Since I was writing about writing the other night, I’m including this series of screenshots of the master at his typewriter from “Deconstructing Harry.” Theses shots are from the movie’s final few moments, where Allen’s character, Harry Block comes to a realisation about how he operates in this world, a realisation that inspires him to sit and hack it out. The narration over this scene is:

[To himself]: “I like it. I like it. A character who’s too neurotic to function in life, but can only function in art.

[Typing]: Notes for a novel. Opening possibility. Rifkin led a fragmented, disjointed existence. He had long ago come to this conclusion: all people know the same truth. Our lives consist of how we choose to distort it. Only his writing was calm, his writing, which had in more ways than one, saved his life.”

The movie is about a novelist whose material is borrowed from events and people in his own life, thinly disguised, slightly distorted and revealed without conscience.

Trivial observation about the name ‘Rifkin’

Woody Allen used the name ‘Rifkin’ similarly in “Husbands and Wives.” Both movies: Allen plays a novelist; ‘Rifkin’ is a character in a novel written by Allen’s character; and the name appears only once and only in narration. In “Husbands and Wives,” the name is mentioned in the final lines of the novel as read by Allen’s character’s mid 20’s pretty love interest who provides critique/encouragement for his writing. In “Deconstructing Harry,” the name is mentioned in the final lines of the movie itself; though he also had a mid 20’s pretty love interest who provides critique/encouragement for his writing. Here’s how the novel ends in “Husbands and Wives” as narrated by Allen in character as novelist Gabriel Roth:

“Feldman longed to meet a woman who attracted him physically and had the following personality:   A quick sense of humour equal to his, a love of sports equal to his, a love of classical music equal to his with a particular fondness for Bach and balmy climates. In short, he wanted himself, but as a pretty woman.  Pepkin married and raised a family. He led a warm, domestic life.  Placid, but dull. Knapp was a swinger. He eschewed nuptial ties and bedded five different women a week:  Students, housewives, nurses, actresses, a doctor, a salesgirl. You name it, it held Knapp between its legs. Pepkin, from the calm of his fidelity, envied Knapp. Knapp, lonely beyond belief, envied Pepkin.

What happened after the honeymoon was over? Did desire really grow with the years or did familiarity cause partners to long for other lovers?  Was the notion of ever-deepening romance a myth we had grew up on along with simultaneous orgasm? The only time Rifkin and his wife experienced simultaneous orgasm was when they were granted their divorce. Maybe in the end, the idea was not to expect too much out of life.”

This is about a conversation I had no choice but to overhear. It was Wednesday evening and I went for a quick and easy afterwork bite downtown at this Indian buffet place. Fine. Shortly after I had arrived and settled in, this couple of pretty girls in their early 20’s were seated at the table right next to mine. The place was relatively empty and yet, there they are… just 3 feet away… i.e. close enough for me to hear every word of their conversation. Whether I wanted to or not. It was pretty much unavoidable actually. And I should add that the two of them weren’t bothering to keep their voices down.

And so the performance begins

After they sorted out what to order (butter chicken and samosas, *yawn*), they immediately got down to business. And the business of course was exchanging complaints about their respective boyfriends. What else. SO here we have it, the gods have tossed some mild amusement my way; it would be an insult not to take it in. So I accepted the situation as a kind of girl-talk theatre while I assumed my own role as oblivious and/or disinterested involuntary audience guy pre-occupied with his phone. [Appearing to mind my own business is one of my natural talents. Because most of the time I actually am.] I can’t recreate their conversation. Believe me, I would love to. For the sake of authenticity. But can’t: my memory recall system doesn’t work in the sequential “then she said, ‘bla bla bla’; then the other one said, ‘bla bla bla.’” kind of way. And if I attempted to improvise for your benefit, it would only come off as totally contrived. I can remember a few phrases though. I’ll get to them in a sec. The point was thus: blonde was complaining that live-in boyfriend, let’s call him Dopey, never really wanted to go out and party. It seems that over time, he’s kind of fallen into this boring routine and he’s not exactly putting much effort into ensuring her social goals are maintained. (But why would he?) And she complained that he is always focussed on whatever he was doing, like a school paper, and does not react well to being interrupted, i.e. he had priorities other than her and her need to go out. Actual quote: “You know, guys are stupid; they can only do one thing at a time.” Asian friend jumped right in with complete agreement and had exactly the same beef with her live-in boyfriend, let’s call him Sneezy: now that they live together, it seems Sneezy doesn’t really need to go out or put much work into the relationship either. Both fellas have lost interest in going out to have fun. “Not even for one drink”. Actual quote: “Oh my god! I know!” and another as we’ve already heard: “Guys are all the same.” Then blonde remarked that given the predictability and stasis of her live-in relationship with Dopey that ha-ha, it’s like her and Dopey “were married”. And what do you know, Asian friend completely agrees because her and Sneezy also seem to be in a married couple kind of rut. Isn’t that hilarious. Much laughter ensued. But no dots were connected. No attempt at a connection made between lazy boyfriends and cohabitation. To the girls, these two phenomena are perfectly independent variables.

Before I get to the moral of the story, I want to point out my favourite part of the conversation, and that part is the un-dénouement. It goes like this: after taking turns tag-team trash-talking the fellas they have decided to pair-up and share a home with, the girls finish their chat not with any kind of greater clarity of the scenario or any kind of 

working theory that explains how their guys got boring around the time they moved in, or let alone any kind of resolve or solution, instead they finish this topic not only accepting their fate, as if they were helpless, but in actually EXCUSING the very guys they’ve just been crucifying. Unbelievable. Can’t remember the phrase they used, but the net effect was something like this: “Dopey and Sneezy are dumbasses and everything is their fault because they’re so stupid, BUT! that’s all okay, it’s all all right, because even though they’re dumbasses, they’re OUR dumbasses.”

Weird. Anyhow, we can surmise that the reason for the conversation has nothing to do with actually improving their situation. The satisfaction of the conversation lies not in solving the issue, but only in the mere descriptive airing of their respective predicaments. Apparently there’s no greater aim here. Just share and discuss. The exploration only goes as far as mutual shared experience: that’s it.

I can’t tell you, as the sole audience member, how disappointingly unclimatic and lame this finale is. So much potential for liberation just left on the table. You just gotta shake your head at the girls’ i) inability to understand the dynamic and the very basic concept that is causing their predicaments, ii) inability to grasp the reality that they can actually do something to influence and change their circumstances and iii) acceptance to just put up with and deal with a substandard relationship. It’s like, “Oh well, this is the hand fate has dealt us. Everything happens for a reason. And I love him anyway, la-la-la.” This complete lack of rigorous thinking baffles me: the problem is plainly laid out, fully described and articulated, and deductions & inferences merely inches away, but yet in the end everyone’s cool with the status-quo. Girls, come on. You’re almost there, just take it a step further and the secrets of the world will unravel before our eyes. Nope. No thank you. We’re done. Our guys are jackasses, lol, but we love them, la-la-la. The end.

The moral of the story

The promise of relationship advancement through living together is the biggest hoax that women have ever perpetrated on themselves. Not that tough to figure out. How motivated is a guy to do anything outside of his total immediate convenience, when he’s already had his way with you last night. And could have or did the night before that, and the night before that, and the night before that, and the night before that, and the night before that, and the night before that, and the night before that. Male chase energy is applied to pursue what they don’t already have, not in what is already in their constant presence. You think he’s miraculously going to step up and propose? In order to achieve what?

Everybody knows at some level that over-familiarity evaporates passion. I suspect that women choose to ignore the very basic causal relationship between their constantly being in their guy’s face and his increasing disinterest. Why. Because they want it both ways: they want the physical proximity AND a motivated boyfriend. And they wouldn’t see why they should have to give one up in order to get the other. Because of course they deserve both. And so we have the real explanation: “Guys are all the same. They’re so stupid.”

You know how many draft articles I have on this blog? Seventeen. Seventeen articles that I have started to write, but haven’t finished. So they just sit there backstage. Not sure how exactly this happens, but there seems to be an optimum amount of effort you want to put into an article. Less than the optimum and your piece will not gel. It’ll be loose or rough or not sufficiently developed. It’ll come off as a piece that makes sense to you, but no one else. On the other hand, it’ll probably have that kind of free style that we all love so much. Interesting side note that the pieces that I get the most positive feedback are the “stream” ones - where out of tiredness, I just go for it and write as it comes and don’t bother to edit. Well I edit spelling… not because I’m a bad speller, but because I’m a clumsy typer. What? the red dashed line says that typer not a word? Rubbish. I’m not writing “typist”. I’m not a typist. It’s not my profession. Ha! Actually, wrong again. because come to think about it, it is actually my job, meaning that much of my day is writing emails - and get this, starting this past week, writing reports. Passionless bureaucracy for its own sake. Action must be taken. BUT then again, my current job is not my profession. Confirmed, there is no “typer”. And that’s still rubbish. After all this time since I first called it. Apparently, just going for it and writing what’s on the mind seems to keep the customer satisfied. Weird. Ok fine. What kills my writing I guess is putting in too much effort; editing beyond the optimal threshold. Then you lose the spontaneity. Then you need it to make sense, not just to yourself but whomever. Then you hear that whomever’s voice and she’s stupid and irritating and needs things spelled out to her, so the writing gets over-explainy; but she’s also easily insulted and a little touchy about her stupidity. So you go easy on her. Such a pain in the ass to write to this person. And when I do, the whole process slows down and gets bogged in bogdom. In the end your piece has been drained of its love.

Note to self: yet another relationship between time and love. I have this theory, well it’s not just mine, but whatever. It has to do with certain time frames. Jesus this is oddly hyperparallel to the effort/writing thing that I started off writing about. It’s just that in order to start the fire, you don’t only need the right combination of inputs, but you want to introduce them at the right rate. Huh, this is interesting. Because it’s not like there’s necessarily a set time-frame, but it’s the relationship of effort to whatever stage you’re at. Too much too soon, it breaks. Too little too late, it dies. We know this. Bla bla bla, time window. Yeah yeah, but that doesn’t preclude the right input at the right dosage for the whatever circumstances you’re at to achieve ignition. I’ll do a diagram to make it clear. Some day. Might need calculus.

So yeah. I think that some of the draft pieces behind the scenes actually had potential; they were going somewhere. I’d like to think that they’re 75% done, but something tells me that in reality if I read them again now after letting them sit on the shelf, I’d instantly know that I’d have a better shot of getting it actually out and published if I just started the thing all over. Why am I talking about this.

Because the most recent draft was a light-hearted piece that I started just the other night. But I took too long refining and editing and rewriting and it got less light-hearted. And I’m not sure if its finish-able. Sidenote: it was originally inspired by this video on the onion. I just find it amusing… this common notion that women seem to have that moving in together with the boyfriend is somehow another step closer to whatever it is that woman are after. In reality it’s quite the opposite, as usual: a step in the direction of permanent stasis. But that’s how it works. That is all I wanted to say. But I couldn’t say it right, it got a little heavy and lost it’s edge. It may be retrievable, perhaps this weekend.

Took Bianca for a surprise harbour plane tour of Vancouver a few weeks ago for her birthday. Beautiful tour. It was a windy day which added a little special something to the adventure of being in a small plane; the thing was bouncing all over the place. Exciting.

Once you’re up in the air, the first reality about Vancouver that hits you straight in the face is how remote this city is. Remote. Totally remote. When you spend all your time in the Lower Mainland, it doesn’t readily occur to you that your comfortable existence is the small exception of civilisation on the edge of a massive rain forest. Two minutes into the flight though, it’s pretty clear.

The contrast is sharp. The seaplane takes off from Burrard Inlet, just off the downtown peninsula; we flew over West Van (cushy forest suburb), and then Horseshoe Bay (still civilisation), then bam, it drops off: Bowen Island, (with a smattering of houses on its coast), and then… you’re flying over the middle of nowhere. Just like that. In just a few minutes there’s nothing but water, mountains and forest. Nothing. Being in the sky looking down gives you a little perspective on life in this town in that Vancouver, geographically, is incredibly small, and virtually isolated. From up there, the ins and outs of the local political and social culture seems fairly insignificant. From up there, nature governs.

Selected iPhone photos from the tour:

Among the things I’ve thought about writing about here over the last month, but for whatever reason, haven’t are: narrowing windows of time and how they apply similarly to how to get back into your blog after having taken a month off, as with having waited too long to get back to somebody, and as with the temporary/fleeting aspects of the finer sex - and as the window narrows, how steering back on course becomes exponentially more complicated; the incredible pleasure of driving a car I love (a couple weekends ago I took my sixty-one 220 out for an exhilarating cruise down West Van’s winding and beautiful Marine Drive out to the gorgeous Gleneagles Community Centre and back with the windows down and its vintage radio playing some bad/good classic rock); the one-day course I took on the subconscious mind a couple months ago; what the hell is going on, generally; the career testing I always wanted to try and recently took (results, you ask? Architect was my number 7, musician was number 1, psychologist 2 - interestingly, ‘mind-numbing bureaucrat’ did not show up on my list); 

the sax solo from Foreigner’s ‘Urgent’ (awesome); the ridiculous amount of attention my car gets (I love the attention or hate the attention? Discuss); Ms. Aguilera’s pipes; how much you learn about the themes in Woody Allen when you watch four of his films in one day, and how Seinfeld and When Harry Met Sally and hence every single romantic comedy since then, borrowed heavily from the master; how since the principal raison d’être of blogging is the need for self-expression, it has evolved to serve writers, not readers - and how this is another fold in the larger observation of the human thrust to communicate outwardly without or before thoroughly considering its interpretation upon reception (shoot first; ask questions later) - the most obvious example and the most interesting in my mind is the communication between the sexes in romantic scenarios, as almost all romantic failures have roots in the urge to communicate with impatience (too much, too soon); back to blogging for a sec: the medium is too slow, big, clunky and unresponsive for today’s distractable attention spans; and how I am adapting (yes, I’m working on a new quicker, snappier, briefer, kind of site -  one that leads a reader through the content rather than merely dumping it all down and expecting the reader to sift through it - inspired by wiki creation software such as VoodooPad as well as concepts of well, seduction actually. I mean in the sense of maintaining power and leading the target to the desired destination - somebody has to lead and faced against the fickle and impatient online reader, it’s in the writer’s interest to take that lead. But not strictly through content, but also in controlling the rate and style of delivery of that content. You’ll see what I mean soon enough.);  why is time moving so fast?; Chico, the neighbour’s cat, is napping at my place all the time now… brat. He just comes in whenever he likes to hang out. And for treats (I bought two bags of Temptations for him - he can’t seem to get enough); how to see Europe; how to live in New York; the harbour plane tour of Vancouver Bianca and I went on a few weeks go; my first presentation to the Urban Design Panel last week - in Council Chambers (it was ok); the videos I want to make and am currently writing dialogue for; how beer drinkers don’t understand non beer-drinkers (you decline another, so they assume that you’re a teetotaller (yes that’s the correct spelling dammit), when in reality, you’d rather have a real drink than down bottle after bottle of mind-shrinking, headache-inducing pisswater); how the new community garden in the north lawn of City Hall is a total disgrace (the force of political symbolism); how I get away with occasionally wearing flip-flops at work; and the lesson of persistence.

Regular visitors may have noticed a fifth square icon added to the series at the top of the site. Do not be alarmed. Go ahead and feel fee to click it. Yes! It’s a movie. Please enjoy responsibly.

And you say flatly, “Dude, you made a video of yourself.” Ha! Guilty as charged. Just having a bit of fun. Allow me to explain: this is my first venture into video and the idea was to experiment to see if I could come up with something visually interesting within certain limited parameters. Yes! How clever of you, just as we do in architecture; mature architecture, that is. So the variables are minimized: just one guy in a black shirt with a coffee cup, no dialogue, and shot with the low-res camera on my MB Air from a single camera position and with single camera angle. Pretty much just leaves action, music, lighting and editing as the active variables.

The final picture was edited down from 15 minutes total footage of me just walking around or being silly at home shot in four separate short clips over the course of a single evening. Then I just extracted any snippet of visual tastiness and strung them together in a certain order. “Dude. You just called yourself tasty.” No I didn’t! I mean that I used any action that possessed the quality of being remotely compositionally interesting, and in fact! in some cases, not at all interesting, yet when set in contrast to action, become interesting through being uninteresting? Understanding?

The toughest decision was choosing from the list of music contenders. Below is a shot of said list and please click on it to enlarge as it was a bit less convenient than usual for some reason to upload this one.

In the end, much fun was had. There will be more.

Oh man, how my blog has sucked of late. Holy H. Mother of sweet sauce, my blog has sucked. Well, specifically it’s the content itself that has been doing most of the heavy lifting of the suck; actually very happy with how one-seventh looks. And feels. But you look back and read some of what’s there, and you go, ok man, for the love of sweet great fuck, that’s bad. Ba-haaad bad. Dude, come on. Massive sigh. But you know, I’m not even going to get into exactly or inexactly why it’s been weak. I have a rough idea, but I don’t care to analyse it further in order to articulate it. I’m just going to move forward. The site just needs to get better. Right away.

And I’ll do that. But the question is how exactly to proceed forward from here, given that a lot of the articles are, you know, garbage? Won’t they weigh you down, you ask?

How do you expect to forge ahead and press on beyond the grasp of suck with all those lame articles still hanging around, you continue to ask? Good point. It’s a design decision, isn’t it. What do you do, comb through two years of posts to delete all the previous suck, and then start fresh with a pure clean slate? Or do you just move ahead with non-suck material leaving the stuffy rubbish in place? You know you want to start fresh to unshackle yourself from the boring, stick-in-ass garbage of the past and free yourself to soar ahead with total liberation. That temptation is there. But in life are we not a function of our past? Even if we reinvent ourselves, are we not shaped by our history, be it cool or even, say, unbelievably poor? Ah. We cannot escape our past, even if it is a bunch of horrible trash. So then the answer is there, my friends: it stays.

But we still move forward.

I took this beauty home today. It’s a 1961 Mercedes Benz 220 “Heckflosse,”  designed back in a time when car design was unique and distinctive. Here’s a cellphone shot:

Jonah Lehrer’s latest post describes his being so nervous and flustered when he first met the woman who would eventually be his wife that he forgot his phone number and in fact gave her the wrong number. Amusing. It happens. But then he said this:

I turned into a bumbling fool that afternoon because some peculiar part of my brain “knew,” long before I did, that she was unbelievably special.

Aww. A bit of light-hearted personal anecdotal quirkiness that at the same time is a nice compliment to his wife. Not completely unwelcome for a blog about neuroscience, and more to the point, a rare example of a guy pulling the soul mate card. I always enjoy the ridiculous leaps in logic made from some marginally coincidental circumstance to the conclusion that as a result of the coincidence that some person is therefore a soul mate. It was meant to be you see. What’s your typical example? I don’t know. Some form of  brilliant deductive reasoning such as “Ohmygod, (some guy) was (at some place) and therefore we’re soul mates.” And when you hear stuff like this you’re just left dumbfounded and blinking unable to really engage with the massive leap in logic from the random to the evidence of destiny. The soul mate momentum thing. Got a life of its own.

So, Lehrer’s little story is not to be taken seriously obviously because we’ve probably all gone through those embarrassingly awkward or nervous scenarios when in the first encounter presence of someone “special,” but we didn’t ALWAYS end up in happily eternal married bliss with that person. About ten years ago on my first few dates with this one gal I was always losing my balance and kept falling into things or falling off the sidewalk. Yeah it was bad. But sooner or later the chemicals return to balance and you can walk straight again and conduct yourself just fine in a functioning relationship. For four years. Sure I was infatuated at first, but how is that sensation not just Mother Nature’s little game to fill your head with chemicals to make you dizzy and stupid just when you want to be your sharpest. Awesome. But did my brain think she was unbelievably special long before I did? No, I knew she was pretty hot (yes, and refined and classy) when I first saw her. And my nervousness was directly related to that hotness and I guess an emotional investment in the outcome of my clumsy approach. I mentioned this was ten years ago, right? I didn’t mistake the flood of natural opiates in my head for some unclear message from my subconscious that required deciphering. “Oh, is it love? Is it infatuation? Oh I’m so confused. Is it destiny?” Give me a break.

So, an update. First, and most obvious, a couple changes to the site. I’ve finally pared it down to be a “single column theme”, sans sidebar. Even more streamlined than before. And centred. And unlike recent incarnations of the site, this one will even render somewhat properly in IE6 for those unfortunate enough to have no choice but to use that ancient browser, like for example those at work at the City of Vancouver, where it’s the default corporate browser. Awesome. Since the site’s inception I’ve wrestled with this sidebar issue: its benefits in navigation and orientation for new visitors weighed against its ragged and untidy appearance. I admit that when going to new blogs, my eyes always tend to go first to the small text beneath the author’s photo to get a quick low-down on what the blog is all about. I’m not disputing the typical sidebar’s usefulness, but that benefit comes at the hefty cost of your site containing an element that looks like hell. The decision is easy for me to arrive at though. Cleanliness wins. “Oh Patrick, you’re so concerned with looks.” Well, I am an architect. But really, you want to get into this? Ok fine, what do most sidebars contain? A blurb about the author. A list of the ten most recent posts. A tag cloud. Recent comments. Links to other places. Google Ads. I don’t know, man. Doesn’t seem all that crucial. A lot of filler. Like when you buy roses, all the fluffy stuff they try to throw in there to fill out the bunch despite your specific instructions to leave it out. Bigger point: fluff is the

default way of the world. Unless, ladies and gentleman, you take action to fight it. Or maybe you actually like fluff and filler. Whatever.

Next is the title: all caps in Gills Sans, a classic from 1928. It’s working nicely because I wanted something that fills the width of the body of the site to reinforce the clean edges, but at the same time wouldn’t  take up too much visual weight with too much height. So the title is a nice, long elegant proportion, 18:1. And the letter spacing also softens the title’s impact. I picked a nice dark grey.  The navigation buttons at the top are smaller and admittedly their graphics do little to help orient new visitors. But that’s not their main objective. Regulars will get it.

Probably won’t be the last monkeying I’ll do with the site, but it’s probably set for the next little while.

In other news

A vacation? My attitude on getting away kind of soured. I would love to get away, but Mexico, as beautiful as some of the beaches look on the tiny photos on the travel websites (don’t get me restarted on the travel websites - terrible); I’m just not enthused about spending my vacation time flaking in luxury in a second world nation. All the reviews I read about staff theft at so called 4 star resorts didn’t help much either. So inaction. I’m also thinking that a vintage Speedmaster might be a better investment.