- a greyhound station, where i send my thoughts to far-off destinations -

A few months ago, a good friend of mine encouraged me to start writing for her organization, which acts as an internship of sorts for developing opera singers and producers. Through my volunteering with Merola, I've had some fascinating views behind the curtains to learn about opera staging and development, and the art form in general. I've always found opera difficult to immerse myself into, but with every history I delve into, kindred spirit I find (Mozart and I are fellow procrastinators) and SNL analog I discover (English ballad opera, here's looking at you), I find my feet a little more.

My latest post looked at the history of happy endings in opera; in a form known for its sweeping, often sad endings, it was interesting to look at how a patron's wish or a writer's satirical outlook could change the conclusion of even very concrete myths, like those of Eurydice and Orpheus.

Curious? Check out the blog over here.


♥ music of the moment: soul meets body

- heroes are born; idols are made -

A friend recently posted this image on his Facebook page, and I have to admit I saw red. (Pink?) It's been an interesting year to be a feminist and pay attention to the Internet. I mulled on the image and what it was saying, and while I disagreed immediately with the cute quotes around "crisis" and some of the tone, it does raise an interesting point.

My response proved too lengthy and link-heavy for responding in the comment field of his original post, so:

Thank you for encouraging discussion; it's definitely one worth having, and one that exists both on and offline. (I'd be happy to share links if you're interested?)  I'd argue the male side of the coin is less visible in part because of the standards imposed by both cultural figures (i.e.: "girls are emotional, men are stoic") but no less there.

I went back, originally, to revise "men" to "boys" in that statement - in the sense of the word pairs "girls and boys" vs. "men and women", but maybe it's a fitting slip; toys and pop culture project a youthful girlishness on women, where even boys are expected to be resourceful, mature, and - as He-Man illustrates - built. Heavy expectations.

Back to those standards: by encouraging women to be emotional and expressive, dialogue formed around the toys we grew up with and are now given the option to share with our children/future generations. Unless we're subscribing to a Liefeld model of anatomy, Barbie is unrealistic, yet she's also an interesting starting point for toys with a more positive outlook: recent examples include makers who have created new dolls with more realistic proportions, or the almost instantaneous unofficial rewrites of the "Barbie: Computer Programmer" book where, in the original, she proceeds to break her computer and lets her guy friends fix it. Those are pretty good things to come out of a "crisis." We're also seeing more indie toy companies on the market as a response to this demand, with products that are often appealing to both genders and build on creative and problem-solving skills (Make magazine recently covered a lot of these in their "Best Toys for Makers" issue, and they look awesome.)

"Girl toys" are also an easier target because they're overwhelmingly pink. There's a visual accord that's easier to pick up on and write about, where the rows in the toy store historically attributed to guys tends to have more variety: action figures, and video games, yes, but also board games, Magic cards, Lego, RC cars, scientist kits... Some see the variety available and go "well, it's not perfect, but it's definitely better," and stop there.

Because Barbie is made in a very specific image, and despite her many careers, a pretty shallow one, it's easier to move past her. Conversely, male heroes are drawn with more nuance, so their shadow is harder to emerge from, or notice its effects. Most wouldn't actually want to be Batman/Iron Man (despite the shirts stating the contrary) because their lives suck when you think about it, but these men are and do everything, which is nearly impossible to measure up to. In the words of the Avengers themselves:

Captain America: Big man, in a suit of armour… take that away, what are you?

Iron Man: Uh… a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.

On my best day, I'm only one of those (for better or worse, the last one) and either way, those are some big shoes to even want to aim towards. Add to that, if it wasn't enough, the physical attractiveness of these heroes: Thor's actor is this year's Sexiest Man Alive, too. There's a reason that men's skincare/cosmetics is one of the fastest growing retail fields out there. I've supported friends and mentored kids I volunteer with who've struggled with these images in contrast with their own, and feeling like they didn't measure up. I know that having caring, adventurous, and intelligent family, teachers, and friends helped to shape who I wanted to become; hopefully, I'm passing a bit of that on.

TL;DR?

I think that we, as a society, are still working past the "man up, it's just a picture/toy/whatever" mentality when it comes to self-image and pop culture aimed at boys. We'll see more discussion, and hopefully, positive growth along these lines in the near future. In the meanwhile, it's up to us to make the difference we can in tiny if constructive ways.

music of the moment: golden boy

- true, and deep as the sea -

We celebrated one year in San Francisco last week; in the spirit of the Bold Italic list, here are some of the things I've learned along the way:


- Every city jokes that they experience all four seasons in one day; San Francisco is to date the only one I've visited that seems to have a different season on each block you walk. This makes layers a must have and greenhorns easy to spot (often with a bear, "California," or "Alcatraz" on their outer layer.)

- Scarves and boots are worn year-round, for good reason.

- San Francisco will almost always be the coldest place in the Bay Area. The good news? The weather only generally fluctuates between 10-25 C.

- The Financial District is a wind tunnel. Yes, the whole district.

- SF is roughly 7 miles by 7 miles in area; it's walkable. Even if folks only have one day, unless they have an injury or can't walk for other reasons, getting around on your own steam is the best way to see everything the city has to offer.

- Don't call it San Fran or Frisco. Presently, SF or The City, caps and all (i.e.: "Where are you from?" "I'm from The City"), seem the most popular nicknames, though some teenagers/early twenties local I talk/work with will use Frisco.

- I have caught myself calling it "The City." (Eep.)

- Step down, or face the chorus. There's even a t-shirt.

- The hills do get easier with time, but Pacific remains my favorite way to walk up Nob Hill.

- Discovering the Wiggle is nothing short of wonderful.

- I've almost forgotten how to walk in high heels.

- Stay at least one block away from Union Square at all times if you're traveling anywhere fast.

- Piers aren't sequentially numbered, but even numbered south of the Ferry Building (Pier 1) and odd numbered north of it.

- Streets aren't numbered sequentially, either. (Or, they are, but often another street will sneak in between, say, 2nd and 3rd.)

- Watch the sea lions from Pier 41 instead.

- Neighbourhood parks are community centres: key for people-watching, frisbee golf, dog-watching, sun-bathing, reading, chess... Playgrounds are just for kids, though, by city bylaw.

- That said, if you're an unaccompanied adult and miss swing sets, a surprising number of hills and summits in SF have tree swings!  (There is also a block-long concrete slide, but I've only just heard about it.)

- As a people, locals are unapologetically opinionated but generally good-hearted. Everyone has a standpoint, and while it can seem like dogs-vs-kids-vs-tech-vs-artists-vs-development-vs-gentrification-vs-history-vs-everything sometimes, in daily life (and away from the Internet), folks are friendly.

- Bartenders are, largely, fantastic. Knowledgeable, friendly, skilled, happy to strike up a conversation when the bar isn't packed.

- The local strawberry season starts in April!

- There are good views from just about every block in SF. Some take more time to find, is all.


♥ music of the moment: honey and the moon

- strange to see you again -

I haven't written anything, really, since moving to San Francisco.

Maybe it came of shock; the first two months spent in an incredulous, sensory-overload sort of fugue state. Or, to put it more softly, my brain took a while to catch up with the rest of me, after our transcontinental shift.

Maybe it's because this is a city of many voices, and I wasn't certain if mine was more signal or noise.

Perhaps it's because I still feel a little wrapped in bubble wrap myself - after a year as a resident visitor, this is in some ways the most home-less I've ever felt. I live a life that folks would and have killed for: days spent wandering a jeweled coastal metropolis, mild in climate, mostly tolerant in outlook; evenings at the side of the man I love. In many ways, it is a good life; we're making hard to make it so. That doesn't change the fact that all of the signposts and mile markers I'd look to have changed (and are measured in miles, for that matter!)

Maybe what's changed is that, one year in, I'm better able to read the signs.

Regardless, here's to marching forward, and writing again.

 .

 ♥ music of the moment: set yourself on fire (final fantasy edit)

- you'll be a hurricane -

These are the things that keep me breathing:
hipster boys in the Mission with Cobain hair and stockinged feet singing their hearts out;
sharing dreams and family-secret tiramisu in a cafe off-Broadway;
"some pig" scrawled in spidery neon script in a window on California;
sultry star jasmine and fuchsia bougainvilleas spiraling up Victorians;
the ray-gun twang of the 1 as it crests Jones
(and the playful shrieks of cable car passengers as they roller-coaster down, streets over.)
That everyone I've talked to has a story -
fifty years of history in their head or a fifty-year-old Muni token around their neck.
History sleeps lightly here, and so do I.


♥ music of the moment: hurricane ada

- he spoke of many things; fools and kings -

Video games and I have an interesting relationship.

I played my way through some of the ground-breakers in the '90s: afternoons spent equally on playground swings and in the basement playing GoldenEye with friends after school; immersing myself in the lush forests and forsaken temples of Hyrule; losing myself a little in Midgarian back streets and flying Gardens.

Somewhere along the line, my siblings and I fell into a chimaera-like approach to the games we played. As a gamer, the mechanics were never so important as the world I found myself a part of - I would, and still do, find exploring the game world (and playing spot-the-reference - blame my bibliophile leanings) often the best part. My sister has a keen eye for puzzles, but also for directions; without her, I suspect both my diving-suited avatar, and my brother's, would be lost somewhere still in the depths of Rapture.  Mechanics and gameplay itself, most often, fell to my brother. Looking back at our playing style, and the fact that he often had two backseat drivers, his patience was legendary. He also has the steady hands (and stomach) to finish most of the games we picked up, where I watched parts of BioShock and shooter franchises like Gears of War and Call of Duty half-hidden behind a couch cushion. I found the worlds fascinating, and had to know how the story ended, but had trouble maiming others when graphics were at N64 levels, and perhaps most tellingly, finished my Fable II play-through with a halo (much to my brother's amusement.)

Still, for our quirks, we were an oddly effective team, and some of our best talks in reality came out of moments we witnessed together in a pixellated world, whether in the question of what to do with the wandering Little Sisters of BioShock's undersea world or reeling in the aftermath of standoffs on a river's edge in Virmire.

It was this focus on video game's affect (how they work, how they don't, and why they matter) that drew my eye to Tom Bissell's Extra Lives.  Bissell weaves a compelling, humourous narrative that doesn't pull punches where he sees weaknesses - nowhere more memorably than where he celebrates Resident Evil's innovative camera work, gameplay mechanics, and thoroughly haunting scoring - and lambasts its preposterously stilted dialogue, which, he notes, "at its least weird, sounds as though it has been translated out of Japanese, into Swahili, back into Japanese, into the language of the Lunar Federation, back into Japanese, and finally into English."

It's a weakness that, Bissell notes, has persisted as games have otherwise become more sophisticated; he notes with ire that some of the dialogue for Fallout 3 "makes Stephanie Meyer sound like Ibsen."  And while his zingers are well-targeted, he also delves into various aspects of the gaming world to find out why games that were so beautiful could get away with being so very stupidly written.


In one chapter, he tours the northern climes of my first home; I'll forgive him for calling it godforsaken, as he was silly enough to visit in winter. He visits BioWare and talks about writing with Drew Karpyshyn, the head writer of Mass Effect, which has been critically and popularly held up as an example of flexible, effective writing paired with inspired voice acting.

Their interview - and the description of the BioWare office; still a place I half-dream of working in - was a cool window into the game development world, but a number that stayed with me was that BioWare
employs over twenty writers: a number that, in the gaming world, seems, by what Bissell describes in the rest of the book, as unfathomable as the number of summits that climber Alex Honnold free-soloed in one day (three) does to the climbing world. Too often, writing seems to be an element tacked on towards the end of production, which can often lead to stilted, redundant, or overly serious dialogue that has the effect of jarring the player out of the world in which they should feel immersed.


Another chapter finds Bissell attending the DICE (Design Innovate Communicate Entertain) conference in Las Vegas. The chapter is a fascinating look at the prevailing trends in video game design, the industry's changing demographic (but static focus on what makes a 'convincing character': rugged twenty-something white male protagonists don't look like they're going anywhere anytime soon) and discusses the peculiar relationship between video games and the film industry. The academic reporting from the conference contrasts with Bissell's personal reflections on Las Vegas as a city; one part travel writing, two parts dystopian recollections of his past residency.

Dystopia is a theme that follows through to the book's final chapter. Its examination of morality, authenticity, and addiction, woven through the retelling of months devoted and lost to playing Grand Theft Auto IV, are reminiscent of writer Taras Grescoe's misadventures in Thailand in The End Of Elsewhere, and equally heart-breaking. Despite the sense of loss, however, choice is the chapter's - and perhaps the book's - strongest theme. As someone who is well outside the target audience for the GTA games, all it took was an overheard aside about running over pedestrians and executing sex workers in-game for me to keep my distance from the franchise and side-eye anyone who seemed to revel in it. I'm not alone in this perspective; Bissell notes that in the seven years between the release of the Vice City and Liberty City versions of the franchise Rockstar has "spent more time in court than a playground-abutting pesticide manufacturer." Even so, another line stopped me cold (in response to the killing-of-sex-workers trope): "...it is not what GTA IV asks you to do that is so morally alarming. It is what it allows you to do."  The game presents you with an open world, he suggests; what you do with it, in the end, is up to you.

Choice, redux.  Rendered in better resolution and more graphic detail than in other games, with the added weight of innocent blood on the player's hands, but at the end of the day, the player was the one who chose to put it there. Given, I'm certain that you can't make it one hour through any of the GTA franchise with your character still remaining what our society would call an upstanding citizen, but then, even in videogames' (perhaps) more innocent past, that's nothing new. Renegades with a history of environmental terrorism (Final Fantasy 7's AVALANCHE team) or even a young boy in green blithely smashing hundreds of pieces of crockery in search of shiny currency would also, likely, be frowned upon.

In the end, Extra Lives celebrates, examines, and challenges gaming in equal measure, and was a fascinating read that braided interviews with industry leaders and pioneers with the author's personal experiences. It's a fast-paced read, and definitely recommended to anyone interested in the evolution, development, or structure of gaming, or storytelling as a broader (and constantly evolving) art.


♥ music of the moment: nature boy (david bowie)

- they were right, when they said we should never meet our heroes -

So.

Begin.

For some reason, my path has found me on this side of the coin instead of food-wandering - although there's been lots of that recently: tapas nights, stellar craft brews (there is, I've learned, such thing as a Chocolate Milk Stout, which should probably not work, but certainly does) and card games, stories over hot pot in Uptown basements painted lemon yellow with signage I could only grasp at weak straws to read - food and literacy are two loves of mine, and there's a post in and of itself somewhere, there: senses and language barriers and learning to trust your nose (and your friends.) Lots of thoughts and never enough time to write them down?

Something like that; still a little haunted by how the Cracked article (is Cracked ever SFW?) that drifted onto my Twitter feed about six hard truths left one solid impression: every minute you spend taking in someone else's media/effort/work is time not spent on yours.  It's worth keeping in mind, as both of these blogs put together don't quite hit the 2/month goal I'd set at the start of the year, and it's something I'd still like to work towards.

On the upside, I did climb three mountains this year! And, M - I'm not even counting Heart as more than one peak despite its fifteen-or-so summits. ^_~

A good friend also challenged me to write about my first city; the city we shared for twenty-odd years, and its legendary winters; eleven days from the deadline and my pen is stalling. I've realized that for all that winter tinged a lot of my writing, none of it was directly about my city - nothing is, except the half-finished NaNo work that I started in Japanland and pushed into bloom over the first November of my return about art galleries and friendship and noodle bars and magicians-of-sorts in a city that was Edmonton-but-not. I'll tackle it soon, but it won't be in the next week; the piece is unedited and at least 30,000 words too long to submit. Still, I'm just about ready, though I fear one of my protagonists won't survive the re-visioning. Sometimes, you grow out of characters, just as you grow out of socks, or bands, or heroes: you see the world differently, or you just don't quite fit, anymore.

(which is where this Metric song fits in: seeing them again at Osheaga this summer was like seeing an ex-lover who you don't love anymore, but who you're happy to see doing well. There's something to the restlessness in this song that gets at me, and oh, something bittersweet there, too.)

I think that my problem with starting something new, on the other hand, is that winter doesn't seem real here, despite the snow flurries that peppered my windows at work today, or the Technicolour light display in the windows of houses down the street.  With green grass still flourishing, it's hard to remember what cold feels like.  But the downtown rink is open; maybe this weekend, when life slows down enough to see it straight-on I'll lace up my skates and slip slowly around the ice. In a hockey family, I was the black sheep who stayed inside and broke boards all winter, but there's something to the movement of skating itself that I'm hoping is a clue; a cue; a key.

Here's to remembering; here's to staying warm and keeping cool. Here's to the holidays; to the time when, as a wiser woman than I once said that hope is currency. Take care, and best wishes for your 2013, where-ever it may find you.

(don't forget - don't forget I love, I love, I love you.)

♥music of the moment: breathing underwater (see video above.)