Tag Archives: art direction

Dead Robot’s Worst List of the Decade

Distractions

The shittiest moments that happened to me in the last 10 years:

Being fired from Rogers iMedia. Going from a $45k job to barely eking out a living caused me to lose a lot of friends, a relationship and most of my dignity. Getting laid off also made me declare…

Bankruptcy. I still can remember the day I signed the papers – I felt like I had let everyone down. Then 48 hours later I got the call for my current job. If I held out another couple months, I wouldn’t have had to sign those papers and be in this 7 year black hole. But I have learned you can live without a credit card. Marry one!

Giving up my first cats. I really should have given up the allergic, 4-joints a day, roommate.

Dad being sick. It was the longest, most frustrating year of my (his!) life. All this came when Michael Moore released “Sicko”. I wanted to punch his fat face and tell him about my father spending close to 28 hours in St Micheal’s emergency waiting for a bed to come free. He’s still not 100% but at least he’s eating and working out again.

The Strike/Workshare/General Economy. After coming home to such a wonderful Disney vacation we were told I was going to a 4 day work week and SharkBoy was going on strike. Worst. Summer. Ever. No money, no-money stresses, heaped on workload, more-workload stresses, shitty weather, no tan to speak of stresses. Last summer can chew my ass.

Movies. I have to say the worst movie I saw in the last ten years (other than the obvious Return to Frogtown ones) was Joel “I Destroy Everything I Touch” Schumacher’s Phantom Of the Opera. I slept through some of it (something I never do) and what I did see made me angry. It’s the only movie I can recall ever really wanting to walk out of. Not that I hated the music (I’ve seen the stage show at least three times), I did enjoy the art direction and the costuming, but the whole thing just bored me and then angered me. Especially when they reversed the bubbles. Moulin Rouge! was my first choice for a long while but I’ve warmed to it – except for Ewan McGregor’s shoutysingy voice. Still hate that.

Crappiest Game. Hands down, the worst game I played in the last ten years has to be “The Price Is Right” for the Wii. We did laugh, but we laughed at it. Second only to “Totally Spies” for the Wii as well. Soul-less game play with the camp girly sucked out of existence.

In all, not a terrible decade. I’ve had worse (Grade 5 to College). I hope your upcoming deca-year will be faboo!

Sorry Paul

Personal Bits, Queer stuff

Back in 1990, I had broken up with my Kiwi boyfriend Paul (amicably) and while I was in school, he and another friend, Colleen got drunk and I guess, bitched about men (me) through a couple bottles of wine.

The result was him painting a “heirloom” of a hall table that has been with my family for years. My earliest memory of this table (it’s always been deep forest green) was that it was in the basement to hold tools and kid’s mittens and touques (kids were not allowed through the front door of our house, for some stupid reason like… oh tracked in mud or something stupidly adult). When Dad separated from Mom, he took a few bits of furniture with him to the new apartment including this table. It was his new “dump” table. You know: you enter your apartment and on this table you dump your keys, letters, gloves, errant plastic bags of body parts you’ve picked up through the day, etc.

This table followed me through Brockville, Brantford, Kitchener, Oakville, Ottawa and back to Toronto. It’s rickety, there’s a huge crack down the middle of the top and the nails no longer hold things in place. It’s like a 15 year old dog you don’t have the heart to take behind the barn with a shotgun.

Cut back to a drunk Paul and Colleen. Angry through the alcohol, they decide to “give me a card” for my birthday. We had watched Ruthless People a while back and I had mentioned, rather snottily, that they used “Memphis” furniture design principals for the art direction. Paul hated that kind of crazy design, he thought it was “L.A. Ugly”. So in their drunken anger, they took brush to desk and here’s the result:

Sorry Paul

On the back they wrote: “Something to remember us by. Summer ’90. Enjoy your card – Paul and Colleen.”

Today is the end of 18 years of visual assault. I painted it. You can still see the purple and red “donuts” through the white. I know they’re there.

But I kept the back with the “inscription”.