Shulgan.com

Christmas Grouch Resolves To Be Cheerful This Year

Oh my gosh, I don't have much time to write this, because it's CHRISTMAS, and I have to go shopping. Natalie is about two feet away from me right now, I'm working on a column and she's studying for exams, supposedly, except every two or three seconds she's turning her laptop toward me and going, ohhh, look at that, at some ever-cuter doll that may become a Christmas present for our daughter. The current favourite is Bamboletta, a series of limited-edition hand-crafted natural-wool dolls that are so progressive and exclusive that some Birkenstocked company rep actually visits your place, and audits the toys you already own, before they decide whether you're organic enough to buy one. Anything that isn't Plan Toys, and you're out of there.

No, but really, they release like 14 at a time at certain designated occasions and the web site says they usually sell out in "a few minutes."

"It's so cute," Natalie keeps saying, turning the laptop toward me to show me various pictures of the dolls. And then, to my grouchy look, she says, "It is!"

Natalie gets so excited around Christmas time, and I become an enormous grouch. It's not even the first of December, and it's already happened. I don't know what it is. No wait, I do know what it is. I know exactly what it is. I get stressed out. I got overwhelmed when it was just Natalie and I, and now we have two children and we have to blow their minds every year. The pressure!

But this year I am not going to let it get to me. This year, I have resolved to Natalie, I am not going to turn into my usual Christmas grouch. This year, I am going to enjoy Christmas. And the way I am going to do that, is, I am going to buy my Christmas gifts early, and I am not going to blow my brains out, cost-wise, and I am going to concentrate on gifts that mean things rather than crappy consumer crap.

Target Christmas shopping completion date: Two weeks from tomorrow. Dec. 14. And then once my shopping's done I will saunter through the holiday parties and open-houses, enjoying myself and my kids through the holiday season. The vow has been made. Here goes. Stay tuned.

Nobody With A Notepad

 

Saturday night I spent some time with my friend Derek Chistoff, who had a bit of a career setback last year and then turned it into an enormous win. It started when he  recorded an album called Let The Children Die that he was really excited about. It created some huge buzz. For example, the song "Nobody With A Notepad" won Derek and his producing partner Rob Bakker, the 2009 Echo Songwriting Prize. And then slam, the same song was at the centre of a $150,000 lawsuit because of an uncleared Lamont Dozier sample. Oops.

So Derek decided to give the entire album away, for free, online. You can download it here. And then he announced the staging of a funeral for the album — a one-night elegy that would see him perform the album live, track by track, with the backing of a 10-piece band. That's the event I attended on Saturday night.

It happened at the Horseshoe tavern. And it was amazing, and the reason it was amazing involves Chistoff's backstory. He's 30 now, but he first started making noise in rap about a decade ago. Flagged early as a talent to watch, the usual, except then cancer took his mom, and alcoholism took his dad, and Chistoff spent a lot of the last decade getting through those body blows and some other issues. We met when the National Post's Ben Kaplan brought us together for this piece about a nightclub, which was funny because neither Derek nor I drink. (You can get a better idea of Derek's backstory in Saturday's Toronto Star profile by Ben Rayner.)

Let The Children Die was supposed to be a key component of his comeback. "Nobody With A Notepad" and the song on the album that follows it, "Father," in particular exemplify the rare vulnerability Chistoff incorporates into his lyrics. The album explores the relationship between children and parents. In a way it's a love letter to his parents, but it's also about the legacy parents leave behind for their kids, and the way that legacy can weigh down a kid, and the way art represents a redemption from that weight—the way art represents a way for a person to create a new identity. He wouldn't let his tragedies keep him back. He wouldn't let his setbacks define him.

The sample controversy must have been a kick in the balls. Except Chistoff didn't mourn about it for long, as many of us might have. He just kept working. And working. And working. The guy just churns out the songs. He's a dynamo. He released the album, Jonestown, last year, and then another album, Vaudeville, earlier this year, and then this week he's releasing another album, "Jonestown 2," which includes this great single, "No More Words," which you can download here.

Highlights of Saturday's show: The blond back-up chanteusse recreating the sampled vocal on "Mr. Daydream." The bass-player stepping forward and recreating Charles Bukowski's voice on "High School Cool." Hell, all of it sounded great, but it wasn't just the way it sounded. What induced goosebumps was the way the event reflected the theme of the album. It was Chistoff's story distilled into a 90-minute bravura performance. Its' success was the illustration of his work ethic. I just sat there, watching him on stage, in control of the event and the audience, in control of his life and his career, and I thought, that's it, that's the secret. You just have to keep churning it out. Don't worry about how it's received. Don't worry about anything but the art. And keep creating. Keep churning it out. Nice one, Derek. Keep it up.

(Pic by Tyler Anderson for the National Post.)

Nostalgia for the Video Store

You know what? I miss video stores. And VCRs and DVDs and the experience of browsing the aisles of a shop as you select the evening's entertainment, and the excitement and anticipation that exists in a video store on a weekend evening. 

Friday is coffee morning at my kids' Montessori, and the parents all gather around for a few minutes after the drop-off to talk about whatever, and this morning's main topic was The Walking Dead, the AMC zombie show, and how good it is, and this mom I really like was talking about the original graphic novel series, and how good that was, and then her husband piped in about how there's an emotional hook to the series, it's not just zombies and violence, although zombies and violence are really cool. "It really starts to get going in the fourth episode," the mom said, which segued into the way AMC already has ordered season two.

On my way home, alone, I was all jazzed up to check out the series, and then I felt the strangest blast of nostalgia for... what? For the video store. And the era of the video store's heyday, when the really excellent entertainment was something you brought home from somewhere, or went out to experience, rather than just downloaded to your laptop or saved to your PVR. It also was nostalgia for an era when movies and TV series were something you discussed with other people, real live people, rather than something you "liked" on Facebook or rated on Amazon.

The conversation I had with the cool parents at my kids' Montessori was exactly the sort of conversation I used to have all the time at video stores, like Queen Video or Black Dog or the old Suspect, where the clerks have seen absoutely everything and are kind of superfans for the best of the stuff and spend lots of time trying to sell their customers on whatever they're digging that moment. It's been years since I'd qualify as a regular customer to any of those places, thanks to parenting, a bit, but also to the way life is now, to the new convenience of PVRs and iTunes and Netflix. Yeah, things are convenient, now, but I'm becoming aware of the sacrifices we're making for all this convenience. I kind of miss those old pain-in-the-ass video store trips, and the conversations I had during them.

The Counter at the Thompson Hotel

Sometimes when I’m feeling unproductive I find it helps if I change up my routine. Last night I hung up my clothes in the washroom, set my alarm for 5 a.m. and plugged the laptop in so that it would be fully charged the following morning. After 25 creepy pages of The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, I fell asleep around 11, and woke six hours later feeling like the last thing I wanted to do was get dressed and hop on a bike for the ten-minute ride through November chill.

I did it anyway. The me that rode through dark streets felt a little guilty, because in a way I was betraying my former haunt, the Lakeview. But a while back I slipped up and asked for the password to the wireless internet at the Lakeview, and since then my productivity there has fallen off. Facebook and Twitter are too tempting. The only time I can work is when the Internet isn’t an option.

My destination was the Thompson Hotel’s 24-hour diner, The Counter. There aren’t enough metal rings for bike locking around the Thompson, I noticed. I locked my bike to one of those yellow telephone pole wire sleeves, then headed into the diner. The Counter’s an enormous place, and at ten after five in the morning only two of the approximately 25 tables were occupied. The first thing I did when I opened my laptop was check the wireless networks. Only one open network here, the one for the Thompson Hotel, but they charge you $10 a pop for it. Which is great. No temptations. Fuelled by a bitter cup of coffee, I ploughed through the second draft of a feature for Today’s Parent that’s been plaguing me for days.

I liked the Thompson. It's a bit farther, and a bit more expensive than the Lakeview, by about $3, but I think I can justify the extra expense because of the absence of Internet. Funny, that — I'm paying $3 a day extra for the privilege of not having access to the Web.

And the place has a vibe to it. A diner at 5 a.m. is such a strange intersection of nocturnal adventurers and morning hustlers. The only other occupied table on my side of the diner hosted a formally dressed couple. They kept making out. When they got up to leave, around 6 a.m., the woman stumbled up to a section of the glass-walled entrance airlock and then stopped, confused. She couldn’t find the door handle. The guy came up behind her, gently grasped her arm and led her around to the other side of the enclosure, where the door actually was. There wasn’t any censure in his correction. Only kindness. I wondered whether they were at the start of something. If so, I wished them well.

My latest Superdad column is posted at Eye Weekly. Check it out here.

Raymi + The Dufferin Underpass

Went out last night with Raymi the Minx. We met at the Beaver, and after some club sodas (me) and some wine (her), we went for a walk under the Dufferin underpass, which I'm basically in love with. Open only since Nov. 18, the urban development project already is changing Parkdale and Dundas West, both psychically and geographically. It integrates two of Toronto's most interesting areas, and I think the result will benefit both sides of the railway tracks. Two components of hipster Toronto have combined to form a critical mass. It's the biggest thing to happen to the area since the founding of the Drake Hotel.

After our little Dufferin underpass moment, I walked Raymi back to her place in Parkdale, and as I said goodbye I encouraged her to work on this book she has cooking. "Just get it done!" I think I said. But I wonder now whether I even should have brought it up. I really do think she's an under-recognized national treasure. She recently celebrated her 10-year anniversary, and her achievement over this last decade is ridiculous. No one comes close to her productivity, nor does anyone match the consistency of her excellence. As an art form, she has explored blogging's artistic limits. And she's still at it!

Raymi so reminds me of Dave Sim, another under-recognized national treasure who defined and explored the limits of his medium over a startlingly long period. Sim actually would have been a great person to interview Raymi, to mark her decade in business. One of the big newspapers should set that up -- an interview between the two of them, and then publish that as a retrospective for the year. Hey, Ben Errett! Get on that!

Anyway, I don't think I should have mentioned her book because I know she's been having a tough time, working on it. Our impulsive culture of the constant status update, in which she participates, reflects and defines, isn't set up for the sort of solitary, steady-as-she-goes consistent labour that eventually produces a book. Raymi has an incredible drive to create, but she is geared to a production cycle measured in hours rather than years. And she's amazing at it. So why bring up the book? Why make her feel bad about that, when perhaps what I should have been doing was celebrating her previous decade's remarkable achievements?

Raymi and a few other factors have inspired me to think more seriously about this blog—as an art form, and the role the blog plays in my life. My sister, my cousin and my wife all have suggested that I create shorter posts — they say my last entry was funny but overlong, and I tend to agree. So resolved: Create shorter posts more frequently. And do them more quickly. No more drafting and redrafting, no more working on posts for hours. Fly through the day's post in a half-hour, max, and then move on. And it's done. Done! Great. Awesome. OK, Shulgan, end here. No here. OK: Here!

Regarding These Terrible Photos of Me

Lately, I have been obsessing about photos of me that are online, in which I look terrible. Absolutely dreadful. So bad, in fact, that I am kind of mystified how I could look that bad. Really. It's kind of fascinating. Does this happen to other people? Perhaps, although perhaps they don't obsess about it like I do. Seriously, sometimes I go to these pictures and I examine them—no, I study them, and they're captivating in the same way one is fascinated by a photograph of a medical oddity, some blurry black-and-white image of a dude with seven fingers. Shulgan: Really? Is that really you? Wow, dude. That is a bad picture.

Before we get to the horrible pictures of myself I want to point out that I don't always look terrible. The above photograph is evidence of that. I like my smile. Sure, the hair needs some work, but I always feel like my hair needs some work. And I like the way my eyes look. I think I have nice eyes. So OK -- I am hoping that's the way I look most times. Hoping, but not quite sure about that, because of these really terrible photos of myself that have recently been posted on the Internet. For example, prepare yourself for this:

That's kind of like, wow. What is happening here? I am in this picture and I have no idea. The woman next to me is Rebecca Eckler, and she appears to be studying her napkin, as though she's just used it to squash some fascinating bug. And then there is me, leaning forward with an expression on my face explainable only if someone used a medieval battle axe to stab me square in the bum. 

I look at this photo, and I wonder: Do I really look like that? Like, do I walk around with that expression on my face? And if I do, why doesn't someone tell me, and get me to stop? Even if it was a complete stranger, if I saw someone walking around with that expression on his face, I would flag him down, and I would slap him, and I would tell him never to wear that expression again. 

The person who took this picture is Chantel Simmons. Who went and posted the above picture on Facebook. (If you and I are friends then I think you can see the pic if you click here.) She must really hate me, if she posted that picture. Right? That's the only explanation. But she actually doesn't, in fact we sort of have this mutual-author-crush thing going on, which is when you don't know someone all that well in the real world but you feel like you do because you really like their writing. Her blog is really funny, and she likes my book, but then there's this picture. I don't know how to explain it.

OK, enough on that. Next is a photo that actually surpasses the above in awfulness. Are you ready? Brace yourself. Here we go:

Gah! Oh my god! It's TERRIBLE!!! Fuck! Holy crap! Shit! I don't know who took this photo, which is lucky for the person who took it, because if I did know who took it I would stalk that person and then kick in the general direction of the shin. Hard.

This one is a different kind of bad than the one above. It's not like the expression the photo captures is all that bad. It's just, in the pic, I look like a twat. If I saw that guy on the street, I would hate him. What a pretentious dork. Except that's me. God! For one, my eyes, usually my best feature, look like they belong to some tiny rodent, perhaps a mole. Then there is my chin. Does the skin under my chin always angle down like that? And when's the last time I washed my hair?

The photo is from a recent Open Book Toronto salon, and before I left the house I presented myself to my wife and I asked her how I looked and she told me I looked fine. (What on earth was she THINKING?) "Should I put in my contacts?" I asked her, and she said, naw, that my glasses made me look like a writer, which is appropriate, you know, because I happen to be a writer. But based on the above picture, and the way my eyes look through my glasses, I pledge never again to leave the house in glasses. And also to wash my hair more frequently. And also to get a haircut. But actually, maybe none of those things will cure things, perhaps actually the only thing that could cure what ails me is something more drastic. Like decapitation.

Now, the final image, which is something different again:

The first time I looked at this photo I thought to myself, huh, not too bad. My sister-in-law Melissa took the picture this summer, when my wife's family was renting a farmhouse on Pelee Island. Natalie looks quite nice in the picture, I think. And there we are, sort of hugging and smiling, so that's kind of nice. Shirtless, I kind of look pale, but not too fat, so OK, and then my eyes go a little farther down and OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT?

Down, around my bathing suit. Is that— Oh my god! It is! That's my... But wait. How bad is this? Who has seen this picture? It's on Facebook. Melissa went and posted it on Facebook, and then she tagged Natalie and then she tagged me, so now everybody could see it who went to my profile page. Then I discovered how easy it was to "untag" yourself. I did that, except the photo still was posted online, anyone who looked at my wife's page could see it, so I called up Melissa and we had the world's most awkward conversation.

"Melis!" I said."How you doing? Hey, you know how you posted those photos of our trip on Facebook? Could you delete one of them?"

She wanted to know which one, and so while she was on the phone she got online and went to the photo in question. "Why do you want to delete this one?" she said. "You guys look nice in it."

"Well," I said. "Gah! This is terrible. How embarrassing! But you can see my... my... You can see my..."

I couldn't say the word, but then she got it, I knew she got it because she burst out laughing. "Oh my god," she said, and I could tell through the phone she was covering her mouth. "You totally can. OK, I'll delete it."

But there's a post-script to this, and it goes as follows: Weeks later I was wasting time on Facebook and I looked at my wife's photo page and oh my god, there it was again, and I was tagged on it, and worse, my tag had moved, now my tag had moved down around the neighbourhood of my bathing suit. Then I got it. It was Natalie's brother. He had put the photo online, again, as a joke. Very funny John. It's still there, although I've gone and removed my tag from it. I'm trying to ignore it. I tell myself it isn't so bad, I tell myself that European men wear bathing suits all the time that display what I'm displaying in the above picture.

This must happen all the time, right? People everywhere must be excruciating over pictures that other people post of them online, because with Facebook and everything else, nobody controls their online image anymore. Right? So with this post, I am trying to take it back. I'm reappropriating these images. I'm trying to drain the power they have over me. And if that doesn't work, at least it'll be easy to locate them, the next time I want to study them.

So This Happened...

...just after I'd been in there with the kids, getting money out so that we could go to the coffee shop just down the way. The trick with going to a convenience store with a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old is, you have to get them to agree before you enter the store that you won't buy anything for them once you're in the store. If you wait until you get in the store to break the bad news to them, no, I can't get you that Twinkie because it's made out of PETROLEUM, then it's a full-on tantrum.

Just before the car drove into the 7-11 I was feeling quite pleased with myself, because I had remembered to get the kids to do the buy-in thing, we're only going to 7-11 to get money, we can't buy anything, and they were fine and we were in and out, no problem. We were walking back up our street, on the way to the house, when we heard the sound of shattering glass. The front of the 7-11 wasn't quite visible, because it was obscured by another building, but we could see people running in that direction, and the thing with lots of people running in the same direction is that it's contagious, we started heading in that direction too, and above is what we saw. The guy claimed his accelerator got stuck. No one was hurt. Lucky, that.

I walked away making a note to feel a little more appreciative of the time I have on this earth, but all in all this experience's big takeaway was, how insanely efficient is the corporation of 7-11. I mean, I have my issues with 7-11 as a corporation that drives out of business local mom-and-pop corner stores, and I choose to go to my local Portuguese grocer for everything I possibly can, rather than 7-11...

But gosh, this happened, a car totally wrecked the front wall of the store, the darn thing was parked in there like it was a garage, and within an hour the car was removed, within two hours the mess was cleaned up and inside of three there was a chipboard wall in place of the shattered glass and brick and the store was open like nothing had happened. The place reopened THE VERY SAME DAY. It's insane.

Thanks to my brother-in-law Isaac for the pic.

Don't Call Me Whitney, Bobby

Just possibly, I may be enjoying life more in these past two weeks than I have, like, ever. So many events have passed these past few months, events that I'd worried about for so long, and I'm still standing, and my family remains intact, and possibly heading into an exciting new phase, to such an extent that I'm wandering around with a confidence that feels vaguely adolescent, it's so bright-eyed. Perhaps more on that, perhaps not. Meanwhile, there's a tonne of stuff I've been meaning to blog about, including:

1. My latest Eye Weekly column has posted. It's about my strange tendency to downplay the enjoyment I get from my children. Call it parenting's little PR problem: http://www.eyeweekly.com/features/article/106076

2. Pedro Mendes is one of my CBC Radio 3 heroes, a man I listen to weekly during the podcast he produces with Craig Norris. Mendes interviewed me for his newish weekly podcast about contemporary males, Manthropology. Here's the link: http://p.ly/1me3v.   

3. Ben Kaplan wrote an interesting piece a while back that worked as a joint interview between me and the rapper D-Sisive. I really enjoyed meeting D, and better yet he gave me a couple of his CDs, which I've been enjoying ever since. He's performing a de facto funeral for his most recent CD (backstory: sample clearance trouble) at the Horseshoe on the 27th of November. I'm totally going. Here's the piece, and a link to info about the show.

4. Whoa, did I ever enjoy moderating the BookFest Windsor panel I did last weekend. The concept was to gather together Windsor/Essex County authors, to discuss the way the area affected our work. To a packed house that included in the audience the writer Alistair MacLeod, all the panelists (Nino Ricci, Lisa Gabriele, Alex MacLeod and Shawn Micallef) discussed such elements of Windsor/Detroit as Bill Bonds, Mel Farr, Kresge's and whatever else. After, I reminded Alistair MacLeod that I'd interviewed him about a decade ago for a profile I wrote of him for the Ottawa Citizen's Sunday magazine. And he remembered. He really did -- he brought up aspects of the interview I'd forgotten. And then he told me I did a good job, moderating the panel. Meeting your heroes is great, but it's even better when they compliment you. Here's the Windsor Star piece about the panel.

5. Randomly, I've been going to a fair amount of galas recently. Last night I attended the True Patriot Love Foundation fund-raising dinner for military families. I sat at the same table as Shelley Ambrose, publisher of the Walrus magazine, and Stephen Meurice, the editor of the National Post. Neither of whom I'd met before, both of whom turned out to be really nice. And I sat next to Eva Karpati, the editor of Good News Toronto. What an interesting idea for a newspaper -- something that only publishes good news. Then a few weeks ago, at another gala, for The Sir Edmund Hillary Foundation, Natalie and I had a great time talking to the actor, Eric Johnson, and his wife, Adria Budd Johnson. We bonded over the inadvertent purchasing of silent auction items. Oh, and hey, that's the origin of the above and below pics. The SEHF gala, I mean. The blurry version is one taken by my son, and the non-blurry one, below, is me holding the camera, self-portrait style.

6. OK, wow, namedrop much, Shulgan? And I haven't even talked about any of the other stuff I'd mentally compiled to blog about, such as, the recent night a bunch of writers gathered together at Parts + Labour to fete the editor Jane Warren, when I sat next to Rebecca Eckler, who I got a kick out of, in the way you get a kick out of someone who is completely different from you, like for example she isn't a big fan of the CBC and I am kind of the world's biggest fan of the CBC. Or the Open Book Toronto salon at the Spoke club where Micah Toub and Kat Borel and I kind of ganged up on the poor moderator, Nathan Whitlock, to such an extent that Natalie felt sorry for him and now I want to find him and give him a hug.

 

Literary Death Match Toronto

I'm a judge at Toronto's Literary Death Match on Tuesday night at the Drake Underground. (Embedded video above is from LDM 27 in NYC.) Things kick off at 7 p.m. and here's a bit of a blurb that I cut-and-pasted from Book Madam's cut-and-pasting:

After popping our northern border LDM cherry at the beginning of our LDM100 celebration (in Vancouver), we're ending the whole shebang at TO's Drake Hotel — a perfect final stop for the epic month+ tour.

And, wow, do we have a top-shelf lineup in store! The night's foursome of wordsmith combatants features playwright/novelist Claudia Dey (author of How to Be a Bush Pilot; HarperCollins), New York Times bestseller Ibi Kaslik (The Angel Riots; Penguin), poet/scribe Susan Holbrook (Joy is So Exhausting; Coach House Books), and screenwriter/cult hero Andrew Kaufman (All My Friends are Superheroes, The Waterproof Bible). 

They'll all be under the watchful eye of a first-class trio of judges, including Bookmadam Julie Wilson (curator of Seen Reading), doer-of-awesome Lisa Gabriele (author of The Almost Archer Sisters, Dragon's Den senior producer), and author/journalist Chris Shulgan (Superdad: A Memoir of Drugs, Rebellion and Fatherhood, The Soviet Ambassador)!

Hosted by LDM creator Todd Zuniga. 

Where: The Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen Street West, Toronto (map)
When: Doors open at 7 pm, show starts at 8:15 (sharp)
Cost: $8 at the door, $5 preorder, $5 for students with a valid student ID

And finally some of the event's PR:

Each episode of this competitive, humor-centric reading series features a thrilling mix of four famous and emerging authors who perform their most electric writing in seven minutes or less before a lively audience and a panel of three all-star judges. After each pair of readings, the judges — focused on literary merit, performance and intangibles — take turns spouting hilarious, off-the-wall commentary about each story, then select their favorite to advance to the finals — that is when the show’s literary sensibility takes a turn for an absurdly comical climax (like a Laser Tag Duel, Literary Card Sharks, the Cash Advance Money-Grab, or Stab-A-Hole-In-Nebraska) to decide the winner.