Richard Dawson, The Pig

I've rented a collection of "All Star Family Feud" episodes. I'm not exactly sure why I've done this, but I've had a number of revelations while watching it this afternoon.

First, Richard Dawson was a f*cking pig. It might not have seemed that way to the general public at the time -- I certainly don't remember anybody talking about it in the '80s -- but his attitude toward his female guests went beyond "chivalry" or "1984 machismo" into aggressive lechery.

I might dismiss his constant stroking, grabbing, and kissing as "of the time," but the women he's doing it to certainly don't seem to think so; just watch as they shrink from his touch, and watch as he gleefully comes back to do it again and again. It comes across as a form of physical intimidation that you don't see from TV superstars anymore (I hope).

Granted, some of the women seem quite happy with this, but most of them are obviously disgusted. Here's Dawson trying to grab the hand that Maureen McCormick is trying to make discreetly unavailable. She's probably in a tizzy about the cold sores she got from him last week. Christopher Knight, barely sentient, is smiling because of gas.


Second, the country hoe-down atmosphere had always escaped me. Our family watched this show a lot and I never noticed its rural theme: fiddle music, needlepoint set decoration, Dawson's plantation-owner outfit, the entire IDEA of a "family feud." It's only now that I hear the weird way that the announcer says "Family Fyeee-youd!"

An American "yokel show," and by no means the only one...we've had them in Canada as well.

Third, people get nastier as shows go on. It's interesting how the competition -- both between and within teams -- gets less friendly over time. The camera loves to linger on the glares and sneers, and there is something PARTICULARLY scary about a sneering woman who has feathered hair and professionally-applied raccoon eyeliner.

Fourth, the Petticoat Junction people were the coolest. I've never seen Petticoat Junction, but they BY FAR outranked the other teams in terms of personality, graciousness, and intelligence. Since I love "Leave It To Beaver" and at one time enjoyed "The Brady Bunch" this is a hard thing to admit.

Sherlock Holmes in "The Lost Pencil Case"

Chapter 1 - A Most Unusual Discovery

During my journies I happened across the widow McClure, a sweet Irish lass, long beyond her years and now terminally ill. Suffering from demetia, each time we met it was most similar to the first, and I found myself once again amazing her with my feats of deduction.

"On Thursday nights," I said to her, "you watch 'The Price is Right,' and you always cheer for the fat ones."

She was amazed. "Mr. Holmes, how do you know such things?"

"These mental stretching-exercises are like morning calisthenics to the student of crime. I am aware, of course, that your grandchildren always visit on Thursdays, and you have said in the past that they are uncommonly fond of television."

"I said that?"

"Indeed you did, but let's return to my monologue. In my curious daily business I am required to read all the latest periodicals, in order to keep abreast of current events which may impact my work. One such magazine which I devour from cover to cover is...'The T.V. Guide.'"

"I love that book," said the esteemed widow, the rosy blush of long-lost youth returning briefly to her aged cheeks.

I made fast my explanation, before her oncoming fit should stop it in its inevitable tracks. "It was short work to decipher the guide's Thursday night schedule, from which -- bracketed by your regular mealtime of five o'clock and your bedtime at six -- I deduced you would be watching 'The Price Is Right' on your video-telegraph machine on regular Thursday evenings." I paused for effect. "Now let me tell you about the Cottingley Fairies..."

Mrs. McClure, as always, was uncommonly amazed, and she shook my hand as best her palsy would allow. Whilst in the perpendicular position that was required to grasp her hand I noticed a most intriguing object lying atop the snow.

I did nothing to betray my knowledge at the time -- wishing not to entangle the widow in the nefarious schemes of the criminal underworld -- but after seeing her off to her daily sponge bath I returned to the sidewalk. Stooping to retrieve the singular object which I had spied, I saw immediately that it was a pencil case.

Chapter 2 - A Crime of Passion

From its position I deduced that it had been carelessly dropped, and not so recently as it was finely dusted with snow. The footprints around it had been hopelessly muddled by pedestrian traffic and by Mrs. McClure's tripedal walker, obscuring any clues as to the owner of the pencil case, or -- if they were not the same -- to the individual who had dropped it.

I turned my attention to the case itself. It contained numerous geometric tools and writing utensils, most telling of which was a gum eraser which proclaimed that somebody with the initials "P.M." had once loved somebody else "4ever," but the initials of the paramour had been cruelly defaced by what I soon determined to be a young girl's fingernail.

This discovery shone new light on the development. At first glance I had assume the pencil case to have been accidentally dropped, but the obscure gum eraser with its gouged-out initials suggested a more sinister motive: an affair of the heart, a lover spurned.

"This puts me in mind of a similar case which you may remember," I said to the stuffed and mounted figure of Dr. Watson which I carry for such purposes. "The unrequited love which John Hinkley, Jr. felt for Jodie Foster, which inspired him to steal her pencil case one night out of sheer pique, only to lose it on the day that he attempted to take the life of Ronald Reagan in a most inelegant way. I fear that the unknown figure involved in this case is similar to that of the case long past; merciless, passionate, and far beyond the bounds of common rationality. Mark my words, Watson...here we face the most vicious criminal we have ever known."

Watson, choosing not to interrupt my investigation at such a crucial stage, maintained his silence and leaned increasingly a-tilt in the growing wind.

Further analysis of the pencil case presented more evidence of the seriousness of the crime, not least in the form of a passionate scribbling on the inner lid: "Jessica you are a jalous bitch :)" I also deduced, from various obscure and sundry notes contained therein that the owner of the case was a Miss P___ M___, enrolled in form eight of M_____ Public School, located as I knew on C_____ Street.

I rushed immediately to the telegraph office but was dismayed to find it inoperative. My next step -- the telephone book -- revealed many more individuals with the surname M____ than I had anticipated. Having decided to attend to the school of M_______ in person, I briefly considered the hiring of a hansom or dogcart to fetch me there, but the hired lackeys in this town refuse to admit Dr. Watson in his current condition and the only other carriage drivers -- those singularly curious members of the Mennonite religious order -- have been reticent since the disastrous resolution of "The Case of the Poisoned Strudel."

Chapter 3 - The Visit

The following morning I hied myself to M_____ Public School with the wayward pencil case in my possession. Inspector Lestrade being long since lost in his ill-fated battle with the Fiery Moria Balrog, I brought instead a collection of Street Arabs in various disguise, these "Baker Street Irregulars" serving to lighten my spirits and affirm my superiority. Having delayed for so long any explanation of my methods or purpose, however, they soon dispersed to the nearest Tim Horton's, tongues a-poke and fingers raised.

Finally, after many minutes of solitary walking, I was on my own at the school, ready to spring the net that I had been carefully weaving since the discovery of the pencil case but a day previous.

Aware that a man in possession of cocaine should not linger at the gates of a public school, I entered the singular halls of the once-great institution. I was greeted by an uncommonly beautiful matron, so pale as to be nearly luminous in the dim fluorescent lighting, a figure at once so winsome and concupiscent that I felt Watson growing singularly stiff at my side.

I bowed respectfully under her gaze. "M'lady, I bring to you a pencil case which may or may not belong to one P____ M____, a student of your singular institution. The circumstances are unparalleled in their circumstance, but I deduce that the case was lost as she found her way home across C____ street. The soft cushion of the new-fallen snow no-doubt muffled the rattle of the falling protractors and pencils, with the result that--"

"I'll make sure she gets it," said the matron, removing the object from my hands and retreating instantly down the corridor. My interview, it would seem, was over.

Chapter 4 - The Scarlet Mormon of East Pushtan

You may wonder at the resolution of this astonishing tale, so unlike any that I or my imitators have told before. I too am uncertain as to the fate of the pencil case, and the fate of the mysterious P____ M_____, whose form and circumstance remain vague in my understanding.

Surely, if Watson were still an active and mobile young man of 35, he would have stumbled upon a postscript worthy of all that preceded, a final few chapters to explain the terrible curse of the M_____ family and their ancestry in another country, another time.

But Watson is no longer the man he was, and I confess the same regarding myself. 'Tis just me and my cat at Baker Street, waiting here, wondering what next will fall from the grasp of this world's singular criminals.

The Adventure of the Behaviourist

During my first years as a Psychology student at the University of Waterloo, I was a dedicated behaviourist. There was something comforting about its endless chains of predictable cause and effect. Next to the more "subconscious" disciplines it was downright simple: you reward or punish a person for doing something, and eventually you can "condition" them to do what you want.

Behaviourists got results...and they could QUANTIFY them! They used a mixture of hard-nosed determination, patience, and metrics to -- say -- turn a kleptomaniac into an upstanding citizen. And I quickly discovered how useful the behaviourist approach was when dealing with pets; thanks to B.F. Skinner and his operant conditioning I had the family cat rolling over for chicken in a pretty much consistent way.

But courses in child development threw me for a loop, with their revelations of hard-wired mechanisms for things like language and knowledge of "self." Suddenly there were parts of human behaviour UNRELATED to conditioning. The REAL blow was the study of Symbolic Interactionism, which shows that we humans relate to our environment in a symbolic way, and therefore a "stimulus" is what we believe and perceive it to be, not something pure that always means the same thing, all the time, to all people.

So I've been forced to let go of much of my love of "billiard ball determinism" and hard-nosed behaviourism, partly because so many other forces seem to be at work, but mainly because all the factors involved -- people, problems, stimuli, responses -- get tangled up with other forces in the real world, making the "laboratory" approach to therapy just as difficult as any other.

So while I skip most of the New Yorker profile pieces, it was interesting to read Kenneth MacGowan's profile of Dr. John B. Watson in the October 6, 1928 issue. Despite the weird synchronicity moment in the first paragraph (Watson was annoyed by the character of "Dr. Watson" in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and here I am reading those stories right now), it's interesting to read a relatively muck-raking article about his academic problems.

By the time of the article Watson had long left academic life. The article claims that this was due to his intransigence and controversial studies, and it inexplicably ignores the entire scandal that surrounded his leaving: his adulterous affair with graduate student Rosalie Rayner. This is my first indication that the New Yorker profiles may have been a BIT of a whitewash.

(Incidentally, for fans of Thomas Pynchon, Watson and Rayner have the dubious honour of conducting the infamous "Little Albert" experiment which gets pride of place in Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow.")

Anyway, Watson was hard at work in the advertising business during 1928, helping with campaigns such as -- more synchronicity here -- Odorono. He made a lot of money perfecting the advertising agency's ability to frighten and titillate us. Maybe that's the way we should remember him; behaviourism was always best at curing phobias, and now we know it was good for causing them as well.

I'd Buy Anything By...Lisa Germano

Yes, it's true, I WOULD buy anything by Lisa Germano...

...but the funny thing is that I don't like her albums very much. I think that she is incredibly cool, and I love the whole idea of her music...but I rarely ever enjoy more than a few songs on each album (though the songs I DO enjoy are ones that I love).

She's a genius. I really get a sense that she's a genius. She can't sing particularly well. Her music is deliberately shoddy and always sounds as though it's about to fall apart. Her songwriting is personal and sometimes painfully fragile. Her enunciation sometimes has a distinctive and endearing "-yawh" sound at the end of sentences that I can't quite place. Her cover art is dreamy in that "4AD" way and she has worked with one of my favourite producers (Malcolm Burn), and whenever I pull out one of her albums to give it another listen...

...I find myself getting slightly bored and annoyed. I don't know what it is. I can't explain this loyalty.

Despite her prominence as fiddle-sawer for John Cougar Mellencamp, her real breakthrough was with this typically Germano-ish -- but slightly more produced than usual -- song called "You Make Me Want to Wear Dresses."



She didn't last long on a major label and I don't think she makes videos anymore, but she seems to tour relentlessly with very minimalistic shows in small venues. I don't seek out Germano information, but whenever I see another CD I snap it up...and there we go again.

So she belongs in the "I'd Buy Anything" category but I don't really know why, and I'm not sure why anybody should or shouldn't explore her music. But I DO recommend her "Geek the Girl" and "Excerpts from a Love Circus" albums as unusually attention-grabbing. I also hear that her collaboration with Giant Sand (under the name "OP8") was very good, but I've never found a copy.

A Guide to Lineups

There's this stereotype that, second only to Swedes, Canadians are the most used to standing in line (except for people who live in countries with chronic shortages, of course).

I don't think this is strictly true -- I've stood in plenty of lines in the USA as well -- but there's no doubt we have a form of "line etiquette" that many hold sacred.

These tips are for those who don't seem to understand lines.

First, observe what others are doing. Maybe the venue has a standardized lineup ritual, or maybe something has formed spontaneously, but in either case you can get a sense of the situation by watching others.

Is there a sign that says "line starts here?" That's a good indication that the line starts where indicated. Are a line of people standing at the sign? If so, go to the end of the line and -- when in doubt -- ask if that particular line is the one you're looking for.

If nobody is lined up behind the sign then you can feel free to start the line yourself. Patiently.

Never step in front of others. In some situations it may be okay to join friends in the line, but usually only if the line is incredibly long or if the line is moving quickly. If the line is short then you should go to the end, otherwise everybody will call you "butter, butter, peanut butter," if only in their heads.

Never take the express line unless you meet the line's conditions. I don't care how old and tired you are.

If everybody is frustrated with the line's slowness, it's okay to make disgruntled comments. But know when to quit. It's bad enough waiting forever in a line without having to listen to somebody huffing about it.

When you are at the front of a line which leads to personal service with more than one wicket, wait until you are called. Never just pick a wicket and walk to it. The person at the wicket may not be ready for you, or there may be a system involved.

If you walk directly to a wicket without being called then you are setting yourself up for a disappointment; what if the wicket closes on you? What if the person isn't ready for you, and meanwhile the people who were in line behind you are filtering over to other wickets which have suddenly become available?

Greed and haste is usually punished in this situation.

When you are at the front of a line and waiting to be called, pay attention. Do not get lost in a conversation with your friends. Do no use your cel phone. Beside the probability that you will not notice when you are being called, it is also very inconsiderate for a service person to have to compete for your attention. Remember, you don't like it when THEY chat behind the counter, do you?

When you are being served, remember how it felt while you were waiting back in line. That's how the people behind you feel now. Do not chit-chat with the service person. Do not make a scene. Do not make outrageous demands. You wouldn't want to wait while somebody else does that stuff. Get your stuff and move along.

If the server made a mistake, you are allowed to come back and go directly to the server without waiting in line, but only if you are in a hurry or if the problem can be quickly resolved. When servers make mistakes, rules can be bent. If, however, you just want to take out your anger about having stood forever in line and then gotten the wrong stuff, save it for a time when you won't make other people suffer. Believe me, people don't respect you when you hold up the line. They think you're stupid.

Small Random Things I Know

• Toronto magazine Popshifter is a fabulous analysis of pop culture, without trendy bloviating.
• It's easy for me to criticize people who go on Facebook update sprees. It is also easy for me to go on such sprees myself.
  
• No matter how poorly I eat, I am still eating better than the 19th century polar explorers.
• We hiccup because of our evolutionary connection with tadpoles. No kidding.
• I simply cannot conceive of the planet Jupiter. I can't imagine it. I don't understand the concept of an enormous planet that doesn't really have a surface.
• If I was independently wealthy and had a maid I would probably be depressed.
• Too much snow.
  

Sir John Franklin, Unforgettable, Dead

William T. Vollmann's novel "The Rifles" is about John Franklin's northwest passage expedition. Except that John Franklin is really the time-traveling twin of Captain Subzero, who is also sort of William T. Vollmann himself, and all of them are in love with a crazy Inuk woman named Reepah, who was part of the greater tragedy of the much-maligned 1950s relocation of Inuit families to Resolute, and everybody has been impacted by the properties of lead, you see.

The book is best when it is describing Vollmann's impressions of the far north; the shambolic yet warm settlements, the sparse beauty of endless tundra, and the sheer superpower of wind, ice, and cold.

It's also good when Vollmann writes about Reepah, a hearing-impaired, gasoline-sniffing, poverty stricken, utterly damaged woman who cheerfully ping-pongs between Subzero and Franklin, past and present, chopping blubber in the kitchen and screaming drunkenly in New York City. Her affairs with her Caucasian lovers are typically Vollmann: lopsided, crazy, impossible, doomed.

But what does all this have to do with "rifles?" I missed it the first time I read the book, but this time I took note of the introduction, in which the author tries to find the source of a river on Cornwallis Island...he keeps following it, trying to find its source, only to realize -- after an exhausting journey -- that

...these lakes were from permafrost melt; the whole island was permafrost; when you were on the island you were in a world of rivers that came from everywhere.

In his "Seven Dreams" series (of which "The Rifles" is book six) he is following tenuous paths through history, following his inspirations in directions that are symbolic and meaningful. "The Rifles" is about starvation and lead, which killed the Franklin expedition (partially through lead-contaminated food), which is killing Reepah (who sniffs gasoline), and impacted the entire north when rifles and European contact turned the ecosystem from one of sheer survival to one of fur-for-profit.

But Vollmann knows that this is a messy river to follow, and he acknowledges that this is too simplistic. The book sinks into necessarily long descriptions of starvation which make the reader understand both the protracted nature of Arctic death and the sheer emptiness of the landscape. As difficult as it is to read, and as spongy as its "permafrost" can occasionally be, "The Rifles" gives a personal glimpse of the far north as experienced by Vollmann himself.

It makes you want to go there and go very far away, all at the same time.

Immediately after this, I finally roused myself to read one of Vollmann's sources: "Frozen In Time" by Owen Beattie and John Geiger, about Beattie's own trips north to exhume the bodies of Franklin's crew.

The book is dry and clunkily sentimental, and it is so repetitive that you wonder if you aren't reading the same chapters over and over again. It's written, in fact, as though it were the awkward offspring of a research paper and a journal, which is exactly what it is.

Beattie was the man who developed and (it would seem) supported the theory that Franklin's expedition was debilitated early on by lead poisoning, mainly due to hastily-manufactured tinned food. Most of the bodies and relics from the 1840s are long gone -- scattered by the elements, lost under the ice, acquired by the Inuit -- but the bodies of three crewmen have remained buried on isolated, inhospitable Beechey Island.

So Beattie and his team went there with a portable laboratory and dug up the corpses. They were amazed to find that the 140-year-old bodies of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine were almost perfectly preserved...and it's the gruesome pictures of the men that are the real stars of the book. Bulging hands, rubbery lips, gritted teeth, staring eyes, emaciated bodies, all dressed in period clothing and looking barely dead. The bodies are downright eerie...if you want nightmares, here are a few online shots.

That's it for me. No more Arctic stories for a while. I'm plunging into Sherlock Holmes because I much prefer reading about that smug bastard than spending another week perpetually icebound.

Exo Hair Postmortem

Last month Vanilla sent me a link to Exoskeleton Cabaret and told me that I absolutely MUST buy some of their hair extensions. I said that such things require elaborate makeup and clothing that doesn't suit me, and she pointed out that the models were quite understated and I should stop being a wuss. She was right!

So I bought two of their pieces: a ponytail fall made out of wool and plastic, and a pair of enormous "tubular crin" extensions.

Saturday was the big night and I gave myself half an hour to get them "installed." But you see, I've always had this problem with hair...

First off, I don't like the incredible PICKINESS of hairstyling, where everything must be meticulous or it looks stupid. Separating my head into REGULAR pigtails is arduous in itself, but building up HIGH pigtails has always been my worst nightmare. My hair is incredibly heavy and my arm-strength is marginal; after half an hour of building, demolishing, and rebuilding my high pigtails I was ready for the sanitarium, and also losing hair.

Then the extensions themselves, attached to thin strips of elastic fabric that are obviously intended to be attached to something -- like a barret -- instead of just being tied up and pinned to death. Then just imagine the joy of arranging these things; it was like herding cats, albeit sixty of them made out of extremely light, long, bouncy plastic.



It took an hour, and by the end of it I was hardly feeling glamorous. All I wanted to do was come back home and make a drunken video with a hand-puppet (see below).

But here's the thing: I think I can do better next time. Maybe I'll try putting them closer together, and attaching bobby pins to the extensions BEFORE I put them on. I can't recommend these extensions highly enough: they're sturdy, they look amazing, and people can't stop touching them.

The latest few pictures are up on Flickr, but I'd like to leave you with this enigmatic shot of Victoria and I which you can try scrounging up a rationale for:

Nightclubbing with Schnapps the Seal

I've taken a bit of a break from the lip-syncing domestic drag shows -- storyboarding them is a pain -- so on Saturday night I decided to do a relatively unplanned experiment: to make a "talkie" with multiple camera angles, starring Schnapps the seal who works for scale (fish).

Unfortunately my insane hair extensions took so long to apply (more on that later) that I didn't get a chance to film anything until I got back home at 1am, considerably inebriated and on the verge of drop-dead exhaustion.

That's my way of explaining what you're about to see...if you dare.

"Our Past Present" Reviewed by Heathen Harvest!

Over at Heathen Harvest there is a wonderful review of "Our Past Present," the split CD of material by Jim DeJong (Infant Cycle) and myself.

Like other reviews of the CDs it points out the "distinct yet complimentary" nature of the two styles, and again the UPhold segments are referred to as "cinematic." I particularly like this description:

All the tracks on here are suffused with an eerily expectant atmosphere coupled with a velvety and suffocatory claustrophobia, as if presaging some unforeseen disaster just about to spring itself onto the unfortunate victims.

I like to think I have a velvet approach to suffocation, so this is a great compliment. I really DO care about my musical victims.

The review is very positive, and coming from such a great webzine it's a particularly nice boost for my state of mind!