The IKEA Dinner Club

According to this article in Der Spiegel, some IKEA stores in Europe are helping retired people stretch their budgets. IKEA’s restaurant offers very low priced meals — lower than any regular restaurant — so they are very popular places for old folks as well as other people on low incomes.

The pensioner and his wife are not the only ones who have turned going to
the furniture shop into a daily ritual. In the western German cities of
Cologne and Bielefeld there are even specially organized breakfast
clubs. From Munich in the south to Kiel in the north, Ikea is
increasingly turning into a welfare center for pensioners, young moms,
low-earners and the unemployed.

Who can blame them? If my choices were IKEA or a soup kitchen, I’d choose IKEA every time. After all, it’s a subsidized meal in a clean and comfortable environment — and it costs the social services agencies nothing.

Unfortunately, IKEA’s commitment to a positive customer experience is being taken too far by some — there are also reports of people using the "Smaland" ball room as a free babysitting service while the parents spend the day elsewhere.

Brokeback Mountain: a few comments

Despite a few perfectly reasonable fears, Martine and I went to see Brokeback Mountain on Saturday night. OK, forget the Larry David reference; my only real fear was that the movie would be one of those earnest "topical" films that are all booming music and Spielbergesque ham-fisted poignancy. I’m happy to report that it was nothing like that. In fact, it was very well made and I really enjoyed it.

The setting was absolutely gorgeous (incidentally, those stunning vistas are actually in Alberta, Canada, where the film was shot, and not Wyoming, where it was set). Ang Lee gives us several gorgeous iconic cowboy images, but he never over-does it. And the story, while somewhat predictable if you’ve seen the trailer, turns out to be more complicated and involving than you may have lead yourself to believe.

The strangest thing for me was the number of sight and situation gags in the film — many of which were very subtle and might have escaped many viewers. On the other hand, they may be of the sort that brings a Stanley Kubrick anecdote to mind: a film reviewer had asked him about a scene in Full Metal Jacket in which a structure in the background was reminiscent of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The reviewer asked about its significance in the current film. Kubrick just shrugged and said "I don’t know. It’s the first time I’ve noticed it."

So perhaps the clever gags that I noticed were unintentional. I’ll mention one below, and you can be the judge. But before you continue, see this:

SPOILER ALERT!

IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM YOU MAY WANT TO STOP READING NOW!

Something I found quite clever about the film is that the director clearly knew the audience would be on the alert for the first sign of attraction between the two cowboys. To be precise, we’d be on hyper-alert. As such, he directed a number of scenes in a very intelligent way, designed to keep up that level of suspense without quite giving us the payoff. For example, in one scene, long after the men have established their work routine, you see one of them get undressed in the background. He squats down and begins washing himself using a bucket of water and some soap (it is not an explicit scene — you see the character in profile, and out of focus). He soaps down his armpits, and then his naughty bits (which are hidden by his leg. Calm down for Pete’s sake!).

If this were a Spielberg film, the cowboy in the foreground would have turned his head at just the right moment and he would have cast a long and doe-eyed look at his naked companion. Not so Ang Lee. Instead, as the guy in the background washes and rinses, the guy in the foreground just pokes away at the fire and is oblivious to his friend’s nakedness. Ang Lee understands the concept of waiting for the shoe to drop.

Then there was the following subtle gag, which may be of the Kubrick variety described above. When Jack Twist  goes back to Joe Aguirre (the Randy Quaid character) looking for work a year after the fateful summer, Aquirre says "Twist, you guys wasn’t gettin paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose."

I’ve never heard the expression "stem the rose" before, but it’s pretty clear what he’s referring to. In the meantime, we’ve seen quite a few scenes in which the guys are sitting around the campfire sipping whiskey out of an unlabeled glass bottle. Fast-forward almost 20 years, and we see the guys once again sitting around the camp fire on one of their "fishing trips." At this point they’re getting older and in this particular scene they’re not getting along so well. We’ve seen that their lives have diverged in many ways. Jack takes a sip of whiskey, and for once the bottle has a label on it: "Old Rose." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!

On the other hand, there was one thing (and only one thing) in the movie that did not ring true for me. Towards the end, Innes’s ex-wife tells him that she knew he didn’t go up to Brokeback Mountain to go fishing because she had left a note in his tackle box and when he came back the note was still there, undisturbed — indicating that he had never even opened the tackle box.

But here’s the thing — these guys are Wyoming cowboys. I don’t care how gay they are or how much buggering they got up to on their "fishing trips." No cowboy — gay, straight, or transgendered — could go into a landscape like that with a fishing pole and not go fishing. It just couldn’t happen. It’s like locking a couple of lesbians inside a chocolate factory and expecting them to never look around and try a few samples.

Other than that it was a fine film about oppression and repression, desire, loneliness, complicated relationships, and personal human struggles. Highly recommended.

The rising cost of working

In keeping with tradition, the cost of taking public transportation has gone up as of the new year. A monthly bus pass for Montreal now costs $63, and $70.50 and $71 for Laval and Longueuil respectively.

In my case, I live in Longueuil and work in Montreal, so — like many commuters — I have to buy a combined pass. The one I get is called a "Tram 3" and it now costs a whopping $99.

To be fair, that’s still fairly inexpensive when compared to monthly transit costs in places like Toronto ($98.75 for a basic pass) or Vancouver (between $69 and $130 depending on the zones). But it still seems like a lot — particularly since it is not a matter of distance that causes me to need the more expensive pass. It’s because I have to use two systems.

take me home

People who live in the far end of Lasalle, or Lachine, or Ahunsic (for example), are all on the island of Montreal, so they need only buy the Montreal STM pass even though they travel a greater distance to downtown than I do.

You could argue that I can also use the Tram 3 pass to travel around the rest of Longueuil, but in the two years I’ve been living in this suburb I’ve never had the slightest need to do so. The public transit system in Longueuil is centered around one task — getting people from their homes to the Longueuil Terminus and back. (There is an entry point into the Montreal Metro system at the Longueuil terminus.) Otherwise, it’s not very useful.

Aside from the terminus, there are few other places in Longueuil that I might want to go to (with the exception of a few places in my immediate neighbourhood). If I did, however, decide to take a bus to some other part of Longueuil, it would probably take me half an hour just to figure out how to do so, and the trip itself would take even longer.

It would likely involve waiting for my regular commuting bus (depending on the day and time, it might only come once an hour), which would take me to the terminus (a 20 minute ride). There, I might have to wait five, 10, or even 30 minutes for the connecting bus that would take me back out of the terminus and to the destination.

Forget that — I’ll just drive there in six or seven minutes. Which would you choose?

Despite the above, my daily commute is quite easy and relatively fast — because I know when the bus will come to my corner, and my destination is the terminus (OK, that’s the first leg of my journey). Coming home is the same — I take the Metro to the terminus and then have a choice of three different buses to take so I rarely have to wait more than a few minutes. But using the buses for any other pattern is just a waste of time. Too bad I have to pay so much for it.

Reading list, 2005

It’s a bit of a tradition for me to start a year by listing the books I read during the previous one. I’m generally not big on lists for their own sake, but I find this one is a handy way for me to take a few minutes to think about what I’ve been reading, and to see what patterns may emerge.

In light of Jessa Crispin’s recent “what your end of the year list says about you” article in The Book Standard, I find it particularly interesting to put together my list this year. She’s primarily referring to “best of the year” lists, while mine is simply “what I read.” But still, I respect her views and so I am glad to report that my list would likely meet with her approval.

So here, in alphabetical order by title, are the 29 books I read in 2005:

  • Balconville, by David Fennario
  • Best American Travel Writing 2004, edited by Pico Ayer
  • Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
  • Byline: Ernest Hemingway, edited by William White
  • Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss
  • Enough About You, by David Shields
  • Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul
  • Kafka was the Rage, by Anatole Broyard
  • Nickled and Dimed; On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrereich
  • On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt
  • Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
  • Remembering Laughter, by Wallace Stegner
  • Sacre Blues, by Taras Grescoe
  • Saints of Big Harbour, by Lynn Coady
  • Screwjack, by Hunter S. Thompson
  • Spies, by Michael Frayn
  • The Bobby Gold Stories, by Anthony Bourdain
  • The Boomer, by Marty Asher
  • The Dark Room, by Rachel Seiffert
  • The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene
  • The Main, by Trevanian
  • The Memory Artists, by Jeffrey Moore
  • The Moon is Down, by John Steinbeck
  • The Museum Guard, by Howard Norman
  • The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
  • The World is Not For Sale, by José Bové and Francois Dufour
  • Them, by Jon Ronson
  • Why Are We At War?, by Norman Mailer
  • You Can’t Win, by Jack Black

As per Crispin’s article, I am happy to note that:

None of these books are, as far as I know, on the New York Times “Notable Books of the Year” list. I wouldn’t object if a few of them were (nor would Crispin) but I’m happy to confirm that my reading list is not overly influenced by advertising and corporate interests.

None of these books were written by a former blogger. If any had been, all it would have said about me is that I’m a blogger too — which is true. But I do agree with her that blogs and books are very different things, and when you try to turn your blog into a book, you end up with something that works far better as a blog than as a book.

I have included at least one graphic novel. Sort of. OK, not really. The Boomer is a quirky little book that is essentially a cartoon / poem(ish) thing, with one panel per page. It’s a very quick read (less than 30 minutes), and is definitely the shortest title on my list (I considered not including it), but it’s not quite a graphic novel. However, there are two graphic novels on my 2004 list and one on my 2003 list, so that should count for something. Mental note: include at least one graphic novel in the 2006 reading list.

There are five women on this list, and none of them are Mary Gaitskill, Joan Didion, or Zadie Smith. Mind you, five out of 29 is a pretty low proportion. It was five out of 25 in 2004 and three out of 24 in 2003. Mental note: try to read more women writers in 2006.