Author: Dan Dickinson

Aw, son of a bitch

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From the raw story:

“People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.”

So, two a week is bad, but two a day is okay, right? Please? C’mon, gimme this one. I’ve had a long day, I’m tired and my pancreas hurts for some reason.

Hang on, hang on…that says “sweetened soft drinks” up there. Does that mean sugar and not artificial sweeteners?

“”The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth,” [study leader Mark] Pereira said in a statement.”

Beautiful! Aspartame FTW!! I may now resume my rampant Diet Pepsi habit.

Where to next?

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4,634 days ago I moved to a place I never thought I’d end up: Toronto. Growing up on the east coast of Canada, you’re trained to dislike Ontario in general, and Toronto in particular. Of course, that was an uninformed opinion, typical small-town distrust of big cities. I was excited as soon as it became a real possibility, just as I’d been excited to move from my tiny home town to Halifax for university. Living in the country’s biggest city became a thrilling idea. Anyway, I’d been offered a good job in Toronto straight out of school, and you didn’t turn that down.

I was lucky enough to move here with other people from university and lived here with my friend Brock for my first year. Brock had lived here before and made the transition a little easier. So did making a lot of good friends at work, mainly other transplanted Maritimers. I really started to love it here: countless live music venues, huge record stores (back when that was important), movie theatres showing all kinds of movies and all the sleepless energy of the big city. For god’s sake, the stores were open on Sunday! Nellie joined me in Toronto the following year, by which time I was in love with the city.

My jobs moved progressively further downtown (except for one blip up to Markham), and so did our apartments. We discovered more advantages of living here: new foods, nicer clothing stores, the film festival, better beer places. We got married, bought a home, adopted cats, got better jobs. Toronto was our home now, rather than a stopping point until we figured out what else to do.

After thirteen years here, though, I’m beginning to fall out of love with Toronto. It still has lots of what we like, but some of Toronto is wearing on us: the pollution, the dysfunctional waterfront, the paralyzing. I also find myself comparing Toronto to other Canadian cities, greener places with more character.

So what would it take to make me move? Career aside, I’d still want a city with a diverse population, good movie theatres (and maybe even a film festival), great restaurants and progressive politics. I’d also like to live in a city with good parks and nearby mountains. A few years ago live music venues and record stores would’ve been major factors, but things change. I suspect that soon movie theatres won’t matter much anymore either, as long as I have broadband.

The career point is the kicker, obviously, but supposing we got a great job offers in another city there are three places in Canada I’d consider moving to:

Halifax: home sweet home, obviously, but it’s changed from when we were students. Or maybe it’s just that we see more now than we did then. It’s a small town, but it’s laid back and comfortable while getting ever so slightly more cosmopolitan all the time. Plus, it’s close to family. However, if they hadn’t done away with the Sunday shopping ban three years ago, Halifax would’ve been a non-starter.

Calgary: true, Alberta’s a very conservative province, and the freaking cowboy/stampede culture would drive me batty, but I could put up with a lot for living 90 minutes from the Rockies.

Vancouver: I think this one tops my list. The green space, the proximity to mountains and wine country, the incredible restaurants, the weather (rain doesn’t bother me, given where I grew up) and the attitude of the city makes it feel like home every time I visit. So if somebody could hurry up and offer me an amazing job there, I’d appreciate it.

(By the way, apologies to Montreal. You certainly have your charms, but moving there from Toronto would feel too much like the same thing, just with a much better hockey team. Likewise, Ottawa: I like your green space and many of your inhabitants, but I…iiiii…zzzzzzzzzz…zzzzzzzzSNRK!!! Huh? Wha? Oh…uh, sorry, Ottawa, you put me to sleep there.)

And, of course, I haven’t even mentioned cities outside of Canada. I’d be here all night.

The best films of 2009

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Bearing in mind that I have not yet seen The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The White Ribbon, The Informant, Precious, The Road, A Serious Man, A Single Man, Big Fan, An Education, Food Inc., Invictus, Where The Wild Things Are or Zombieland (all of which would probably merit consideration for this list) and bearing in mind that I saw this year’s critical darling The Hurt Locker at last year’s TIFF (and was underwhelmed at the time, probably because I’d just watched the unmatched Iraq war story Generation Kill), here are my ten favourite films of 2009:

#10: Adventureland. I typically don’t enjoy movies about the 80s, but then they mock the 80s I’m fully on board. I could also watch Jesse Eisenberg all day and not get tired of it…he’s like a less-emo, more-nerd Michael Cera. Kristen Stewart is quite charming when she’s not fawning over a douche-y vampire. Ultimately, though, what made this movie was the script and the details which the writer must have pulled from his own past…what other reason would one have for writing the part of the former best friend who constantly bag-tags the main character?

#9: District 9. The first of a surprising amount of sci-fi on my list. Though I couldn’t really get myself to like the main character (even though I think I was supposed to), I loved the backstory, the sharp take on racism and the amazing special effects.

#8: Valhalla Rising. I didn’t like this film so much as I just couldn’t shake it from my mind after seeing it at TIFF. I’m not sure it will ever show in a North American theatre, a mainstream one at least. It was a combination of mindbendingly art-house and savagely violent. Seriously, there were psycho-religious themes running rampant through the whole thing, interrupted by things like, oh, say…the protagonist disemboweling a man with his bare hands. For example.

#7: Star Trek. I normally don’t like J.J. Abrams’ stuff, but I will give him this: brother, you have major-league stones. This had the potential to backfire on Abrams HUGE…rebooting one of the most passionately (and bizarrely?) beloved franchises of all time, but he pulled it off with a movie that was both entertaining and slyly immune to criticism of changing the original storyline. It’s a good sign if an action movie feels shorter than its running time, and this one felt much shorter.

#6: Leslie, My Name Is Evil. Uh…not sure how to describe this one. Another TIFF entry, and one of the weirder ones at that. Very campy, very dark and very much about a point in American history…Charlie Manson, Vietnam…the 60s in general, really. Completely over the top sometimes, while almost not bold enough at others, it was certainly memorable. A scene set perfectly to “Black Grease” by the Black Angels was simultaneously disgusting and beautiful. Maybe that’s a good description of the era director Reg Harkema was trying to capture.

#5: Up In The Air. Sharp writing, well-timed subject matter, three exceptionally strong lead performances and my omnipresent desire to be George Clooney made this one pretty damn entertaining.

#4: 500 Days Of Summer. Speaking of sharp writing, I think this one pretty much took the witty award for 2009. Probably took the soundtrack award too. It starred two of my favourite actors, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, as well as one of my favourite things to look at, Zooey Deschanel. I will likely buy this, and watch it repeatedly.

#3: Avatar. I don’t want to buy into the hype. Because, really, this was not a good movie. Sure it was entertaining, but it had an over-familiar plot, substandard dialogue and was predictable from start to finish. So what’s it doing here? My god, man, did you not see it? It was fucking spectacular. Look, was it the kind of film that would typically be considered art? No, of course not. Did it change our perception of art when it comes to film? Probably. The Jazz Singer wasn’t a great movie either, but it changed film for good.

#2: The Cove. I typically favour real-life over fiction in film just as I do in print, and The Cove was the class of the docs I saw this year. It actually played out more as a thriller that you’re spying on than as a standard documentary, but as an animal lover the subject matter was heartwrenching. There were parts I had real trouble watching, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. It deserved its win at Sundance, and its win at Hot Docs. It’ll deserve the Oscar too.

#1: Inglourious Basterds. It’s frustrating, really. The way Tarantino just flaunts such blatant genius by creating half a dozen indelible characters, and as many unforgettable scenes, in every movie he makes, using only dialog. I loved the movie my first time out, but as is usually the case with Tarantino films I found I enjoyed it much more the second time, even though I knew what would happen. Maybe because I knew what would happen, and found myself excited at moving from one great scene to another. Plus all the little familiar inside touches, like Harvey Keitel playing a voice on the end of the phone for ten seconds.

I think "gluttony" was a foregone conclusion

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I knew I was in trouble when I saw all the glasses.

Last night Nellie, T-Bone, The Sof and I treated ourselves to one of Toronto’s Wintercity culinary events, Ex-Communication by Chocolat at MoRoCo Chocolate. This was the description:

“Une soiree of la luxure and sinful indulgence.  Experience a 6-course guided tasting dinner of sweet and savoury pleasures:  3 savoury courses and 3 Valrhona Chocolat dessert courses paired with the finest Champagnes, The Macallan & Highland Park Scotches, Canadian wines, followed by Courvoisier Cognacs as digestifs.”

Sold.

We arrived last night, queued with the rest of the guests and were immediately handed a glass of Champagne Gatinois Grand Cru. We were brought to our table which was covered in glasses…eight wine glasses, eight whisky glasses, four water glasses and four champagne flutes. It was obvious what kind of evening we were facing. We settled in and prepared ourselves for the theme of the night: the seven deadly sins.

  • Wrath was a shot of 60% dark Valrhona sipping chocolate paired with two scotches: 15-year-old Highland Park and 12-year-old Macallan. I like Highland Park, I love Macallan and I lurve dark chocolate…but my god, I never knew how well they went to together. A bit of chocolate on the tongue followed by whisky and zowie. I had a new hobby. An amuse bouche came out too…can’t remember it exactly, I think it was avocado and citrus on a crispy something or other. Good. As Nellie put it, our bouches were amoosed.
  • Envy was the best food course of the night: Japanese scallops in a white chocolate hollandaise sauce. We all loved it. I don’t even really like scallops. Paired with a 2006 Riesling from Alsace, enough of it to drown a small child.
  • Gluttony was subtitled “duck-duck-booze”, and aptly so: there was duck leg confit (yum!) with a chocolate puff pasty (meh) and slices of deck breast in a dark chocolate and chili glaze (YUM!). Still working our way through the Riesling, obviously.
  • Sloth consisted of a roasted filet mignon in a chocolate port reduction paired with a 2006 Penley Estates merlot. From here on out the savoury was over, and it was all sweet.
  • Pride was something pretty unusual: a chocolate “soda” float. Basically drinking chocolate mixed with soda water, from what I could tell. I didn’t love it but I thought it was interesting. Everyone else was less than impressed.
  • Greed consisted of two parts: a small serving of light chocolate mousse, and a dark chocolate & sweet red beet cake. I loved them both, but Nellie didn’t care for the beet cake at all. At this point we were getting pretty full, and the rich food & booze was starting to weigh on us.
  • The final course, Lust, was just too much. Three warm chocolate truffles apiece, 70% ganache and coated in coconut, sitting in a (rather icky) pool of passionfruit bubble tea sauce. We each had one, and it was quite good. The Sof noticed that the menu described the truffles as “flamed with Courvoisier VSOP Cognac” and we wondered what that meant, right up until the server showed up with a bottle and a lighter. They might’ve rehearsed this part a little more as the poor thing was unable to light our truffles in most cases, instead soaking our truffles through with Cognac. When I tried it…well, it wasn’t the most pleasant experience. I was glad she’d left my third truffle unscathed so that I could enjoy it, but the whole affair was so rich — as was the glass of Courvoisier paired with the truffles and the shot of port to send us off — that we all felt done in.

All in all it was a very enjoyable evening, and a pretty good value in the end: three excellent meat dishes, wine, scotch, champagne, cognac and a formidable amount of chocolate for $125 including tax and tip. Not bad at all. A little much for a Monday night, maybe, especially for a lad with an 8:30 meeting, but there you go. I suspect, cardinal theme notwithstanding, that they could have scaled it back to five courses (dropping the soda and the fiery chocolate boozeballs) and hit the mark perfectly. Maybe next year.

The ten best albums of the last decade

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Yes, I know we haven’t really begun a new decade yet. And yes, I know we’re already a month into the “new” decade. But everybody else did it, so me too me too me too.

Here are, in my opinion, the best albums released between 2000 and 2009:

    1. The Arcade Fire . Funeral
    2. And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead . Source Tags And Codes
    3. Radiohead . Kid A
    4. Sigur Ros . Agaetis Byrjun
    5. Spoon . Kill The Moonlight
    6. Sleater-Kinney . The Woods
    7. The New Pornographers . Mass Rmantic
    8. The Hidden Cameras . Mississauga Goddam
    9. Mates Of State . Bring It Back
    10. Regina Spektor . Begin To Hope

      The weird thing about this list is that there’s nothing later than 2006. In fact only two albums from 2009 made my initial cut-down list, and none from either 2007 or 2008. Were those three years devoid of great music? Or have my music consumption habits changed so much that I no longer absorb and appreciate great albums? Both possibilities worry me.

      Sorry, cats

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      I know, I know, this blog is a ghost town lately. Too much time at work, both for me and my brain. Not a lot of other time or processing happening. In fact, today was the first chance I’ve had to just relax. We went to the market, picked up some wine and snacks and watched two movies: Adventureland (imdb | rotten tomatoes) and Trouble The Water (imdb | rotten tomatoes).

      We even sold our old futon, finally. We were glad to see it go to some kids who’ve just moved here. Hopefully it lasts as long for them as it did for us. That futon was pretty much the first piece of furniture we bought when we got our first place in Toronto, and it’s served us well over the years. Twelve years later and it’s still completely solid. We need the space and there’s just no earthly reason for us to still have a futon anymore, but we still felt a little sad to see it go.

      Now relaxo-day is coming to a close, and tomorrow it’s back to work. Anybody out there have a time-delaying machine? Anybody? Anybody?

      "All is lost, you can't go home"

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      Two tragedies caught my attention last week. One was massive and horrible in scale, the other rather more private.

      I tend to associate songs with feelings or memories, often for no particular reason. This past week, while absorbing scenes of destruction in Haiti following the massive earthquake, a friend emailed me news of the passing of musician Jay Reatard. Of course the two events don’t compare in scale — Reatard (whose real name was Jimmie Lee Lindsey Jr.) was one man, a fairly obscure musician — but on reading the news of his death his songs swam into my head the same way those photos of Haitian ruins imprinted on my brain (especially this one) and Reatard’s “There Is No Sun” became, in my mind, the sad soundtrack of the Haitian disaster.

      That night, on my commute home, my mp3 player randomly started playing Reatard’s “It Ain’t Gonna Save Me” and it shook me a little. Eerie enough to hear Reatard singing “All is lost, there is no hope for me” over and over again on the day of his death, but positively chilling to think of all those for whom those lines were so true, lying trapped beneath rubble or searching for family amidst the ruins.

      There’s no logical tie between Jay Reatard and the disaster in Haiti, but they’re now inextricably linked in my mind. Reading the stories, watching the news, donating to the Red Cross, even hating Pat Robertson…for me, Watch Me Fall is now the score to it all.

      You take the red pils, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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      Back in August my favourite beer blog gave me some good news: a new brew pub would be opening at the end of my street. Not just any brew pub either: it would be run by Mike Duggan, who has quite a pedigree in Ontario craft brewing. Actually, the building itself (at the corner of Victoria and Lombard) had a pedigree too: it used to be home to Denison’s and Amsterdam.

      Four months later, Duggan’s Brewery finally opened. Last night Nellie and I got around to trying it, and we were both pretty happy. We sat in the bar section rather than the restaurant (as much by necessity as choice; even though they haven’t had the grand opening yet the place is packed most nights) and ordered some small portions. Well…we assumed it would be small. My corned beef sandwich, fries and cole slaw stuffed me, and Nellie’s chicken wings were huge. Both were very good, and there were at least half a dozen other things on the menu I want to try. There was one poor frantic soul waiting on all the tables, but he managed to keep our glasses full.

      Speaking of our glasses, we had three pints each: Nellie had the fest and the tripple (yes, that’s really how they spelled it), and I had the weiss and the Pils. We each had a pint of the #9 IPA, which we already knew and liked. That leaves three we haven’t tried: the stout, the Asian and the porter. Can’t wait to get back.

      As if it weren’t dangerous enough having C’est What and Beerbistro so close, now we have this too. Oh well, we shall have to tough it out. Le sigh.

      "That borscht haunted me for weeks"

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      Yesterday I finished reading A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 (amazon) by Vasily Grossman. A month ago I blogged about needing more information about the Russian front, and I count myself lucky to have found this book. Grossman was a writer first, journalist second, so he brings out the characters he encounters even more than the war itself. He was not a party stooge, and did not simply churn out Communist Party dogma. He did describe in a rather breathless manner the generals who pushed back against the initial Nazi invasion, and especially the men and women who held the line at Stalingrad, but he also spoke very frankly about the epidemic of rape as Russian soldiers advanced across Poland and Germany. This frankness would eventually land him in hot water, especially when he arrived at Treblinka. His article ‘The Hell Called Treblinka’, published in Znamya and reproduced in the book, was a sickening and somehow eloquent description of the horrors Grossman found there.

      “Stories of the living dead of Treblinka, who had until the last minute kept not just the image of humans but the human soul as well, shake one to the bottom of one’s heart and make it impossible to sleep. The stories of women trying to save their sons and committing magnificent doomed feats, of young mothers who hid their babies in heaps of blankets. I’ve heard the stories of ten-year-old girls, who comforted their sobbing parents with a heavenly wisdom, about a boy who shouted when entering the gas chamber: ‘Russia will take revenge! Mama, don’t cry!’

      …

      Inhabitants of the village of Wulka, the one closest to Treblinka, tell that sometimes the screams of women who were being killed were so terrible that the whole village would lose their heads and rush to the forest, in order to escape from these shrill screams that carried through tree trunks, the sky and the earth. Then, the screams would suddenly stop, and there was a silence before a new series of screams, as terrible as the ones before, shrill, boring through the bones, through the skulls and the souls of those who heard them. This happened three or four times every day.”

      As a Jew Grossman must have been overcome by emotion — indeed he suffered from nervous exhaustion on his return from Treblinka — but the article was written with very little of it, save what seems like amazement, or shock, at the scale and savagery of the thing. This frankness would land Grossman in hot water, eventually, as he underestimated the antisemitism of Stalinist Russia. While Grossman reported on the obvious targets of this slaughter, Russia would only allow descriptions of atrocities to specify Russian or Polish citizens, not Jews specifically, and Grossman’s insistence (along with other writers) on highlighting the atrocities against Jews would draw the ire of the Party. Grossman further angered officials by attributing the Stalingrad victory to the soldiers rather than to the Communist Party and to Stalin himself. In both cases Grossman was likely saved from the gulag, or possibly death, by the passing of Stalin in 1953.

      Grossman’s greatest work of fiction, based on what he saw in those four years, was Life and Fate (amazon), his 1961 book titled and written as an echo to his mentor Leo Tolstoy‘s most famous work. The KGB seized all copies before it could go to print, but Grossman had given a copy of the manuscript to a friend. It took twenty years for this manuscript to be copied to microfilm and smuggled to Switzerland, by which time Vasily Grossman was long dead. He died disillusioned by Stalinist Russia’s corruption and lies, but enamored to the end with the bravery and determination of the soldiers he fought beside for those four years.

      "We are not swans. We are sharks."

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      I’m always conflicted about the Reuben sandwich. It always seems like a good idea, all the rye bread and corned beef and swiss cheese, and then all of a sudden…sauerkraut. Ugh…whose #@&% idea was that?!? It doesn’t ruin the whole experience. It just dampens the rest of the tasty flavours.

      The past few days have been like a Reuben. On Wednesday we saw Up In The Air (imdb | rotten tomatoes) which was excellent, and deserves all the hype. George Clooney, Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga (my girlfriend du jour) were all great in their roles. Highly recommended, if you haven’t seen it yet.

      On New Year’s Eve we returned to Nota Bene for dinner, as we were so impressed by our first visit (about a year ag0). Two things went wrong before we even got there: I finally succumbed to this cold I’ve been fighting off for weeks, and we had FAR too big a lunch at Terroni. Still, I was excited to go. Last time we both enjoyed all three of our courses and the service was outstanding. This time…well, I can’t be sure if things have gone downhill, or if it was just down to being New Year’s Eve. My lobster bisque was just okay and my main (pulled suckling pig) should have been better than it was, even after I realized I was eating blood sausage with it. Nellie’s starter was good (it was the same pasta she had last time) but her chicken was…well, a giant slab of chicken. The molten chocolate cake & Grand Marnier ice cream we had for dessert was solid, if unremarkable. Really, though, the thing that shocked me the most was the difference in service. From the start we felt we were being rushed…asked for our orders when we’d barely sat down, drinks showing up when the last ones were less than half drunk, and so on. We asked for a recommendation from the sommelier; whoever we got wasn’t the sommelier, but someone who seemed to know less about wine than we did. Merlot? Yeah, no, we don’t want merlot, thanks. What pissed us off the most was this: since we had a fair amount of wine to go with the chocolate dessert we ordered glasses of dessert wine for after that final course. Instead, they bought the dessert wine while we still had half our dessert and nearly a full glass of pinot each. I get it, it was New Year’s Eve and they were trying to turn over the table, but it’s not the kind of treatment I’d expect from Nota Bene.

      On New Year’s Day (happy 2010, by the way!) I dragged my sick ass out of the condo because there was no way I’d miss the chance to see Avatar (imdb | rotten tomatoes) in IMAX/3D.  Wow…it was worth the hour standing in line. It took me a while to adjust to the 3D glasses, but my god. Just incredible. Seeing little plants floating in front of me, feeling vertigo as the camera looked down off a cliff, getting nearly airsick as we flew through a canyon. The movie itself wasn’t anything special or new, but if that movie doesn’t win every single visual effect Oscar, then something is drastically wrong.

      We spent the rest of yesterday (and today, so far) sitting on the couch and watching movies (Lions For Lambs and The Watchmen) and playing Mario Kart Wii.

      Pretty good couple of days. Too bad about the stupid sauerkraut.