Muse-ic Mondays: Issue 16

Much like the recent identity-crisis-ridden weather, I have been feeling quite up and down as of late. Am I a lion... or am I a lamb? Perhaps I'm a llama? Or maybe a lobster? Please don't let me be a louse... or a leech... Join the club, Mother Nature, join the club.

But judging by this week's forecast, perhaps things are about to start looking up. Vitamin D for the win!

Anyway, I thought I'd pass on this intriguing video by The Knife that my sister Anne shared with me. Interestingly enough, the song is called "Pass This On":

I hope you catch some of that spring fever that's been going around. You'll pass this on, won't you?

Stuck on Skins

To me, being sick means napping at all hours, surfing the net for no particular reason, reading until my eyes bleed, and 'discovering' for the 100th time that there's nothing good on TV.

Luckily, being sick also means catching up on all those TV shows already on DVD that I've been meaning to watch.

Skins 

I just finished watching Season 1 of the British teen drama Skins and I must say, I was quite impressed. Sure, it features all of the characters found in your typical teen drama (the princess, the nerd, the popular one, the loyal sidekick, the party animal, etc) and all the familiar ingredients (love triangles, peer pressure, rebellion, self-esteem and body issues, etc), but with a lot more sex, drugs, and illegal activities to boot.

What I like about the show — and what makes it stand out from the typical teen drama — is its blunt British humour, its sometimes surreal sequences, how each episode focuses on one character, how every character has a dysfunctional family, and how the characters actually look like teenagers. Sometimes brilliant and sometimes bizarre, Skins is certainly entertaining.

All of the Skins videos on YouTube have had their embed functions disabled, so click to watch the Skins Season 1 trailer.

On to Season 2. Stay healthy my friends!

Reveling in Ravelstein / The World According to Hilary

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. 

Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." 

-Groucho Marx

Photo by moriza

One positive thing about commuting to work is that I get a good 10 hours of reading in every week on the subway alone. And burying my nose in a book helps distract me from just how close to my own face the nose of the person squished beside me is...

The endless possibilities of language never cease to amaze me — I'm constantly fascinated by words and their boundless combinations. And sometimes, while reading a novel, I find certain passages, sentences or even small phrases to be more memorable than the book as a whole. For instance, I recently read Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, and while it was quite the splendid piece of literature, for the first half of the novel I found myself reveling more in the book's sparse-yet-effective injections of humour than its philosophical musings. As evidence, here are two sentences from Ravelstein that made me chuckle like a crazy lady on the subway:

"He swore off contact lenses after he lost one in a spaghetti sauce he was cooking."

"You drank from your Coke bottle, and T.S. Eliot was watching -- with horror."

In other instances, I find myself predicting whether I will enjoy a novel or not merely by reading its opening line. Ok, that might seem akin to literally judging a book by its cover, but when I read the opening line of The World According to Garp, I just knew it was going to be a good read:

"Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theatre."

Talk about a hook.

Other times, I'm simply struck by creative imagery...:

"The woman at the mercado had dirty blond hair, like margarine full of crumbs." -Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry

 ...or humourously relatable passages...:

 "I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone." -Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

...or just plain old humour:

"Buying clothes is always tricky. But when there's loud music playing, it really throws your judgment. You look at stuff like, 'Hey, if there was a cool party and I was a cool guy, this might be a cool shirt.' 

You get it home, there's no music, there's no party, and you're not a cool guy.

You're the same chump, 75 bucks lighter." -Jerry Seinfeld, Seinlanguage

This post could go on forever, but you get the point.  

Savour language. It's damn tasty.

Muse-ic Mondays: Issue 15

Two buzz-generating music videos were released last week:

1. Young Artists for Haiti - Wavin' Flag
They'll call me freedom, just like a wavin' flag...



2. Lady Gaga ft. Beyoncé - Telephone 
I knew you'd take all my honey...



Thoughts?

Muse-ic Mondays: Issue 14

Today is International Women's Day, so let's raise a toast to all the intelligent, inspiring, inventive, funny, fearless, loving, loyal, beautiful women in our lives.

And let's not forget all the amazingly talented female musicians out there who continue to knock our socks off.

Cheers, ladies. Now crank up the volume!

Triumph of the Chill

It was a great Canadian weekend for obvious reasons. But in-between puck drops, I had the pleasure of viewing a 46-minute documentary on a perhaps lesser-known Canadian athlete of sorts: The Snowking.

Documenting the rise and production of the annual Snowking Winter Festival in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Triumph of the Chill follows Tony (the Snowking) and his loyal band of "sno-ldiers" as they build the festival's venue and pièce de résistance: a giant castle made entirely out of snow and ice.

Now in its 15th year, the Snowking Winter Festival is a month-long festival in March that features fireworks, art exhibitions, theatre performances, nighttime concerts, and a hockey tournament.

It's quite interesting to see how the massive castle is built and the film's Rick Mercer/Fubar-esque humour is nicely balanced with great sequences of the Snowking crew hard at work. But the icing on the...erm, 'ice' is the film's soundtrack: featuring local Northwest Territories musicians, tracks range from folk tunes to hip hop rhymes ("home of the ice road truckers/40 below lovers"). Even the Snowking himself sings a little ditty.

I only got my paws on Triumph of the Chill because one of my sisters lives in Yellowknife and she mailed out a copy, but who knows where the flick will end up in a few years. Great film -- I wish it much success.

Although it doesn't do the film justice, here's the trailer for Triumph of the Chill [I'm assuming it was originally titled Stay Cool]:

Stay cool, Canada.