18 November 2008, terribly early in the morning
You may recall Shima bought me a set of B&W film for my birthday, along with some darkroom time at ImageWorks. The film I went through fast enough, but I was lazy about actually developing it at ImageWorks. And then last week I learned that you can’t actually use the ImageWorks darkrooms to develop film — they have a fancy machine that develops film for you. Their darkrooms are meant for printing alone. You can get your film developed at ImageWorks, but it costs $7 a roll. Besides being a bit expensive, this seemed counter to the idea of Shima’s gift. So over the weekend I staked out supplies, and last night I picked up everything I needed to develop film at home.
Meterials in hand, I got to work. The only tricky part in the process is getting your exposed film from the canister onto the reels that go into the development tank. You need to do all of this complete darkness, or in my case, with your hands inside a darkroom change bag. I didn’t want to waste any film, so I didn’t practice doing any of this before hand. I picked a roll of HP5+ I shot recently, which I decided I’d be willing to sacrifice if I messed up: thankfully, I didn’t.
Developer, stop, fix and a bunch of water in between, and I was all done. The developer I bought, Ilfosol 3, is meant for processing slow to medium speed film. I was trying to develop HP5+ which I had pushed 2 stops. My choice of developer could have been better. The negatives I ended up with look underexposed. I’m going to try this all again, but will leave the developer in much longer.
The whole process went much smoother than I had thought. Now I just need a scanner.
[2] Photography
The wild getups, the in-yourface bumper-stickers, the foul language at the restaurant, the snarky tone in the weekly newsmagazines, the loud bass thumping from the thousand-dollar woofers, the Lee Atwater approach to public discourse—what are these if not the mating calls of a neutered body politic, of people who can allow the full-scale invasion of a country that never attacked them but who will come to blows over a parking space? Or, if you want to push it all the way: what are these displays if not the cultural patrimony of ancestors who could tolerate chattel slavery and be incensed to the point of open revolt by a tax on tea?
— Garret Keizer, Of Mohawks and Mavericks
17 November 2008, terribly early in the morning
Shima and I were in Barrie over the weekend. I feel like we traveled into the future to witness what the winter will bring. While Toronto remains quite dry, Barrie was pelted with a ton of snow. (And I mean high-quality packing snow.)
[1] Life
11 November 2008, early morning
Canada is basically the greatest country in the world. And the best part about Canada is, we aren’t all up in peoples faces about it. Lest we forget.
[1] Life
10 November 2008, terribly early in the morning
During the last election the LTTE asked — is that the right word? — the residents of Jaffna to boycott the election. And, in doing so cemented a win for Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was quite clear about his intentions when it came to dealing with the LTTE within Sri Lanka. The day before the election I had agreed with the LTTE boycott, because the political system in Sri Lanka has clearly failed its Tamil people. My thinking here was one of abstract politics: people shouldn’t take part in a broken system. For the LTTE, I suspect it had more to do with their belief that a solution for the Tamil people’s problems lay solely with them. And now 3 years later, the Sri Lankan government rejected a ceasefire with the LTTE. On any given day TamilNet reports on various murders and kidnappings in Jaffna and the East, on bombings, disappearances, etc. Sri Lanka sounds like it is the worse it has been in years.
Current Events | Politics
6 November 2008, early evening
The Paul Bright Gallery opened up down the road from me today. This is gallery number three to open up on the Bloor and Lansdowne corner. Richard Mercer is across the street, and Toronto Free Gallery is a few doors down. I still live next to a strip club, but I feel like the neighbourhood has lost a little bit of its edge. Mind you, i’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
You can see a reflection of a pawn shop in the window. I wonder how long that shop will be there.
Life | Bloor and Lansdowne
5 November 2008, early morning
Last night was amazing. I haven’t been so emotionally invested in an election my entire life. And this was an election I played no part in.
I met Tyler at his office, and along with my brother, the three of us made our way to the Gladstone. We were joined by a big posse of people, all interested in the election. The Gladstone was a great place to be last night. People were genuinely excited about what was going on — and you could get beer. The Gladstone was electric, and I’m glad I stayed their long enough to see Obama be declared the winner, and listen to John McCain give his concession speech. You’d have think the leafs had won.
If history is unfolding around you, don’t go to Dundas Square. Dundas Square is a great place to be if you want to look at ads, but that is about it. What a failure of a public space. My cousin sums things up great:
What a self hating city this is. Last night really made me hate Dundas square even more. It truly exists only to sell you things. You cant be a citizen there, you can’t be a person. You can only be a consumer. It is a totally inflexible space and those omnipresent screens can only be used for evil.
So essentially, Toronto has no city centre or town hall that exists as a genuinely civic space. It has a big mall and it has a place to go if you want to be bombarded by ads.
… A black man was elected president of the United States and they couldnt stop selling us useless fucking shit for like an hour?
If you build a city or community on the creation and accumulation of wealth, that is all you are going to have in the end. It is cheap and crass and meaningless and often totally innapropriate. It is antithetical to everything that residents of the city actually need.
But, at the end of the day, who cares about Dundas Square. I listened to Obama give his victory speech at the Elephant and Castle with my cousin, brother, and Haran. The room was quite somber — except for myself, who was pretty loud and drunk at this point. There is a Black Dude heading to the White House, and he is awesome. This is awesome.
[14] Current Events | Toronto
4 November 2008, terribly early in the morning
Americans will start voting today. I will sit and watch. I’m hoping there is going to be record turn out, that young people and minorities actually get off their asses and vote, and that at the end of the day a black dude who grew up in Kenya is the new President of the United States of America. I won’t lie: I’ll probably still think America is a piece of shit evil-ass country. That won’t change the fact that Americans electing a black dude to run their country is anything short of amazing.
Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever. I saw my mother’s face again, and felt, for the first time, how the stones of the road she had walked on must have bruised her feet. I saw the moonlit road where my father’s brother died. And it brought something else back to me, and carried me past it, I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise. And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky. — James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues.
Any Americans reading this: vote. For the love of god, vote.
[1] Current Events | Quotes
31 October 2008, terribly early in the morning
It’s Halloween, and tonight I plan to dress like a hipster. This costume works for a couple reasons: I already have enough junk to dress like a hipster: skinny jeans, crazy shoes, thick plastic glasses, vintage t-shirts, etc. I recently purchased this strange vest from PreLoved which may round out the costume. (If you have any other ideas for what a hipster outfit should entail, I’m all ears. Sadly, I still can’t grow an ironic mustache. I may in fact be the only South Indian man unable to grow mustache.) Since my friends already think i’m a hipster, the costume would also be ironic, thereby cementing it as a solid hipster costume. If only I had a fixed gear bike.
[2] Life
29 October 2008, terribly early in the morning
Shima and I watched a bunch of films during our holiday. At some point I thought i’d write a little blurb about them all, but so far, that hasn’t happened yet. One film we saw definitely does deserve some mention, because it doesn’t look like it’s going to get released here in Canada. On the plane ride to Sydney Shima and I watched Caramel, a Lebanese film about a women. There are basically 5 stories in the film, all playing out at the same time: one woman is having an affair, one is getting married but isn’t a virgin, one is having trouble dealing with her age, one is dealing with her sexuality, and one is trying to live her life while caring for her crazy sister. It’s all really well done. The lead actress in the film is also incredibly hot, which is a nice bonus. The films name comes from the fact that in Lebanon they use caramel in salons to wax legs (and wherever else).
The film’s trailer is online. More reviews of the film at Metacritic.
Movies
21 October 2008, early evening
Use Tomato/MLPPP to Stop Bell from Throttling your Internet Connection.
So the WRT54G router firmware I linked to earlier does in fact get around Bell’s (anti-competitive jack-ass) throttling of my Teksavvy internet connection. I love my router, I love Teksavvy, and I now love Tomato/MLPPP. I haven’t been able to download torrents during the evening for many months. (Bell throttles during off-peak hours, so while I was at work my torrents used to run at full speed.) I really didn’t expect a solution like this to develop: I was waiting for Bell to get their asses handed to them in court. Clearly, relying on your government to take a large corporation to task is an exercise in futility. If you’re on Teksavvy, and have a respectable router, I seriously recommend you upgrade to this firmware. Suck it, Bell!
So how does this work? MLPPP is used to aggregate several different network links into a single faster link — i.e. you can take several DSL connections and make a single faster one. With MLPPP the client will split a packet up into smaller fragments, and send each fragment with an additional MLPPP header over different links to the server. The server will then reassemble the original packet from the fragments it receives. You split your bandwidth over all your links, effectively creating a single faster one. You can run MLPPP over a single link, but it obviously offers you no advantage, as all your data is still going over the same link. In this case, the advantage comes from the fact that (for the time being) the hardware Bell uses to track and shape Internet traffic does not know how to process MLPPP traffic. Bell doesn’t reassemble the real packet to examine what is being sent, and thus can’t decide if it needs to be throttled. As long as your ISP understands the MLPPP protocol, you should be able to avoid throttling this way.
[1] Technology | Life
To put [undecided voters] in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
— David Sedaris on Undecided Voters in the Current Election
You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
‘And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’‘
— Lee Atwater in a 1981 interview explaining the evolution of the G.O.P.‘s Southern strategy
15 October 2008, terribly early in the morning
Some will say yesterday night was a big waste of an election. They are probably right, but it wasn’t all bad. Yes, our government is basically the same as how it was the night before, but there is now a tiny little orange dot in a sea of blue in Alberta: the NDP took a piece of Alberta back from the Tories. That’s got to count for something. The NDP actually made some big gains, and they are probably the only party that can be happy with the election results. (Sadly Peggy Nash lost her seat.) Another plus is that minority government number three for Harper may mean he gets the boot. (The Anyone but Harper Liberal, NDP, and Bloc coalition I was hoping for never materialized.) The Tories can’t be happy with this result at all, regardless of how Harper tries to spin things. They had a huge lead in the polls going into the election, which they managed to lose completely through horrible campaigning. If you can’t beat Dion — whose party barely supports him — who can you beat? In two more years maybe we’ll be doing this again. Go Canada!
[4] Current Events | Politics
13 October 2008, early evening
Normally I cross-process the slide film I buy. Processing slide film (E6) is a pain in the ass because it costs more and can’t be done by most places. Getting it cross-processed — developed as if it was regular colour negative film (C41) — is easier. You end up with crazy looking pictures, but sometimes the effect works really well.
I shot a roll of expired Velvia 50 at my wedding. I was going to cross-process it, like I do all my film, but thought I’d switch it up and get it developed properly. The guy at shoppers wasn’t exactly sure how much it would be, but I figured it couldn’t be more than 2 or 3 times as much as developing colour film. This was a mistake on my part.
It took Shoppers a month or so to get my pictures back to me. Mezan grabbed them while I was in Australia. They turned out OK, though they are far from exceptional. The whole endeavor cost me $60. That’s basically 10 times as much as getting colour film developed and printed at Shoppers. I want to blame this on the Shoppers photolab, but it seems to be my own damn fault.
At least I have a whole bunch of slides now.
Photography
11 October 2008, late evening
We made it back home. Our flight was delayed 4 hours, which meant we missed our connection. Quantas booked us on the 10:00 PM flight out of LA. (That would have taken off 10 hours after we were supposed to have left.) Go Quantas! Our flight was split between Quantas and Air Canada, so we thought, may as well see what Air Canada could do. Air Canada didn’t drop the ball, and got us on a 3:00PM flight. I can’t believe Air Canada showed up another airline. I think Shima and I were both stunned by this, and the fact the staff on the flight were young and good looking.
All in all it took something like 28 hours to get back home. People aren’t meant to travel that long.
[3] Life
9 October 2008, early evening
Shima and I are sitting in the Quantas Transit lounge. Our flight was delayed 3 hours. I’m not sure if the free internet makes things better or not. Hopefully we aren’t stranded in LA. That would suck.
Life
7 October 2008, late afternoon
Shima and I are here for a few more days. I haven’t read my Google Reader news in 3 weeks. I’m not sure if I should go back and see what I missed or not. I also haven’t been on MetaFilter in weeks. I suppose these things are both signs of a good vacation. Shima and I are heading off to the zoo shortly, which should be the last touristy thing we do in Sydney. Then it will all be loafing about with my cousins and family before taking a damn long flight back home.
[2] Life
2 October 2008, late at night
I have yet to be charged less than 3.80$ for a coke when I’m out at a restaurant. That is way too much. Everything in Austrailia is expensive, but that just seems excessive.
[4] Life
21 September 2008, early evening
Shima and I are alive and well in Australia. It will probably be quiet here till I get back. The cousin I’m staying with doesn’t own a computer. (I know, I couldn’t believe it either.) The weather here is great. We’re on what i’ll call our first official day out, as yesterday we arrive and slept for most of the afternoon and evening. (I’m writing this post in an Apple store downtown.) I love Apple.
[2] Life
16 September 2008, terribly early in the morning
The last film I watched at the Film Festival was the Thai film Chocolate, by the director of Ong Bak. Chocolate is in a similar vein: light on plot, heavy on lots of crazy action. Unlike Tony Ja, the start of this film Jija Yanin didn’t have any prior martial arts experience. The director told the audience she trained for three years before making the film. I would say the martial arts is better in Ong Bak. That said, the action sequences in Chocolate are still really great, and reminded me of a Jackie Chan film. There are lots of crazy stunts. The last fight sequence on the side of a building was awesome. Judging by the out-takes shown at the end of the movie, if you see someone getting punched in the face during the film, they actually got punched in the face. People falling of buildings are probably falling off buildings. Thai “special effects” apparently aren’t effects. I guess that’s also part of the appeal. Chocolate was awesome.
I’ve been bitching about how stupid the TIFF audiences seem to be this year, but I do have to say that Midnight Madness audiences can’t be beat. The Midnight Madness program seems to attract people who are sincerely interested in the films they are seeing. I’m pretty sure a good chunk of the audience probably saw most if not all the films that screened during the week. You definitely need to check out Midnight Madness to enjoy a true TIFF experience.
Movies
15 September 2008, terribly early in the morning
I’ve watched a few episodes of Mad Men now. The show is great, which I’m sure anyone who has heard mention of the show is well aware of. The show is about the people working at a Madison Avenue ad agency during the 50s. Like the Sopranos, what’s it’s actually about is a fair bit deeper than that. The whole show has a very bleak and depressing feel to it. Characters seem to feel trapped in their circumstance. Again, this is very reminiscent of the Sopranos. I quite like the show, but I have no idea how it isn’t being shut down for being essentially one long cigarette commercial. There must be money from the tobacco industry funding Mad Men. If not, they need to start asking for some. It really is all I can do not to go buy a pack midway through an episode.
I also have the biggest crush on Miss Joan Holloway.
[9] Television
13 September 2008, mid-morning
The first film I watched at the film festival was Adela. It’s a quiet and slow look at the life of a 80 year old Filipino lady living in a shanty town dump site on the outskirts of Manila. The character who the film is named after, Adela, is played to perfection by Anita Linda, who is probably the Sophia Loren of the Philippines. (She’s 84 years old and travelled to Toronto to take part in the premier of the film. It was very sweet.) The movie itself was really good, although it’s a bit hard to watch. The director really wants you to feel the slow pace of Adela’s life, so while everything is hustling and bustling around her, we watch as she wanders around, waits for telephone calls, etc. Scenes play out longer than you would think they should & start without any characters at all in them; dialog is sparse; etc. The film is very well put together, but can be a challenge to actually watch. Still Anita Linda’s performance definitely makes the film well worth watching.
Movies
12 September 2008, terribly early in the morning
I watched Three Monkeys with Carvill and Limin before watching Two-Legged Horse with Shima at the film festival . A rich man runs over someone in the middle of the night; his driver takes the fall for him, promised a big chunk of money when he gets out of prison. The movie is an examination of how this event effects the driver and his family — his wife and son. I quite liked the film. The movie gets particularly interesting when the father gets out of jail. The film seemed to be about the way we ignore obvious truths in our lives; how we leave things unsaid; etc. It’s shot beautifully: the cinematography was great. The 4 lead actors all give very nuanced performances. It’s a very quiet, subtle film. It would have been nice to have had the director around to ask him questions, but at our screening no one was there. The film was quite good, definitely worth watching if it makes it to DVD.
Movies
11 September 2008, terribly early in the morning
The night before watching Treeless Mountain, Shima and I watched the Iranian film Two-Legged Horse at the film festival. The film is directed by Samira Makhmalbaf. (Her father is a very famous director in Iran, and she is certainly a good director in her own right.) The film is set in Afghanistan. A poor boy is hired to carry the son of a rich(er) man whose son has lost his legs to a landmine. The film is about the relationship between this boy who can’t walk, and his two-legged horse. The film is really an examination of human relationships — in particular of abusive relationships. The film gets very surreal very quickly. By the end of the movie you are watching a very strange film. It reminded me of Ashes of Time in the way it was edited. Within a single scene events may take place out of order. Some small scenes are repeated again and again. Both boys play their respective parts brilliantly — neither were professional actors. The casting must have been very difficult.
The Q&A following this film was a disaster. People were very upset after watching the film. I think that may actually be a sign the film was successful. I don’t know what it is about TIFF that seems to attract the ignorant and affluent, but the questions that were asked at this screening were ridiculous — opening with a comment on how stupid and horrible a depiction of Afghanistan was in the film, and ending with a query on whether Afghanistan was actually like this. (Hint: you aren’t watching a documentary.) Her answer to both questions was similar: “The movie is not about Afghanistan. I would have made the film in Iran if they let me.” Makhmalbaf handled herself very well, considering much of the audience was so confrontational.
Two-Legged Horse was a challenging film to watch, but it’s certainly a very good film. Shima is convinced it is typical Iranian fare, but I think it is particularly odd.
Movies