adventure/nimrods abound

imma do things chronologically so we don't lose anything in the mix.

when we got hitched, we had to rent an amp. so we went to the only music store in geneseo, ny - buzzo's music. owned by this fine gentleman:

who walks with the help of a jerry-rigged cane (it looks like a bunch of metal rods taped together with packing tape) and speaks in a raspy mumble that's near incomprehensible. buzzo, who's famous catch phrase is: "you kidding me or what?", is a well-preserved relic from the trip the light fantastic, don't drink the kool-aid, shine on you crazy diamond 60s counter culture. he doesn't really do rentals, but he made an exception for us. in return, the dotytron bought this shirt:

when the last of our auxiliary performance thank you cards went out shamefully late, i made sure to get the dotytron to include one for buzzo, with some photos of the amp and the dotytron rocking out with the electric guitar.

on wednesday, i came home and emptied the mail box (note for posterity and future house-chore labour division collateral: THE DOTYTRON NEVER EVER CHECKS THE MAIL) to find this envelope:

i waited for the dotytron to come home and we opened this letter together:

it reads:

dear lagerfeld and dotytron,
so glad it's gone so well!!!
hope this finds you both healthy and happy!!
the pictures will be "on the wall" somehwere (or on the "green giant")
thanks!!
best regards,
al "buzzo" bruno

AMAZING ON SO MANY LEVELS!!! first of all, only buzzo would write BACK. second of all, only buzzo's lsd-derived chicken scratches would take us the better part of half an hour to decipher. third of all, we're going to be immortalized on the wall of a geneseo institution! so the best! we got deep roots there, folks.

last night for dinner we had another legume-based dish. i made that warm baby spinach, lentil, bacon, shallot salad that i do. i usually bread and fry the goat's cheese rounds but we didn't have panko and we already had toasted breadcrumbs leftover from the lima bean dish on tuesday, AND i was feeling chided and remorseful from the weekend of gluttony followed so closely by fat tuesday, that i just smeared the goat's cheese onto toasted slices of my sourdough bread and served it alongside, topping the salad with toasted breadcrumbs for texture. it was good!

so we pile in the captain to do some errands before dball. as we're driving to dball, i start talking about ehm do's show on saturday and the dotytron mentions that he's kind of weirded out by how she was making kind of ribald comments (it was close to valentine's day, after all) and he doesn't really want to see his sister being sexy - that it gives him the willies. and i was talking about how you have to be supportive and then i said, "i'm sure if you were dita von teese's sister, you would go to her show"

the dotytron, driving, looks over at me with narrowed eyes and a puzzled, uncomprehending look and slowly says, "okaaaaaaaay.........i'm not really sure where you're going with this."

and i was like, "you know, if you were dita von teese's sister, or her parents, you would go to her show, even though it's sexy."

a couple of beats passed in puzzled silence. my puzzlement at the dotytron's obtuseness, his puzzlement to be revealed a second later when he burst out laughing, "oh, i get it. i thought you meant that dita von teese's sister would be going to ehm do's show, and i was all like, 'why would dita von tee's sister go to ehm's show?!?'" LOL!!! we laughed our guts out. it was the way he kind of gave me the puzzledeyes and was all like, "okaaaaaaaay..." about it. like he didn't have a clue where i was going but was willing to reluctantly follow along. kind of like a metaphor for our relationship.

so we played against a team that i kind of dislike in dball and lost because they're an amazing team. my team (well, like 2 players) got super rattled and freaked out and started accusing the other team of cheating and then one of the dudes on my team walked out like a poose. it was so poose. this broad on my team said that there's more glory in throwing someone out when you're the last person on the court for your team than a catch. THAT IS SO WRONG i almost smacked her upside the head. catching is the NUMBER 1 SKILL in dodgeball. the NUMBER 1! repeat it after me: CATCHING IS THE NUMBER 1 SKILL IN DODGEBALL. because it's the double whammy - you get someone out AND you bring someone on your team BACK IN. what an idiot.

anyway, on the way home, we got pulled over by the cops because the sticker on our license plate was expired and we hadn't renewed it. the dotytron tensed up like whoa, but i found the whole situation kind of funny. we were literally 1 block from our house. i've never been pulled over before so i put my hands up in the air in the car to show the 5-0 that i wasn't packing. the dotytron was unamused. when the lady cop (it was a lady cop!) was shining the light in the car i suddenly had a hilarious idea. how awesome would it be to be pulled over by the cops, have them come up to the car, shine the light in, only to have you turn around with one of those halogen head-lamps strapped to your head?!??? ahahahahahahaha!!! i can picture it in my head and it would be so funny.

so we're waiting there while they run our vehicle and registration and insurance shiz and then the lady cop comes back and says, "it's your lucky day, guys. we just got called to a knifing" WHAT THE HELL? lucky us, unlucky schlub who got knifed, i guess.

so i've been on twitter for about a year maybe and i finally got into a snippy tweet flame war with the food writer for the toronto star, who wrote this incredibly smug article about how torontians aren't being "cool" about the arrival of guu. read about it here. it got linked in my twitter, so i'm like, ummm...FIRST OF ALL ELECTRO CYBER GEEK, how do YOU get to be an arbiter of taste i toronto? have you met you? btw, you posted THIS as your twitter picture:

what an "asexual snail" in the words of dr. rei. explain how i'm supposed to take any of the pretentious, holier than thou, "oh, i'm going to ask my FRIEND, the chef at kaiseki-sakura [aka native insider authenticity generator alert!]" drivel that comes out of your mouth, seriously? you, who overcooked a ribeye like whoa?

(i pulled this photo from his blog...which is teeth-gnashingly smug). so i posted in response to him...uhhh... what's your FREAKIN' POINT? people line up all the time. sorry if it's not "cool" to line up. people line up for all kinds of things: ramen at momofokus, yakitori in japan, caplansky's, the black hoof, reserving 6 months in advance for alinea (could be construing as lining up) - are all of those equally "not cool"? HOW ARE YOU "COOL"? so effin' elitist and self-aggrandizing.

sigh. i effin' hate the calibre of the food community in toronto if it's made up of corey mintz and toronto life and joanne kates. where's the realness? where's the inclusiveness? where's the JOY? the joy in eating...that giddy excitement, the desire to share, to encompass the world at your table and while away an evening with friends over the table? if these people have it...it doesn't come across. what comes across is how much you want to sock them in the nads. that corey dude even has a twitter hater who's only goal is to start flame wars with him (misterpsm) kind of awesome.

in other news of people being shacker hackjobs, the special library association, of which i am a member is hosting a workshop with a guest speaker on the topic of "information overload." the guest speaker, whose bio reads thus (you can skim it...the main point is...he talks himself up like whoa):

"Karl Dawson is the CEO of phiScape AG, a company specializing in distributed computing and data integration in heterogeneous environments, with particular application to digital media and knowledge management systems. Prior to founding phiScape AG in Zürich, Mr. Dawson was CTO of Deltavista, a data broker based in Switzerland which connects large volumes of data from a myriad of public and private sources through sophisticated record linkage. In this position, Mr. Dawson not only designed the software and data architecture, but contributed to key parts of the implementation. Prior to Deltavista, Mr. Dawson was employed at the Amdahl Research Laboratory in Toronto, where he helped to develop a relational database system with an embedded rule-based engine. Before this, Mr. Dawson worked five years at I.P. Sharp and Associates in Toronto, where he was privileged to help engineer the company’s APL interpreter, implementing new language primitives. Mr. Dawson holds university degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science."

anyway, chachi up there describes his upcoming presentation thusly:

"Arthur Toffler characterized "Revolutionary Wealth" as resting on three pillars: time, space and knowledge. The identification of these particular elements is in no small measure attributable to technology, particularly the internet. "Internet time" is something that we all know about. "The World is Flat" is the standard metaphor for globalization. But, whereas the internet has compressed time and space, knowledge is expanding at an accelerating rate. This is the “information overload” problem that we experience in our daily lives.

Information overload cannot be solved by search engines alone, since even the most precise search requests still leave us with a lot of information to absorb. We live in a post-Gutenberg world of electronic documents, but where are the post-Gutenberg tools to help us process all this information? There has to be something more than just tag clouds."

i got just one simple question for you: WHO THE F**K IS "ARTHUR TOFFLER"???!!!??? i can only assume you mean ALVIN TOFFLER, the actual author (with heidi toffler) of "revolutionary wealth" - unless of course YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO BE TALKING ABOUT AND MAYBE DIDN'T EVEN READ THE BOOK YOU'RE REFERENCING IN YOUR TALK SUMMARY.

WE ARE INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS. WE SHOULD BE GETTING THIS STUFF RIGHT. this is basic. that's like calling barack obama, bruce obama. or michel foucault, marion foucault. so i posted a comment on the event page. it's infuriating. because, you know, if information professionals actually had A SINGLE THEORETICAL INTEREST outside of hitching a cart to whatever "digital networking/crowd-sourcing/breaking down information silos" bandwagon happens to be jolting by n00b-alley, then stuff like this would be less likely to happen. you gotta crawl before you can walk, kids. GAH!!!

this weekend is gonna be dope.

tonight: dinner with the fam-bam up in markham. we're getting takeout from this sri lankan place, babu. i'm excited to try sri lankan/south indian stuff i've never had before like hoppers, etc.

tomorrow: i don't know where for lunch and then DREAM MENU for dinner for kung kung's birthday. hoping to hit up asc at the basement for old time jungle's sake. haven't danced in FOREVERS.

sunday: dim sum brunch with C et famille and then back downtown for dball.

family and jungle and food and friends - the quartfecta of good times.

fin.

chicago day 3

first things first, i got the 'entertainment weekly' summer movie preview and it consumed me. it's one of my little seasonal rituals. i get the movie preview issues (they do fall, winter, spring, summer), then sit down and methodically go through them, month by month, circling the ones that i want to see based on the descriptions/buzz/cast/director/subject matter, etc. then i put these circled titles into my notebook of films. when i see the films, they get crossed out with a line through the middle of the title. if i love the film, there's a star in the margins so i know that i'd someday like to own it.

it's a neat, tidy, efficient little system and i LOVE the act of doing it.


tonight for dinner i made this pasta with fried eggplant cubes, grape tomatoes, basil and olives. alongside i made my antipasto salad which is basically iceberg lettuce, romaine, roasted peppers, tomatoes, red onion, salami, and provolone all dressed with a very vinegary red wine vinaigrette. you could also add olives, cucumbers, hot italian peppers, mushrooms...basically just plus it up however you wish but use as your guideline things that would normally appear on an antipasto platter.

okay, day 3 of chicago times.


sunday was our "free" day, meaning we didn't have much planned by way of itinerary. we decided to check out oak park, which is the suburb of chicago where the majority of frank lloyd wright-designed houses are clustered. he also did the unity church. getting to oak park necessitated a 45 minute subway ride. that was fine, the neighbourhood is hella affluent and suburban to the extreme, in that tony, monied way. like, the kind of way where apparently people who own the frank lloyd wright-designed houses get all panty-knotted about the fact that their houses are tourist attractions and there are people walking around stopping in front of their yards - newsflash: you BOUGHT A FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT HOUSE. what did you THINK was going to happen? sheesh. talk about entitled.

naturally, we got pwned by our lack of foresight and the dotytron's tour antipathy from seeing the inside of flw's home and studio. so we tooled around and gawked at the GINORMOUS houses and took some shots of us with flw's bust (the vacant eyes were a bad call on the part of the sculptor - he looks like some generic early 20th century british illustration of a wacky, well-to-do eccentric à la dr. doolittle).

the dotytron's leg was hurting him like crazy that day, so we decided to pack up ship and go for lunch. the plan was to go to this mexican place that was a little closer to chicago downtown, but still definitely not on the beaten path (it was in humboldt park) - requiring getting back on the subway and stopping somewhere between oak park and the loop. the place was called cemitas puebla and was famous for making cemitas - mexican sandwiches served on a sesame flecked bread, that i'd never even heard of before, and seemed like something i would only get in mexico or in chicago.

i called the place up and he told me what the closest subway station was. we cross referenced on the map and got off at the stop. we passed the conservatory, which is listed as an "off the beaten path" tourist site. and then we started walking. and walking. and walking. we walked for 20 minutes and found ourselves in the thick of a down-at-heel african american neighbourhood. i describe it as kind of like 'boyz n the hood' but not quite as nice. every house had a padlocked iron fence between it and the sidewalk. people were drinking malk liquor at noon, hanging out. some of the houses were boarded up and needless to say, the dotytron and i stuck out like sore thumbs. we were openly being gawked at. there were also signs in some of the house windows that said stuff like: "stop the shooting! no more innocent victims!" with other signs expressing a similar sentiment plastered on the street light poles.

i stopped and asked directions from some kids who gave me the wary up and down look and we were told that it was "back thataways" - so we walked for another 15 minutes (did i mention that the dotytron was limping like the hunchback of notre dame?) deeper and deeper into this neighbourhood, not recognizing a single street sign. finally, we came to a major artery and hopped on the first bus, abandoning the mission.

it wasn't that i felt unsafe per se. it's not like i thought we were going to get capped in the middle of the day. it was more because we stuck out so badly - there was no way we could be anonymous and it was a terribly discomfiting experience. i felt othered in a way i haven't in a long, long time. i wasn't going in there as the benevolent liberal, the hilary swank character in 'freedom writers' - i felt like a trespasser and interloper. maybe it was all in my head, it probably was...but walking in that neighbourhood i felt the full weight of my privileged subject position and my complete inability to navigate the social relations - i was a tourist with a capital T. and i mean, i'm reasonably aware of my own tourism. i'm not one of those people who goes on trips and pats myself on the back about how i avoided the "tourist traps" or looks down my nose at "touristy" things and tries to act like i'm one of the "natives." i know i'm a tourist. i can't be anything BUT a tourist. this experience kind of crystallized all that awareness and brought it forward in such sharp relief that i couldn't sublimate it.


by this point, we were famished, so we went to wiener's circle for cheese fries and chicago style hot dogs. i love a good steamed vienna red hot. i loved steamed buns. they can be pretty mean to the custies there, but they were nice to me because i was unfailingly polite. i got a double cheddar chardog and a double steamed dog. they were amazingly good, though next time i think i won't get the cheddar fries because they are transcendently good for all of 2 minutes and then the cheese hardens and turns stubborn and recalcitrant the way only processed cheese can.

as we were debriefing over our experience in the ghetto, the dotytron brought up this quote from paolo friere that made us BOTH start tearing up. it's something along the lines of this: hope is an ontological need. hopelessness is not the inverse of hope, it is hope that has lost its way. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so amazing.

as we wandered home, we passed an anthropologie and i applied myself to the sale rack with prodigious industry while the dotyron snoozed on a lemon-coloured sofa.

then we went to garrett's popcorn shop (in business since 1949) and grabbed cheese popcorn (the best cheese popcorn i've ever had...the tangy, sharp, salty cheese flavour perfectly coats each spongy piece...not like the smart food dust that gets in your nose) and caramel corn and went to millenium park where we beheld the glory of the gehry designed amphitheatre and took a million pictures of the bean. the bean is a magical thing. apparently when it was first unveiled, or when chicagoans first saw an unfinished version of the bean, they were in an uproar. now they love it, as they should. it's hypnotic, enticing, fun, playful, engaging - all the things that public art should be.



i'll probably end the chicago chronicles with the alinea recap, so i'll talk about what we did on our last day. we were supposed to go on the segway tour, but it happens rain or shine and we were already feeling a little trepidatious because of the fact that the weather thus far had only deigned to oscillate between a bracing chill and bone-numbing cold. when the day of the segway tour dawned overcast and cloaked in a wet, miserable, dense rain, we called an audible and bailed.

we had breakfast at the bongo room, where i had the pretzel studded pancakes (a reasonable portion) with caramel and white chocolate cream and a side order of sausage and the dotytron ordered the breakfast burrito with chipotle cream.

then we went back to our hotel and bowled a game in the bowling alley in our hotel, which apparently doubles as a club and a bowling alley for the rich and famous, as evidenced by the framed pictures of lance bass and puffy bowling there.  we separated and i returned some of my anthropologie spoils and the dotytron went to this famous jazz record store called the jazz record mart, whereupon he happily gorged on the riches of a store devoted entirely to jazz and blues. we gathered our bags, hopped on a plane (the ricketiest plane EVER - i could feel the refueling guy screwing the gas cap on from my seat!) and came home.

it was a fantastic time filled with adventure and fun. i'd love to go back. i still think new york is MORE fun, but chicago is a great city for a weekend jaunt.

tomorrow i'm going to see 'adventureland' with D at my beloved AMC theatre. K and J are going that night too and we might end up at the same show. the real question is: what to eat? chipotle's? milo's falafels? harvey's??? I LOVE THE AMC!

fin.