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I look in the face of the doppelganger, who is death, and he
is me.
Like a retouched photo of myself: a face completely familiar, somehow
made strange. There are some superficial differences between us.
I taste no blood in my own mouth. No bruise swells under my eye.
I touch my face to be sure, feel only sweat. This creature is not
me; its pain is not my own.
Drome prowls through the basement, checking his line.
Too hot to sleep; too tired to think. The bait is gone from some
of the traps, taken without tripping the release. Showing off, he
thinks.
The mechanism of evolution is death. This much is clear.
As the organism evolves, the art of dying must be refined into subtler
forms. These rats are getting so damn smart, Drome figures, he could
sell them to the university for experiments. If he could catch them.
Let the biologists evolve the bastards, with induced cancers or a rodent
retrovirus. I've done all I can. If you can't tempt them with
cheese, offer them scholarships.
What would you say if I offered to strap you in a chair, clamp
your eyelids open and force you to watch commercials for an hour and a
half?
My own relationship with the media is diseased, and I would
be ashamed to describe it if not for the fact that I suspect I am hardly
unique.
Stock traders couldn't survive being unplugged from their information
feeds. Take away just their cellular phones and they'd flop around like
divers deprived of air.
Difference is the spice and the friction that keeps us warm
in this cold land. This is the stuff we are born from, and this is the
joy of living in Canada. The fact that I am unlike you, that we
will
disagree -- this is a prime feature of our common character, and no myth
of unity should be permitted to obscure its peculiar and obstinate beauty.
The Trade Forum is directed at a level of production involving
sums of money that are beyond reason. It excites and nauseates me. I feel
like a loyal Soviet citizen at the height of the Cold War taking a tour
of Western High Society. The Ninotchka factor is high. Decadence!
Decadence! Appalling lavish indulgence. At a certain economic level, moviemaking
becomes something like counterfeiting in reverse, a means by which great
wads of loot are made to vanish into nothing.
We've seen this tale before, I think, but the joyful savagery
in this comedy of corruption makes it a worthy reprise. Somebody wins,
but everybody's screwed, and it's a moral we need to hear from time to
time, an occasional antidote to the voodoo glamour of celebrity dreams
and fan magazines.
David Mamet is not a bulletproof playwright. Performed poorly,
his dialogue limps along like a slow, sick dog. I've seen Mamet plays where
the actors were embarrassed to have his words in their mouths, spitting
them out like a bad taste.
There's a point where comedy eases over the edge into cruelty,
and there's no laugh track here to keep you from feeling exposed.
Welcome to the dark side of the Fringe Festival: appalling amateur
theatre that could never get produced anywhere else.
The English have their fair share of mass-murderers, to be sure,
but none of them are quite so much fun as the Demon Barber of Fleet
Street.
No need to worry about Ward and June. They'll be ground zero
when the nuclear family finally explodes. There are bound to be other survivors,
though -- mutated, but recognizable -- the freak show tent at the family
circus.
These are not necessarily experiences you would want
to
have, but they certainly aren't ones you would care to give up if they
were already yours -- and for an hour, they are.
Written by Christopher Hampton, Treats is a three-body
problem. You know -- physics. When you have two bodies exerting gravitational
forces on each other their motion is predictable, but when a third body
is introduced the math becomes intractable, and there's no telling how
they will behave.
Only a few things happen in The God of Small Things. Those things
are terrible, on the small and human scale of things, but described with
beauty and a sensuous brutality. Key events reverberate forward and backward
in time, accumulating detail, wrapped in multiplying layers of description
and emotion.
Of course the architect is unique among artists also in having
his work periodically and deliberately demolished. This is something
we understand intuitively in Vancouver, where redevelopment notices are
plentiful as stop signs. And it seems appropriate to ask: is not
a love of destruction intrinsic to the profession of architecture?
Except for Microserfs, almost all of Coupland's work
has been written in the present tense. His characters operate in the tense
of television, where even in flashback events are always happening now,
in real time, as we watch. Laudatory dust-jacket quotes are drawn from
fashion rags - Cosmo, Elle, Details - at least as often as respectable
literary magazines. He flirts with the fashion vortex of absolute now,
where being out of date is ample cause for mockery and abuse.
The drug of choice varies: sex, alcohol, junk, violence -- whichever
best succeeds in imposing its own ruthless purpose on these random lives.
Human connection must be guarded against, a feeling so rare that its eruptions
become almost impossibly painful, like a frostbitten limb temporarily warmed
to life.
We are willing to recognize art in propaganda like
Triumph
of the Will, or Soviet Socialist Realism where content is externally
determined. Commercials could be called the flipside of Socialist Realism
-- capitalist propaganda.
Dunno what they feed those boys down in Texas. Human growth
hormone, I'm guessing, from the size of the bass player. Jumbo shrimp and
pituitary extract.
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