morrisseyed

[mental meta: should i dispose of the numbered titles?  part of me likes it, but they're a bit annoying to read after the entry has been spidered.]

It’s Hali, late June, nearly July.  It’s 15 degrees outside.  It’s raining (and therefore overcast), and we won’t see the sun for a couple days.  but i’m taking it all in stride, due to the itunes going on in the room right now.  the used airport card for grampy imac arrived earlier this week, so i installed it the other night, and this morning have rejigged our home network in order to bring the imac and the print server into the office as opposed to their former living spaces in the living room and bedroom.  the best thing about this setup is the fact that i can now listen to my own itunes database through the imac’s speakers rather than through the notebook’s little dudes, and my-oh-my did i forget how great music sounds when you can hear it through something built to listen to as opposed to simply “hear from.”

anyway,  i was going to rip U2’s Zooropa into the itunes DB, since it is definitely one of the best pieces of high-pop-art of the last 20 years.  I’ve neglected to play it for the past while since I’ve lately been doing my pomo introspection by way of Brian Eno, but this past week I’ve felt that it is about time to return to the hollow sounds of the metropolitan night on this particular disc.  But I digress.  Although Zooropa is ripping as we speak, my pop-music tastes for the day have taken a sudden detour toward sentimental-bloke-rock.  In the process of picking up Zooropa, my attention was caught by the spine of Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head from 2002, which we all loved to hate by 2005.  In spite of Chris Martin’s overbearing melodrama and pathos, this remains a damn fine album, and it fits these rainy Hali days all too well, so it definitely required a spin on the hard drive..

Back in “aught-two and aught-three”, i intentionally searched for, and reveled in some mental dark places, and this Coldplay album, along with the fine cry-baby tunes put out by Travis (whose two albums sounds EXACTLY ALIKE and that’s how we like’m), really helped me to be affected by overbearing emotional weights and feel them in ways people often try to avoid.  I think that’s why we sometimes hate coldplay.  The dude and his music is in many ways “too overbearing”.  But the thing is that listening to the album should force us to confront our dark spaces (wherein we would fall in love with Chris Martin for showing them to us).  More often than not, however we realize that those dark spaces would in fact appear if we were to actually tune in to the show, so we reject the band and the album outright in an attempt to stop the pending punch in the stomach from ever landing.  Rather than confronting our dark spaces, we just say that “Chris Martin sucks” and “he thinks he can cry for all of us.”  But often I want that punch to land, with brute force, squarely in the stomach.  I want to be reminded of how shitty things can be at times, because pretending that things aren’t sometimes a little bit shitty isn’t a healthy way to live.  That’s a life of artifice, and we have enough of that around us already.

(As I read this a second time to fill in all the prepositions and nouns i neglect to use when I draft things, I realize how my recurring punch-in-the-stomach metaphor follows some of the major themes in Palahniuk’s Fight Club.  I want you to hit me as hard as you can.  Is that what Jack/Tyler wanted?  Jack/Tyler wanted a punch in the face because he wanted to feel things again.  Jack/Tyler was one of any number of educated 30-somethings who had come to the realization that he might have to face a life time of photocopied accident reports and middle management career opportunities, and Jack/Tyler snapped.  Jack/Tyler, and Palahniuk, is in some ways (but not all ways) like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man in Notes from Underground.  Underground Man wrote a 75-pages rambling, sneering essay against the Man of Action in the novel, yet he felt so inferior to him and his kind the entire text.  Although Dostoevsky’s Man of Action/Man of Thought dichotomy doesn’t confront his own time period’s social struggle with modernism the same way that Palahniuk does with postmodern consumer culture a hundred years later, there exists in both an underlying narrative thread about wanting to have a better emotional sense of the world.  I’m not suggesting we should all form Fight Clubs and beat the shit out of each other - that would turn all of us into Underground Men I think, which is not to be desired..  But perhaps from time to time we should take Jack/Tyler’s internal penguin’s advice and just “slide”.)

(note.  forgive me for my inaccurate interpretations.  I haven’t read these texts in years, and it’s been just as long since i watched any screen adaptations of the works, either.  A great present-day rendering of NfU starring Henry Czerny exists, by the way. Underground Man works in a planning office in Los Angeles, I believe.  It’s available at Video Difference, too. )

PS it’s the Euro Final today.  I’m cheering for Spain, in spite of my undying love for german engineering, film, and culture.  Achtung, baby.

Things I did yesterday (Saturday).

1. Went to the MANS Multicultural Fest.  It really should be called the Multicultural Food Fair, but I’m cool with whatever name they give it.  A food fair by any other name is still a food fair.

2.  Watched some one try to break into cars.

3.  Watched a friend get the fuzz to prevent said person from breaking into cars.

4. Watched a lot of people cook various foods i paid to eat.

Things I ate yesterday.

1. Some sort of Portuguese rice-and-tomato-and-meat stew.  it tasted like a cabbage roll, but that was fine with me.

2. Half of a perogie, which reminded of the wicked awesome homemade perogies my dad use to buy from the ukrainian cultural association (or something to that effect) on lakeshore road when i was a kid.  said association built a church on the profits of their sunday perogie sales.

3. Some filipino meat on a stick from Rocky.  i felt a little bad doing this, since rocky’s meat on a stick has always been so accessible in downtown halifax.  all the same, meat on a stick is meat on a stick - you can’t ever go wrong with sticked meat.

3a. (I nearly forgot this one.) Some grape leaves stuffed with cous cous and tomato from a table flying an egyptian flag.  whether they represented the egyptian association of nova scotia or just their own kitchen, i couldn’t care less.   bring on the grape leaves, whatever NPO you are!

4. some lemonaid.

5. a frigging bbq’ed quarter-chicken from the sikh association of nova scotia, for only three frigging dollars.  awesome.

6. a taste of some rice pudding.

7. some sort of curried chickpea concoction from the islamic association of ns.  the accompanying hummus was better than the curry.  but it was all only two bucks, so i didn’t mind.

then i went home and went to sleep.

Oh boy…  the Liberals’ Green Tax Shift…. For once, I chuckled at a line attributed to the Tory backbench jerk, Jason Kenney, in response to this recently released plan (read: news item).

Kenney, who some call the Conservative’s Attack Dog, but is more like PM Harper’s lap dog, is known to chew out anything that anyone from an opposing party has to say.  He’s an awful person, really, in that he pays no heed to what other MPs say, suggest, opine or propose, even though those parliamentarians represent Canadians just as he does.  It pisses me off to no end, because just as Kenney has a couple liberals and NDippers (and aghast, even Greens!) in his riding, the MPs whom he attacks also represent tories in their own ridings.  He essentially has no respect for parliamentarians, or even citizens, of other political stripes.  Kenney essentially attacks the parliamentary process, and rejects the notion that (1) representatives of other political parties deserve a voice, and (2) that citizens who voted for other political parties deserve to be heard.  What a bastard.

But this week, he declared that the the new Grit platform, the proposed green tax shift, to be something that will eventually leave us “Shift out of luck”.  And that’s a pretty crafty turn of phrase.  I gotta give props to either Kenney or his handlers on that one.

Anyway, I’ve got some serious issues with the Liberals on this issue.  This is one of those moments that I wish Persons of Interest really did give a damn about these interweb thoughts, and that tories and grits both trolled this site, because they both have a lot to learn by actually keeping an ear to the ground on this issue.  I don’t know much about Dion’s plan, but I know enough about it to know that its claim to being  ‘tax-neutral’ is going to be hogwash, because so much of it is based on income taxes.  Let’s be clear on this, a great number of Canadian citizens pay no income tax (students like me, the retired, the unemployed or underemployed).  Plans which propose to lower income taxes and then increase consumption taxes actually become a tax burden to some one like me.  Those with little to no income have nothing to be lowered when it comes to the income tax, so they have a lot to lose when consumption taxes rise.  This is the standard NDP line about Carbon Taxes and Taxing, and it’s a very good point (for that matter, it’s rather brave of the NDP, who are traditionally green-friendly, to talk this way).  It certainly differentiates the Ndippers from the greens.

But the thing is, as much as I would face a burden (undue or not) by way of Dion’s tax shift, I’m willing to roll with it.  We’ve all gotta work on this one, and I’m willing to wear a sweater sooner in the fall and longer into the spring if it means using less oil or electric to keep my flat warm.  This is where the tories (and the Ndippers) fall flat on the environmental front - in spite of the fact that the general cost of living will rise in this apparently “tax neutral” scheme proposed by Dion, many people will be drawn to it.  It’s a plan that would get shit done.  That should be the Liberal’s campaign slogan this time out:  The Liberals:  Getting Shit Done Since 1867.  Or, The Liberals:  We Get Shit Done.   Because when it comes to the environment and child care and the economy and industry, the tories are falling flat on their faces again and again.

but here’s the problem.  Dion won’t frigging pull the trigger.  The Liberals could get shit done, but they’re too scared to show muscle.  I’m fed up to here with Dion and Dion’s caucus.  Sometimes they want to go to the polls and he doesn’t; other times he was going to strike when the iron was hot but then caucus would demand to wait it out for a bigger scandal.  This is not how one determines the pulse of the nation, and it certainly isn’t the way to get voters fed up enough to want to go to the polls either.  Since the January 2006 election, Harper and his boys (because there are very few girls, we all know) have stayed in a minority position in the polls.  They were stagnant before they ever sat down and proposed a budget. They’re going no where.  If Dion were to even finally find the balls to call out for non-condifence and then miff the election campaign,  he’d in all likelihood end up in the same position as before, opposition in a minority House.  There’s nowhere to go but up for Libs, but they’re sitting there, waiting it out and wasting the time of the nations’s tory-dissenters.  we’re all sitting on the sidelines, tapping our wrist-watches, waiting for thing to get going, and they continue to abstain from votes.

Dion’s got everything to gain here and nothing to lose but his pride and position as leader of the liberals.  The dude is dithering in this respect more than Mr. Dithers, Paul Martin, ever did.  I like Dion, I really do, but what he’s doing is not good for the nation, and it’s certainly not good for the Grits.  His green tax shift, in spite of its warts, is better than what the Tories could propose, but it doesn’t matter because we won’t see anything come of it until at least the fall or even the winter of ‘09.  (We’re going to see at least a 3-year Tory minority government here.  Minority! Ridiculous!)  His green plan is great, and so is his dog, Kyoto, but both have gotta shit or get off the pot.  I’m tired or this already.