things not conducive to raving

1) incubating a fatburger

but let's do things sequentially, shall we? thursday was a little bit of a crazy day as i had to bring all my dodgeball stuff, my contributions to book club, AND a giant cupcake caddy with me on public transportation...as my friend J said when she dropped me off at the subway after book club, "i feel like i'm sending you away to camp!" lol! giant knapsack, 2 side bags, purse, and cupcake caddy.

we totally lost our dodgeball game by 1 STINKING GAME! to a total n00b team, playing short-handed, with only 5 people: 3 girls, 2 guys. it was tragic. they tied it up with 1 minute left in the game and at the end, when the buzzer rang, they had ONE more person on the court than us, which means that they won by some stupid technicality. if we had had even ONE more person, it would've been OVER for them. oh well...if we play them again, it's going to get silly. they're going to get spanked. but...i REALLY hate losing to teams i KNOW we can beat.

i guess i can indirectly blame book club for my lack of mustard last night. we were book clubbing until PAST 11pm!!! that's the latest i've been up since i found out about spumante. it was buck. i didn't get home until after midnight. it was insane-o. of course i woke up at my usual time (6ish) so i got minimal sleeps and yesterday was a bit of a busy, errand-y day, which meant that by the time i had eaten dinner, i was SPENT. i've said it before and i'll say it again: WHY CAN'T NIGHTS START AT 9PM AND GO TIL 1AM?!? that's IDEAL! the thing that kills you is the pre-drinking time when you're WAITING to go out - that inertia is hard to battle.

anyway, yesterday was a little buck. woke up, went for a 3km run, waited for a contractor who NEVER SHOWED UP, got an hour long massage, and then met up with the dotytron to head downtown to see our first hot docs, this movie "babies" - here's the trailer:

it was pretty cute! my favorite babies were the namibian one and the mongolian one. the white baby was the boringest. so privileged! and its' parents were sooooooo san francisco liberal - like at one point the baby smacks its' mom upside the head and the mom just coos at it. it wasn't even that much of a BABY at that point - it was at least a year old. they also took the baby to some baby and parent singing group where they were singing what sounded like aboriginal songs about mother earth (english-ified, of course.) i mean, it's not like it WASN'T cute at all, but it was the least interesting by far. it also goes to show you how much in the west we fret over our kids and worry. namibian baby was chewing on rocks and animal bones in the dirt. and mongolian baby was plunked down amid livestock and going bare-butt most of the time. we westerners totally over-think things, i think.

at book club there was a whole discussion about daycare and about the problems one of the book clubbers was having finding a daycare near her where they do infant care (like, from 12 to 18 months) and how she didn't want to move the kid at 18 months to a different daycare and uproot the schedule. i was like, "but aren't they like, pretty adaptable?" and there were some murmurings of agreement but also my friend J said that they're having attachment issues at 12 months anyway. i dunno...i kind of feel like, there are babies who grow up in like, palestine or the congo - humans in general are SUPREMELY adaptable, i don't think that the upheaval of sticking your kid in a new daycare at 18 months is a) even going to be be remembered and b) going to be even an issue. COMPARED TO GROWING UP IN PALESTINE?!?!!!!!! c'maaaan.

the dotytron and i are also way more into fear-based parenting than the ladies in the book club. i don't even call it fear-based parenting - it's like setting a baseline of acceptable behavior and not pandering to children. THEY'RE CHILDREN. YOU tell them what's what and the expectations of how to live and behave within your family unit, which serves as a baseline for their eventual interactions in society. and the foundation for that is RESPECT and DOING WHAT I SAY BECAUSE I'M AN ADULT AND I SAY SO. i don't understand negotiating with children. you don't negotiate with terrorists, and children are basically miniature militant extremists. i don't think my mum and big d would have ever FATHOMED pandering to us. which isn't to say we weren't spoiled and given so many different advantages, but the dotytron is full of stories of sending home notes with kids telling them to practice their instruments and the kids coming back with NOTES FROM THEIR PARENTS excusing them from their homework. that's what leads to a culture of entitlement folks. and no work ethic. that, right there.

mum and big d would have never even conceptualized taking MY side over my teachers...the very thought is ludicrous. i also believe in making kids work.

anyway, we'll see what happens to our beliefs when the time actually comes - they'll probably all go out the window! you'll see a gradual series of micro-capitulations until we're fully at the mercy of the whims of the tiny despot. lol!

after the doc i accompanied the dotytron to his after school program and then we went on a mission to real mccoy burgers and pizza in scarborough to get the mojo burger, which is an 8 oz homemade patty with cheese and bacon. we also got a whistle dog, which is a hot dog with cheese and bacon. the place is even smaller than johnny's, if you can believe it, with no option of eating in, which means we were RACING to get the food home in time. the plan was to side our burgers with an order of the mexican fries from great burger kitchen, but since those fools don't have a working phone number online, we ended up opting out of the fries to get the burgers home quicker (it still took us a half hour to get home.)


my review? delicious. different from johnny's in the sense that this is a real hamburger and not one of johnny's frozen patties - johnny's represents an ideal in the classic, greasy spoon, burger shack-y kind of burger, whereas this burger is much brawnier and meatier - on account of being a 1/2 lb of meat and all. the bun was perfect - a little soggy from the ride home but still had enough support for the weight of the patty and toppings. it was delicious. just what the doctor (read: the fatburger) wanted.

then i proceeded to pass out from around 7pm until 11pm, waking up intermittently to find the dotytron watching "jersey shore" which he just discovered like, 2 weeks ago and is totally obsessed with. lol! then we shuffled off to bed. we officially are le suck. i've been complaining and complaining about the lack of good old skool parties for YEARS. a prime candidate (probably THE prime candidate) comes along and i can't get off the couch. le sigh. it will get better - it HAS to get better. i have to believe that i will one day dance and go out again because i'm NOT ready to throw in the towel yet, ya hear?

today we're going to see another documentary, "cooking up dreams" then doing some garden-based errands and then meeting up with my mum for dinner - i've been craving hong kong style cafe food (also known as cha chaan teng for the tea, "cha" served there) like crazy. so i think we're going to go to phoenix so that i can get my ox tongue spaghetti, baked porkchop rice and malay style beef tendon curry on (and maybe hainan chicken rice, too???) then we're meeting up with my bros to see a movie. s-dawg gets back this afternoon and is having chova drive him (à la tony stark in "iron man") to a hero burger to eat "real" food. lol! i can't wait to see s-dawg and hear stories from sri lanka!

best get crackings.

fin.

go hard or go home

my vote: go home.

life is INSANELY busy right now. work is teh crazez0rz. then i come home and more often than not i'm getting the screws put on me by my realtor to check out houses. monday night i almost gave myself a migraine trying to figure out the meal plans for my family's disney trip. my usual obsessive meal planning was attenuated by the fact that for large groups (and almost everyone, really) dining at disney you have to make reservations NINETY days in advance. disney has also implemented this meal plan thing where you can pay a flat fee for 1 quick snack, 1 quick service meal, and 1 table service meal for each day that you're there. sounds great, right? but once you factor in the meal plan, the restaurants offering the meal plan, the fact that there are 4 different theme parks and countless hotels, that some meals require the redemption of more than 1 voucher at a time - it's a logistical nightmare. i normally wouldn't even CARE where we ate at disney...but the reservations thing ramps it all up. plus the fact that trying to get consensus out of my family on anything is impossible. my family has never met an event/gathering/meeting that they couldn't turn into a GIANT s**tshow through a combination of poor communication, lack of planning, and last-minute changes. so yeah, it was a three hour long session. last night we had a documentary. tonight i'm going to help my friend H paint her new place, which is a 10 minute walk from my house! i'm so happy to have good friends in the neighbourhood.

last night i made us a chicken heart salad based on something i had at paul kahan's "publican" in chicago (that one had duck hearts.) i sautéed up finely diced onion and garlic in a pan of butter and olive oil, then cranked the heat and added the chicken hearts. when they were just done but still tender(ish) i pulled it off the heat, stirred in baby spinach and a good shot of vinegar, seasoned it up, and finished with a final sprinkle of fleur de sel. i served it with boiled eggs cut into quarters on top of my sourdough sandwich bread, which i cut thin, buttered, then grilled on the panini press.

it was pretty good, but it wasn't the dotytron's favorite. he's not so into hearts and gizzards as i am. he thinks it gets a little too "temple of doom" to be eating 14 chickens' worth of hearts. i think he's making arbitrary distinctions. the next time, i'm going to sear the chicken hearts individually, as dumping them all in the pan didn't allow for as much caramelization as i would have liked.

okay, so hot docs this year has been mostly miss. we've seen 4 so far, and i've basically take a 30 at each one.

friday night we saw "art and copy" which combines clips of iconic ads with interviews with the giants in the field - people who helped redefine the nature of advertising. some of the people were interesting, but the documentary fell flat - there wasn't enough substance. it meandered and lacked any kind of cohesion. you have really interesting, engaging, brilliant people who are reduced to quippy soundbites that don't really lend you a sense of well...anything. it seemed like the director was too enamoured with the genre of advertising to come up with any indepth analysis or critique. because he distributes attention amongst a number of people, you don't get any cohesive sense of any one of them - it becomes a survey of the field and a somewhat sycophantic look at the medium and its' stars.

on sunday we saw "let's make money" this was THE WORST. it actually made me want to punch the air, the screen, and everyone around me who was sitting there not stewing in rage (in that order.) it was SO BANAL. it starts off showing a montage of gold being mined and then turned into bars...from the description in the hot docs catalogue i thought it was going to track the route that money follows. this is the hot docs synopsis: "What do banks do with our money? The intricate web of the world's financial system is surveyed in pursuit of the answer to this timely question, all leading to a harsh take on the consequences of greed." sounds pretty decent, right? WRONG! this was SO SO SO TERRIBLE. stupid interviews with people who had no authority or context (most egregious was this spanish cartographer commenting about the "concrete tsunami" - aka the building of giant foreign-owned luxury developments on the spanish coast.) most of the interviews consisting of long, rambling, directionless commentary delivered by some teutonic random talking over his shoulder as he drove on the autobahn - seriously, how intelligent or composed can you expect someone to be in those circumstances? there were stupid, pithy introductions to each segment that were peripherally related - stuff like, "how do we save ourselves from the rich?" SO DUMB. it was so insulting and high-level. basically we found out that power and money are concentrated in the hands of the few and that africa is hella po'. WE KNOW THAT ALREADY! the problem with the doc is that it doesn't properly tell you why. or HOW the IMF and world bank screw over africa. why agricultural subsidies are bad, etc.

i could understand if the documentary assumes that everyone has such a deep understanding of the issues that it doesn't want to re-tread remedial ground...but the overall documentary is one giant gloss. it just doesn't make sense to perform a surface analysis of such complex issues. TERRIBLE.

on sunday night we also saw the newest featured from the director of one of my favorite docs from 2007, "helvetica." "helvetica" used the font as a launching pad for an examination of trends in typography and on a larger level, aesthetics. it was a fascinating cultural studies look at a cultural product that is once ubiquitous and invisible - and how it's rise and fall from favour says specific things about cultural and aesthetic values.

the new documentary from this dude is called "objectified." it's a look at industrial design - the thought processes that go into the design of the everyday objects we use. i thought there was a bit of a disconnect between the idea of industrial design and how it was depicted in the doc. he chose to talk to the superstars of the industrial design world, the people who AREN'T really designing everyday objects. they're designing stuff for the MOMA store. also, it became another meandering survey piece through a lack of focus on the part of the director. this was very well shot though - the static images were beautiful, but empty, like the movie. they briefly touch on the sustainability, but not in any in-depth, considered way...it turns out to be more like industrial design porn. i'm as susceptible to that stuff as the next person (one need only look at my rapidly multiplying backlog in my google reader for evidence) but at the same time, industrial design is a persuasive, consumer-driven art form that is at odds with the precepts of sustainability. there wasn't any talk of that or of how people's desires and what we consider to be "intuitive" design is constructed. maybe i'm inserting too much of what **i** would have liked to see, but overall, i thought the film suffered from a lack of focus and inability to really get at the meat of the matter.

last night we saw "the jazz baroness" which follows the strange life of a wealthy white baroness (baroness pannonica "nica" de koenigswarter, born kathleen annie pannonica rothschild) who fell in love with thelonious monk and supported bebop at its' height. charlie parker died in her arms. this was a potentially interesting story bludgeoned to death by the too-heavy hand of the director/filmmaker (the baroness' grand-niece, hannah rothschild, writer for vogue and vanity fair.) the symbolism and editing were atrociously heavy-handed. helen mirren lends her considerable patrician talent as the voice of the baroness, in voiceovers. there's a lot of great interviews with jazzy heavies like sonny rollins and other people i'm only peripherally aware of through the long-suffering, dedicated (and oft-wasted) tutelage of one dotytron, esquire. it was interesting enough, but not great. apparently the baroness and monk never consummated their mutual love. even though he lived with her, wrote songs for her, and she worked tirelessly to get him gigs, even serving as chauffeur and putting herself in considerable danger - a white woman consorting with assorted black musicians and smack addicts. it's worth seeing if you have a passing interest in jazz (or share a life with someone who does) but if you're outside of that select sub-section of society, it's not very good and not worth going out of your way for.

tonight for dinner i just got us a quickie chinese bbq and rice takeout from a chinese bbq place in chinatown east. i was on the run.

okay...off to paint!

fin.

just a quick note

i've been feeling extra frenzied lately - trying to lock down two vacations is a little stressful and the pressures of living a semi-decent life that encompasses a few of my regularly scheduled hobbies. plus the 2009 hotdocs schedule was released last night so trying to whittle down the hundred or so docs and find the magical balance between: light-hearted fare; heart-wrenching human interest stories; heavy political stories; heart-wrenching political stories; educational political stories; glossy, slick entertaining documentaries; something to do with music (for the dotytron); our schedule limitations...is totally exhausting and a logistical nightmare. i think we've got our picks sorted...i'm going to phone it in and hopefully grab our tickets tomorrow. phew!

tonight for dinner we had leftover lamb stew with root vegetable mash.

allow me to leave you with this little tidbit: we are now the proud owners of our very own MAH JONG TABLE!!!!!!! and our own set of lovely, vintagey 70s green mah jong tiles! let the tournaments begin!

fin.