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Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Area Man Writes Book

Just a couple days before Christmas, the weekly Arrow Lakes News - your information source for Nakusp, New Denver, and the rest of the Upper Arrow Lakes - ran a short article on my book and confirmed my status as a pseudo-local here in the Kootenays.

Full disclosure: the article was more or less solicited. When I visited Wes at Nakusp's warm and friendly Meritxell Books a couple weeks back (the name's pronounced "Mehr-ih-chell," by the way, and is the capital of Andorra, where Wes once ran a popular bar), he suggested I drop in on Andrew Petrozzi at the Arrow Lakes News office, which is more or less across the street from the bookstore. So I did, and Andrew eventually produced the linked article and photo.

I highly recommend you ignore the photo, which is, in a word, awful. I think one of my mother-in-law Val's colleagues said it best - and most diplomatically - when she noted that I appeared, in said photo, to be stoned. I wasn't, but I appreciate the attempt to explain away my appearance as a product of British Columbia's most lucrative cash crop nonetheless. Anyway, if you need to see the photo, it's here.

I'm otherwise pleased with the article, though, and I think Andrew Petrozzi is a talented young writer with a lot of potential and the Arrow Lakes News is lucky to have him. And I say that with total objectivity, and not at all because Andrew had, in his office, a well-worn copy of the Sept/Oct 2002 issue of Shift in which my essay "The Simpsons Generation" first appeared, and informed me he'd photocopied the essay for several friends, and had me sign the cover.

Posted by Turner at 01:09 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (366) | Comments (0)

Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Big In New Zealand

Well, I may have been left off the Globe 100 (The Globe & Mail's annual list of the hundred most notable books of the year) in favour of - among other distinguished tomes - a history of "the presence of the Virgin Mary in Canada," the best of the 23 "inside" looks at the Kennedy White House released in the past year, another entry in Peter C. Newman's 219-volume study of the fine art of sucking up to the rich and powerful (this one a behind-the-scenes memoir chronicling a life spent sucking up to the rich and powerful), and whatever Pierre Berton mailed in before he shuffled off this mortal coil.

Not that I'm bitter. Especially not at the esteemed Mr. Berton. I just think his most significant achievement in 2004 was the step-by-step lesson he gave in rolling a joint on national television (on Rick Mercer's Monday Report), and that most Canadians probably already have adequate supplies of books about the Far North by Pierre Berton.

Anyway, screw you guys at the Globe; I'm loved in New Zealand. That's right: Planet Simpson made The New Zealand Herald's list of the best books of 2004. Thus proving my longstanding theory that New Zealand has by far the world's most intelligent and literate citizenry.

Posted by Turner at 03:42 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (370) | Comments (1)

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Back In The Saddle

We're back in Calgary, and back in the weblog saddle, so to speak. For the purposes of mental health and getting our brains screwed into place properly once again, we took a little hiatus there.

Backposts are a'coming...

A Summary Of What's In Store:
- Ohhh, The Gabereau Show - DONE, SEE BELOW
- Talk of the Town, Vancouver - DONE, SEE BELOW
- A buncha other stuff, including ZedTV and hotel pillow architecture - DONE, SEE BELOW
- The Retarded Decision To Drive the North Route Back To Nakusp (or: "This Scenic Route Sure Is Scenic!") - STILL IN THE WORKS
- Downtime At Strawberry Hill - ON THE WAY
- Home Again Home Again Riggy Jig Jig (Redux) - IN PROGRESS
- Xmasland in Calgary - NOT SO MUCH TO DO WITH THE BOOK, BUT STILL COMING SOON

Except for some radio stuff and Turner's 2005 speaking engagements, the Planet Simpson publicity machine is officially on "idle" for a while, which means we get to actually acquaint ourselves with our home and friends in Calgary once again. This coming month we'll be adding to the Axed And Other Notes page, rants about how when you're a writer nobody pays you on time (yeah yeah, whine whine), the phenomenon of Bestseller Lists and how they are rigged, and why the British suck (except for John J and a few select others). Stay tuned!

Posted by Ashley at 10:25 AM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (183) | Comments (1)

Saturday, December 11, 2004

Oh! Gabereau!

Before the shoot, Turner, Vicki and the floor director discuss whether the interview should delve into what's under Hula Homer's grass skirt...

Now, the show was supposed to air next Thursday morning. However, something, uh, went awry. Something about the production codes for Friday's (yesterday's) show being really similar to the one for Turner's show. And somehow all the affiliates in eastern Canada (Ontario and eastward) decided to show the one with Turner, YESTERDAY!

Our family and friends all across eastern Canada... well, they've been crushed. Or they will be, when they hear. It's a terrible thing. All we can say is that eventually we'll have a copy of the show on tape, and that we share your pain. (Family - we'll bring it for the next reunion.)

However!! CHEERS to the ever-superbo Montreal-based Keitha, who sent us this:

From: "Keitha"
To: "ashley"
Subject: Vicki Gabereau Live
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 14:54:29 -0500

You have NO idea how cool it is to have the
teevee on in the background and then look up
to see Turner's mug! Lovely!

Excellent work on very little sleep. Though
I'm sure you could have totally bombed and
still it would not have tempered my enthusiasm.

Three cheers for Planet Simpson!

Kxx

P.S. Apologies for the many weird photo angles...
it's really, really bright upstairs and this was
the only way to get a clear picture. Plus, I was
stupidly excited!

Thanks, K!

Please note that Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC will get Turner's Gabereau appearance on Thursday, December 16th.

Posted by Ashley at 07:36 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (364) | Comments (0)

Pillows Are A Girl's... Best Friend

Well, I'm at about the stage in pregnancy where there just can't be enough pillows. When I've got four pillows under my head and between my knees and under my back and propping things up every which way, and Turner is over there with one pillow, I admit I've been known to lean in and ask, "Are you using that pillow?"

At bedtime on our first night in Van, we called room service and asked them to bring a few more pillows (them: "How many?" Turner: [turning to me, whispering] "How many?" Ash: "As many as possible!") and bless their pointed heads, the folks at Hotel Vancouver forked 'em over.

But seriously, you have to dig the cleaning staff at Vancouver's venerable Castle In The City, who obviously have a sense of humour.

First pillow arrangement:

Second pillow arrangement:

Cheers, cheers, cheers! to the Canadian Pacific Hotels and their fine cleaning people. Hurrah.

Posted by Ashley at 02:27 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (452) | Comments (0)

Talk Of The Town

The Friday night extravaganza: Hal Wake's very successful literary lecture series, held at UBC's downtown Robson Square campus. Alumni of Talk of the Town include the indominable Pico Iyer, favourite Canadian storyteller and radio personality Bill Richardson and my old colleague from Harriet's Magic Hats days, puppeteer Ronnie Burkett, among others.

The format was one of those "In Conversation With..." dealies, which seem to quite suit Turner's style.

A packed auditorium! 300+ people braved the wet and the wind and spent their Friday night listening to Turner yammer about the book.

And lookit the crowd of Vancouver-based friends who came out to the event! An all-star cast, including [clockwise from top left] Travis Smith and Susie Gardner, Gregoire Dominic Pepin di Lachance Compton (who flew in from Melbourne for the occasion!), Elan Mastai (in town from Toronto for the holidays), John Turner (sometimes known on this site as Other Brother John), Phil and Sabra Hofton, Auntie Anne and pal John, and three lovely friends-of-our-friends dragged out special for the occasion. Cheers, y'all!

**It bears mentioning that this is the event which brought us to Vancouver in the first place, and that Talk of the Town hosted us at the grand Hotel Vancouver. (C'mon, you know we're too poor to pay our own way by this stage - I'm not stealing hotel soap for kicks, you know.) In short, although all sorts of other great media was arranged for Planet Simpson in Vancouver for this week, Talk of the Town made it all possible. Thank you Hal Wake!!**

Posted by Ashley at 09:58 AM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (504) | Comments (0)

Friday, December 10, 2004

ZedTV Magic!

Signing in to the [monster truck rally voice] ultra security zone of CBC Vancouver (ouver...ouver...ouver):

ZedTV is CBC's late-night edgy youth programming.

Oops, Turner forgot his... legs? Oh that wacky bluescreen.

The ZedTV interview will be shown sometime in January. Apparently they're going to put T against a background of the Simpsons' livingroom. Or so the rumour goes.

Posted by Ashley at 01:23 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (267) | Comments (0)

Thursday, December 09, 2004

You Suck!

Posted by Ashley at 03:00 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (239) | Comments (0)

Sounds Like National Coverage

The Vancouver Files...

Howdy ho, we're on Canada's west coast after a few weeks in hibernation licking our jetlag wounds in Calgary and BC's interior. A few backposts will go up later today featuring our visit to the legendary Meritxell Books in Nakusp and yesterday's five-seasons-in-a-day drive to Vancouver.

In terms of pound per punch, this Vancouver blitz will reach roughly sixty zillion Canadians and Americans: Turner got up at 4:30am today to do a radio interview with Geoff Metcalf's show for WMET in Washington DC, a Liberty Broadcasting hub that pinged the interview live to its 300+ affiliates around the USA (though his performance in the 30min interview was commendable, lord did the time zone difference make it an Un.God.Ly hour for T here in Pacific Time).

Next up this morning was a dark and rainy walk down West Georgia to the CBC, for Turner's 'appearance' on Sounds Like Canada with Shelagh Rodgers.

We'll have an audio copy of this interview in a week or so and will post it here on the site. Shelagh was lovely and generous and friendly. Cheers to an icon for making time on her program for Planet Simpson.

In an hour or so, we skip next door to the CTV building to today's taping of Vicki Gabereau Live.

Turner, Turner, he's our man!

Turner, circa 10:19am, preparing for his encounter with Ms. Gabereau at 10:45am

Posted by Ashley at 10:35 AM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (308) | Comments (4)

Wednesday, December 08, 2004

680 km: Nakusp To Vancouver... No Problem!

We managed to convince Mom and Mike to do some last-minute dogsitting of Pony, and made our dogless departure of Nakusp this morning with (we hoped) enough time to make the Galena Bay ferry. One of those magical Canadian highway vortices, the 48 km Nakusp-to-Galena Bay stretch takes half an hour no matter how fast you drive. The ferry leaves at half past the hour, every hour. If you leave the house with 28 min to reach the ferry, you'll miss it. Period. Why, I dunno.

The conditions were, well, "snowy". We were out there preparing the car at least an hour before we had to be at the ferry dock, books and bags on board and Pony in the house, staring accusingly down at us from the livingroom window as Turner cleaned off the last of the morning's dump of snow.

(Ten days ago we were in Malaysia and it was 30C. I'm just saying.)

Most of the drive to Revelstoke looked like this:

Treacherous!

After we passed through Three Valley Gap and were well on our way to Salmon Arm, however, things started to look a little cheerier:

And spirits remained high through to about Merritt:

But, yeah... this is about the size of it, coming down off the heights of the Coquihalla, traffic backed up on the other side of the highway for kilometres. It was a bit jiggly, a lot icy, it was snowing and blowing, and we did most of the last 30km in to Hope at about 45km/h. Overall your basic Canadian long-haul winter driving experience. The things we do for Turner's art.

But we made it to the Fraser Valley without incident, and now we're safe and sound, ensconced in our schmancy room at the Hotel Vancouver, downtown. Up tomorrow, a sickeningly early 4:30am start for an American radio interview, then to CBC for Sounds Like Canada, and onward to CTV later in the morning for Vicki Gabereau... stay tuned!

Posted by Ashley at 10:17 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (186) | Comments (0)

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

The Legendary Meritxell Books

We slalomed into town today in Mom's giant red 4x4 truck, to make the pilgrimage to Nakusp's landmark bookstore, Meritxell Books.

The proprietor Wes Towle is a great favourite of ours and a huge fan of the Red Sox (a former Bostonian, our man at the bookshop), so there were hearty handshakes all around when we jingled our way through the door. Wes bought five copies of Planet Simpson and set us up to hound the local media (the Arrow Lakes News and The Valley Voice) to cover Turner's connection to the area.

Posted by Ashley at 06:37 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (149) | Comments (0)

Monday, December 06, 2004

Vancouver Sun Review

Thanks once again to John Turner for sending us this text:

An annotated, tangential, catalogue-sized recap of Simpsons lore -- brilliant
Melora Koepke
Special to the Sun

December 4, 2004
PLANET SIMPSON
How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation
BY CHRIS TURNER
Random House Canada, 466 pages ($35)

"Best show ever." Go ahead, say it in the voice of Comic Book Guy. Essentially, you've just summed up what Chris Turner spends 466 oversized pages saying in Planet Simpson.

Turner, the technology and pop-culture columnist for Shift magazine, has a lot of fun getting there. His basic thesis -- that The Simpsons is the most important cultural phenomenon of our time -- almost goes without saying, so instead of spending a lot of time huffing and puffing to figure out why, he dives right into the topic.

It would be impossible to write a definitive guide to The Simpsons that outclassed the show itself, but luckily Turner, who is clearly more a fan than a scholar or a critic, doesn't even try.

Douglas Coupland's foreword to the book asserts what everyone already knows: "The Simpsons have, of course, evolved into a shorthand for several generations' need of collapsing baffling modern-day situations into powerful folkloric parallels."

But even in the midst of such a grandiose (and true) statement, Coupland dissolves into quotes and recaps of Simpsons episodes to illustrate his point. The Simpsons is one phenomenon where the source material far outweighs any attempt to summarize or analyse or apprehend it.

This is a pickle that Turner quite obviously relishes.

It's a compliment of the highest order, then, to say that Planet Simpson is second only to the show itself in terms of fun. This is an annotated, tangential, catalogue-sized and utterly brilliant recap of everything there is to know about Springfield, U.S.A. Reading it is like watching the recaps of last night's episode that used to happen when the show first aired in the early '90s -- i.e., full of the electric pleasure of shared experience.

It's not that Turner tells us things we already know. He's comprehensive in his fandom, and every page is chockablock with new insights. Although he doesn't shy away from the sociological perspective, he doesn't let broad statements get in the way of full-blown appreciation of the actual material. The chapters devoted to the five central characters -- Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart and Mr. Burns -- could each be utterly satisfying books in themselves.

The book's biggest weakness, a lack of primary-source interviews, is also its biggest strength because it lets Turner be everywhere at once -- all things to all people, all-telling and all-knowing -- instead of behind the scenes.

I would go so far as to say that he has raised the bar for pop-culture criticism. D'oh!

Posted by Ashley at 12:39 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (438) | Comments (0)

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Seriously Baby, I Can Prescribe Anything I Want!

Gregoire Dominique Pepin di Lachance Compton down in Melbourne sent us some pics of his med school colleagues "studying" for finals:

Clinical studies suggest that reading Planet Simpson vastly improves the bedside manner of future doctors (results not valid outside of Australia).

Posted by Ashley at 08:19 AM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (264) | Comments (0)

The Montreal Crowd Weighs In

Thanks to the ever-stalwart G. Sean P. Monkman for these links:

Bookshelf: Finally Simpsons In Credible Book Form, review by Ezra Black
Short, collegiate review of the book.

This next one's a list of recommended books as xmas presents - Planet Simpson's shout out is about halfway down the page:

Books to give! by MJ Stone, Melora Koepke, Jamie O'Meara

Posted by Ashley at 07:06 AM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (237) | Comments (0)

Saturday, December 04, 2004

Why Would They Come To Our Concert Just To Boo Us?

Reviews and other comments on the book continue to trickle in from around the globe. I don't want to play the fool's game of replying to my critics, but as an exercise I thought I'd highlight three recent articles that provide an interesting and semi-representative cross-section:

1) A long feature in the New Zealand Listener.

The Listener is New Zealand's most prominent newsweekly, and this is a well-composed and largely laudatory piece based on a chat I had with the magazine's erudite TV critic Diana Wichtel while in Auckland (photo). As with many Planet Simpson reviews/notices, there's a money quote therein just waiting for a second edition of the book so it can appear on the back cover: "A highly entertaining, great wodge of a book."

(Incidentally, "wodge" stumps trusty ole Dictionary.com, but Britain's Free Search Dictionary chimes in with this definition: "a thick piece or large amount of something." And - again like many other notices - this one mentions of my occasional longwindedness and penchant for tangents: "the book gets bogged down occasionally in its liberal social, political, economic, etc discourse." And of course there's the obligatory Comic Book Guy reference: "[Turner]'s trying not to come across like the show's resident anorak, 'Comic Book Guy.'" (anorak: "a boring person who is too interested in the unimportant details of a hobby and finds it difficult to meet and spend time with other people"; also "a short, waterproof coat that protects the wearer against cold, wet and windy weather, usually with a part for covering the head." For the record, I was most trying to avoid coming across as a boring person; if you'd like to see me as protection against inclement weather, I'm fine with that characterization.)

Also for the record, I've been compared with, contrasted to, and otherwise lumped in with the Comic Book Guy more times than I care to remember during this round of publicity. The Listener piece is guilty of this. Comes with the territory, I know, but still: Laziest. Allusion. Ever. You wanna impress me, book reviewers? Compare me to Milhouse. Or Disco Stu. Or Pops Freshenmeyer.

Anyway, all in all this Listener piece is fair and insightful, and best of all I'm accurately quoted (a rare and elusive phenomenon). I'm especially pleased that this line made it in: "'The one thing I have thus far determined from reaction to the book is that a certain sort of stratum of the British elite thinks I'm crap,' says Turner cheerfully." (You will see more on this topic in point #3, below.)

2) Next up: A shortish, mixed, slightly stuffy review in the Deccan Herald, an august daily based in Bangalore, India.

Money quote: "A book for those who would revive the American Empire and those who anticipate its fall."

Mention of longwindedness? Yes: "The fact is The Simpsons is an American Mass Icon, of the early '90s. Turner's attempt to make it more lessens it."

Comic Book Guy reference? No.

What I really like about this Deccan Herald piece, though, are its South Asian idiosyncracies. In particular, it's a stellar example of near-impenetrable Indian academic writing, which in my year living in India I came to think of as the colony's ultimate revenge on the Empire. Not just in academic treatises, but in the labyrinthine absurdities of Indian government bureaucracy and the baroque linguistic tics of the English spoken by elite-educated Indians, you find a kind of parody of England's own pomp and ceremony that broadcasts Britannia's overstuffed pomposity and smug self-importance for all to see. Try, for example, to wrap your head around this line from the Deccan Herald review: "The Simpsons leveraging rabbelaisian honesty could survive time, but only if it stops being a mouthpiece for gags coined by Californian pretend radicals." ("Rabelaisian" - even correctly spelled - stumps the Free Search Dictionary, but Dictionary.com comes to the rescue: "characterized by coarse humor or bold caricature.")

When Ash and I lived in India, we were based in Shimla - former summer capital of British India, now a kind of broad caricature of a Swiss mountain resort beloved by Indian honeymooners, and an even broader caricature of a state capital full of the most self-absorbed, self-important, narrow-minded and obsequious bureaucrats the world's ever seen. (Shimla is the only place on earth I've ever seen grown men actually sprinting each other to try to be the first to shake the hand of a government official. A sad, true story.)

A short while before we left Shimla, our great friend Angad, then an undergrad at venerable St. Stephen's College in Delhi, came to visit. He brought with him a scholarly journal that he was quite excited about - a kind of Indian Marxist Review of Books whose title happily escapes me. It was - and I say this as someone who took a class in Race Relations at the height of the political-correctness movement in 1990s Canada - the most totally impenetrable pile of academic jargon I'd ever laid eyes on. Pages from it should be sewn into flak jackets and shipped to Baghdad. Anyway, Mr. Tarun Cherian, my interrogator at the Deccan Herald, is a glimmering beacon of literary clarity by comparison, yet his use of Poindexter-grade Borax like "rabbelasian honesty" (not to mention "net commune" and "Bush cowboyism") reminded me fondly of Angad and his Marxist book reviews. (Which he was always too smart for anyway - Angad, that is - and has reportedly since discarded in favour of writing that isn't trying to render you unconscious.)

3) Speaking of intellectual posturing and hinting toward upper-class British twits, this brings us to the third entry: A brief and poisonous notice penned by Guardian columnist Zoe Williams for The Spectator, the venerable British conservative journal.

Nice of them to find space between ponderous essays hunting desperately for positions more pro-American than Tony Blair's, for Ms. Williams' screed on my book, which manages to be more mean-spirited than the Sunday Times savaging of Planet Simpson back in September - a feat I'd heretofore assumed was impossible. Good show, Ms. Williams! I'm either wearing or being an anorak in your honour.

You'd have to register at The Spectator's website to read the thing, and I don't want to encourage anyone to do that, so here are a few relevant passages:

"...[H]is argumentative arc is at best so breathily over-enthusiastic, and at worst so self-aggrandising and contradictory, that he makes you like the programme less and less, the more he praises it... like reading a critique of King Lear that tells you repeatedly how moving it is... quasi-academic... slack logical progression..." And it goes on like this.

The really lovely bit, though, is that Ms. Williams spends nearly half of her glib dismissal refuting my claim (which I actually borrowed, with citation, from John Seabrook of The New Yorker) that highbrow and lowbrow are no longer relevant cultural distinctions (if they ever were), and that more importantly stuff like The Simpsons and punk has far more artistic merit and cultural relevance to contemporary culture than whatever your local symphony is currently mounting. Ms. Williams rises to this bait like a Victorian schoolmarm:

"The argument is muddied by an ongoing and confused tension between high and low culture. At one stage, Turner anoints The Simpsons as the biggest pop cultural phenomenon of the Nineties; not because of the ratings (the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles scored higher) but because of 'resonance', a quality that is eventually, circuitously defined as the ability to stand the test of time. So far, so reasonable. Later, however, explaining why the show is better than any symphony orchestra or novel by John Updike, he . . . writes off orchestral endeavour as 'a finely honed imitative craft'. (What does that mean? That classical music is rubbish unless the first violin wrote the symphony? That a new John Adams is de facto more creative than anything by Mahler?)" And, again, it goes on like this.

So here's the small necessary retort:
For the record, Ms. Williams, what I meant was that the first violin, regardless of his or her skills as a musician, is the practitioner of a dead art that survives only because it congratulates rich and/or smug elites like yourself for having tastes so much more refined than the great unwashed. What I meant is that The Clash, for example, built an artistic expression of postwar social decay that boasts a clarity, directness and power that your average musique concrete composer could only dream of. What I meant is that Mahler, whatever his merits, made most of his artistic statements in the age of the horseless carriage and was six feet under for a good two decades before "talkies" signalled the dawn of a new art form. And so thinking of performances of his music as somehow a "higher" art than rock & roll is somewhat akin to thinking of a really passionate oration from a Bronte novel as de facto a more significant artistic achievement - the oration itself I mean - than, say, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel (i.e. "funny book") Maus. What I meant is that The Simpsons is a pure expression of pop art in a way that the works of Roy Lichtenstein could never be. And I meant, I guess, that I'd happily provide someone like yourself with ammo for a nasty little article in The Spectator (est. 1828) if in so doing I find a way to communicate to Simpsons fans that their favourite cartoon is categorically the same thing as the collected works of William Shakespeare: a great body of art that speaks volumes about its time and about the human condition generally.

You know, if you wanted to read the book instead of just posture above it from a great (and myopic) height, and then shit upon it.

*Ahem.*

Thus my theory that upper-class British twits hate my book. All the power to 'em. Hate away.

Posted by Turner at 06:25 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (319) | Comments (0)

Linky Love

Thanks to John Turner (Sr.) out in Nova Scotia for forwarding us these links:

Interview with Bharati Jagdish

Review by Diana Wichtel

Nothing escapes the eagle eyes of a pilot!

Posted by Ashley at 06:13 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (336) | Comments (1)

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Back Into The Canadian Media Maelstrom

So we arrived home to Calgary on Tuesday. After exactly 1.5 days to adjust to the -18hr time difference between Malaysia and Calgary (seriously: 18 hours) and the 35 hours of travel we undertook on November 30th (going east across the International Date Line bounces you backward a day, so you live the date twice), we were up an' at 'em again today shilling for the book.

First off in this, the final major publicity push before Christmas, was a store signing event at none other than Calgary's downtown Coles Books location in TD Square. Lunchtime host to more than 600,000 walking shoppers and quaintly attired homeless folks, the Scotia Centre-TD Square-Eatons Centre +15 complex in Calgary was a great place to drink in the bathrooms when we were teenagers because it was easy to be anonymous in the crowd. (To this day the taste of tequila reminds me of the fourth-floor Eaton's Centre ladies room.)

The lovely folks at the Coles had set up their whole front window in rows and rows of Planet Simpson, they made a poster (which they let us keep), and they monitored the author table like bodyguards who know their stuff. About four dozen people bought the book on impulse as they strolled on their lunchhour, a hell of a turnout for a mere bookstore signing. Cheers to the Calgary business community and their disposible income!

The quote of the day, however, goes to a couple walking past. We join their conversation in progress:

dude: So I says to Mabel I says...
girl: [noticing window display, looking interested] Hey, the Simpsons...?
dude: [looking over with interest, taking in the signs and the display and the table at which Turner is seated, and his face clouds with doubtful uncertainty] ...Who's that guy?
girl: [shrugs]
[They move on, without breaking stride. Exeunt.]

The staff at this particular Coles are old hands at having authors sign books at the store, so we got into the inevitable who's who anecdotes about Stuart McLean, Joy Kogawa, etc. And then they let slip that Will Ferguson, fellow Calgarian who is touring his new book Beauty Tips From Moose Jaw on a trajectory that periodically overlaps with T's, said during his store visit last week that Turner looks like Comic Book Guy.

Come again?

Let's just take a second to clarify things, here, Will. You:

...think that Turner:

...looks like Comic Book Guy?

Well now wait just a minute you, Mr. "Will Ferguson," Mr. Canadian-Hating Margaret-Atwood-namedropping Katimavictim, here's a beauty tip from someone born in Moose Jaw: if there's a Comic Book Guy around here, it's the guy who calls his book Why I Hate Canadians. (What, was Worst. Nationality. Ever. already taken?)

(Also, doooode - don't you realize that in several ways you and Turner look alike?)

Nice, guy. Real nice. Running around Canada badmouthing the next generation. Real supportive. Very Canadian of you. ;)

Furthermore, you wanna go?!?

Posted by Ashley at 09:11 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (285) | Comments (2)

Free Shower Curtain!

So we're all fans of free stuff. Let's face it. From the free quarter when you check the telephone change slot to the 250mL bonus/enprime extra-big shampoo bottle at the drugstore, when something's free, it's better than good. It's great. It's awesome. It's fantastic. It's... free.

Myself, I am a grand fan of the free soap at hotels. Notsomuch the shampoo and conditioner, which is generally just tarted-up dish detergent and really not worth your while. However, soap is generally soap everywhere in the world, and while you can spend lots of money at home getting all snooty about anti-bacterial this and moisturizerizing that, soap's function is to get you clean, and most soaps do the job.

Aha, but what if the soap is free, like, say, at a hotel? Oh, I mean, I'm not naive, I realize the cost of the soap is buried in the hotel bill somewhere. But for us, on the tour of Asia Pacific which just wrapped up, we weren't footing the bill for accommodation. So, yes, the soap was truly free. And I stole a whole whack of it along the way through New Zealand, Australia, and Hong Kong. Collecting and hauling all that soap home was one of the joyful side projects of the Asia Pacific publicity tour for Planet Simpson. So I know of which I speak on the whole free soap front, and I'm uppity enough to get my fuss on about it. Oh, lemme just tell you all about the soap.

But to start with, you need to know a few basics about getting the most soap per night spent in a hotel.

Firstly, even though hotel soaps are usually smaller than the soap you have at home, most of them are still big enough to last a few days. But the maid service will replace your used soap with new soap 90% of the time, even if you can clearly get another day out of the bar you're already using. You want to put only unopened soap into your bag for taking home, so the idea is to get as much use out of the soap you have to open and use in the hotel room for cleanliness' sake, and not let them take that soap away (necessitating the opening of another, new soap which otherwise could be squirrelled away for stealing). So before you leave for your day out in the world, carefully wrap the used soap in toilet paper or kleenex and stuff it in the corner of your toiletries bag. Remember: you're not taking this soap home! You're just hiding it from the cleaning staff for the day, so they'll give you a new soap that comes in a wrapper. When you return in the evening, snatch up all the new soaps in the room and tuck them away first thing. Then take the sticky toilet paper plus soap mess out of your bag, wash it off, and put it back in the soap dish. Voila, conservation.

The second thing you need to remember is that there are often two soaps in the bathroom: the one at the vanity sink, and the one in the soapdish of the bathtub or shower (or if you're lucky, you have both a shower and a seperate tub, and they each have a soap dish). The sink soap is often smaller than the tub soap. This is important to keep in mind, because you want to take the largest soaps home, always. As such the best thing to do is stuff the tub soaps in your bag right off so you don't open them by accident. Open and use only the sink soap (remembering of course to hide them from the cleaning staff in the morning each day so that they are replenished), which as we've already discussed, will last you more than one day even if they are smaller.

Third, and lastly, don't fall victim to the idea that it's trashy to steal the hotel soaps. For pete's sake, you're supposed to steal the soaps. That's why they're there! That's why they often wrap them in packaging that says the hotel's name on it - free advertising in your home bathroom in exchange for a few cents worth of soap is a good investment, it says so in every quality hotelier's business plan. And really: you're too good to take home the soap? Who are you, Queen Elizabeth? Ken Finkleman? Jesus, get over yourself and steal the soaps, already.

Whereupon The Hotels of Asia Pacific Are Subjected To A Ranking Based On Their Toiletries

1. First hotel of the trip was the Regal Airport Hotel in Hong Kong. Lovely place; we were just there for the day's stopover of 14 hours, but we were given a two-room suite that also had two bathrooms. You know what that means, don't you? That's right, twice the soap! Good lather, so-so smell, overall a 6

2. Second hotel was the Auckland Hilton. Hell of a hotel. You may remember our kick-ass view over the harbour from the postings on the blog. What we neglected to take photos of, however, was the bathroom. What a lovely place to spend some time, that bathroom. We had a glass shower stall and a jacuzzi tub, various places to lounge around, a giant mirror, and even a pillar in there. The soap was also lovely, overpackaged in plastic, but otherwise nice. Tea tree 'aromatherapy' flavoured, bland smell, overall an 7.

3. Third hotel was the Stamford Plaza in Brisbane. Again, one hell of a hotel. We were on the TOP floor! And again, the room's bathroom was outstanding. It reminded me of a private yacht club bathroom I'd seen in St. Jean Cap Ferrat (just before me and my friends were unceremoniously tossed from the place for being asshole English-speaking teenagers sneaking in with no membership): tasteful striped wallpaper, abundant towels, nice low square stools upon which to sit, two sinks, even a television, and a lot of unused floor space. And the soap: people, we peaked early. The soap at the Stamford was waaaaaayyy nicer than it needed to be to get my thumbs-up. Lovely huge round bars wrapped in paper with monogrammed sticker labels, these soaps smelled like something very expensive from the Crabtree and Evelyn 'special collection' vault. Overall, you just can't beat the Stamford Plaza for soap. A 10.

4. Fourth hotel was the Sofitel on Collins Street in downtown Melbourne. We heard from a local architecture buff that several dozen gorgeous Parisian-style historical walkups were bulldozed to make way for the hotel when it was built a few years ago, which does nothing for our impression of the place. But even before we heard this tidbit, the Sofitel wasn't super impressive. They didn't have the room ready when we arrived, we were eventually shunted into a room that had two single beds (which I obstinately pushed together late one night, at the expense of my back), and the hotel elevator system was the pits, constantly jammed with people trying to get somewhere, since the hotel lobby was on the 2nd floor, but the rooms and restaurant and so forth all started on the 35th floor. (Which of course begs the question: What the hell? What's going on on the other 33 floors? And that's a question we can't answer, I'm afraid. We just don't know. Our elevators didn't stop at those floors.) Before I move on to the discussion of their soap, the only nice thing I have to say about the Sofitel is that they had free apples at the front desk, which saved both of us from a few blood sugar crashes during our time in the Melbourne publicity gauntlet.

But the soap? Well, the Sofitel obviously hoped to curry favour with all of us frustrated-with-the-elevators people through the bathroom toiletries selection and quality, because they went all out. Thick bars of designer Aveda soap, shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion were on offer. There was a substantial shower cap and nail file supplied, as well as cotton balls, a serious sewing kit, and q-tips aplenty. I managed to sneak two extra bars of soap out of the maid on our last day, too, so I left this hotel extra-endowed. Overall on the soap, a 9.

5. Next up, our fifth hotel, the harbourside Marriott in Sydney. Again with the retardedly slow elevator service, it was almost faster to take the stairs 12 flights up to our room than wait in the lobby with all the other guests standing there tapping their feet and getting increasingly mobbish about the constant delays. Our room at the Marriott was totally standard, your basic high-end hotel room. But there were no bathrobes and no slippers, and no conditioner, and the shower stall leaked all over the (very slippery, we learned) floor. But they they had pretty good soaps, though I only managed to snag two over the course of our stay because although there was a sink and a seperate shower and tub set, there was only one soap provided to the bathroom each day. What they did provide wasn't bad, nice standard clean smell. Overall a 6.

6. For our final night in Australia we were shuffled off to the Medina Executive Suites hotel in a substantially less-grand part of Sydney. A totally serviceable room and we didn't really spend much time in it, but we nevertheless came away with two bars of soap. The cheapest quality of the lot, it was okay, did the cleaning trick but not much else. Packaged in mooshy pink cardboard and labelled "soap". Overall a 4.

7. Last hotel, lucky number seven, was the Grand Plaza in Hong Kong. When I die I would like to be reincarnated as one of the hawks that swoop around the upper floors of that hotel, showing off for the guests. Our bathroom was fricken ridiculous, with black marble covering everything horizontal or vertical, and was tastefully appointed with several sets of brass fixtures worth the price of our car in Canada. The water pressure was so fantastic that the giant shower stall actually had a breeze when you turned on the water. And the soap, well they sure didn't scrimp on the soap. Again with the huge circular bars, again with the monogrammed sticker labels. But I'll put it slightly behind the soap at the Stamford Plaza, if only for the scent, which was only magnificent and not absolutely flawlessly divine. Overall a 9.5.

8. Thaba and Phet's condo in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was our final overnight destination. They gave us their own bedroom for the stay, which had a lovely blue-tiled ensuite bathroom. You'll be glad to know that I do have some scruples and never had any intention of stealing soap from my best friend, so shame on you for even thinking I would consider it. But what they had in the bathroom was yellow and worked great. Overall an 8.

So now we're home and totally, completely, and utterly exhausted and wrung out, finished, completement grille bruille. We unpacked in a daze but one thing's for certain: you betcha we're lathering up a storm here in Cowtown with all our awesome free soap booty. Aww yeah.

Posted by Ashley at 06:30 PM (-07:00 GMT) | TrackBack (217) | Comments (2)

Hollywood Reporter

Thanks to both Brother John and the folks at Random House Canada for sharp eyeballs catching & forwarding this link:

Review by Gregory McNamee

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Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Wilfred Said 'Just Wait An' Let It Come To Ya...'

Thanks again go out to Brother John for zeroing in on this link the moment it hit the interweb:

Review by Dave Watson

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