I've moved

This blog is now at:

siqister.wordpress.com

London: Fresh Off the Plane & Delirious

Still got twenty minutes on this computer so I thought might as well, even though I don't really have much to say since I only got off the plane three hours ago.

London is very pretty in a bustling city-that-works kinda way--not that I can decribe it better than the next person--and very green. It's already quite warm here, although the morning air still carries that English chill.

I'm staying in Earl's Court this time in London, which is right on the damarcation line between central London and that other aptly named "Zone 2". It was an Aussie slum before but has come a long way in gentrification. I actually like this area a lot, again for its workaday quality. On my way here I actually saw people jogging(!), grocery shopping(!), and people of colour(!). There are tons of restaurants on Earl's Court Rd., most of them touristy but not as touristy as central London locations. This main drag reminds me of the Annex in more ways than one.

'Cause You Can't Betray a Car Shaft

After sleeping through the Canadian political spectrum both literally and metaphorically, spawning an excruciating book chronicalling said process, and consequently fulfilling every Nietzschian mantra about women, Belinda Stronach has finally decided to stop doing any more damage.

Amen, sista.

Urban Foibles: Ghost World

Just as I started a campaign of virulent hatred against the pigeons of Nathan Philip Square, I saw these two having a moment in the setting sun.

I hate doing or saying anything about this, and hate even more what this might say about our baser instincts, but hating on something as a collective act of solidarity often bring people closer together than anything else might.

I was on the crowded west bound platform of Bloor Station today, standing really close to a stock type of downtown westend -- black blazer, ironic cap, girl-jeans-worn-by-a-guy, the works -- as uncomfortably as I do when I have to stand that close to anyone, let alone a walking cliche of a human being. The train arrived, doors popped open; we rushed in and settled across from each other, which was when I caught a whif of library musk. I turned around, and saw an elderly man with a beret, reading, or rather liberally sniffing, a yellowing pocket-sized romance, his porous nose forcing its way into the binding.

Bizarre things seem to happen a lot around me, and in any case I'm often the only one who finds it funny. I jerked my head the other way, came face to face to a stern woman in her 50s, and played contortionist gymnastics with my facial muscles as I tried really hard to pretend that nothing was happening and I was not crazy. Then I noticed the westender with a smirk on his face, gazing through his aviators (pretty atrocious eh?) at the old man; then glancing in my direction, his faint suggestion of a smile broke into something altogether more tangible.

Thus is how we bonded for a moment, two people unlikely to have liked each other and to like each other in the future, accomplices in hatred and contempt; I was Thora Birch to his ScarJo. Meanwhile the old man sniffed on, unaware of his role in this meaningful moment.

Urban Foibles: Cannibalism Next Door

Toronto, you've given me more and more reasons to love you.

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Those who think that Toronto is merely a more vanilla New York City--a 110% correct assessment--should nevertheless heed this human interest story from the Star, the sheer grotesqueness of which earned it the top spot on the website's GTA page. Wincing and feigning disgust aside, more than a few of us are secretly elated that Toronto is finally breeding its own crop of passive-agressive psychos par excellence, instead of the much more mundane variety that haunts Spadina and Bloor in search of people willing to buy his dreamcatchers. It's a rite of passage for this young city of ours, no?

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This story also confirms my long-held suspicion that cannibalistic pigeons are a greater threat to North American civilization than Iranian nukes or governmental ineptitude. The Mad Pigeon Disease shall no longer be the bane of the Land of Horse Manure, but will instead strike the heart of civilization, Eaton Centre.

Here Is What I Did This Weekend: Got Jeans, and Almost Famous

Shopping is something that either evokes fond memories of American Apparel trysts and insults-disguised-as-mockery (when I shop with mostly female friends and the odd few gays ones) or boundless trepidation (when I shop by myself). I've struggled to come to terms with this strange dichotomy, and have made the following self-discoveries:

One, I don't really care that much about fashion, and consequently am not very fashionable. Up till three years ago I thought Old Navies was an acceptable expression of one's individuality; I completely missed the point about polka dots; and I still don't get these palestinian scarves. The best I've managed to pull off is to be tasteful: that is, to wear the bland looking jeans and the inconspicuous chucks and sweat-shop-free grey t-shirts that just screams "university student", "the Guardian reader" and "passive consumer of culture" (whatever that means). Standing by the wall I might as well just be the wall.

Two, my problem with shopping alone is a result of conflicting psychological undercurrents. This I figured out as soon as I entered the Gap at Bay and Bloor this past Saturday to seriously shop for jeans, my only pair having just ripped in certain vital areas.

Now is as good a time as any to freely admit that I have an inferiority complex at clothing stores, especially at the snootier ones where you are expected to know what you are talking about. Now Gap usually doesn't rank that high on snootiness, but this being Bay and Bloor, the wage-slave-cum-sales-associate descended on me like vultures that just smelt rotten meat.

Very preppy, sexually ambiguous male in his mid-20s: Can I help you?

Me: ummm...I've just taking a look around really.

I spent 10 minutes literally looking around before realizing it was the women's floor. More nerve racking was the somewhat morbid looking "wall of jeans" laid out for men upstairs.

Me: umm..."boot cut", wonder what that is. "Slim fit"? I can't tell the difference.

Black? Navy? Pre-stressed? Easy fit? I forked over everything like my life depended on it. On top of that, I can't remember my size--it's been THAT long since I shopped for pants.

I hunted down an attractive 50-year-old sale associate with a Yorkville Drawl and asked her if the 32 in "32X30" referred to the waist size; she noticably paused a second to suppress a snigger before asking me what I wanted so she could find it for me. I just died little inside.

The thing is that normally I wouldn't even waste my time feeling bad about these people, but just then I felt as never before the need to justify my existence to this tanned and attractively turned-out fashion horde (lowly fashion hordes at that; see Holt Renfrew): I read goddamnit! I can talk hours on end about why the Raj failed and why Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed. I can tell you about Baron Haussman's Paris and Man Ray's Paris. I can recite Manhattan's movie script backwards if I had the inclination, eh? Eh?

I was lucid enough to realize that these people have no time for the Raj and the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

I did end up finding the ideal pair of jeans though, and paid for it. At $100 it is like the most expensive piece of clothing I own--I've paid my dues to hang out with my more glamourous friends.

p.s. one of my photos from flickr got featured in Torontoist's weekly roundup of good photos. That got me really excited for like, three seconds. http://siqister.blogspot.com

It's Too Bad They Don't Offer B.A. in Useless Knowledge...oh Wait They Do!

It's 3AM, and I've been working on this paper on multi-layer feedforward back-propagation neural networks for 9 hours--a very unproductive 9 hours, since I've yet to write anything.

In that time span however I've mastered all the new functions of Mac's upcoming OS Leopard, acquainted myself with the latest educational prices on Macbooks, learned the performance difference between Adobe Photoshop CS2 Camera Raw and Nikon Capture NX in high ISO situations; that, and that Toronto's second favourite restaurant chain according to Eye's 2005 survey is, incidentally, Swiss Chalet.

It's a bloody lie when they tell you that knowing doesn't hurt, 'cause it totally does.

p.s. a hug for my very close friend Aliza; at least somebody (somebodies) loves you.

Urban Foibles: the Heartbreak Club

I really ought to have something more intelligent to say than this, after almost two months of saying anything at all. But one of the most fascinating things that happened in the life of the city in the past month is--no, not 48 Abell (who has the energy any more)--this.

The launching of kizmeet is an all-too-predictable step towards the coming of the great internet-reality interface, when everyone (and I mean every single cellphone-camera-using, facebook-whoring human being) gets to live out his/her own Truman Show.

This leaves the "missed connections" page of Craigslist kinda dejected looking: a place past its prime, the internet equivalent of that tired-looking Chinese restaurant with stern waitors and dead lobsters in the water tank. And appropriately enough, I found this post(paraphrased):

"W4M--I saw you at Wong's Buffet in Brampton. You were the guy in khaki pants and white sneakers eating alone in the corner. We shared a few laughs at the steam table waiting for the fried rice. I was with family & couldn't ask for your number."

Steam tables, formica countertop, bad chinese food, Chervolet in the windswept parking lot--if Brampton was the antebellum South then Bloor St. might as well be my own Mason-Dixie line. But reading it still felt kind of cute. What do you call this? The universality of experience? Awkward girl gazes longingly at the awkward guy, fried rice in hand--aww, the tantalizing tactility of the moment.

One City, Two Faces: Tsukiji Market

Posted on urbanphoto.net

Sushi Bar at Tsukiji Market, Tokyo

The hardest thing for me as a kid growing up in the vastness of suburban Tokyo was to imagine a place different from my own—I was merely one amongst the tens of millions who lived on lands far from the city centre and dominated by the postwar glass-and-concrete aesthetic, and who, via Tokyo’s impeccably efficient train system, poured into the city’s downtown (an unfamiliar and decidedly North American concept), itself a vague place to which the usual definition—anywhere within the famed Yamanote loop line—does no justice.

Life was and still is organized around single train lines: you take it to work, to shops, to the dentist’s etc. Patterns of life literally do not intersect, and one’s world at times becomes a partial reality, composed of the landscape along the morning train ride and people (often the same ones) you bump into on the train platforms and around the train stations.

Which explains why I’d been to many of the fabled sites of Tokyo for only so lamentably few times, and to some never at all; a fact, nevertheless, a sensible Japanese person would take as a matter of course. Take Tsukiji Market (so highly regarded by Lonely Planet) for example—why would a middle-class college-going kid travel to a place for fish mongers and restaurant buyers?

I went regardless, armed with a camera, an academic, collegiate curiosity, and a copy of Lonely Planet which simultaneously identified me as a gaijin and exempted me from Japanese sensibilities.

“Tsukiji” has had a relative short run as a wholesale market (it began in the 1930s), but is, despite its proximity to rarified Ginza, firmly and inextricably linked to the ancient traditions of old Edo’s shitamachi. Aptly translated as the “low city”, shitamachi was the area east of the “high city”, inhabited by lowly trades people–a place of lore that was unglamourous yet prosperous and always uninhibited and vivacious–now survived by only a few touristified pockets, including Tsukiji itself.

Yet it is a functioning market. Huge loads of fish start arriving before dawn, and go through fierce bidding by buyers in a now closed process. By seven o’clock everything has found an owner, and merchants began cutting up their spoils for retail. This is when the market kicks into full gear, as throngs of restaurant buyers arrive for provisions of the day.

Fragments of the shitamachi spirit remain: vendors disregard rules of politeness, hawking their food at the top of their lungs; the fish and meats are displayed with much less scruple than elsewhere; people push past each other uttering insincere apologies; and muddy vegetable-laden golf carts occasionally zip through the crowds, inducing short-lived panic. Also on display are some of the least trendy yet most essential food items in a Japanese kitchen: soy sauce, miso paste, pickled vegetables. The occasional hardware store provides the essentials for a Japanese restaurant.

The bizarre lurks among the mundane.

A stall selling what seems like preserved animals

Outside, crowds of people get their mid-morning fix at street-side noodle shops, many of them literally holes in the wall (although the noodles look fantastic). The business of eating is conducted standing up—all are busy working people, and few seem like tourists.

Standing in this bustle and hustle one can’t help being moved by the place’s warm inclusiveness: to get in on a piece of this place yourself you simply have to show interest in a piece of tuna or slip into one of these dark old sushi joints. This is life at its most humane. The shitamachi vendors are at once loud, unpretentious, welcoming, and show no trace of fin de siecle mawkishness—the market is to be torn down and replaced in 2008, but somehow you know this place will live.

Zut! I Just Killed Zis Zing Again

Not entirely through my own design though. A powerful earthquake off the coast of Taiwan on Boxing Day severed all internet cables between mainland East Asia with North America, and I've been virtually without internet for two weeks, that is, until now.

Entries are on the way though...