a lot in this blog) went hunting for a bathroom light, and while the plain-jane horizontal vanity fixture seemed the most practical...well, it looked CHEAP. Second-best was a mirrored light which dangled up to 200 watts of pure brilliant glare.

But how to install it? I had vague plans about getting a more knowledgeable friend to do it, but on Saturday morning I decided not to allow myself to be victimized by simple home renovation, even if it meant getting electrified and killed during my first week here.

Fortunately the light came with (vague) instructions, and after shutting off the power and sticking a flashlight between my shoulder and chin, I undertook the nontrivial task of removing the old fixture and then wiring, placing, and screwing in the new fixture all by myself. Without drinking any coffee first.

And as you can see from the picture...I did it! It's so bright in there that you can't look above the mirror without suffering temporary blindness! And now I can find all the crusty shampoo-bottle rings that the previous owners left behind!

I'll post more pictures as other rooms approach some level of completeness, but here's a picture of what Zsa Zsa did during the first week.


That's right, she sat on the back of that chair and hugged it for dear life. It was the only piece of comfy furniture I retained during the move, and even though she'd never cared for it in the old place...well, suddenly it became her bestest friend.

Dr. Seuss and Flit: "Selfless Death"

Awwww, this one is truly sad. Not even the ubiquitous cat could bear to be in it.


From the December 7, 1929 issue of The New Yorker. Weep!