I have been so busy doing stuff…
Over the course of November that I haven’t updated Cafe Solo. I’ll potentially commence a blogging frenzy.
Amsterdam is beautiful today. It’s sunny outside and the air has been crisp. It reminds me of high school autumn in Ontario. I have vivid, yet distant memories of walking around leafy downtown Cambridge after high school and having coffees by the river with all my poetry books and political manifestos and sketchpads falling out of my handmade Smiths satchel bag.
The past few days I have been sick, with a bad, bad cold/flu. My friends Janneke and Marisa have been spoiling me with cups of passionfruit tea. If my five-year-0ld niece Zahra were here, she’d be rolling her eyes at my “fashion-fruit” obsession that has managed to cross the Channel.
Yesterday I went to Rotterdam. I had to visit the Brasilian Consulate in order to sort out my visa for Brasil. I’m going to New York City in a week and then am off to Sao Paulo with my gang for a month of sun and debauchery. And Christmas in a village and New Years in Rio de Janeiro. I can hardly wait.
I need sun, sun and more sun.
In the new year … so many plans. So, so many plans. I’m looking forward to things.
As a great man once said: “I love New York”.
x
Douglas Coupland is on MySpace!
The ringleader (tormentor extraordinaire), ultimate Canadian and big brother of all generation-X’ers, Mr Douglas Coupland has been discovered on MySpace. That’s right, Douglas Coupland is on MySpace.
To read a blurb about MySpace’s latest user demographic information and to link to recent data on the matter, check out Cult of MaHKU.
[That quirky] Dutch Design Week
Last week I had the opportunity to see some brilliant, some entertaining and some very questionable design in the Dutch city of Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week (October 21-29).
There was a lot of interesting stuff, but the first headturner I checked out was this fascinating walking table …
THEN, there was the girl that designed the lamp that crochets or knits its own lamp shade. The light (when switched on) charges the motor in the knitting machine, so the longer the lamp is on, the longer the knitted shade will be. What you see in the picture below is apparently “almost one week” of the lamp being switched on. The girl in the photo is the designer of this fascinating item.
And of course no design expo is complete without the guy that thinks of bachelor convenience …
Pictured above is the the “Bachelor Board” — an ironing board that converts into a chair. And if you’re wondering … you store the iron in the headrest. Now the funny thing is, I’m not sure I know any guys that even own an iron.
Perhaps that warrants its own blog entry.
Cyanide-free Cult of MaHKU
I’ve been swamped since I moved to Amsterdam. Swamped with my Masters degree, with my new job, with my new apartment, with my new life. I love it all … and my new apartment is just dreamy.
Anyways, for my digital concepts class, all of us editorial design students have had to create a blog, directly or indirectly relevant to our masters projects. I created Cult of MaHKU on Blogger (It’s always good to switch things up … and by the way, stick to WordPress as Blogger is horrendous in comparison).
And so I was thinking to myself earlier, “What should I blog about on Café Solo?” … and it occurred to me: “I could blog about my other blog.”
So here it is … Enter the Cult of MaHKU
Total visual enlightenment. At least that’s the point x
Iconic (childhood) candy
IT’S FASCINATING to look back upon iconic images of childhood, such as candy wrappers, that remind me of life before responsibility. Candy wrappers remind me of school playgrounds and ways to spend a quarter at a 7-11 … or Halloween. I grew up in Canada, (but I’m sure the Yanks will get teary-eyed too). The vast majority of this candy is terrible. I hated much of it as a child, and I’m sure I’ll hate it now. But it still brings back that warm fuzzy feeling of growing up and how big of a deal preparing for Halloween really was. I’ve never been nostaligic about childhood celebrations, until last week, when it just hit me that I hadn’t had a real Halloween in years …
Halloween versus St Martin’s Day?
THE COUNTDOWN to Halloween has begun. 22 more days. Yeah sure, who really cares about Halloween outside of North America … North Americans take Halloween seriously and put a lot of planning into it. When I lived in England I experienced Guy Fawkes Day – the day most Brits revere on a similar par to Halloween in North America – but very loosely. Most people who’ve never experienced Halloween in Canada or the USA have no clue how big of a deal it is. In fact, I wonder how much the Halloween retail market is worth – what with candy, costumes, decorations and advertising… But regardless, since I left Canada in 2000 and the US in 2004, the only “celebration” I truly miss is a “real” North American Halloween.
That said, St Martin’s Day [In Dutch: Sint Martijn’s Day], a holiday similar to Halloween exists in the Netherlands and Germany. The Dutch celebrate it on November 11 instead of October 31. Apparently, the kids go door to door just like in North America, except, instead of wearing complete (and elaborate) costumes, they only wear masks. And instead of saying trick or treat, they sing songs to neighbours for candy or fruit. Fruit? That’s amazing, but I just don’t think anyone could do it in North America without getting investigated by the cops. I remember when I was eight years old some kids parents found a needle in Tootsie Roll — and as far as I can recall it was that day on that every kids parents started inspected and filtering the treasures accumulated on Halloween. Every warm-blooded North American kid has a good Halloween candy horror story.
Anyway — I “Googled” St Martin’s Day, trying to unravel the origins of the day, and a lot of stuff came up:
“It was a dark and stormy night. Martin was quite alone on that dark stormy night. He only had a cloak and a singular piece of bread. He was returning home when suddenly a poor and homeless man appeared in the darkness. Martin felt pity for the man and gave him half his piece of bread, and half his cloak and offered him hospitality in his home. Now he is called St Martin and is known for his kindness to the stranger. That is why we celebrate Saint Martin’s Day.”
OR
“Like so many other Christian celebrations, St Martin’s Day coincides with pagan rituals from the pre-Christian era. This falls at the same time as the early winter festivities of light and fertility celebrated by the pagans. The Christian Church, very early in its history, saw that there was a problem with holidays. Many people, even though they had become Christian and given up their pagan ways, didn’t want to give up their holidays. The Church, being smart, put Christian Holidays around the same time. The people kept their holiday, they just celebrated something different.
So who scores more candy – Dutch kids or North American kids?
Microsoft, Yahoo link instant messaging systems
YAHOO and Microsoft announced that they would tear down the wall
between their formerly exclusive instant messaging services and allow members
to mingle beginning Wednesday. The union of Yahoo Messenger and Windows
Live Messenger systems would create the world’s largest combined IM
network with nearly 350m users, the US companies said in a joint
release.
Click here to read the full story.
Source: AFP, Middle East Times
Period film posters (meet popular culture)
THE OTHER DAY, I selected a handful of film posters, on the premise they accurately captured an essence of the popular culture (and/or popular factions) in Western cinema at the time.
On a totally separate note, I found a really interesting site that hyper-analyses themes, issues and ideas in cinema. Images: A journal of film and popular culture is an interesting site for a film buff of any degree, purely on the basis of the random information available on the site and also the analysis of relatively obscure ideas and subject matter. The information isn’t organised as thematically or methodically as it could be, but there is some cool stuff on the site. The “In Focus” feature this week is sure to bring tears to the eyes of any warm-blooded North American that grew up in the 60s, 70 or 80s watching old Westerns after school or late at night: “30 Great Westerns.” Ummm, can somebody say John Wayne?
The features on the site more academically written than journalism, but the benefit of that is that its well-researched and methodically analysed or deconstructed. I’ve found a number of must-read articles on the site that I must recommend to anyone that considers themself a cinema enthusiast of any degree …
• “Monster at the Soda Shop: Teenagers and Fifties Horror Films”
• “Cleopatra Jones: 007(Blaxploitation, James bond and Reciprocal Co-optation)**
• “Billy Wilder: About Film Noir” and “Samuel Fuller: About Film Noir” (These are both interviews)
**This article about “Blaxploitation” (The exploitation of black people) in the cinema is a really interesting read.
On a separate note, for anyone studying or interested in the study of popular culture in cinema, this page from the English Department at Berkeley University in California, lists some good resources and links. It’s a starting point. I’m working on a project encompassing this sort of stuff. If anyone knows of any good resources in the realm of iconogaphy, cinema and popular culture — please get in touch. –Saba
1955
1963
1966
1972
1986
2001
A handful of perspective
IN RESPONSE to my post, below, about September 11th, many friends replied to me, by email, by myspace and even a surprise visit to simply share their memory of that day with me. It has been very inspiring and interesting to hear everyone’s stories. Here are a just a few – I will try and add a few more of them when I get some time. Thank you to everyone who took the time to share your thoughts and personal experiences with me. -Saba
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“WELL, I was in teacher’s college and i was break time for one of my classes. Standing in the hall of UTS, the school that also doubles as part of the teacher’s college, a fellow student came up and told us the news.
“Not really thinking it through I downplayed the severity of it. But boy did I get a shock when I went to the Eaton’s Centre and people were huddled around the TV. Once I saw footage of the crash I got goosebumps all over. Hell I’m getting them right now writing this and thinking about the footage.”
– Peter Liaw, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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“ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 I went to the Mercury Music Prize in London, which went ahead despite the tragedy in the States. PJ Harvey won the award which she accepted via telephone from a hotel in Washington, from which she could see the still-smoking Pentagon. ‘I’m not sure this prize means very much today,’ she said. ‘No,’ replied the chairman of the Mercury judges, ‘today music means more than ever.'”
– Ian Gittins, London, England
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“ON SEPTEMBER 11th, I was living in Washington, DC, finishing up my final semester of undergrad at the University of Maryland. As part of my daily ritual, I would walk through the Student Union building to get to my first class in the morning. The lounge area had TVs set up all over the place, and from the corner of my eye I saw that all of the had the same still shot of what looked like two flag poles. I figured that it was one of those “Please stand by. We will return to our regular programming.” stills you get when the TV station messes up the programming. I simply continued walking to class.
“Upon entering class, our professor announced that there had been a terrible aviation accident and that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. One girl ran out of class, telling us that her father worked in one of the towers. We were excused from class and most of us worked our way to one of the multiple TVs on campus. That is when the second plane hit. I saw everything on live TV from that moment on.
“The news anchor then announced that a plane struck the Pentagon too. I knew that my mom was only two blocks away from the Pentagon, so I gave her a call. She couldn’t be reached. ( I later found out that she was OK, but that she had heard and ‘felt’ the plane crash nearby).
“I went home that afternoon by subway, paranoid of everyone and everything around me. I stayed glued to the TV at home for the next 36 hours. The feeling was terrible.
“That terrible feeling lingered for a while — worsened further months later as I needed to handle ‘suspicious packages’ with gloves for fear of anthrax, and then having my favorite-bus-diver-of-all-times murdered by the DC Sniper. I know that these events are totally separate from September 11th, but they all messed with my mind to the point that I needed to move away from DC just to feel as though I could breathe again. I still get a lump in my throat and teary-eyed thinking of that day.”
– Michelle Lennox, Portland, Oregon, USA
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“I WAS woken up by the phone ringing and my sister from Ohio asking me where Dave was? I was so disoriented it took me a minute to put my head on. She asked me again and then told me to turn on the TV. Right then I saw the second plane crash in to the second tower.
“Dave was in Canada and due to come home on September 11th. I started to panic because I wasn’t sure if he was on a flight and of course I couldn’t reach him. Nobody knew what was going to happen next. The airports on the West Coast hadn’t opened yet, so we didn’t know if there were going to be more catastrophes. Dave had already been out of town for ten days and I was REALLY ready for him to be home. I was working at Transworld still and had two kids to take care of while he was out of town. He finally called me, not knowing what was going on because they were at the airport in Toronto and couldn’t get out. He was with Steve Berra and Juliette Lewis. Steve started to panic and was ready to rent a car, but I think they shut down the borders too. It took another two days for Dave to get home and I was just sooo happy he was alive and nothing happened to him, that the two weeks he ended up being gone didn’t matter.”
– Stacey Swift, Oceanside, California, USA
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“I WAS self-involved and depressed, in bed, ignoring the phone as it rang and rang and rang and rang; trying to escape the world because i was still (and for a few more years afterward) debilitated from my father’s suicide the year before. He died Sept 8th, 2000. I had no idea that the towers were falling; with the radio and TV off, I had no idea what the phonecalls were about. When I finally got out of bed and heard the messages, I felt even worse; I really couldn’t fathom the scale of what had just happened, but I DID feel like the world truly was ending, and that my father was just smart enough to get himself out of it before the shit hit the fan.
“Here’s a couple writings [ed: I have not included them]. I just realized they are both dated ’03, I think that’s when I could finally emerge from the hole of darkness I was in and talk about it.”
Mandy Resendes, Los Angeles, California, USA
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Café solo 