Marla Botterill enjoys some tasty Pho, with Banh Xeo in foreground

It may not be the healthiest option for dining out as the kitchen tends to be a little heavy on the oils, but Saigon Delights (217 Division Street) is definitely one of the quickest, cheapest, and tastiest options in downtown Kingston. It’s comfort food at it’s best – easily ordered out, or always ready for a casual, last-minute walk-in – this place serves up some delicious treats to turn your melancholic mood into warm satisfaction. The menu boasts spring rolls cooked the way you imagine them but can seldom actually find (crispy, steamy, and stuffed full of shrimp and bamboo shoots), several kinds of green and red curries, a hearty Pho soup that comes garnished with cilantro, a vegetarian Com Sau Cai, and my personal favorite Banh Xeo – a platter consisting of two Vietnamese style crepes filled with chicken, shrimp, and mung beans, topped with fresh greens. Everything at Saigon Delights comes super hot, fresh, and flavorful, and never more than $10. The only setback here is that the downtown location isn’t licensed.

Com Sau Cai

I’ll let you know from the outset that, upon first viewing, this movie went straight to my Top 5 list. I can’t believe this film has been out for almost a year and I’ve only now just seen it. To make up for it, I’ve watched it six times in four days. It has all the elements for a good Riva-movie: overarching theme of loneliness, adorable protaganist, lovely leading man, New York City, Paris, awesome soundtrack. Obviously I identify with Nora (Parker Posey) since she is such a mirror to every person in the audience who’s every wanted to be loved and not found it, or found it, just maybe, only to let it walk away. Plus there’s something about her everyday life that is totally ubiquitous; she dresses up and gets out occasionally, but her efforts are both half-hearted and sadly self-conscious. Posey is brilliant, everyone already knows this. But it’s Julien (Melvil Poupaud) who I’ve fallen completely head-over-heels for! He reminds me of someone I used to know. A boyfriend, I think, but I can’t place which one. There’s just something so familiar about him. About the way he moves. About the way he talks and the way he kisses. Even his whiskery face seems like something I recognize from a long time ago. Julien is captivating. Both he and Nora exactly match the haunting Scratch Massive melodies to a tee. Written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes, Broken English is funny but the humor here is real, genuine, everyday funnyness; a Frenchman mispronouncing a word (“I ‘ope you find ‘appiness”...”a penis?”...”yes!”) or Nora and her friend Audrey’s conversations over glasses of wine, yoga, and manicures. While there are bright moments there is dark here as well. Nora’s struggle with her anxiety is sad to watch, hard to understand if you have never experienced a panic attack, and heart-wrenching if you have. Finally, the last scene is gripping. And perfect.

5 hearts out of 5 (and by ‘hearts’ i mean ‘loves’):

it’s like the really good
discussions
never get started until
two am
and then time
disappears

The apocalypse is now a calico cat. It’s huge. And fat. And vicious. Its jaw foams and bubbles with angry saliva. It spits. It spits at me and anyone who goes near it. It has a ferocious roar and it snaps and bites the air like a rabid tiger. It’s eyes are narrow and black and bloodshot with delirium. The hair on it’s back stands straight up, in a constant state of bristling edginess. Its claws are razor sharp and lethal. The wounds they inflict throb and sting my arms, my legs, my face. I’ve been battling this cat for days, for weeks. I have bite marks around both of my wrists, and at the side of my neck. It wants my jugular. It leaps at my veins whenever I try to calm it into submission – turning my sweet, cajoling words into choking coughs of pain. Soon I can’t battle anymore; I’ve only got scraps of flesh left. I have to live in constant fear, tip-toeing around this stupid calico cat, at the mercy of it’s egomaniacal temper. But I can’t stop plotting…I can’t stop thinking there must be a way to kill this fucking cat.

In 1979, Dick Hebdige addressed the profundity of the rock & roll style by examining the function of subculture, specifically, 1970s British teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, and punks. In Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige argues that style is a form of “intentional communication’ used by subcultures to make sense of their members, and to mark themselves as such to the dominant culture. He argues that, contrary to the (still) popular assumption that subcultures embrace total lawlessness and chaos, the internal structures of these groups are, in fact, “characterized by an extreme orderliness: each part is organically related to other parts and it is through the fit between them that the subcultural member makes sense out of the world.” The recognition of something as a style necessarily requires some common, identifiable quality. Independent elements are adapted to a dominant trait so that every individual appears marked by an expression of the whole. In Hebdige’s analysis, for example, style is a search for the correspondences in the clothing of the punks, which he explains as an organizing principle simultaneously determining the character of the components and the design of the whole.

‘Style’ then, is composed of all the symbolic and literal aspects – dress, appearance, language, ritual occasions, interactions, music – that members of a culture or subculture produce and consume within the boundaries of the group. For Hebdige, it is quite specifically style that “causes a formation of unity within a group’s relations, situations, experience”. In fact, style functions in a complex relationship to culture. Hebdige’s notion quite clearly draws its methods from the semiological concept of the symbolic structure of meaning.

The clothing worn by an average man or woman on the street is chosen according to taste, preference, financial constraints, etc., and these choices are significant in positioning the wearer within a corresponding set of social roles. These selections encompass an assortment of messages and meanings, which are transmitted through a number of complex social determinants such as class and status, self-image, and attractiveness, etc. Hebdige argues that clothing choices can be just as expressive of ‘normality’ and ‘naturalness’ as they can be of ‘deviance’. Nonetheless, the styles of subcultures are distinguished from the styles of their surrounding culture precisely because they appear so fabricated. It is the appearance of difference that reveals what Louis Althusser has called the “false obviousness of everyday practice”.

Andy Warhol, Red Elvis, 1965

1950’s and 1960’s pop artists accepted the role their artworks played as commodities. Both the early and later Pop artists understood the interrelatedness of modernism and mass culture, and perceived a dependence between the two in their capitalist situation. In his article, “Pop – An Art of Consumption?”, Jean Baudrillard writes that “it is logical for an art that does not oppose the world of objects but explores its system, to enter itself into the system.” For Baudrillard, the success of pop art was in its ability to expose how an object moves from the level of the commonplace to the level of sublime once it is no longer useful as an object, but only as a sign. Pop artists presupposed that cultural images function as signs in a field of communication, and that these signs hold significant social meanings. They utilized as their materials, things that already existed as signs – photographs, brand-name goods, comics; things familiar to the viewer before they witness what the artist does with them. For the members of the IG and for the 1960’s Pop artists, authenticity, originality, and aesthetic autonomy were less important than the image perceived by viewers/ consumers. This is summed up well in the Velvet Underground song, All Tomorrow’s Parties, in which Lou Reed asks, “What costume shall the poor girl wear to all tomorrow’s parties?”

For Warhol, Nico and Reed quickly came to personify many of the aesthetic qualities that dominated his own work, representing “the living parallel to Warhol’s pop canvases: they were enigmatically sexual and glamorous, yet simultaneously, they were distant and aloof.” In 1967, the same year that Blake and Cooper arranged the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Warhol designed the cover for the Velvet’s first album; a bright yellow paper banana that peeled away to reveal a purple-toned ‘pop banana’. The Velvets had become a major presence in Warhol’s films, books, and performances, even touring with him across the country and succeeding in attracting an audience base made of up rock & roll fans, avant-garde film fans, pop artists, filmmakers, and pop culture enthusiasts. Warhol intentionally transformed the members of the Velvet Underground into local pop icons. Warhol exposed the myth of ‘real’ art’s claim at being non-commercial and transcendental of the capitalist market, by exploiting it.

or…How to Stay Warm at the End of Winter…

1 cup hot & strong black tea
1 shot triple sec
orange slice

Combine first two ingredients in a mug. Garnish with orange slice. Enjoy. (developed by Masterson-Symko Laboratories Inc.)

The Breakfast Bagel: break two eggs into a small bowl. beat gently. place in microwave on high for 2 :45 second periods. toast two sides of a bagel. butter bagel. line bottom of bagel with slices of chedder cheese. place microwaved egg on top of cheese. layer on a coldcut (ham or turkey works best). place a tomato on top. salt and pepper to taste. top with second half of the bagel. enjoy with a tall glass of milk.

Online Submission From Anonymous

It was a calm warm night and I was walking down a well-lit suburban street talking with a woman who was wearing a black polka dot dress. Something else had happened – a lot of talking and such – before this account begins but I am not clear on the details. I know we had decided to sit down and smoke in a park adjacent to the road. I said I first needed a drink and could see a table with a white tablecloth on the curb in the distance. So I left my co-walker and walked towards the table that was covered with bottles. Once I arrived the bottles had gone but I could see another table similarly situated about another quarter of a mile down the road. I must have passed three or four more empty tables until I finally arrived at a table with people standing around pouring themselves drinks. A strong wind had come up
and there were a lot of paper particles floating in the air. The wind grew stronger and feeling anxious I stopped a motorcylist to get a ride back to the park. We were almost back to the park and by now there was larger debris flying in the air. A man jumped out in the street in front of us waving his arms for us to stop. He told us to turn around as a tornado had just touched down in the park.

The Queen’s Student Opera Company Presents ‘Pagliacci’ by Ruggero Leoncavallo, February 2008

Wow. I am actually blown away. I haven’t been this blown away by a show for a looooooong time. In fact, I had just succumbed to the (apparently false) conclusion that Ontario was simply incapable of good theatre of any kind. This coupled with my previous experience of student opera being relegated to that of a few perfunctory and pretentious grad-student productions at the University of Alberta, my expectations were on the low to nonexistent side when I walked through the doors of Duncan Auditorium tonight. But I walked out thoroughly and totally impressed by QSOC’s finely-tuned, spirited, and downright professional production of Pagliacci. The voices, while certainly ‘young’, were powerful enough to really give strength to the climactic notes of the opera, and I was especially impressed by the enthusiasm of the chorus singers – who fairly drew me right into the scene on several occassions! Adam Bishop gave a seasoned and gripping performance as Canio, where Geoffrey Sirett provided his Silvio character with a steady, strong bass full of meticulous concentration. Sarah Angus was a beautiful and mezmerizing Nedda (despite occassionally falling out of her operatic signature), and Dylan Hayden was loveable/hateable as the baffoon, Tonio. The direction was seemless – I mean, honestly; so refreshing to see an opera in which the singers can actually act and aren’t afraid of moving around the stage a bit. The technical processes were nearly flawless – save for the moment at which Nedda and Silvio kissed and their microphones accidentally rubbed against each other, making it sound like one of them had farted indiscreetly (sort of ruined that moment!). Rage, revenge, unrequited love, and sinners wearing the faces of clowns really made for a Saturday evening very well spent.

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