I was watching this long interview with David Cronenberg when I realized it’s been 6 years since his last film. 

Later, I found a 2016 Indiewire article which explains that Cronenberg was considering retirement due to the increasing difficulty in finding financing for his films.

I blame Disney.

It’s not as if there aren’t interesting, smaller films being made, but they do seem to be fewer and further between. At the very least you have to look harder to find them because all the air in the room keeps getting sucked up by a new Star War or more superhero shit.

There ought to be a cinema-carbon-offsetting program. Every time a studio pollutes culture with yet another tent-pole, blockbuster, theme-park attraction masquerading as cinema (shout out to Scorsese), they should be made to finance 10 sub-50 million dollar movies (Hell, or 50 sub-10 million!) and if it’s a sequel to one of the aforementioned pollutants? The offset should have to double.

Let’s get more films made from the “old masters”. The Cronenbergs and Lynchs of the world and lots of new and emerging filmmakers. Give us work from women, filmmakers of colour, LGBTQIA+ filmmakers, people making experimental films, foreign language films etc. 

When I am king.

Currently Playing: Desired – “Nineteen + Memory Tape”

Currently (Still) Reading: HEAVY WEATHER, Bruce Sterling

A previous version of this post ran with FAUCET spelled FAWCETT. Today I learned that the titular sink fixture was not in fact named after Farrah Fawcett. The More You Know…

Yesterday I fixed a leaky faucet in my bathroom. 

This is hardly one of the 12 labors of Hercules, but I’m generally not “handy”. At least, that’s what I always said as an excuse for not fixing things. The truth is I hate feeling STUPID and the thought of not being able to figure something out makes me feel stupid, so I think up reasons why I shouldn’t try in the first place. Clearly, this is not a virtue.

In keeping with the mild self-improvement kick I’ve been on, I decided to just shout “Damn the Torpedoes” and charge headlong into the mine-filled waters of ultra-basic home maintenance. The repair ended up being slightly more complicated than the YouTube video I watched promised. It seems, due to the assembly-line, cookie-cutteresque method of suburban construction nobody had bothered to plumb shut-off valves into the water lines under my bathroom sink. I eventually had to shut off the water to my entire house for an hour and a half while I extracted the worn cartridges then purchased and installed replacement cartridges into the sink, but 90 minutes later I had a fully functional sink again!

The sink fixed, I began prowling the house like a caged lion seeking out other broken shit to fix. I was mad with power! I was the smartest man alive! I fixed a drawer, the bottom hinge on my bedroom door and my shower!

The shower problem goes back a few years to when, afraid to feel stupid, I had someone else fix a leaky showerhead. Ever since that repair the shower would never heat up to a temperature much higher than “arctic tundra”. I endured this for several years, again because I didn’t want to take it apart and try to figure out how to fix it for fear of feeling stupid. Well, yesterday I took it apart and discovered there’s a pin that goes inside the shower handle that stops the knob from rotating too far and it had been inserted upside down. Two minute fix. I could have been having nice hot showers for the past 3 years if I hadn’t been afraid of feeling stupid. It turns out that the satisfaction I felt in solving these problems myself far exceeded the anxiety I felt when thinking about the possibility of failing and feeling stupid.

*Ron Howard Voice* Joey was getting life-lessons all over the place.

Currently Playing: TenDJiz – “De La Soulviet”

Currently Reading: HEAVY WEATHER, Bruce Sterling (GR)

It’s been about two months since I cancelled my subscription to Spotify. This leaves me without a streaming music subscription for the first time since May of 2014 when Google launched Play Music in Canada. 

Before streaming I bought a LOT of CDs. Basically all my disposable income from the time I first started having any went to buying music. I have several thousand of them. A few years ago The Bride convinced me to at least get rid of the jewel cases. Now the CDs sit in gigantic CD wallets we bought. I’m pretty sure they’re actually sitting in the same spot they were when we finished sleeving them all. I had long-since ripped every one of them into a gargantuan MP3 library which also went pretty much untouched after streaming music became a thing. 

Over the years I realized how much less connected to music I felt. For some reason having infinite music at my fingertips meant I would listen to the same few records over and over. It took me SIX YEARS to figure out this was stupid. I was paying a premium (of which almost ZERO was going to an artist) to not listen to as much music and care even less. So, in December I decided to pull the plug and switch back to mp3s, sourced mostly from Bandcamp.

In the two months since I did this I’ve discovered, listened to and cared about more music than I have in years. Feels good.

Currently Playing: Vantage – J-Funk City: Vantage’s Edits Collection

Currently Reading: ROSEANNA, Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö (GR)

I spent some time searching (so far in vain) for episodes of an old CBC (and later, TV Ontario) podcast called Search Engine. It was hosted by Jesse Brown who now runs his own network, CANADALAND. It was all about the internet and its effects on the culture and politics of the day. It ran from 2007-2012, first as a radio show, then as a CBC podcast and finally as a TVO podcast. I would LOVE to listen to it again.

Apparently 8 years ago is ~10,000 years in internet time. The pages the files were hosted at seem long-dead. This is very frustrating, but also makes me think how crazy it is that so much of everything is at our fingertips that when you encounter something you CAN’T find instantly? It is INFURIATING. I now find myself wondering if I shouldn’t make personal backups of all the various podcasts I like? It seems crazy, given how unlikely it is that I would want to listen to most of these things more than once. Yet, I wouldn’t have predicted I’d want to listen to Search Engine again but here we are! (Incidentally, if you know where I can find these episodes? Holla at ya boy).

There’s something in me that can’t stand the idea of something, no matter how stupid or obscure, being gone. Archiving all these bits and bobs of our digital culture feels just as vital and important to me as the work that goes into physical artifact archives and restoration. Someone needs to save our past and our present from our future.

This ties in with what I was thinking about yesterday about digital content. Whether it’s a library of ebooks, season of television or even a free podcast you streamed, when that company decides it can increase revenues that quarter by 1/8th of 1% by shutting down the server that file lived on? It’s gone. Hell, maybe the hobbyest who created that content eventually just stopped paying for that space and forgot about it when they moved on to a new enthusiasm. I want to protect that stuff. Future generations deserve, no, need to hear the terrible weekly comic-book review podcast I did in the mid-to-late-oughts, damn it!

All these… podcasts… will be lost in time. Like… tears… In rain.

Probably time to donate to the Internet Archive and go and buy some more hard drives.

Currently Playing: 2814 – 新しい日の誕生 (Birth of a New Day)

Currently Reading: HEAVY WEATHER, Bruce Sterling (GR)