Touch You Last

I can't believe how many books in this series I never got to.

I’ve mentioned before that statcounter allows me to spy on how people found my site—either by a bookmark, through a link on someone’s page, or through a google search. Well, recently Statcounter has taught me that I can’t spell. For each person that stops by, the data from statcounter looks something like this: Number of Entries: 1 Returning Visits: 0 Entry Page Time: 26th April 2005 08:11:35 Visit Length: 0 seconds Entry Page: touchyoulast.blogspot.com Exit Page: touchyoulast.blogspot.com Location: New South Wales, Australia Referring URL: www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=Rohinton Minstry interview&meta= What do I learn from this? Location: Hey, I’m popular in Australia. That Naomi Watts seems pretty tech-saavy. She’d like my beard. Returning Visits: Maybe not so popular. Visit Length: Naomi decides she can’t handle this much man. Referring URL: Rohinton Minstry interview? That sort of thing is odd, but not so out of the ordinary; someone once found me by searchin...

What is the most blatant disregard for the five-second rule you’ve ever witnessed or been responsible for?

Here’s another list, even though I’m told that the Internet is clotted with them. It also takes care of another of the softball 101 in 1001 tasks, which is a bonus. I don’t expect to impress anyone on this front. As far as cultural awareness goes, I’m weakest on music. Remember that I’m being honest—even though I’m crushed with shame for having the Fruvous on there, they're on there. 50. Shakespearean Fish , Melanie Doane – I saw her perform in a bomb shelter of a bar back in University. Enjoyed this entire album quite a bit. Was also confounded by her bum, which was like something you’d see on a Lego person. 49. Five Days in July , Blue Rodeo – During their heyday, I saw Blue Rodeo in concert more times then any other band. Too many by the end, because I got to watch them age—poorly. By the last two shows, Greg Keelor would just sit down on an amp any time he had a solo—and this was nine years ago . 48. Men With Brooms Soundtrack – Bought the album for the song Mass R...

Blue Velvet is not unlike an old episode of Scooby-Doo: Kyle McLachlan makes a passable Fred, Laura Dern embraces parts of both Velma and Daphne, and Dennis Hopper could conceivably be Old Man Withers—the crusty amusement park owner disguised as the monster—assuming Old Man Withers was a psychopath who liked to huff nitrous oxide and dry-hump people. In a nutshell, Blue Velvet is about Jeffrey, a young, all-American type boy who returns home from College after his father falls ill. On a walk home from the hospital, Jeffrey makes the grisly discovery of a human ear, which he brings immediately to the authorities. The police are interested but they shut him out from the details of the case, so Jeffrey begins some boy detective work. He is led to Dorothy, an alluring though seemingly unbalanced lounge singer who he believes may be a murderer. But he soon learns that Dorothy is being sexually blackmailed by a lunatic named Frank, a man who needs all kinds of crazy shit to get his rocks o...

Imagine your dream car, whatever that vehicle may be. It might be a Porsche or a Humvee, it could be the General Lee, KITT, or that monster truck that turns into a robot and eats other monster trucks. You can have this car today, free of charge, and the insurance will always be taken care of for you. There’s a catch, though. The radio can only ever play the song, “One Week” by The Barenaked Ladies. As long as the car is on, so is the radio. The volume goes from 4 to 10, and there is no off. The radio can never be fixed, and other media devices of any kind will not work inside your vehicle. What would your car be? Would you take this car?

I think I was nine or ten years old at the time. A friend of mine offered to take me to a wrestling match at Maple Leaf Gardens. This wasn’t lame local wrestling, this was the bigs: the WWF. And it was back during what I like to think of as the Golden Age of wrestling—with the Iron Sheik, Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka, Kamala, Big John Studd, and all the rest. Before Frankie and his family came to get me, my parents gave me a quick lecture on manners, and then handed me a ten dollar bill. Then I was off, packed in the car with Frankie, his parents, his uncle, and his cousin. Can’t say I recall much about the drive up, or who was on the card that night, but here are the things that I do remember: -- Instead of urinals in the bathrooms, the Gardens had long, metal troughs. I tried to pee once, standing arm to arm with a very short dude with a very tall afro. I’d never really seen a urine trough before, or for that matter, a black guy (I grew up in Georgetown which, to this day, is 99.9% white),...

I’m in the midst of reading The Dirt: Confession of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band . This is the Mötley Crüe biography, and it’s not for your mom, and it’s not for your grandma, because it’s very likely that Vince Neil has had sex with them both. And he wants to tell you about it. I was never a Crüe fan, but I admired them from afar. Upside-down pentagrams didn’t really fly in the McLean household, so Guns N’ Roses were about as hardcore as we were allowed to get, and even that was only because we’d convinced our parents that Izzy Stradlin was from Harbour Grace. The Dirt isn’t a biography I’d normally think to buy, but lately I’d started to believe that I was the only person who hadn’t read it. Douglas Coupland read it almost as soon as it hit the stores (and describes the book as being “so brutally honest that after a while it becomes art”). A group of writers in L.A. found the book so inspirational that they began a summer of debauchery under the rallying cry “ What woul...

It’s 1951, and love is in the air. Love of all kinds, whether it’s smooching-in-the-back-of-the-theatre love, feel-ups-in-the-front-seat-of-your-shitty-pickup love, hook-ups-on-the-pool-table-with-your-mom’s-boyfriend love, or sexiest of all, boning-Cloris-Leachman-in-a-creaky-old-person’s-bed love (which I like to think of as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’). Welcome to Anarene, Texas. The Last Picture Show follows a year in the life of a few small town folk, particularly a group of teens in their senior year. The main players are: Sonny, an innocent-faced, directionless kid played by Timothy Bottoms (who—imdb tells me—plays Dubya more than any other character these days); his volatile friend Duane (Jeff Bridges); and Jacy, the school hottie and Duane’s girlfriend at the onset (played by an especially nubile Cybil Sheppard). It’s a movie about tedium, and the cruelty that comes as a result of it. Jacy leaves Duane to move on to other men that aren’t necessarily better or ...

I watched Sin City last night and I am torn up about it. I slept about two hours, just thrashed about in the bed, and I blame the damn movie. I’m so close to just loving it outright—if only it weren’t for all the hookers. In the movie’s favour: - It is absolutely beautiful, every frame, even when you’re watching some guy get crotch-shot or in other ways dismembered - (this is an overused phrase so sort of devalued, but I mean it when I say) I haven’t seen anything like it before - The cast is just short of perfect - It doesn’t just have you cheering for anti-heroes, it creates a universe so horrible that a good guy/bad guy classification is impossible Detracting from is this: - Seeming misogyny that I have trouble explaining away The majority of the women in this movie are hookers. Failing that they’re strippers, naked lesbians, or waitresses that routinely get the shit beat out of them. Now given, every character in this movie is a criminal or a lowlife; as far as the men go they’re...

We just came back this weekend from Quebec City, where I hadn’t been since I was thirteen. Friends of ours, Jen and Greg, are getting married there in the Summer, so we tagged along to check out the church, meet the preacher, and also because apparently we missed all the snow and bitter cold. It’s sort of amazing what I don’t remember from the last time I was there. Back then, it was for a grade eight school trip. I remember the drive into the city, past the cliffside that we were told Wolfe and his men scaled prior to the Battle of the Plains of Abraham. I also remember being told not to look inside a certain sex shop we’d be passing, then passing it, and then the crush of thirty kids all trying to press their faces against the window (some came home with crab-ridden eyebrows, so I’m told ). And I also remember that the inter-school dance at the end of the trip was cut short because some idiots from St. Mike’s thought it would be a great idea to buy butterfly knives and practice ...

What does it mean to "do it Quebec style?"