The Last Days of the British Ex

A short after-dinner walk last night had me passing the British Ex-Serviceman's Association, when I heard a rap at the window. It was Bridget, of Bridget and Alison who live around the corner. A couple pints later, Bridget winning two meat draw hampers, some Korean chicken take-out Alison picked up from across the street (the BEx stopped serving food years ago), Alex and Anita's karaoke, and more laughs than I've had in a long time, I resumed my walk.

Monday May 23rd will be the British Ex's last day at 1143 Kingsway, after at least 50 years at that location (the building was sold to developers last year). My history with the pub began in 1994, when I moved to Kingsway and took out a membership, promising at the swearing-in ceremony "never to overthrow the Canadian Government." In November 1995 I launched my book Kingsway there, and the BEx insisted on doing the food, which I remember included celery and Cheez Whiz.

Pictured above, Bridget's brother Terry about to sink the 7 ball, Anita behind the karaoke machine and Alex on the mike, kicking things off with Steeler's Wheel's "Stuck In the Middle With You" (1972).

The Cute Life and Other Craft Books

The Cute Life won't cost you much. But then, what're you gonna do with it?

Lots of pom pom action in the Cute Life. Scarves with faces and those without. Two kinds of hats: a sun hat for the garden and a beret for the cafes. Two kinds of bag: one for the heroin you're smuggling for your Russian girlfriend's father, the other for your make-up. An out-sized tube of lipstick. Spectacles for reading.

Did you hear about the Cute Life? She was found in Coney Island. Her page torn to confetti-sized pieces and fed through the cracks of the boardwalk.

No Stars, Just Talent

The National Hockey League regular season is coming to a close, and those out of the playoffs are providing frank responses as to why their teams failed to qualify. One of them is Chicago Blackhawks' centre Tyler Johnson, whose response to what went wrong (see above) is based on individual play -- at the expense of the team game.

That's my reading of it -- that skilled players have internalized the game to the point where they're playing against themselves -- lost in instantaneous risk-assessment and self-reflexive critique -- and not each other, in teams. It is an unfortunate comment, equating "simple" with "dumb", but we know what Johnson is getting at: that a team is greater than the sum of its players.

Early in the season, one of the leading contenders for the Stanley Cup was the Vegas Golden Knights, a relatively new team built from an Expansion Draft comprised of some of the NHL's best third line forwards, middle six defensemen and a selection of great but older goalies. "No stars, just talent," as Richard E. Grant's character says in Robert Altman's The Player (1992).

Against all odds, Vegas went to the finals in its first year -- one of the greatest sports underdogs of the 21st century. But Vegas being Vegas, it needed a headliner, and this year it traded some of those game changing starter parts for an emerging superstar. At the time of the trade, Vegas was high in the standings. Last night, with its superstar held pointless, Vegas failed to make the playoffs for the first time in its five year existence.

Les Revenants (2004)

Géraldine Pailhas is Rachel in Les Revenants, a strange, allegorical film set in a small French city suddenly overrun with dead people. Not zombie dead, but a softer, slower moving dead -- a je ne sais quoi dead, if one can say such a thing.

Among the dead is Rachel's husband, a civil engineer who returns to work, only to find himself reassigned to the shop floor after presenting an incoherent proposal for the expansion of his employer's factory. Like the other dead, Rachel's husband doesn't seem to care much -- about anything. For her part, all Rachel cares about is the return of her husband, and she has a hard time accepting that he is not, nor ever will be, the man he was before he passed.

A city official (a sociologist?) takes an interest in the dead -- Rachel and her husband, in particular. It is through this official that the elements of the film are brought together, and we come to understand why the dead, who are tracked through heat-sensitive CCTV cameras (the dead have cooler body temperatures than the living) are secretly meeting: to find a tunnel that would return them to their graves.

News Cycle

Everyone but Amber and Johnny is what I like best about this defamation trial. The bit players, like the artist Johnny offered his Eastern Columbia Building penthouse to. That and the colour of Congresswoman Greene's testimony dress, the one she wore for her hearing in Atlanta. And now Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Why? Because he needs a platform for his data extractor, a device so sophisticated, so worlds ahead of everything in development, so Lex Luther, that the extractive part is simply the decoy, a distraction from something unimaginably more insidious, hidden behind a veil of no holds barred "transparency". All he has to do now is make Twitter a private company and, like the ingredients of Marlboro's cigarettes, we'll never know what the fuck he's fucking us with. But that dress! That light blue testimony dress!

Sunday's Walk

 

Sundays have always started early for me. I never knew why until recently, when my Mom was telling me about all the partying she and my father used to do when I was a kid, and how good a boy I was because I always slept through it. Could it be that Sunday's early starts were related to another (this time sudden) recollection: Saturday's almost-criminally early bedtimes? What else could account for those early starts, my tip-toeing around the house until my parents got up at noon.

Yesterday I was up at 6am, the sun shining, the birds chirping. Rather than float about in my pyjamas all morning, as is my habit, I decided to get dressed, see what happened. What happened was me leaving the house at 8:30am for a walk that included the length of Commercial Drive, where I spoke with artist Keith McKellar, who was setting up a display of his hand-drawn city scene prints across from Grandview Park, and further south, in front of the post office near Broadway, artist Lobsang Tenzin was doing the same with his small water colours, one of which I purchased (pictured up top). Nice huh? How Ukraine's yellow and blue meet in a restorative green?

Though their work is very different from each other's, both men are in similarly great shape for their ages (early 70s?), with thick heads of (grey) hair, good skin and bone structure, athletic movements and an inner peace I associate with a rich spiritual life.

Aglow with these encounters, and a little hungry, I stopped at Subway for a 6" turkey sub, to eat on my way home. As I was heading west on 13th, a woman rushed past, then quickly turned around to say, "Hey, that smells good," and I told her what it was. "Do we know each other?" she asked, and it turns out I was talking to Denise Britt who, with her co-vivant Trent Hignell, owned and operated Black Sheep Books in Kits in the mid-1990s.

Denise hadn't changed a bit, which, oddly enough, does not account for why I didn't recognize her, at least not right away. After she fetched Trent, the same. Standing with them in their front yard, they told me how the bump that was Denise's tummy the last time I saw them had just completed his first year of university at my alma mater, UVic. So more to glow over as I floated home, alive with my encounters.

The Palachi Papers

Lady Evans hath looked down upon the American-born Duchess of Sussex in her latest book, The Palace Papers. Both look the worse for it. Lady Evans (aka Tina Brown) for the flogging, the Duchess (aka Meghan Markle) for seeking validation in Visibility's more godlike cousin, Ubiquity. Lady Sussex wants to be all things to everywhere, and the Maidenhead-born Lady Evans thinks that's cheap. (The best part of royal titles? Having one can absolve you of any or all responsibility.)

Below is the freeze-dried (and at times alliterative) equivalent of a page from Tom Wolfe: 

"The buzzed-up Jessica Mulroney was Meghan’s thirty-something role model in style and new BFF. Meghan has always been astute in flattering fashionable and famous women and absorbing their networks. Physically, Jessica could have been Meghan’s sister and was just as tireless. She had turned her private life into a permanent destination wedding, posting a ceaseless flow of images about her glossy existence. As a fashion stylist cum marketer, Jessica marked everything in her world with a hashtag. Her own three-day nuptials were covered on Canadian television news, her parenting became a partnership with Pampers, and her trips to the gym a promotional op­portunity for Adidas. It could not have escaped Meghan’s notice that a crucial factor in Jessica’s commercial leverage was her famous Mulroney hus­band. “The Brandtastic Life of Ben and Jessica” was the title of a To­ronto Life magazine puff piece on the Mulroneys."