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June 26^th was our travel day. We woke up at the ungodly hour of 0400 to make it to the parking lot, take the shuttle, and get to AUS in time for our 0655 departure. If anything made us feel better, it was the assurance that Vancouver was the best:

That, and that the Thievery Corporation’s presence provided a mental wave of jet-set cool to the bag check routine.

The flight was divided into two legs: Austin to Denver, and then on to YVR. The layover was just enough to stretch our legs and get a McPuck breakfast.

Arrival at Vancouver was overcast and cool, about 62 at our 1100 arrival time. There was a light sprinkle of rain as we came in from the sea towards the city.

After marshaling our luggage we grabbed a taxi and headed into town. The path reminded me of the city of Bondi Junction in Australia: many smaller houses ( of the west San Francisco variety: Glen Park, West Portal ) and the occasional group of stately manses. Upon arrival to our residence, Pendrell Suites, we were greeted by the manager’s mum who bade us enter amid some re-decoration work that was going on on the ground floor. We were shown to the suite at the very top.

Steel skies like this not seen since San Francisco, or Amsterdam

I thought that perhaps we had been given the wrong room as I had requested a ground-floor, smaller space for just the two of us. Upon entering the spacious, top-floor suite I had the nagging feeling that we would be told “Oh, sorry, wrong room.” When the manager, Boyd, arrived he assured us that all ways well and they’d chosen to upgrade us due to the decoration work and any potential noise. We totally lucked out, as you can see from the pictures.

Boyd is an friendly fellow who pointed out the features of the suite and told us about the numerous filmings that had happened in our unit and on the facility’s grounds. Apparently our kitchen was the one used to resemble Aalyiah’s Oakland apartment in “Romeo Must Die”.

I See Hollywood People

He also took time to annotate our map with restaurants, points of interest and suggested routes. We changed into walking clothes and asked the decorator downstairs if he could recommend a bite. He did and we took him up on it. He recommended a Bulgarian café on Denman street, just a few blocks to the northwest.

Still feeling our early arrival time, we set out on a path that took us northwest to the busy Denman. Denman reminds me a bit of Lombard street through the Marina district of San Francisco: many motorists waiting to get through a barrage of stoplights to get onto the street that takes them to the bridge into North Vancouver ( The Twin Lions Bridge ). The café was quaint and narrow and we ordered  two quiche-like things. With something in our stomaches we continued northeast on Denman towards Robson Street which is the fancy shopping district.

We wound our way down Robson until we reached its border with the Yaletown district and decided to turn home, for we were still truly quite tired. By the time we got back we shuffled our way upstairs for a nap.

Now, the reason we had come to Vancouver, was to attend the reception for my former roommate and his new wife, Patrick and Linda, in their hometown. Their wedding had occurred in San Francisco, and they had their child shortly thereafter. As such, they hadn’t had a time to be received in their hometown and this was that occasion. Patrick asked us to come to dinner with him and several others who happened to be in town.

Ready to go!

After our nap we cleaned up and headed over to Section 3 in Yaletown where we all had a fine dinner of appetizers, martinis, and pasta. Afterwards Linda and Patrick gave us a ride back to our suite where Lauren and I took the opportunity to get some much-needed rest. Day 2 would be quite active for us.

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When I started¹ college I was monolingual ( if you don’t count public-school Spanish ). By graduation I was exceedingly comfortable with Dutch and French². These studies, along the way, showed me the wider possibilities of the expression in my native tongue and, as such, I feel as though I lost the sense of the original linguistic constraints of my class, culture, and region. In some ways, it made it harder for me to speak my native tongue.

Allow me to explain.

You see, the first language I really mastered was a Germanic one that maintains some legacy structures which are permissible in modern English, but which are either anachronistic, or, at the very least, unusual, to the modern ear. I’m not sure how second ( and third, or fourth ) language acquisition remaps synaptic paths, but things that didn’t pass my “acceptable English” filter before Dutch did pass after.

A simple starting example:

English:

I think that the apple is red

Dutch:

Ik denk dat de appel rood is.

In Dutch, and other Germanic languages, after a relative pronoun ( “that / dat” ) one has the permission to stack all the verbs at the end of the clause³. Thus, a literal English translation would be:

English:

I think that the apple red is

Now here’s the thing, this utterance is not wrong, rather it’s merely quirky, odd, but legitimately comprehensible⁴.

Now to a more complex example. One idea that became legitimate for me post–1998 was that both “to be” and “to have” were legitimate auxiliary verbs for making the past-perfect.

That is, in traditional English I would say:

I have come to Amsterdam to view Golden-Age paintings.

But in Dutch the helping word is from a form of “to be” (“zijn”) not “to have” (“hebben”) and thus is the translation of “I am” or “ben”, not “heb”. Thus:

Ik ben naar Amsterdam gekomen om Gouden-eeuwse schilderijn te zien.

That is:

I am come to Amsterdam in order to see Golden-Age paintings.

Having been interested in the history of the Manhattan Project since 4^th grade, I certainly knew J. Robert Oppenheimer’s alleged translation of the Bhagavad-Gita:

Behold, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds

Or, having a traditional Christian upbringing:

Joy to the world the lord is come.

“Ah-hah”, thought I, “it appears that somewhere the use of ‘to have’ overtook ‘to be’ as the auxiliary term for verbs.” Dutch, which shares an approximate common ancestor with English around the time of Chaucer, seems to have preserved something we English-speakers have removed.

But in 1999-2000 I also studied French, and the past perfect ( or passé composé ) also uses a form of “to have” (être) or “to be” (avior) to indicate something that happened, and completed ( i.e. perfected ) in the past.

I came to Paris to visit Shakespeare’s bookstore.

French:

Je suis venu à Paris pour visiter la librarie «Shakespeare’s».

Literal English:

I am come to Paris to visit the bookstore, Shakespeare’s.

Hm, so here we are with French, the other influential parent in English’s family tree, asserting that forms of “to be” are legitimate helping verbs.

Now, what can we note among the French and Dutch verbs that use “to be” as the helping verb?

French: To fall, to come, to go, to leave, to return…

Dutch: To be, to become, to burst, to be startled…

Answer: These words seem to have a tendency to be intransitive; that is, they cannot take a direct object. Surely there are exceptions, but this seemed like a good hunch to base my research on.

Via Grammar Girl⁵ I found this citation by The Mavens.

This legitimate, but now archaic usage is known as: the “resultative form.”

As stated at The Mavens:

An Historical Syntax of the English Language says that the change from the type “he is arrived” to “he has arrived” may have been partly due to the identical pronunciation of is and has, reflected in the contracted spelling ‘s, found even in Shakespeare’s time: “I’m glad he’s come” (The Taming of the Shrew).⁶

Learning these languages, and most definitely Latin which influenced scholarly writing in both linguistic communities, has made me love the subjunctive and given me the tendency to pepper my expression with seeming anachronisms, but it’s really just that my English syntax filter was made a bit more malleable than is usual.

Knowing where English can be bent to allow these subtle and fine archaic constructs occasionally makes my expression a bit sharper to the ear and, given that these constructs are so heavily used in the legal and religious communities, can quickly whip the ear of a listener to attention without the listener even knowing it⁷.

I feel that learning the languages of others gave me new tools for understanding the mental constructs that frame the realities of those speakers. Experiencing this is an epiphany of the liberal arts education and is as fundamentally mind-blowing as a hallucinogen.⁸

Footnotes

1: 1995

2: My mastery of both Dutch and French have suffered from disuse and Latin muddling their compartments.

3: There are some variations for prepositional phrases, but let’s keep the matter simple.

4. Yoda’s syntax, for example, should illustrate the point. Further discussed in another Grammar Girl episode.

5. Fogarty. unaccusative-verbs. 2006. Grammar Girl. http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/unaccusative-verbs.aspx (accessed July 1, 2008).

6. Carol. be+intransitive. 2001. The Maven’s Word of the Day. http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20010912 (accessed July 1, 2008).

7. Shades of Snow Crash

8. I believe this may be, in part, what’s working in Joyce’s “Ulysses”—he’s trying to blow your mind with words, not mescaline.

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It’s a familiar way of structuring an idea on the internet, especially as presented in blogs:

The world seems to have some condition

Now, portion the first are pro-SKUB, but portion the second people are anti-SKUB.

pro-SKUB arguments are lain anti-SKUB arguments are lain

Now a commenter comes along and, being a fair-minded type, can only come to the conclusion that surely some Hegellian synthesis of the two camps is sensible.

He begins typing this out and then thinks: “By Odin’s Raven, this is clearly the most banal thing I’ve ever written: everyone knows that pro-SKUB is sensible in some ways and anti-SKUB carries the day in others”.

And then you just hit the cancel button.

Posted in Culture, Technology and Computers | 1 Comment »

“Beautiful British Columbia”, that’s what it says, right there, on every license plate in the city. To match a boast like that, you had better back it up, to wit:

Texas: We make sure everyone’s textbooks teach nonsense, or
Texas: More food involving puddles of cheese than Switzerland, or
Texas: Still debating merits of annexation

But BC delivers, it is simply like someone thought of the best parts of natural vistas, cut them out of magzines, pasted them together, and in some sort of Anthony Michael Hall bit of hilarity, made the dream reality.

In this vista Lauren and I had a bit of a vacation and we fêted the marriage of my former room-mate and the subsequent birth of his daughter.

Pictures coming soon, but for now the funk of flying west to east all day long must be slept off.

Posted in Personal, Travelogue | 2 Comments »

I feel sorry for the Lesbians.

Imagine, if you will, for a moment that you are a resident of the isle where that finest of Greek poets, Sappho, practiced her craft. While hailing from a tiny island, you have much history of which to be proud: written of by Thucydides, home to no lesser intellects than Aristotle and Epicurus, etc. The Lesbian has a rich classical heritage to be proud of and a vibrant beach-culture in the here-and-now.

But when searchers of the internet go to discover more about your home what do they get? Well.

…And more of it than you can shake a stick at!

The Lesbians, while having profited handily on lesbian tourism lo these many years, recently undertook to have their name moved out of the realm of the public domain via EU complaint ( toothpaste back into the tube, my good Lesbians ).

Recently, I wanted to research the name used by Iove for Venus in the Æneid, “Cytherea” ( kith-uh-RAY-uh ). It’s so named for the island “Cytherea’ which was sacred to the goddess of love and mother of Æneas. It is also the nom d’ecran of a certain adult actress.

Search with SafeSearch ON.

Fortunately I see no burgeoning career for a “Hestia d’Eros” or “Hephasteus Smith” so, for the moment, those searches are safe.

Posted in Culture, Modern Times | No Comments »

Was a time that I ate out every night, or I ate spaghetti.

It’s called living in San Francisco, kids.

It’s been really hard for me to break this habit because, well, I love fajitas, enchiladas, burgers, sandwiches, salads, hot and sour soup, it’s all so tasty…but costly, fattening, and a host of other bad things. Lauren has helped put me on a bit more of a sensible regimen on this front.

Last night, in efforts to advance domestic bliss and sensible dining I made:

Apricot Pork Chops

They were quite good and I bought all of the ingredients for $21.00, far less than dinner for two.

Plus I have a ready reserve of apricot Smuckers, you never know when you’ll need that.

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While I lauded “Control” in the previous post, we also caught “Get Smart” and “Baghead”.

June, in the run up to the 4th of July hot zone of movies, seems to go through a doldrums just as the air truly begins to stultify. Left few other choices, we saw “Get Smart”. It wasn’t especially bad, but it wasn’t especially good either. I had the same feeling I had when I caught “Evan, Almighty”.

I wanted Steve Carrell to do well, and I wanted it to be funny, it just, well, failed to deliver. Not even the cute Anne Hathaway in ( I am told ) Chanel could really keep me interested. Steve, my man, get you back to Apatow lest you be relegated to Shamalyan-dom.

In what shall serve as a wooden circus-tent stake through the heart of Indydom, the Duplass Brothers’ latest film “Baghead” was also seen, and was deemed to be just about the same as “Get Smart” ( take that, indie film hipster scum ).

It was one of those movies shot on the cheap that professes to be a send up of LA types by being an indie movie about LA types. At the end we’re supposed to feel smug and Sundance-y, but instead I thought it was needlessly self-obsessed, self-referential, and self-reverential. This proves yet once more that if you stick around long enough, you too will be the enemy you once raged against.

Here’s the plot. 4 people in LA leave self-congratulatory indie film festival and decide to make their own movie—for real, no fooling around. They go up to a cabin with a ton of booze ( always a great start for serrrious work ) and plenty of latent sexual tension. In the midst of writing a story about a murderous “man with a bag on his head” they are beset by, uhm, a murderous man with a bag on his head. Thanks to the IndyScope jostleCam and badMakeUpVision, we get motion sick as the adventure(?) plays exhaustingly out. At the end, guess what, LA people are rubes obsessed with their own promotion and will do anything to break out of the rank of anonymous extra-dom. I restrain myself from sighing.

Not biting satire, not particularly insightful, just kinda, boring, really. I’d rather watch other peoples’ vacation slides.

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Last night Lauren and I watched Anton Corbijn’s “Control”, the bio-pic about the late frontman from Joy Division, Ian Curtis.

Who knew that Maccleston also imported my site CSS file

You cannot explore the tangent to the late Glam Rock / punk / pre-goth fertile period of English music without coming across Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

With its rich synthesizers, Curtis’ unintelligible Doors-influenced baritone, and driving bass work, it marks a shift that would move to richer, more ambient, more experimental sounds in the New Wave.

The film is short beautifully, Corbijn’s eye for composition showing off his years of experience in still-shot photo journalism.

In “Control” we see the mundanity of northern England’s post-war culture. Jobs exchange, economic stagnation, row-houses and the stifling need of the war generation to re-impose the burgeois Englishness that made the world post disaster make sense again. In this the iconic pharos of Aladdin Sane-era Bowie and Lou Reed serve to give the idle, bored, expressive souls a way to dream of a diferent path for themselves.

Ian, as if acting out the rules from a Pulp song ( “…dance and drink and screw, ‘cause there’s nothing else to do” ), asks his sweetheart, Debbie, to marry him at the tender age of 19. Samantha Morton’s character agrees and Ian is tied to the wheel of expectation and convention — something that he assuredly was never really going to rest peacefully with. As Debbie tries to be a good wife ( cooking, making tea, cleaning, and naively assuring him of her unending love for him ), Joy Division, Ian’s band, inexplicably takes off and suddenly Ian is introduced to a much larger world ( encompassing, at the very least, London and the Western European continent ) and the exotic Annik Honoré.

As the upswing to superstardom begins to approach the exponential, Ian’s shyness takes hold. He didn’t mean for superstardom to be so demanding, to be so large, for there to be so many people. At the same time he begins to experience grand mal seizures which agonize, embarrass, and humiliate him. To combat these he takes an array of pills potent enough to tranquilize elephants which fail to check the seizures, which put him further out of sync with the rest of society, and which increase his sense of isolation.

It was at this point in the movie that I noticed an odd similarity between Curtis and Kurt Cobain who, at the height of the rocket ride, began to experience intense stomach pain and frustration with having become quite so famous.

The two both follow the same path from there on out.

In some ways I wonder if there aren’t people in this world whose cling to the mortal coil isn’t just a bit too light. Their souls are too light for their bodies, too scared by noise and the weight of social expectation. When prompted with the choice of becoming heavier, of binding into the body, they choose to fight its demand for their souls to settle firmly there.

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“Hancock” is Will Smith’s summer vehicle:

The notable attributes of Hancock are that he is:

• Homeless
• Surly
• Prone to intoxication

I thought this was a bit of a predictable gag, the Juno-fication of the myth of the superhero. Instead of doing the right thing ( or, freaking the-hell-out when teenage daughter is pregnant ), witticisms will abound and the surly pregnant-teen ( or, superhero ) will grow on you. The Jason Bateman factor seemed all but to ensure this.

But the other day I listened to the “In Our Time (Radio 4)” podcast with Melvyn Bragg on Kierkergaard and was reminded of the sheer terror and weight underlying the “Fear and Trembling” thesis and I thought: “How would you respond to the proposition if you were a superhero, that is, if you were objectively better than everyone else?

Coloring this thought is the masterful “Superman Scene” from the noir “Kill Bill II”.

As you know, I’m quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones about superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating.

Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well-drawn. But the mythology… The mythology is not only great, it’s unique.

Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there’s the superhero and there’s the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he’s Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone.

Superman didn’t become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red “S” - that’s the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears - the glasses, the business suit - that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us.

Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He’s weak… He’s unsure of himself… He’s a coward.

Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.

If you were objectively stronger, faster, smarter, and in Hancock’s case, “Fresher” than the entire population of this pathetic planet of small-minded monkeys, how could you act with anything but contempt?

What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. —Friederich Nietzche ( Kaufmann Transl. )

Just as Robinson Crusoe style adventurers come to accept the presence of the lesser creatures ( a helper-monkey, a parrot, etc. ), so the solitary superhero must accept the piddling company of sub-species companions against the deafening loneliness of being the last / the only / etc.

Wilson, a sub-species of companion

I should suppose the only rational emotions would be contempt for them and yourself, and as an emollient for the latter only copious amounts of booze would suffice.

I hope that this idea is explored in the movie.

Posted in Entertainment, Philosophy Proper | 1 Comment »

If ever I get to cast a “History of New Wave” music, I already have Michael Score to be portrayed by Macauly Culkin, but who to play Colin Moulding of XTC?

Answer: Jon Heder

Posted in Entertainment, Modern Times, Movies, Nostalgia | 1 Comment »