Well, that happened.
Watching the Ford mayoralty implode - if we could a) call it an implosion, as he is, as of now, still in office, and b) call it a mayoralty, because COME ON - has been delightful in nearly every conceivable way, but my delight causes me pain. No one should be excited about what’s happening in Toronto right now, except that everyone is; that the cause of all this scintillation is an allegedly serious drug addiction, allegedly serious racial and homophobic slurs, and a guy who is causing more destruction to Toronto’s national and international reputation than any public figure who has served in my lifetime, is nothing to get happy about.
And yet here we are, in the flow of a piece of political theatre so expansive and genre-defining that it nearly doesn’t deserve the name. This is the Goodfellas of Toronto’s meek little public sphere, and right now, an (ahem) coked-out Ray Liotta is screaming across town, fairly sure a helicopter is following him. And each event - each thermonuclear meltdown from Rob Ford and the rest of Ford Nation - fires a thunderclap into the air that can be heard for miles. I was on a VIA train heading back into the city yesterday afternoon when Mark Towhey was fired, and there was an honest-to-god vortex of black cloudy doom holding station over Toronto on the horizon. I half expected to arrive at Union Station and find the city a smoking crater, smote into ashes by a benevolent overseer who has not, till now, made His presence felt.
We should not be enjoying this, but many of us are. Ford made it a fight, showed unilateral contempt to every man, woman, and transgendered child who - appalling in a democracy, I know - had an even marginally different view of things than he did. He has made it such a fight that, whether it works or not, something like a thousand people have contributed their actual money to a crowd-sourced smear operation intended to make public the alleged crack video… which, mind you, might or might not exist, and might or might not bring down the mayoralty, and might or might not put Ford in jail - but we all just want to see it anyway, because fuck that guy.
There is a simple, unequivocal problem with Rob Ford as the mayor of Toronto or any other city, one which exists far beyond the boundaries of bigotry, anti-environmentalism, football bullshit, contempt for rules, or just being an asshole: the man does not respect the seat. He does not respect the office, and does not respect the city. And while every single one of us might have our own particular flavour of why we currently want to see him fail, that single problem is the foundation upon which all the other quibbles, small and large, are built. Rob Ford does not respect Toronto, or the office of its mayor, and he shows it every day.
Seriously though - who had “crack addiction” in the Cabin in the Woodsish sweepstakes of how this big turkey was gonna go down? (If he goes down?) The escalation, the “what could possibly happen next”-ness of the nonstop Ford shitshow, would boggle the best writers in the land. There is no bottom on this downward spiral, apparently; every omega-level event that Ford somehow waltzes past only reveals another omega-level event beyond it. What’s left in the quiver? (Whores and murder, obviously.) At this point, Ford could call a press conference at 2 p.m. today and then, at the podium, reveal that he is the Lizard King of Beta Rigel before cracking his torso open and letting a stream of hive-minded, armoured slugs roam free across Queen Street, and I wouldn’t even register mild surprise.
Oh - and to the racist, homophobic, crack-supporting suburbanistas who put this man in the highest office in the city… enjoy your fucking cars.
I’m not ready! This one’s gonna be hilarious! And I am a disgraceful $700+ DOLLARS shy of my fundraising goal! Come on people, you get the easy part of this deal… vote with your spending fingers now!
Jeffrey Jacob Abrams and the magic of the Mystery Box.
“How Could You Leave Us?” John Ottman, SUPERMAN RETURNS. Seriously one of my favourite pieces of music of all time. This could be called pastiche, of course - it’s the most complex re-purposing of music from John Williams’ score for the original SUPERMAN that Ottman undertakes in his score for RETURNS - but it accomplishes that task flawlessly, and just as flawlessly builds, develops, and completes the emotional arc of the scene it underscores. It’s the most emotionally resonant scene in the movie - I’d argue even the haters would have trouble finding fault with this sequence - and this is a stunning musical poem about choices, loss, and enduring love.
In the game of strip-mining your nostalgia for fancy cash dollars, Star Wars came first, Star Trek is happening now, and Star Wars comes next. JJ Abrams: what are you doing to us? Read on…
“All field units. Intercept the android.”
There’s a new Star Trek movie in theatres, and I’ve got pretty serious problems with it; which makes this a perfect time to continue my backwards troll through the endlessly problematic Star Trek: The Next Generation feature films, bringing me to Star Trek: Insurrection, a.k.a. Star Trek 9, and – arguably – the origin of whatever problem in the franchise grew so massive that it compelled Paramount to hit the reboot switch, wiping out 40 years of Star Trek continuity. Something about the mood in the room changes with Star Trek 9, and the franchise crosses the border from mainstream fare to fan service, even though the fans didn’t like it much either. This was 1998 – Deep Space Nine was wrapping up (Worf’s presence on the Enterprise explained in a line which is, delightfully, interrupted before finishing, as though to assure the audience that no one cares), Voyager was in the middle of its lackluster run, and Enterprise was imminent. Less than half a decade later, Star Trek would be a dead duck. The tide turned here.
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Imagine the process by which letters, ordinary letters, which you may have paid no special mind to on any previous day in your life, get reorganized to form a bouma shape which, every time you see it or write it - a phoneme which, every time you hear it or speak it - makes you glow from the inside with a kind of special knowledge that you used to think existed only in books about magical worlds beyond wardrobe doors.
Welcome to Tumblr, Yahoo!
Elrond’s armour appreciation post.
So are we just gonna ignore how COMPLETELY FEANORIAN this armour is?
Am I the only one imagining how absolutely perfect Maglor or Maedhros would look in this?
Because…yeah.
<33333333333333
//Precisely. Headcanon: When Elrond and Elros left the Feanorian camp Maglor gave them one of his old armors…
It’s sappy I know.. I’ll be in my corner of shame now.
You had me at “Elrond’s armour appreciation post.”
The first prequel-sequel in the Star Trek reborquel lands with a wet thud and Team Mamo assembles to discuss what went wrong with Star Trek Into Darkness…
