i've been thinking things over

+ i'm doing less reading in general than i'd like to. i'm also up far later than i should be, almost every night. but it's what i do. i slept over at sean's on friday night, after guinness at the mountain shadow. i'm the third person to report that bit of info to the internet, now. it's like a strange mutual affirmation. we were all there, and now we're letting each other know that we all independently noted the event as worth recording.

+ my mother took us out for sushi tonight. we went (actually, for the second time this week) to honjo, which used to be atami, at nanaimo and hastings. apparently she told my dad to 'fuck off' last week. there was no specific incident. they've been in a strange separation for three and 1/2 years. actually, they separated the same week that i left surrey to live on my own at sfu, before moving in with jan in august. the end of april, 2003. i still don't understand it all. i'm not sad about it, just confused. my dad and i went for an early dinner last monday and ended up drinking beer until 11.30 pm. we didn't even talk about it.

+ i still intend to write my geography of vancouver as a series of sushi restaurants that i've eaten at. of course, by geography, i mean autobiography. it's really the same thing. it won't really be about sushi, but it will, because sushi is a lens through which i see my city and ergo my life. these are the words: honjo, atami, kishu, kitto, toshi, ajisai, tokachi. i don't even know what these things mean. there could be a sushi restaurant called 'kandahar.' there is a tim hortons in kandahar, and a royal bank branch in dubai. i could go to dubai and use an ATM without incurring service fees.

+"come on, at least we don't have cancer, right?"

+ new records!

• broadcast, the future crayon (2006): this is a rarities collection, spanning 1998-2005. seeing broadcast live in 2003 was very exciting. this is uneven, naturally, but nice to have and really lovely. i like what this band does!
  
• leonard cohen, songs from a room (1969): i have not really listened to this much yet. just enough to know that it's terribly poker-faced. i'm far more interested by nu-cohen than classic cohen. i like him with a sense of humour. i'll spend more time with it.
  
• jim cuddy, the light that guides you home (2006) : this is solid.
  
• sloan, never hear the end of it (2006) : hooray; sloan is interesting again! i'd almost forgotten all about sloan, but this album is really, really enjoyable.
  
• joni mitchell, clouds (1969) : i can't believe that i've never heard this album before. i've probably listened to the mid-'70s albums more than anything else i own, from age 14 on. somehow i've always missed it, and never considered it consequential enough to pick up. initially, it's her weakest album. i will need to spend more time with it.
  
• jane siberry, bound by the beauty (1989) : not sure why i don't have more of her records. this one is really enjoyable, despite the dodgy production sound and sometimes trite arangements. it was only $7.99!
  
• yo la tengo, i am not afraid of you and i will beat your ass (2006) : better than summer sun, for sure. the first half is really fantastic, but i'll have to spend more time with the second half.
  

i made a conscious effort to only get albums that i hadn't already heard. it's a different way of getting to know albums. i'm trrying to restrict my soulseek habit to things that i can't get elsewhere. such as endless versions of what the world needs now is love. i've got 16 different takes now. i especially enjoy the version by sergio mendes and brazil '66, who were a easy-listening machine along the lines of herb alpert and the tijuana brass whose gimmick was running pop songs through a bossa nova filter with multiple vocalists. these are the things that ground me.

cash on the barrelhead

cosmopolis was ultimately very good. some beautiful passages near the end, but an overall eerie counterpart to game 6. several lines of dialogue are ripped directly, such as the 'peeing under the manhattan bridge' cabbie riff. other situations are nearly identical, but inverted, such as both closing sequences, each of which take place in a barren, disconnected, vaguely spiritual warehouse but with opposite power dynamics and brutally different conclusions.

now i'm reading the body artist. i love it. the pace, the slow ecstasy of every sentence. i want to read it all. i want to save it for a rainy day off. i have so much to read. i also have a lot of time, and i simply have to prioritise books. wonderful books.

it felt good to back at senate.

it also felt good to be on campus at 10 pm! i like recontextualising SFU in that way. i like it at night, in the rain.

apparently the p:ano show i saw in seattle might be their last ever. they've recorded so much uneven stuff but the occasional moments of transcendance make it all worthwhile. i liked the bumbershoot show for its willful audience antagonism.

breakpoint

i began working at the purdy's chocolates in pacific centre in may of 1999. listening to massive attack, protection and any bjork makes me think of the smell of crushed almonds. the ones we put on ice cream bars. riding the skytrain back and forth. i would sit in the end of the train and take pictures of the track. for a long time i would get coffee from yogen fruz, because it was just across the way. then they closed, and i went to blenz. when blenz stopped their buy-seven-get-one-free cards, i started to go to tim hortons for a coffee and a canadian maple doughnut. this morning i had the same, on my way to class at harbour centre. that doughnut made my morning. there was a michael ignatieff event downstairs that i missed while in class. i'd like to meet him, because i don't expect he'll win. he's a terrible politician, and the liberals should know better than to elect a bumbling rookie. but on the break i ate my doughnut and returned the phone calls that i'd missed during class.

between lytton and lilooet we listened to joni mitchell, court and spark. from the campsite to pemberton, along duffy lake, we listened to the left banke. then from pemberton through whistler we listened to the best of bread.

up until 5 am last night after a night at the railway club and then denny's. fuckin' denny's. i went to class and then came home, getting no reading done in the process. i did get a book from the library, however.

my dad lent me two ferron albums. some absolutely incredible songs, esp. i never was to africa, a song that i know as a trapezoid cover. i do this: i stay up late, very focused, listening to songs over and over again, drinking tea and bourbon, reading bits and piece of my favourite books. so many books. but i find that the ferron albums remind me a lot of jane siberry. and of when i saw jane siberry in 2001 at st andrews wesley and it snowed on the way home. circular songs, precise.

i hope to get a chance to reread george melnyk's new moon at batoche soon. it was two years ago that i was still staying every other weekend at the delta hotel downtown, listening to damon and naomi, reading george melnyk. i say that john henry introduced me to cultural theory that spring but it was really reading george melnyk that fall, looking at the city. my city.

west point

i feel really good about politics right now. my instincts are good, and i need to learn to trust them. i pick up on things and i am generally correct about implications and intentions. student politics stresses me out more than real politics because i can't trust that reactions will be professional. there's no even playing field. when people lose by the rules, they jump to anonymous smear campaigns. they make things up. they lie. the frustration is that the people who believe in smears at this level are the ones working in real politics. things get ugly elsewhere, sure, but there's less stupidity.

what confuses me are the tactics that are clearly built for a daily or 24-hr media cycle. anonymous smears are only useful if they get into the media or other level of public consciousness before being discredited and spun. SFU works on a 7-day media cycle. within a day of launching an anonymous smear campaign, it will be answered. on the other hand, it's a classic identifying tactic, and might as well have had a signature across the bottom for all that it's a classic move. maybe it's just a matter of keeping the opposition off base. it rattled me, just because i hate to have to be at that level. i know the rules and i work within them well. i know how to win.

in effect, we're caught in a massive and national industrial sabotage campaign. that's all. today made that very clear: this is dirty fucking pool, and it has little if anything to do with SFU at all. the question is whether people realise that. i wonder if people believe that they are working on behalf of students, when in fact they are working on behalf of a corrupt business entity.

i've monitored myself well, in terms of committment and time. i asked good questions today about the ottoman empire's bureacratic tendencies! i understand bureaucracy. my curiosity about the debate over whether newfoundland was the victim of a british/canadian conspiracy in 1949: why would canada go to such trouble for newfoundland? they seem to have caused us more worry than not. newfoundland complicates things.

john kerry would spend all day on his phone as the days wound down in 2004. he'd come to a decision and then call up someone else for a second opinion. then a third. this is a variation on analysis paralysis. if john kerry had taken 50,000 more votes in ohio, we'd have to rewrite history. kerry's cell phone addiction would be hailed as brilliant. bush's intractable nature would be derided as idiotic, rather than stolid. campaign history is a difficult beast.

they're loading bombs into the hills

+ i'm desperate to read don delillo's the body artist. it looks like a prose poem at first glance. 124 pages. a novella a best. bits of prose. shards. i've been reading cosmopolis and i'm having trouble figuring it out. the waves and patterns are wonderful but there's a bitterly sardonic edge that i can't quite grasp.

+ i've stopped talking about music here, which is strange, because this is all about solipsism and personal autobiography and simple record keeping, in a sense. i don't really enjoy talking about music. sometimes i do, but not often. listening to records is intensely personal, and the associations i create are almost always individual. this is an ideal shared experience but i keep it personal.

+ my student society is now just a shill for cellular phone plans.

+ lots of reading, of all sorts. i need to make time and go for hikes before the weather turns.