The Line Up Saves My Night From Nicolas Cage

The Line Up is that tiny restaurant on the peninsula of property where Albert Street and Arthur Street meet at Bannatyne.  Right beside Cinematheque.  Anyways I went there after a late Friday evening at school.  I had just finished my Blog about how I was going to break free from the shackles of CreComm and start to enjoy the culture offered by the historical Exchange District.  OK so maybe The Line Up doesn't quite justify 'National Historic Site' status (yet) but what can I say, I was motivated and hungry after my ranting.
 
I met a friend who works in the area and we decided to partake in The Line Up's great offer of Dinner and a Movie.  The deal is you pay $11 for an entree, a regular drink and admission to movie at Cinematheque, Towne 8, The Globe, or even IMAX.  YOU CAN NOT BEAT THAT!

But I am getting a little carried away.  Why am I singing the praises of this Exchange District mainstay?  This is not purely a plug for the 'little diner that could.'  There is a point but you need some more back story.  You see after enjoying a delicious dinner my friend and I walked over to Towne 8 where we had our pick of only a couple of BAD movies: Little Fockers and The Season of the Witch.  (Next time I get the Dinner & a Movie deal I will check what's playing first.)  We checked the online reviews to which were not very flattering.  Daily Nexus compared Nicolas Cage's Season of the Witch to Monty Python and the Holy Grail... "but without any jokes and worse special effects."  But as true Winnipeggers we did not want to waste our free movie ticket.  So we chose bad action (Witch) over bad comedy (Fockers).  In hindsight we regretted our decision.  Season of the Witch was complete crap.  We should have gone to the King's Head for some live music instead.

Now back to The Line Up.  After the credits rolled we were walking out, trying to forgive ourselves for sitting through such crap, when I suddenly realized that I had left my school bag at The Line Up. My bag contained my lap top and memory stick with all of the year's assignments.  So needless to say I was a little worried. 

We rushed back to the restaurant but it was closed. So I called and left a message and even emailed their website. The following morning, after a sleepless night of imagining the worst, I got on the bus and headed back to the Exchange (a very depressing bus ride on a Saturday morning: "This is supposed to be my day off!").  When I got there I spoke with a cashier.  My bag was safely stored behind the counter.  When I got it back I thanked her profusely and quickly checked it.  Everything was there.  Phew!

So thank you to the Line Up's trustworthy staff and clientele.  You have restored my faith in mankind, which was very shaky indeed after realizing that many millions of people can suffer at the hands of just one man. See: Nicolas Cage's film career.

By the way here is a little excerpt from Monty Python's Holy Grail.  Funny, and amazing special effects! Cage could learn a thing or two from these guys.

Soupy out.





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Culture Right Under My Nose

Cre8ery Gallery is right across the William Avenue from the Red River College's Princess Street Campus.  In fact I can see it right now as I sit in the computer lab writing this blog.  The brown brick building typical of Exchange district architecture used to be a factory and was converted into a gallery by the Cre8ery co-owners Jordan Miller and Shawn Berard in 2006/2007.  The art supplies store on the main floor faces the William street exit of the our lovely building.  Maybe you have noticed it.  Owner Shawn Berard says that a lot of the Graphic Design students take advantage of their 40% off nights on the first Friday of every month.  The gallery entrance is just around the corner on Adelaide. 

I visited the gallery as part of a Projector story I was doing on First Fridays in Winnipeg's Exchange.  (In case you did not know First Fridays are A free year-round once-a-month event in the Exchange District & its' borders when Artists & Galleries -along with cafés and small businesses- open their doors to the public every first friday of each month from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m ...and later.)  And the thing that stuck me about Cre8ery was how close it is to our campus and the fact that I had no idea it was there.   There are a lot of great little restaurants and shops and galleries in the Exchange, or so I hear, but they can be very hard to find if you don't know where to look. That is part of the charm of this little part of Winnipeg... I guess. 

I remember during my first week of CreComm walking around the Exchange telling myself that this is where I will be spending the next two years of my life.  And I was glad.  It is a great part of town.  The old buildings inspire creativity and romantic notions.  I imagined myself finding all the little 'hole in the wall' shops and restaurants.  Saw myself checking out underground bands and alternative art shows.  I would be immersed in the culture of the Exchange.

Five months later and I am no more immersed in the culture of the Exchange than I was in September.  Sadly when I do venture from the sanctity of this womb of recycled brick and steel that we call the Exchange District Campus I am either running to get to class, running to catch a bus or running to get a drink at the King's Head.  (And I went to the King's Head plenty before I went to school here so I can't even include that under the "broadening my horizons" category.) 

Don't let yourself get blinded to the beauty that surrounds us here in the Exchange.  Venture out of the building on lunch hour some times.  Find a new coffee shop or cafe that you have not tried yet.  And hey if you need some artistic inspiration I encourage you to check out Art-i-peg at Cre8ery.  It is literally less than a one minute walk from the William St. RRC doors.  There is some great Winnipeg inspired art being displayed there.  The last day is Wednesday the 18th.  Catch it before it is too late. 

It is truly scary how school work can envelope your existence.  I for one have had the CreComm blinders on for too long!  No more!  I will tear them off and see again for the first time.  I will soak in the uniqueness of these historical surroundings.  I will wrap myself in the banners of art and entertainment that decorate this district.  I will live, damn it!  I will live!

Soupy out

Blogging After the Holiday Hangover

If you are like me you probably spent too much time partying with your friends and eating with your family this holiday season (and of course spending quality time with all of them).  After three and a half months of overworking my brain in my first term of Creative Communications, I effectively turned my grey-matter-muscle off for the three week break.  However, my guzzling, gulping and gorging muscles were in marathon mode.  It was a great holiday.  That was well deserved.  Or so I keep telling myself, but failing to convince my guilty conscience.  I had so much down-time.  Surely I could have got a head start on my IPP proposal.  Or prepped my communications portfolio for the summer job hunt.  Or researched the local magazine market in order to find a niche for my term 2 project.  I didn't even blog (I was going to blog about the Weakerthans show I went to but somehow it never got done...amazing show by the way).

Even now as I type this, the Blogger website feels unfamiliar.   And I feel guilty.  It looks up at me like a sad puppy after I have left it alone in the house for too long.  I try to convince it that I am not a horrible master: "Souppppyy.  Come here. Come here.  Well I know I was gone for a while, little buddy.  But I'm back.  Did you think that I was gone for good?  No I would never leave you."  

So in order to get back in good favour with this little guy I decided to take him for a little walk around the blog.  And just a hundred words in he is looking up at me lovingly again, having forgotten about being abandoned for three weeks. "Good boy."

Soupy out.

The Watchmen Rock the Pyramid

Winnipeg's own The Watchmen played Friday and Saturday night at the Pyramid.  I went to Saturday's show and my ears are still ringing.  They definitely had it cranked up to eleven. 

The show was sold out, and was attended by long-time fans of the band, like my friends and I.  Watchmen were a staple on the stereo at our high school parties.  Best known for their energetic live shows, we saw them play numerous times throughout high school and university.  They broke up in 2003 but have come together for various tours since.  And their fans are always hungry for a good show.  This was the first time I have seen them since at least 2003 so it was definitely a nostalgic experience.

Despite not playing together as frequently as in their heyday, the band was tight.  They played classic songs such as All Uncovered, Boneyard Tree, Any Day Now and Stereo.  Lead singer Danny Greaves was in top form.  His vocals throughout the show were dead-on.  As usual, at one point in the show the other band members left the stage and Danny sang a song without any instrumental accompaniment.  This time around he sang a heart felt version of Tom Waits's (Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night.  Outstanding. 

Soupy out

David Sedaris: Dirty Jokes, Animals and Old Ladies

David Sedaris has themes for each of his book tours.  On his latest tour the theme is jokes.  He asks everyone that comes up to get a book signed if they have a joke to tell him.  During the reading at McNally Robinson Booksellers on Monday November 22, he shared some of his favourites with the eager fans.  Most of the jokes were very dirty, but hilarious.  For example one involved Monica Lewinski, Lorena Bobbit and a flasher. 

As you can imagine an evening with Sedars at McNally Robinson is not a like typical book readings.  Neither is his book.  He is famous for his books of stories about himself. But his latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is his first book of complete fiction.  It is made up of fables about animals going through situations that many of us can relate to.  Sedaris promised the audience that this publication does not mean the end of his very popular books of personal essays.

Sedaris has published eight collections of his sometimes funny, sometimes heartfelt, always unique stories. He is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, and you can also hear him reading his stories aloud on This American Life on Public Radio International.

Sedaris spent about half of his 80 minutes at McNally Robinson reading stories from this latest book.    He spent he other forty minutes reading journal entries; interesting tidbits about things that happened to him on his book tour.  This is how Sedaris tests his material for other stories.  He says that he often goes back to his hotel room after a reading and edits his work based on the reaction of the audience that night.  No doubt some of the anecdotes that he read aloud will make it into one of his future collections of stories.

His journal entry readings consisted of stories of embarrassment: at a hotel pool realizing too late that he had put his swim suit on inside out; the weirdest things he heard from people during book signings: a woman who had been served another woman’s breast milk in a plastic wineglass at a yard sale; and as I mentioned before, his favourite filthy jokes. 

One of the funniest journal entries involved him noticing “a cute little old lady” pushing a walker in a parking lot and getting into her car.  Then he noticed her bumper sticker which read: Marriage = 1 man + 1 woman.  Sedaris, who has lived with his partner, Hugh for over 10 years, had a sudden and drastic attitude shift: “As I watched the old hag struggle with the door handle I thought:  people that get to use handicap spots should not be able to hold political opinions.  You have the best parking spot, so just shut the F#%K up.”

At the end of his reading Sedaris generously promised to stay at McNally until the last book was signed.  Which was very nice considering the size of the crowd.  There were between 150 to 200 fans there.  I did not intend on waiting in line for over an hour just to tell him my favourite dirty joke.  A priest, a rabbi and an orangutan walk into a bar…

Soupy out

Talking with Michael Van Rooy

Award winning Winnipeg author, Michael Van Rooy was signing books at McNally Robinson on Saturday when I spoke with him.  An Ordinary Decent Criminal, the first book in his Monty Haaviko crime series, won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book by a Manitoba Author in 2006.  Van Rooy was also awarded the John Hirsh Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer in 2009.

Van Rooy was very friendly and helpful. He is the Literary Arts Ambassador for the Winnipeg Cultural Capital of Canada 2010.  He offered to send me a copy of An Imagined City: A Literary History of Winnipeg, as part of the Arts For All project: It’s About The Stories…It’s Always About the Stories!  

After he signed my fresh-off-the-shelf copy of An Ordinary Decent Criminal we chatted for a while. Some background info and some of the topics we discussed are below: 

His education: Van Rooy was born in B.C. but raised in Winnipeg.  He graduated from Sisler High School, studied history at the U of M, and more recently English at U of W.  Van Rooy received his criminal education during a stint in Stony Mountain Penitentiary and Rockwood Institution for armed robbery in his early twenties.  In a Winnipeg Free Press interview Van Rooy said, "I didn't do it.  I was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

CreComm: When I told him that I am a CreComm student he explained that his mother was a CreComm instructor for twenty years. As a teenager he helped her mark papers.

A recommendation for aspiring writers: Get business cards printed calling yourself a Writer, “They are really useful.”  Van Rooy said, whether you are published or not “you are a writer."

On making time for writing: "You need to develop a pattern, a rhythm.  Whatever works for you.” Van Rooy said David Bergen used to go to work an hour early every morning and would “write in his car in the parking lot of Tech Voc." He suggested getting up an hour early each day and trying to write a page. Just 330 words. "By the end of the year you will have a novel."

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Recommended reading for writers: A book on screen writing by Robert McKee called Story, and Aristotle's Poetics.

Thanks Michael.

Soupy Out

New Yorker Story Review: The Tree Line, Kansas, 1934

TheTree Line, Kansas, 1934 could be the location heading in a report.  And in fact the story is narrated by Lee, a retired FBI agent who has probably written hundreds of reports for the Bureau over his long career.   Lee is sitting around at his house on a lake “tweezing apart past scenarios that had ended up with (him) alive and others dead.” He is specifically looking back on a 5 day stake out in Kansas.  It was during the time when the FBI was making a name for itself catching criminals like Pretty Boy Floyd and Dillinger.  Even in 1934, Lee is a “hard-bitten” veteran of the FBI.  He and his inexperienced, know-it-all partner, Barnes, are waiting in the tree line on a farm.  The farm is the known hideout for Carson, a dangerous bank robber.  Barnes thinks they are wasting their time hanging out at place that Carson knows they know about.  And he tells Lee at every opportunity.  Lee, a man of few words does not scold him or tell him to shut up, although in hindsight he wishes he had.  He may have saved his life. 

The main body of the essay is structured like a report.  Lee numbers off the reasons why he should have known that day was going to go horribly wrong.  How his gut was trying to warn him.  Some of the reasons include everything from the movement of the sun, the look of the road, his partners impatient outbursts, and the wind: “Any experienced lawman knew that the wind rising like that had to mean something.”  And sure enough his gut is right.

But this story is not about the arrival of Carson at the farm, in fact, disappointingly, the shoot out with Carson and his thugs is only mentioned in the last line of the story.   This story is about perception.  Lee reflects on the perception of time after a long stake out: “surveillance compressed time, tightening it in—days of inaction punctuated only by occasional shit breaks, piss breaks, smoke breaks and drink breaks, food breaks and stretch breaks interrupted only by small, inconsequential peripheral actions observed.”  This “compressed” perception of time during long periods of doing nothing, can affect you.  Your body and mind can fail you when they are suddenly called into action.

 This story is also about our perception of events that occurred long ago and how time can skew those events.  Did Lee really have a gut feeling that told him there was going to be trouble that day?  Or, looking back, has he just imagined this gut feeling where there was actually nothing but boredom?  Was this imagined gut feeling a product of his guilt for inaction in a time of crisis?  For an experienced law man like himself that sort of failure must be hard to live with.  So he takes the tiniest of details from his five days at the farm and compiles them into a “gut feeling” that he failed to act on.  Perhaps, in a law man’s mind, having a gut feeling that you were slow to act on is better than having no inkling of trouble at all.

The best part of this story was how well the author, David Means, got inside the head of a retired FBI agent.  The kinds of experiences and details that the author put into the story made me believe that Means had been a law enforcement officer.  At the very least he has done significant research into the history of law enforcement in the US.

I also appreciated how Means crafted his story about the details of a stake out that don’t make it into the genre novels or Hollywood movies about this time in American history.  A normal story about this event would include some details about the stake out, but just as a way to build anticipation for the climax: the violent shoot out.  Means does the opposite.  He builds the entire story around the monotonous details of a five day stake out, and excludes the action at the end.  It is a unique yet somewhat anticlimactic take on the 1930’s crime story.

Below is a shootout from a movie about Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd from the 70's, in case you, like me, were craving some pure old fashioned unadulterated action after reading David Means short story.

Soupy out.