Grand Opening

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The Nadeau Show.

Floating House

While wandering around Jingumae on Google Earth, I discovered this. It's.... floating.

Survival Horror Mario

I think it's about time Nintendo makes a Mario game for adults.

It's time for Nintendo to reconsider their artistic direction. The Mario franchise has been sunshine-and-lollypops for long enough. I can't help but wonder if the tone of the series is not a hold-over from the 8-bit days when they were so limited in the characterization and environmental details. As technology improved, Mario and his world just got shinier.

At no point, apparently, did anyone at Nintendo consider the twisted, horrifying nature of the Mario universe. It's full of creatures that wouldn't be out of place in the Cthulhu mythos- giant sentient bipedal mushrooms, murderous winged tortoises and carnivorous plants all stand in Mario's way. Yet with a madman's strength this portly plumber out-maneuvers or smashes his way through his enemies time and time again. Surely this reality takes its toll on the man.

Or maybe it isn't reality at all. What if Mario is hallucinating? What if you played a tutorial as the shiny falsetto Mario in a fantasy world, and then woke up as real Mario getting waterboarded by a couple Koopa Troopas? Break free, smash your torturer's skulls and rip their corpses out of their shells so that you can use them to bludgeon your way out of Bowser's Guantanamo. Monsters in the plumbing threaten to burst out of the pipes and kill you. Fungus is coming to life and trying to kill you, so eat their relatives to make yourself stronger. Here's an experimental botany lab- what happens if Mario eats these flowers holy shit is he throwing fireballs?

Imagine Manhunt crossed with System Shock. YES. This could be for Mario what Batman Begins was for the Batman series. The world is changing- it's getting weary, more skeptical of the worldview advanced by big business that things are okay. They're not. We're looking at a deep, dark recession; maybe times like this call for a deeper, darker Mario.

(Partly inspired by this T-shirt.)

Bikes and History

Last night, in-between bouts of swearing at the Montreal Canadiens and complaining about Canada's troubled Upholder-class submarines, my dad turned to me and asked: "What kind of motorcycle did you have..?"

The sudden interest kind of surprised me, since he had been so opposed to the idea of a motorcycle that I didn't tell him about it until a year after I bought it. "It was a CB360," I said.

He disappeared into the basement and re-emerged with a grease-stained Honda shop manual. I often forget that he worked for a few years as a small-engines mechanic... at precisely the time he would have been working on motorcycles like a 1974 CB360. I flipped through the shop manual and recognized everything- it was for a four-cylinder CB500, but the design is similar enough to a parallel twin that I'll just pretend two of the cylinders aren't there. This is going to be really helpful in re-assembling the bike- or at least in figuring out if I can get that engine to run again.

Moments like this, when my dad is involved, usually come standard with a story. He didn't disappoint- in fact, he pulled out a knife. "A guy from France stayed at my house in 1974," he started. He had been riding a Honda motorcycle cross-country and his engine began cutting out on him until he had had enough and decided to stop at my dad's shop to get it looked at. They disassembled the engine. Put it back together. They couldn't figure it out until someone, at last, realized how weighed-down the bike must be with the Frenchman's things and noted that wiring passed through the rear fender. On a big enough bump, the heavily-laden bike would "bottom out" - the wheel would hit the fender- and short out of the electrical system.

In the meantime the Frenchman had been staying at my grandparents' house. This isn't and never will be a cosmopolitan place, so a visiting foreigner can really fascinate, and the Nadeaus apparently loved this guy even though, in my dad's words, "he was the type of guy you wouldn't fuck with." As a token of appreciation, he handed my dad a Solingen dagger that has been buried in our basement for twenty years next to a Honda shop manual and who-knows-what else.


Forensic evidence indicates that this is what my CB360 might once have looked like.

Signifying Nothing

Most television news reporters are spend their screen time half-yelling. If there was a transcript I imagine all their lines would be written in capital letters. If it weren't bad enough that the TVs in this house are always on and always spewing useless information, hearing trivial news in a TV-commercial voice makes me want to put a pick-axe through the screen.

Entertainment, fine. Television is nicely suited to providing entertainment. Watch a show, turn it off. But, just as a singing telegram is a less-than-ideal way to hear about the death of a friend, maybe we should wonder if yelling, flickering television is an appropriate means of expressing serious ideas. It isn't easy to discern trivial information from information that matters when they are delivered to us in a similar tone of voice. Moreover, how am I supposed to treat the news as serious and important information when it's interrupted by completely unrelated advertisements? Obviously the TV network heads don't respect the subject matter of their news shows, so why should I?

A man in Belgium went on a killing spree in a daycare. Children are dead, more are in critical condition. Cut to a commercial of a screaming man in a cowboy hat promising easy loans. What is wrong with us that we tolerate this?

Brother can you spare $13 billion?

Looks like the auto companies are getting their loan. I think, really, it's a sign of how much trouble we're in as a society. In the United States we see this deeply established resistance to socialized universal healthcare- and, in Canada, a growing resistance to it- with the stated intent of keeping the state out of our business, so to speak. But look how easily Wall Street and now Detroit's Big Three are getting bailed out despite the staggering amounts of mismanagement in evidence.

We need them, the story is, no matter how much they fuck up. Here's an idea: rather than handing over massive piles of cash to idiots like GM and Chrysler, why not buy them up? Maybe government-run car companies will be inefficient and produce cars that nobody in their right mind should want (hello British Leyland!) but I don't see how that will be any different from the present situation. Or how about the government giving out those billions in the form of US Automaker Gift Certificates? I think Jay Leno came up with that one. I'd gladly buy a Cobalt SS... if the government were footing the bill.

Poking fun aside, this really goes to show what matters to people. Government intervention is communism except when you're afraid of losing your investment. Obama is a Marxist if he "spreads the wealth" but a fool if he doesn't redistribute it to corporations that squandered their wealth in the first place. It's cool if tax dollars end up in Chrysler's piggy bank, but not if they go to hospitals. Long live this silly mess we call capitalism.

Give Me 16 Acres

My mention of International Architecture & Design in an earlier post might already have hinted to you that I am starting to look more seriously into a long-stranding interest of mine: architecture. I've always been fascinated in one way or another by "built" spaces. I don't really understand how anyone could not be interested, in some sense, considering how much our lives are affected by the environment created for (and by) us. From small private things like how the floor feels under my bare feet or the kind of light I'm sitting in when I eat or use my computer, all the way up in scale to the neighborhoods I walk through on my way to work and the way people are using these spaces in their daily lives.

I guess I am drawn to architecture, like politics, because its effect on us is so pervasive. It's my curiosity about our collective experience of the world. From ideas we build the political systems, ideologies, and frameworks we live in. But we can also take ideas + physical materials and build the homes, neighborhoods and cities we live in. And these spaces that we inhabit affect us and shape us in return. I like broadly informative topics like this. So I'm not completely certain where I'm going with architecture, but I expect that, generally, it's in an intellectual neighborhood I would have ended up in anyway.

I'm not turning my back on political science. The early-December fuss about the coalition reminded me how much I love that kind of stuff. I think I'm still going to apply to do an MA, if only as a back-up plan (at UNB for sure; possibly also at another school in a city I would actually want to live in) but for the most part the coming months are going to be about preparing myself for architecture school- possibly the six-year program at Waterloo in September, and if not, then for M.Arch programs at U of T or UBC to start in September 2010.

Go Ahead, Impress Me

I don't think I'm a terrifically hard person to impress, but this morning I picked up an International Architecture & Design magazine and despite the exquisite taste in evidence throughout the piece, I wouldn't give much of it any more than a golf clap. Let me explain.

I have to say that (for example) I don't really think IA&D needed to ask five top interior designers for their favorite sofas if the price range was going to hover somewhere above $8000. For that kind of money any idiot can pick a nice sofa. I could probably pick eight nice sofas for that kind of money. Or even rent an apartment of my own for a year.

Also, if you're going to discuss the challenges of achieving privacy while remaining connected to city life, it is a bit of a cop-out when your success story is a multimillion dollar home in Wychwood Park. What's the challenge there? I could cover my naked body in sequins and sleep in a leopard-print sex swing and it would still be pretty private if I was in Wychwood Park. I'll happily agree that Ian MacDonald's house is beautiful, but that's superfluous to the fundamental challenge- it's easy to have a nice private space when you've got the wealth for it. Show me how to do that for under $1000 a month and I'll be impressed.

Then comes the humble story of a designer who bought a 1,200-square-foot flat in a historic landmark building in Montreal as a "temporary residence" until he realized that you can live an elegant life without a house... if you have a suite the size of a house. It gets predictable from this point on: rich guy has nice home.

Other themes visited in the magazine: rich family hires rich architect to make their nice home nicer, rich woman with kids has nice home with fingerpaints, nice cities are expensive to live in, houses look nice with expensive flowers in them, nice bicycles are expensive.

I don't mean to detract from the taste or achievements of the people featured in IA&D. It's just that it's a lot easier to have nice things when you've got the money to get most anything you'd like, and we shouldn't congratulate for successful design things that have, as their first requirement, financial wealth. Or, rather, we must not equate nice things with expensive things, but to read this magazine one might be fooled because most of what appears in it is smugly exclusive and pricey. Taste has to transcend price tags. Comfortable and stylish living should not be the exclusive territory of the affluent, and I think successful design should have a lot to do with addressing this.

I feel like, at the end of all this, I should bring up something I do like. I am a big fan of Apartment Therapy's Smallest Coolest Apartment contest. There are a few weird entries but for the most part what you're looking at on that website are the homes of people with life situations a lot more like the sort I (and many I know) can reasonably expect in the next ten years.

More importantly, all of them come up with solutions more creative than "be rich."