New Digs

A year ago I moved my blog to a new platform.  You can find me here: chinottoismynemesis.com 

I took a year off from writing but now am ready to get back into it.  

I have a lot to say.

Fin.

Moving On Up.

Hi. I've moved the blurg to a new spot.  All will be revealed in the new spot.  Email me for details/link to the new spot, if you want to continue to read about my life.

We'll see how long it lasts/how it goes.

Fin.

A London Some'ting

...or the great pork tour of 2016.

The Dotytron and I celebrated 15 years of jungle love this year.  15 years is not nothing. It's kind of a big deal.  We've been through a thing or two, and we wanted to celebrate in some grand, fiscally irresponsible fashion.  Originally the plan was New Orleans, for a extra-long weekend bacchanalia of jazz and beignets and crawfish and brass bands.  Then the Dotytron stumbled upon the 10 year anniversary of Rupture, a promotion company in London that's been pushing the breakbeat heavy sound that we love, that I really pushed when me and C64 were in the promoting game, that has been my heart and home.  For their 10 year anniversary they put together what can only be described as a "punishing" line up (very technical term).  So we did what any other jungle-crazed ex-ravers would do, we looked at each other and calculated the costs, and the time difference, and the fact that with the Dotytron's work schedule we'd only be able to spare like, 3 days in jolly old England, and the ridiculous exchange rate, and we said, "F**K IT, IT'S ABOUT TO GO DOWN."  And we did it.

The logistics of leaving all three at home were not triflin'.  They were something else. We drew up a master schedule, we booked our caregiver to come in on the weekends, we set up contingencies and play dates and made food so it was all ready to go.  We sent emails, we left health cards, and even still, I was a ball of stress and nerves leading up to it.  A neighbour asked me before we left if I was excited and I was just like, "I'm too freaked out that something is going to go horribly wrong. I don't think I'm going to be excited until I get back to Toronto and find out that nothing happened."  (This turned out to be a bald-faced lie, since outside of a quick hello Facetime video shortly after arrival, I didn't worry/think about them once).  The wonderful grandmas (one of whom is effectively deaf and the other one who has major joint issues) conducted themselves admirably and we owe them the world.

We left on a Thursday night red eye.  Arriving at 9am the next day.  Now, I don't know if you lot know this about the Dotytron, but he is a terrible traveler.  His comfort zone consists of a razor thin slice of equilibrium - he can't sleep on planes, he gets sick, he's tall and awkward and uncomfortable.  It wasn't looking good for him, because even despite duping our family doctor into giving him a prescription for sleeping pills, they didn't do squat.  I on the other hand, am an exemplary travel.  Being used to functioning at a high level on little sleep is a point in my favor.

On arrival.

Our crash pad.

We dropped our bags, showered, and then hit Borough Market for a roast pork, applesauce, and crackling sandwich, and a sausage, arugula (sorry, rocket), and stilton sandwich.  The Dotytron also had one of the best cups of coffee of his young life at Monmouth coffee. It's coffee where people wait in line for about 25 minutes for a cup.

Then we did something we've never done before...we split up.  Usually, we're glued to each other, but he wanted to meet up with some Toronto crew to go record shopping, and I would've rather eat a bag of barf than follow around a bunch of DJs on a crate-digging expedition, so I went to the Tate Modern.

I **think** that's St. Paul's Cathedral, but we are always the worst tourists in the world, so I can't be sure.  Pretty picture though, right?

I hoofed it to Ottolenghi Spitalfields and picked up a bunch of goodies to tide us over the next day when we knew we'd be crunked.

After a long, luxurious, deep nap made all the sweeter by the subconscious awareness that there was no way I'd be woken by a little body climbing into bed and kicking me in the head, we posse'd up and headed to the venue, which was conveniently located about 100m from our apartment.  Good planning, us, good planning.  I have to be honest, I slept so deeply that I almost didn't want to go to the party.  It was also hectic because the promoter's had promised the Toronto contingent (about 8 people made the trip to London for the party, including our two buddies who were DJing) paid guestlist tickets available at the door.  Anticipation for the show was so intense (people were selling counterfeits??!  For a rave?!) that the promoters told us to line up by 10pm, or else they'd hit capacity.  It was kind of annoying (like seriously, you're not going to prioritize the people who you promised tickets and who crossed an ocean to be here?), and it was kind of fraught, but we got in around 10pm.

Skanna - aka the love of my life

Ummm...what is there to say about this party, except that it was LIFE AFFIRMING.  I felt like I was home, in a very real way.  Among my tribe of people (aka weirdo junglists).  The party was oversold like crazy...three sweaty, grimey rooms PACKED with a throbbing mass of people...one of those parties where you can't even dance because it's just a constant rotating shift of people squeezing by.  Was I uncomfortably skin-to-skin with some white dreads at some point?  Yes. Was I thoroughly grossed out by the tacky feeling of their sweat-slicked bodies against mine?  YES.  Was I worried that one wrong step and I would be trampled?  YES.  Did I get hit on?  Yes (still got it, Lagerfeld).  Eventually, in the main room, during what was billed as the "Alliance of Science" set (Equinox, BKey, and some other shacker) I was dancing up on top of some benches lining the main room.  This sound...this breakbeat heavy choppage...this tsunami of thunderous, sequenced, programmed amens, this chest-rattling bass...nothing does it for me like that.  I never get to hear it.  I never get to be surrounded by people who love this sound like I do and will brock out.  I never get to be around my people.

The thing is...people still CARE about jungle in the UK.  There's still a scene...and not just that, but a bit of a revival going on.  People were calling out "Insiiiide" and shouting "boh" for rewinds and I was like YES YES YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES!  Dotytron of course came back all fired up to rebuild the scene here but we all know that Toronto is a provincial backwater...a tertiary, staid, conservative town and if it wasn't the case that almost everyone I love in the world was here, I wouldn't stay.  I was like, you're almost better off saving the money you'd spend bringing Equinox here to play to 100 people (MAX), and going to London once a year for a weekend of Rupture.

It was beyond magical.  I danced from about 10pm-5am (jah bless the time change and our arrival working in our favour...it felt like we left the party at midnight).  I was sore and grungy and covered with a thin mist of rave rain and it was like a benediction.  We fell into our usual party rhythms...the Dotytron flitting around, socializing, me eking out a little square of space by the bass bins, throwing elbows to maintain it, reconvening at various points but otherwise, blissfully on our own trajectory, but near enough so that our orbits overlapped.  I want to go back.  I would go back in a heartbeat.

The next day our big outing was the Harry Potter Studios tour, in Leavesden.

We hit Borough Market again the next day for breakfast which was a duck confit butty.

So, you take a hour-long bus ride to the studio lot.  They usher you into a theatre, and they show a video of Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, and Daniel Radcliffe reminiscing about their time on the studios filming the movies.  At the end of the movie, the three of them turn away from the audience and open the door to the great hall at Hogwarts, and say something to the effect of: "Follow us now," and then the screen of the theatre rises up and the doors to the Great Hall at Hogwarts is there and everyone turned to each other and went, "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!" and people were like, bursting into tears and screaming, and it was truly, truly, the best.  So funny and dorky and amazing.

It was a big day for us.  For our splashiest meal, I made us a reservation at Fergus Henderson's incredibly influential restaurant, St. John.  When he opened the restaurant, he was one of the only people doing nose-to-tail eating and elevating so-called "humble" cuts of meat and returning to classic British cooking.  The food was a revelation.

Oat crusted mackerel with bacon and brown butter, potted crab toasts, and the iconic bone marrow dish.

The Dotytron had liver and chard and I had lamb's heart with rutabaga mash.  It was heavenly.  The heart had a texture like pork cheeks, but slightly more tender, sapid and blood rare in the middle.

The next morning we had breakfast at Modern Pantry, Clerkenwell.  I had a pecan frangipane croissant, and a shakshuka type thing.  The Dotytron had a benny with a yuzu hollandaise.  

We spent our last full day record shopping, regular shopping, and milling around.  Pretty lowkey and chill.  I had plans to check out a classic Sunday roast dinner, but because the seat of the Empire turns out to be a provincial backwater (is anyone surprised?  Not I!), we found that a lot of restaurants right in the core (Picadilly and the like) closed after a lunch service.  Da hell?  So we wandered around, peckish, Finally, we arrived at a Spanish restaurant with a crowd of people outside, waiting for one of the coveted seats.  There was no order to the crowd, so there was the general sense of unease in the air, subtle jockeying for position, mental headcounts of the people in the mass outside cross-referenced with the number of seats inside.  The Dotytron and I were the last pair to snag a set of bar stools and felt like we'd won the lottery for it.

Croquetas

Tuna Tartare, which our Run Lola Run server insisted was her favorite dish.  It was okay.

Spanish tortilla

Fried baby artichokes with hollandaise

Octopus a la plancha

Fried zucchini blossom served drizzled with honey

Beef cheek stuffed piquillo pepper, fried

Spanish flan and an olive oil cake with some weird trail mix served on the side

Two lovebirds, in love

Two lovebirds, homeward bound

It was such a good, fun, trip.  Although, 2 months later, it seems like a distant memory.  I'm hungry to go back.  

The thing is: 15-odd years ago, I made a choice to spend my life with this Tally McGoo from my high school.  I didn't know what I was choosing at the time.  I mean, how could I?  I was a half-formed lump of clay.  I'm still not even a fully-formed lump of clay.  Yet, every day, for the past 15-odd years, I've gotten up and continued to choose this life we've made together.  I choose this guy, with his big, pure, open heart and his ability to make me gasp with laughter. I choose his sentimentality and sensitivity and empathy.  I choose his silliness and his ability to be a goof around our children and his endless patience as a parent.  I choose our ups and downs, I choose our squabbles, I choose our brocking out in a car together, I choose our shorthand and our finishing each other's sentences.  2001 me, goomba that I was, turned out to be pretty smart, guys.  I don't know what life is going to throw our way.  I don't know what our struggles are going to be.  I don't know how low the capriciousness of fate will bring us.  The only thing I know is that there is an alchemy between we two.  As a team, we are magic.

Fin.

New Beginnings

I don't f**k with resolutions as a general rule, but I do want to write more this year, and this blog is as convenient a place as any to start, right?  24 posts last year??? Pathetic.  I will stay committed to the long form written word until my dying breaths.  You heard it here, first (and by that I mean, not for the first, nor last, time).

Like most of you, I've been busy. Everything has been happening on a maximal level. But I haven't stopped with the inputs and I haven't stopped with the heaving, churning mass of thoughts, reflections, half-cocked analysis, rapidly-to-be-renounced-opinions-made-on-the-fly and the like.  They're here and they need to be committed to the ether, lest in my dotage I forget (somehow!) what a half-formed lump of clay I was.

I'm here. I will write. I will record. It's going to happen.

This is my vow to you, my dear readership of...3? 4? Maaaaybe 5?

I hope this new year brings you fire and resolve and words/actions that will force their way out into the world.

For the record, I spent my NYE with my Dotytron, at an old skool jungle party in the basement of a local pizza place.  It was tiny and the sound wasn't loud and it was only marginally better than blasting tunes at home, but I saw a dude who looked like Anthony Kiedis reinvented as a circus ringleader and I got to yam a pound of wings at 2am and it only took me five minutes to drive home...so all told, it wasn't that bad.  Plus, more importantly, they were very tasteful about the countdown.  I hate me an extended countdown like few things on earth.  I can feel myself getting bored with all the turning and hugging and "Happy New Year"-ing strangers (I only f**k with extended hugging when it's people I know and love) and the public kissing.  I also hate how Auld Lang Syne has to go to such a dark place.

Recently, Dr. Rei had to talk me down from the ledge when I went to an Auld Lang Syne place too quickly.  I hate how f**king sad that song is, mang.  THERE'S NO REASON WHY IT SHOULD BE LIKE THAT.

Anyway, that was me.  Now I'm on "vacation" but our caregiver is away this week and we've been dealing with a rotating round of stomach bugs (just the kids so far, *knocks wood frantically*) so it's a wonder I'm even able to steal these 10 minutes to myself to pound this out.  I DID IT FOR YOU (read: me).  IT'S ALWAYS BEEN FOR YOU (read: me).

Fin.

Times Like This...

It was hella maudlin and trite, the way my FB feed and Twitter filled up in the hours after the US election results with statements like, "In times like this, art is more important than ever," and other similar sentiments exhorting people to write, make art, pour themselves into some creative expression of their shock, disbelief, anger, and hurt at the results.  And yet.  

Monday night I went to see Colson Whitehead interviewed by Desmond Cole at the Bluma Appel Salon.  The talk was fine.  I wasn't familiar with Whitehead's work.  The only thing of his that's crossed my radar was his Zone One book, which is about some kind of zombie apocalypse, so I just assumed that he wrote elevated genre fiction.  TURNS OUT: he's actually hella literary.  The interview was okay.  Desmond Cole (one of the Toronto Star's only saving graces) was being very earnest and Colson Whitehead was being quippy and snarky and ungenerous in the face of earnest questions, which I find somewhat unforgivable and classless.

I chased the talk by seeing Moonlight with Dr. Rei. I mean, if I had known what was coming, would I have reveled in the beauty and stillness of this film, more?  I doubt that's even possible.  I watched this movie with my heart in my throat the entire time.  This film is heartrendingly beautiful. It's a film of moments, moods, shades of stillness, timbre of gazes. Based on Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and written and directed by Barry Jenkins, it's a quiet look at three stages in the life of Chiron, a boy growing up impoverished with a drug addicted mother in Miami, coming to terms with his sexuality and masculinity in an unforgiving pocket of America (exceptionally unforgiving? That I can't speak to.  Maybe just standard-issue unforgiving.)

The movie is widely lauded. Perhaps overmuch?  It's hard to say.  I think after so many pinned hopes for Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation [interlude: my sister messaging me in the summer saying, "I just can't with Nate Parker after what's come out about him" and me responding, "Is it because his wife is white?" and her being like, "Uhhh, no...about the fact that he raped a woman!?!?"] to ameliorate the 2016 #oscarssowhite debacle went up in flames, Moonlight could not have been better positioned.  It's difficult to disentangle the timing of Moonlight from it's near-universal effusive reception, but I kinda DGAF - it's not perfect, but we (read: I) try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the very, very, very good.

I watched this with my heart in my throat. It is so achingly beautiful - the bleached brittle light of Miami in the day, the humid interplay of shadows and ocean at night, black bodies lit properly. Each act of the film is a collection of tones and moods and impressions - this is not a film that bludgeons you with exposition, character development, plot.  It's a collection of moments, some so tender that I could feel my heart breaking the way glass does when you fill it with something hot...a tiny pop and then radiating hairline fissures etching fine across the surface. It's a movie about looks, the weight of what's unsaid, pauses and spaces with the mass and presence of mountains. It's about masculinity, fatherhood, parenthood, sexuality, confusion, violence, performance, class. It's about what happens to a person when external pressures cause them to fold in on themselves, when the impossibility of their material conditions renders them guarded, mistrustful, wary, fearful of betrayal.  The main character, Chiron, is so still and reserved, all his emotions in his eyes, and his small tics.  The performances are almost all uniformly great...except for Janelle Monae who is a touch stiff in her role as a surrogate mother to Chiron.  Naomie Harris is an excellent actress but her role is overdrawn and is the only one that nears-caricature.  

Considering what a giant, terrifying, saddening s**tshow the rest of the week ended up being, I'm glad that I had the opportunity to revel in something beautiful and quiet and sweet, with someone I love.

I mean, I don't know how to sum up my feelings about the election.  I have a lot of thoughts.  I felt sick to my stomach.  I feel stupid...I mean, whiteness advertises itself on a daily basis.  It tells us EXACTLY what it is...and I still thought he wouldn't win.  I thought the imperfect alternative (HRC) would prevail.  So I feel duped.  I also feel like you can't underestimate the power of economic disenfranchisement and class and the effects of smug left-leaning politics.  

The night of the election, one of the scariest things I read, was a tweet where someone said, "a lot of white people kept their heads down, their mouths shut, smiled at their neighbours, and marched into those booths and marked Trump" and the truth of that gave me goosebumps.  The insidious banality of self-interest.  How left-leaning media have engendered a situation where people know enough to hide their reptilian, base selves.  

More thoughts on this to come.

For now, there is beauty. In spite of, despite, in the face of...everything else.

Fin.

Funny Snippets

Yo, can you believe that with a demanding job, 3 kids, and many interests and hobbies, that I don't have much time to blog no more??? CAN YOU???  ANSWER ME!!!

Here are some funny bon mots, one-liners, quips, and happenings from our world, lately.

We figured out a decent plan at the last few Micelli Mondays of summer 2016, which entailed going to a different pool (one with a water slide!), doing ridiculous poses on said slide (to the deadpan bemusement of the teenage lifeguards), swimming, then packing up and ensconcing ourselves at one of the picnic tables by the fenced-in playground, and me engaging in protracted negotiations to convince the good people at Domino's Pizza to deliver our pizza order to the closest park intersection, instead of an actual street address.  At our very last Micelli of the summer, we were finishing up our pizza, watching the kids play barefoot in the playground, when we heard the P.A. system of the pool click on, followed by:

"UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH....ttention, the pool will be closing in five minutes. Repeat: the pool will be closing in five minutes."

We DIED laughing.  The kid held the "uhhhhhhh" for SO LONG.  The commitment to the gag was pretty advanced.  It's the closest I've ever come to a legit Meatballs moment and it was a glorious way to send off summer.

Related, Dr. Rei reminded me the other day that we were referring to hot dogs as "problematic bae" at the cottage.  WHY ARE WE SO G-D FUNNY?!?

The Big Yam, after I got shouty and told him to pack up his pencil case off the dining room table, "Why are you always telling me what to do? Why can't you help a man who's six."

For a while there, when the twins didn't like what they were hearing from us/any authority figure/each other, they would say, "Don't speak those words!" (picked up from our caregiver).  "I want to watch something" "You can't" "Noooo! Don't speak those words!!!"

Quincess, sitting at the dinner table, being classic daydream believer, "Chickens come from eggs. They come from little eggs. It's vewwwy speshoul."  The way his lisping little voice has this faint Brooklyn edge - the way he rounds and extends the O sounds...kills us.

We were driving and passed by one of those houses that pop up in Toronto and are shaped like a barn.  Me: "I like those barn houses..."
Lindsay: "I want that barn house, too!"
Me: "Do you have money?"
Lindsay: "Uhhhh..." *spreads hands palms out* "No."
Quincess: "I found money!"
Me: "You did?"
Quincess: "Yeah, it was under the couch, it was golden."

For the Big Yam's birthday, he wanted to play Laser Quest with his family (!!!).  So we all posse'd up and went.  I just love my family, so damn much.  It was so funny.  You could hear S-Dawg shouting "DELETED!" each time he hit one of us. Before you go into the game zone proper, there's a holding chamber where they give you the rundown and ask you to recite the pledge.  Uncle Rico apparently knelt (a la Kaepernick) during the pledge...just ridiculous, ridiculous stuff like that.  This is where I come from.

The bird.

The plate.

The people.

The Big Yam on his birthday (!!!)

This past weekend was my mum's annual hospital fundraising gala.  The Dotytron and I don't usually go, but because this was the 20th anniversary, and our CLE fambam was coming up, we did.  What I didn't know, was that there was a Star Wars theme in the VIP room, and so, my night consisted of this:

 Almost the whole fam, plus the CLE contingent

Finally, out of nowhere, Quincess Leia has started busting out representative pictures of people and the Dotytron and I are gobsmacked.  It legit brings us to tears.  We became aware of it on Thanksgiving.  Q was working on a Magnadoodle, which Lindsay ripped out of his hands, resulting in tears, and Q slapping L upside the head.  When we revisited the Magnadoodle later, we saw a picture of a face similar to the one below, and the Dotytron went into high key CSI mode: "WHO DID THIS. WAS IT Q??? NO WAY. JUST TELL ME IF YOU DID IT." Interrogating my niece and nephews...lol!  Finally, CHova was like, "No, it was Q. He slapped Lindsay and then went over and drew it, I saw him."

 I know it doesn't look like much, but you have to understand that the Big Yam is only doing this level of representation, now.

Fin.