Fish and Chips

Toronto

Round the corner from my house is a small Korean Mom and Pop fish and chips operation. The interior has been painted over so many times the tin ceiling panels are almost flat now. There is an original 70s Pepsi ad of a dad and son on their stomachs, facing each other, sharing a soda and some manly advice. Slightly torn and yellowing posters explaining the difference between trout and salmon adorn the walls. There is a “No Credit” sign on the wall. The benches look like they were pulled from a burning church for midgets.

The Pop doesnt say a word. Slim and gaunt, he preps the fish in the batter and when it’s done, adeptly scoops it out of the fat and slops it into Mom’s draining mesh. Thats all Ive ever seen him do. The Mom is the personality of the duo, always greeting me with a loud “HELLO yeh!” and a plastered on smile. Something about her says she is perpetually in a state of nervous fast forward as if she will forget EVERYTHING if she doesnt get it done RIGHT NOW. She repeats your order 4 or 5 times when you tell her (“Fish yeh? fish! Fish!? Yeh?”). She adds a slight, terse “yeh” after her sentences. She expertly flips your order of fish twice so that there is an even coverage of vinegar over the slab of fried mercury and dough. She must have the last “Goodbye!” as you exit. Must! All of this is insignificant in comparison to her greatest need: to touch the tape dispenser several times before actually wrapping your order in the Tsing Tao Daily. Right on the counter is an old-style brown tape dispenser she uses to seal the newspaper. When I first started to go there I would count the times she would touch the tape and not pull one off, as it were. Once! Twice! Folds the paper over the bundle! Three times! More paper! Four…? Rip! Yes!

I eventually made a contest out of it with Sharkboy: “Who Would Get More Tape Touches?” I was winning at 5 touches when one day we went in and Sharkboy made an astute observation: she touched the dispenser, which was moist at the cutting edge, to wet her fingers so she can grab the newpaper that goes around the fish. It made sense. There was usually 3-4 sheets of newsprint around the order…

Damn it! There went a little quirky thing that I loved about a total stranger, right out the window. I honestly thought with all her idiosyncrasies, she had full on OCD.

I still play the “Goodbye Game” with her, thought. Ive only won once and that was by saying it really fast and slamming the door.

Attack of the 50 Foot Bear Drag Queen

Queer stuff

I had an interesting exchange with my roomie this morning. We were joking around about my weight (bad chips habit, me) and he asked, since I said I was “too svelt for the Bear Community”, what constituted being IN that community.

“Does being fat and hairy mean you’re in? Do you have to go line up with two pieces of ID for a card?”

I explained Bears, Cubs and Otters and even the fringe Goats, Beavers and Wolves.

He said that he found many Bears to be arrogant. I argued that they were shy and felt exclusive from the gay community. That the Toolbox was a perfect example of this… the old bar was physically apart from the “community” and had a rougher clientele that did not shave bodily or succumb to the Botox ads at Church and Wellesley. He sited that many Bear groups in Toronto are tight knit and clique-ish. I couldn’t argue that point. I tried to join BBT a couple years back – two emails and no reply. And I’ve heard countless other similar complaints.

I said that Bears were taught all their life that 1) they were gay and that 2) their bodies were disgusting so when they did find their niche, they had a tendency not to be able to shuck their quiet shy demeanours, but there were some cases that were totally opposite.

“Like drag queens?” my roomie offers.

I couldn’t disagree. They’re quite similar in many respects. Subcultured and proud, both have their uniform (Bears=Ubermasculine flannel, Drag=Fabulous Frock), both have their music (Bear=alternative, hardly ever disco, Drag=Diva) and both usually have to go through a double coming out process that has that person overcompensating in some way: Bears=Walking around shirtless at their first Bear Social; Drag=First time out in public in said Frock. It can be a beautiful thing or a total mess, depending on their self image, training and execution.

I assume that this is common when cultures sub-divide into infinity and gay men, who have had no mentor or education in their sexuality, are left to discover the “community” they belong to.

Blog Backfires

General

I generally dont like to post news articles but this made me laugh out loud:

Replying to a question posted on the site about how difficult flight attendant training can be, she wrote: “It is challenging if you think memorizing city codes and airline regulations and struggling into a slippery life raft from a swimming pool with everybody in your class looking at your butt and your flailing legs sounds daunting. Oh, and all the meanwhile you have to keep your hair and makeup perfect.”

I encountered similar hardship with this blog in the past. Careful what you write. The web has teeth and is sniffing your butt.

1400 miles north of Chicago

Celebs and Media

Oh you Americans.

Last night on Categorey 6, Day of Destruction one of the scene intros flashed across the bottom of the screen read: “1400 miles north of Chicago”. Go get out your atlases, writers of this drivel, because that puts you somewhere in Hudson’s Bay, not in Alberta. North West is what you meant?

Team America is a wise, wise film, kids. Go see it.

The CGI of the truck getting the wind prop while driving through the Wind Farm in Texas scene was probably done on a Commadore 64. Ive seen better graphics coming out of my Playstation. First generation Playstation.

C6: DoD was a Day After Tomorrow for people who cant afford the $13 to go to a movie. After seeing DAT, I suggested a drinking game where everytime someone ran into the scene and yelled the hero’s name (“Jack! Your son is on line 2!” or “Jack! More weather…stuff…is happening in NYC!”) you had to take a drink. For C6: DoD, if you took a drink every time Dennehey pushed his glasses up off his head you’d have alcohol poisoning before the show was over. Where the hell did they dig up Dennehey? I think you could see the exoskeleton suit holding him up and making him move, under that ill fitting costume.

Yes I am going to watch the rest on Wednesday.

We got quilting to do!

Toronto

Daryl has an Arte Showee coming up, it seams (oh the puns!) This is the angry patches stuff that he creates that takes me back to when punk meant “angry as fuck!” and not “hey where’s my money!” He will be displaying his Propaganda Quilt at

Toronto Free Gallery
660 Queen St. East Toronto
(they dont have a website I think. I googled a foot fetish site from their name…)

From November 18th to December 22rd.

Get out there and see some Ahrt!

Muzak and the Sisters

Celebs and Media

Down the brightly lit isles of food and product I travel. Happy! Happy! Im not really paying attention because Im humming along with the muzak:

“Hum de hum da huming, almost hum de two
Humma you were leaving, like you do, you do

All my dreams came shoo badoo, all my shopes and gears
All my dreams came shoo badoo, in tears, in tears”

I stop dead in my tracks and look up to the ceiling. I realize that Im humming along to the muzak. The muzak is playing a mutated string quartet of ABC’s Be Near Me. PAHfffffssshhhh! I feel my 20s drop away from me like a booster rocket, twirling hotly into the ocean of memories miles below me. Ladies and Gentlemen, we are oldly floating in space.

To have one of your ultimate favorite songs mangled into Muzak was a defining moment. It made me realize that soon I would be hating youth culture like my parents do. Soon I would be laughing outright at young 20somethings wandering around with their fauxhawks and buttshowing lowslung jeans. Soon I would be saying things like “Didnt Le Chateau make that back in the 80s?” With Sharkboy saying “Yes. You showed me a picture of you wearing it.”

Morressey’s words become a prayer for me: “Sir leads the troops, jealous of youth, same old suit since 1962.”

As more and more commercials rape my past via the culture I was brought up on to sell their cars, cookies and crap, I become more angry. Then last night happened…

Last night was pretty much the same scene as before. Standing in line at a check out with my purchases, humming along to the muzak. This time I recognize the song within a few bars: The Scissor Sister’s Laura. Not a fruity limp version but the original song. I kid you not.

Okay I may have been living under a rock here but in my mind, the Scissor Sisters are still pretty much an “underground” group, right? To use the rocket analogy again, their music was like little thrusters on my ship, giving me the last little booster thrill ride. Then this…then the fizzle out. I havent even downloaded all their songs yet and here they are being played over the Muzak network.

I guess the rule applies that when someone over 35 stumbles across a good chunk of youth culture and somehow makes it known to others that s/he likes it, the youth drop it and it shatters into obscurity. Like any rock band who does a Bond movie theme: Off the charts within 6 months. Think of it… Garbage – World is Not Enough…*poof*. Duran Duran – View To a Kill…*paff*. Madonna – Die Another Day… well. She comes back like wicked acid reflux. Exceptions being Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones.

I digress.

I can imagine that in the future, when three or more people stumble upon something “cool” the nanobots in their blood, placed their by Saatchi and Saatchi, pooling just inside their pleasure centres, will contact each other by WiFi, assess the coolness of the thing and then contact the mother hive base and the commercialborg will spring into action, assimilating that culture groove, and spitting it back into our hapless faces.

I, Paranoid.

Villains

Celebs and Media

One of the first memories I have is the Disney movie 101 Dalmatians. I was 9 or so when I first laid eye on Cruella DaVille. Cloned from Phyllis Diller and Joan Collins’ lesbian relationship, Cruella scared the crap out of me. Her boisterous attitude, the long cigarette, the out of control hair, mysterious all-covering fur coats all combined to remind me of the worst of my mother. But seeing how this is a post about Disney villains and not some pseudo Freudian inner sexual rant, I will continue.

There are strict rules about how we perceive a villain in the Wonderful World of Disney. The fastest way I can describe it is this: they’re either male or female. Congratz, you say! Hear me out:

The Men. All Disney Male Villains (DMVs) MUST have a British accent. Why? Because to Americans, a good North London born and bred voice sounds pompous and condescending, making our hatred gland secrete ire for anyone smarter than us. With the pompousness, comes a pseudo-homosexual undertone designed to sexually offset kids’ budding sexuality in the audience (or hetero parents, for that matter). Oddly enough I know no homosexual who actually disliked a Disney villain, male or female (females do rate higher though). The best male villains rolled their r’s and swirled their hands in large circles (from the wrist) when flamboyantly revealing their sick and twisted plots to a captive hero. When confronting their nemesis, DMVs looked upon their goody goody enemies with half closed eyes and big bottom lips, jutted out in feigned interest. This was usually followed by the DMV placing the hero in such a complex trap, the gods themselves couldn’t ex the machina.

Proof? Here are some prime examples:

Jafar (Alladin): Can you say Joan Crawford in reverse mandrag? The droll downcast eyes and harsh uplighting in every scene would make any drag queen jealous. And those lips. I swear to god he’s wearing eyeliner and eye shadow.

Scar (Lion King): Voiced by Jeremy Irons. Remember him? Dead Ringers? Creepy. Scar is pretty much my cornerstone DMV. He explodes at his stupid henchmen, plots three steps ahead of the writers themselves and you know that as soon as he reaches power in the pride, he is going to have a Caligula-esque orgy within hours.

Professor Rattagan (The Great Mouse Detective): Vincent Price’s lilting foppish voice was perfect as the evil master mind nemesis to Basil (“Oh I love it love it love it,” he chants in one scene, like some queen at a Banana Republic year end sale). Mentioning Rattagan’s true self as a rat and you are fed to an obese fag-hag like cat. How’s that for denial?

Judge Claude Frollo (The Hunchback of Notre Dame): The most sexually fragmented character ever created by Disney. Don’t know him? Maybe you remember his voice as MegaByte from Reboot? Or even more obscure as Chairface Chippendale from The Tick (cartoon, not live action)? No? How about the voice of The Supreme Being from Time Bandits? He has a silky commanding voice and deserves better work than the crappy video games he’s been voicing lately. Who can forget his passionate song to a flaming fireplace as he tries to deal with lust and his piousness? While not gay, certainly he was repressed.

Sir Hiss (Robin Hood): Not so much Brit Evil than creepy smarmy sounding snake. With a lisp. And check out that penile head!

Gaston (Beauty and the Beast): No British accent but he is egotistical, narcissistic, body conscious, proud of his hairy chest, mentions his many hunting conquests and reveres his ability to spit. Can you say overcompensation?

Captain Hook (Peter Pan): Fresh cabin boy, anyone?

The Women: In the Disney universe, female villains are either skeletally emaciated or extremely fat, but most certainly are always Vamps, in the post-war, VD spreading way. Definitely Tramps. Their voices may not be played by British actors or have that Eton taught quality, but there is a throaty, gutteral and husky quality to their voice. I suspect these characters are played this way to entice underdeveloped fears of sexually from immature male children, confusing the crap out of them and making them squirm in their theatre seats. The Disney Female Villain (DFV) is always manic and prone to violent mood swings, going from sultry seductress to exploding volcano, swatting their henchmen with solidly placed firebolts or back hands, in seconds. Their make up is extreme, verging into scary clown effect. Their clothes are always ill fitting, either too loose to give a glimpse of side boob (Yzma, played by Ertha Kitt, in The Emperor’s New Groove) or too tight (Ursula, The Little Mermaid) to offer more curvaceous visuals.

The average DFV is overtly sexual:

The Witch (Snow White): A fine start to all of Disney’s villains by creating this rather anti-Christian device of black magic. As a large hag, her eyes are puffy and downright scary. In her true form, she looks down upon all with her half closed, painted lids. She�s the aunt that doesn�t approve of your birth.

Malificent (Sleeping Beauty) and Lady Tremaine (Cinderella): Joan Crawford was obviously the model for these two villainesses! What is it with everyone fearing large shoulders, smoldering eyes and wicked lips? In the end Malificent is run through with a sword while she’s a dragon. I will just shake my head at the sexual imagery here. Lady T was always looking at Cinderella’s buttkus as she cleaned floors.

Ursula (Little Mermaid): Fat. Pat Carrol. Shakes rump a lot. Fearsome.

Madame Mim (Sword In the Stone): I chose her because she’s prime cross over material: British accent AND a woman. Actually Martha Wentworth was born in NYC but she did a great job with the voice. Boastful and a poor dresser.

Cruella de Ville (101 Dalmations, etc): As I mentioned, her frail skinny body kept under layers of furs and loose fitting cocktail dresses is pure Die G�tterd�mmerung harpy sans wings. She came across like she had just polished off a 5th of gin and that would make any Al Anon kid nervous.

To sum up, Villains from Disney are designed for us to hate them for the following didactic reasons: they get our ire by their pompous, overbearing, authority-hating accent and a vague sexual fear, either by grating against our orientation or by confusing us with unleashed passions.