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Elastic Spring

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Miscellany

Published: 15 March 2011

Hits: 2089

And finally it's here. A month of -20, -30 below, strangely out of season, it's light now until almost 8:00 PM but still the temperature's cold and now, finally, the temperature's shifted, +5, +10, a more seasonal spring. Snow disappears from the roads, the sidewalks, only strange and dirty heaps of ice at the side of driveways remind you of how long this winter has been. Finally spring. The heart leaps at the prospect. Soon it will be garage sale season...

Pupaphobia

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Theatre

Published: 15 March 2011

Hits: 2035

Sunday, and I've tickets to a couple of the Animated Objects Festival productions. Specifically, The Book of Jonah and Handmade Puppet Dreams by Heather Henson.

Now The Book of Jonah is in the Lantern Church basement in Inglewood, and we should be cued by the abundance of young children in the audience. Very young children, aged 5 and under. But still, we've bought the tickets and we stay. 45 minutes of shadow puppetry with the young kids calling out things like "What's the wire" and laughing whenever the word of God hit Jonah on the head. Interesting, but long, and the voice of God seemed a bit, well, serious...which is probably what you get when you see a puppet production of a gospel in a church basement. Very mildly entertaining I was mentally killing Jonah in a variety of ways long before the whale got to him, and when finally he's eaten there's a 20 minute "interpretive" bit where Jonah's in the whale and the whale's in Jonah and they're both spinning around and spinning around to some ambient trance music. 

Not for us. But, with a bit of tweaking it might be an acceptable production for young kids. But absolute bloody murder for the adults. 

From there we move on to Handmade Puppet Dreams at the Plaza in Kensington, an selection of short films featuring live action puppets (vs. Stop-motion animation). And these are simply disturbing, weird, weird, weird. The opening number looks as if it were inspired by Pokemon and Dark Crystal, the following productions get even weirder, a (Polish? Czech?) puppet who destroys books and fondly recounts the days before the Nazis and his Gypsy Lover...voiced over in English by the guy who does movie trailers, the puppets cast in that clear poly-resin you see so many "collectible" figurines cast in nowadays. And others. The boy summed it up best: "It's as if we paid somebody else to take drugs for us and watched the results....". 

1 Exception: EVERLOVING - it looked CGI, but was shot upside down and under water and in reverse, about bags and scraps of paper that blow together in the wind and form - for a few moments - something approaching sentience before dissolving. I've tried to find a YouTube video of it, to no success. It was exceptional, the rest - well, ...

It's been enough suffering for the boy for a single day, and so I drop him off at home, he's puppeted out and I've a headache that's grown steadily worse throughout the day.

But I'm not done. After the boy's dropped off I find Club Sapien and attend a lecture by Marsian on Puppet and Object Fetishes - People marrying landmarks, RealDolls, cos-play, furries and such. Fascinating subject matter, and I haven't linked to any of the topics here because if you don't know what I'm talking about you should do your own investigations.

And sadly that's it.

Links:   Puppet Uprising, PuppetSlam (blog by Marsian), Handmade Puppet Dreams

Milestones

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Restaurants & Cafes

Published: 11 March 2011

Hits: 1868

It's independent film night with the boy, and I've got to go downtown to pick up our tickets for the animated objects festival. I'm multitasking.

And as we're downtown we stop into Milestones on Stephen Avenue Mall. Now really, IFN should be about independent & foreign films, and by extension independent and exotic restaurants, but we're already there and so we take a chance. We're hungry.

And it's lousy. Lousy not just in a "we ripped off Earl's Menu" kinda way, but in a "We ripped off Earl's menu and Denny's chef's" kinda way. Lousy, lousy food. A spinach/artichoke dip that had the consistency of melted butter with bits of green goop floating in it (spinach? Parsley?). A waiter that couldn't make eye contact (although I appreciated the fact they hired older waiters, Earl's could learn a lesson or two there) and scurrilously lit our lamp and had to write down an order for 2 - for 2. A burger with less meat on it than a McDonald's cheeseburger, a dessert that tasted vaguely of chocolate and I suspect was imported from the dessert cafe on 14 St (where they import things from I don't know...). Flat soda pop. A fine decor that looked like it might have once been expensive, but the carpet hadn't been vacuumed or cleaned in what I suspect were years, and there were chips here and there, small details of decay that spoke of the ruinous meal that awaited.

Summary? Don't go. Walk further up Stephen Avenue Mall and take a chance somewhere - anywhere - else. No stars here. Not a one.