The Blork Blog – Page 35 – Food. Montreal. Me

January 8, 2009Ed Hawco 16 Comments

One Cent Credit

A few months ago I canceled my American Express Gold Card. I’d been a “member” for about ten years, and for the first few years I didn’t mind paying the annual fee because, as I saw it, it was a small price to pay for the prestige of having an American Express Gold card! Also, most years I’d recoup the fee by taking advantage of some of its benefits, such as being able to refuse the extra insurance on car rentals.

But now that I’m all grown up I’ve lost the need to flash gold at hotels and restaurants. To be precise, I still go to hotels and restaurants, but I no longer feel the need for the flash, particularly since I know (and really, have always known) that it doesn’t really impress anybody. So why bother paying the fee for gold?

Well, year after year the annual fee would sneak up on me. I’d always forget that the card was coming up for renewal, and when the fee would show up on my statement I’d think “oh well, might as well keep it for another year.” But last year I got smart. I used Future Me to send myself an email the month before the card was to automatically renew, reminding me to cancel it.

And that’s exactly what I did. When I got the email from Future Me I paid off the balance, waited a couple of days, then phoned and canceled the card. There was only one problem; when I paid the balance I mistyped and paid exactly one cent more than the amount owing. A month later I got a statement from American Express for the canceled card, with a zero balance, but a notice that there was a one cent credit.

my amex bill

So now what? It’s not like I’m going to demand they cut me a cheque for a penny. If I ignore it, they’ll send me these one cent credit notices for the rest of my life. I suppose I could always call them and let them know they can keep the penny, but I’m not prepared to lose an hour of my life explaining to some guy in Bangalore why I paid an extra cent and why I don’t mind if they keep it. I could always write to them, but experience tells me that writing to a bank is like writing to Orwell’s “Big Brother,” but in a Kafka novel.

What do you suggest?

January 7, 2009Ed Hawco 1 Comment

YULBlog Reboot

yulblog If you’re from Montreal and you have a blog, tonight would be a good night to come out to YULBlog. The yulblog.org Web site has been completely rethought and redesigned, and what better way to celebrate its relaunch than at the first “First Wednesday” of 2009?

(Confession: due to the weather, I won’t be there. But that’s a whole other story.)

In the meantime, even if you don’t go to the F2F event, feel free to list your blog on yulblog.org. Go here for more information!

January 5, 2009Ed Hawco 1 Comment

Revolutionary Road Movie

vintage richard yates cover revolutionary road If you don’t know by now that Revolutionary Road was my favorite of all the books I read last year, then you’re just not paying attention. But as I’ve said before, I have my doubts about the film version, directed by Sam Mendes (of American Beauty), which opens in Montreal any day now.

I’m doubtful because the book was such a writerly novel; as much, or more, about the telling as about the story itself. Not that cinema can’t achieve the same level of art and craft in its narrative, but doing it that way generally doesn’t sell a lot of extra tickets, and with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead roles, there are some big salaries to cover.

However, I’ve seen a few reviews that indicate the film may indeed be somewhat true to the grindingly anxious subtext and nuance that we find in Richard Yates’s book. But first, Adelle Waldman, writing in The New Republic, provides us with a latter-day review of the novel, reminding us of what’s really going on in the book. Her review’s blurb says “Revolutionary Road, considered the original anti-suburban novel, isn’t actually anti-suburbs–but something far more devastating than that.”

…if Mendes’s new film is to do Revolutionary Road justice, it will transcend the easy anti-suburban categorization. While Yates’s depiction of suburban life is nightmarish enough to exceed the worst fears of Jane Jacobs’s devotees, Revolutionary Road is far more than a complacent takedown of the ‘burbs. It is in fact less an anti-suburban novel than a novel about people who blame their unhappiness on the suburbs.

Katrina Onstad, reviewing the film on CBC.ca, had similar things to say about the book:

… Yates tells the story of a married couple living miserably in the suburbs, but they’ve imported their own pain and dysfunction from the city.

And about the movie:

…their fights are colossal and verbally lacerating, with each party projecting their own failures onto the other. Yates’ clear, colloquial language gets a full workout in these devastating rounds, which measure just how low lovers can go.

There’s more:

Both the book and film take place on the eve of second wave feminism, and April’s rudderless, identity-free existence doesn’t have a name yet; it will take Betty Friedan, in 1963, to identify the plague of discontent felling housewives in The Feminine Mystique. April’s misery may quietly exist in the shadow of what’s coming next, but Mendes doesn’t delve deep into the kind of broad social satire of television’s Mad Men, where housewives regularly disintegrate. There, our pleasure is in watching the racist, sexist characters march obliviously towards the precipice of the late ’60s.

Revolutionary Road is not as moored to its historical moment; there’s actually a timelessness to the psychological portraits Mendes paints. We watch the lit fuse that is Frank and April’s relationship, wondering just how many compromises they can make, how cornered they have to feel before the inevitable explosion.

OK, I’m convinced enough to give it a go. Don’t let me down, Sam Mendes!

January 5, 2009Ed Hawco 3 Comments

A Memory

I’m sitting in a chair, or a bench really, made of orange webbing that runs the length of the cargo hold in a US Air Force C-130 Hercules. We’re flying over the arctic tundra when suddenly a loud alarm sound pierces through my earplugs, a kind of honking that’s even louder than the bone-rattling hum of the four turboprop engines.

The alarm is honking because the big hatch in the back isn’t closed right. Not that I can see very much, crammed in there next to cargo stacked almost to the ceiling, but I figure it out when I see these Air Force guys go back there, climbing across the cargo like monkeys, and I hear them banging away at something. In the meantime the plane descends to about 100 feet off the tundra, which I reckon is a precaution so we won’t fall so far if the cargo door pops open and everything flies out the back, throwing off the plane’s balance. Finally the alarm stops and I assume the hatch is secure although no one actually says one way or another, and the plane goes back up to it’s normal altitude, which is still only a couple of thousand feet. 45 minutes later we land on a barren airstrip next to a radar station on a cliff at the edge of the arctic ocean, and as we get off the plane nobody says anything about the alarm or the cargo door.

The strangest thing about this story — at least for me — is that it’s a memory, not a dream.