Something repeated and something new at the Ngoc Van Vietnamese restaurant

Margaret and William at the Ngoc Van, January 2014

All week William has been asking to go to the Ngoc Van (Vietnamese) restaurant again. With the weather finally turning nice and an otherwise uncommitted Friday evening, we went. As fate or luck or design would have it, we were seated at the same table where Erik, Geremy, and I were seated on September 7, so I took a stitched photo similar to the one from that night. Food was good. William tried a spring roll, which he is usually averse to. This has become the restaurant which symbolizes "trying new things" for him.

Geremy and Erik in September 2013

warm feet sharpens the mind

Margaret bought me a pair of alpaca slippers yesterday, responding to my months of agony over cold feet around the house. It allowed me to focus and completely rewrite the dialogue for the super-8 film I'm trying to make, a Sockvile inter-season teaser in iambic pentameter.

New visions

William and I bached it this morning while Margaret went to an early morning Christmas card design session with other artists to raise money for the food bank (cards available soon on ebay). Pictured below is Margaret with local art legend Wilf Perreault. .

 This evening we went to Leslea and Leif's house, had a glass of wine and looked at their amazing new kitchen. They expanded the back of their house by four feet and it made a lot of difference. Makes me want to start baking.

15 hours of ...

 

 We checked out of the hotel and went for brunch at Diane Bessai's fantastic (and large) condo.

Fred Bessai and Diane Bessai

Carl had to get to the airport. Frank, Tom and John Bessai were all there. We got to talk more than we did at the other parties; less people, more about family

. Frank, Tom, and John Bessai

 

Diane has one of Margaret's watercolour snowman pieces from her 2001 show. We don't see it often. John bought it for her for her 70th birthday. 

 

I thought we were going to leave town but we decided at the last minute to drive downtown and find the new Art Gallery of Alberta building (with no address but for some vague description from teenagers at a coffee shop on Whyte who don't drive and hadn't been there). Somehow we managed to find it and saw a very good Warhol show. It had four of his toupees and a lot of his early drawings. It also had a number of films showing that I'd not seen including "Kitchen Party".

Warhol silver cloud pillows at AGA

We arrived in Saskatoon around 8:30 and saw Mike Grzesina's new condo. It is a very good place. William had a swim in his pool. We drove home to Regina, arriving late.

trippin'

Margaret and Carl Bessai

We spent a bit more time at the aeronautical museum this morning (the B+B gave us a free pass) then we came into Edmonton and checked into the university tower hotel. It is very nice. The afternoon was spent wandering down Whyte Avenue looking for oddities. Most of the time seemed to be spent at the Junque Cellar which specialized in the 1970s. I think I either own or once owned 2/3 of the interesting stuff there. This evening we went to a big BBQ at Margaret's cousin Frank's house. Frank's brothers John, Tom, and Carl Bessai were also all there, as was their mother Dianne whose 8th birthday is being celebrated.

Open and close

Margaret had an opening at the Flatlands today for her collage collective work.They showed box-based pieces as well as a number of works from their personal collections. I attended for a few minutes before getting to the set and concluding my role in Erik's film. In this image I reuse my robot outfit from last year's student studio shoot, which I also used for a test shoot with Erik last summer, as the time travel uniform for my character.

Reflecting

Today I spent too much money. Bought all the episodes of Poirot tv show on dvd as well as a small sliver extremely overpriced plastic to protect Margaret's new Ipod.
To cap it off, we went to the Mercury for supper (Margaret paid since I was griping too much) and I took this photo of William reflected in the glossy formica tabletop.
I also updated my website in a few places, added a page for the new Dunlop show as well as my "Rerun Amok" and "All the Boys are Called William" projects.

portrait of my brain

This isn't really my brain, it just feels that way. I had a headache all night that kept me from sleeping. This morning William asked if we could watch "Alice in Wonderland" which I bought a couple of weeks ago but haven't opened yet. I was quite certain that he didn't want to watch it, being potentially creepy, so I gladly agreed. I quite enjoyed it and so did William. He wanted to re-watch the Mad Hatter scenes. My headache persisted but discovered that it was less when I was sitting upright so I slept in a chair all afternoon. This image is a photo Margaret took yesterday while working at Gerda's on paper making. It is by Gerry Ann Siwek: image of bunny from handmade paper with inclusions.

Victoria Day art creation

Victoria Day today. We went to the short parade on Elphanstone to open the Cathedral Village Arts Festival, then to the park and had some fun drawing with the "comic jam" run by Allan Dotson inside the Balkwill Centre. Later I took William to the playground where I shot 300 feet of film of him playing with trucks in the sand for my "Grain" project.

My Birthday

I started off the day light: a quick cappuccino and a biscotti then out the door to meet to discuss avant garde film with Brett at the new Mercury Diner on 13th Ave. It was the perfect place to discuss nostalgia, which was central to out discussion today. The Mercury opened last week and is owned by the same guys that run the Novia. They've fixed it up really nice with red vinyl benches and lots of retro stuff.Since I'd worked late last night getting a draft of the curriculum report done (a week ahead of schedule), and had no meetings this afternoon, I blew off the rest of the day. Margaret had to work (owing to her forgetting a shift yesterday) so William and I went to "Clash of the Titans" in 3D. He was amazed at the new glasses style, having not seen a 3D movie since "Shark Boy and Lava Girl" with the two colour glasses. It was fun and not as intense as the previews had led me to believe.This evening we dropped in to Paul's place and watched the new episode of Dr. Who on our way to going swimming. In the end we decided not to swim (just as well, I have had a leg cramp for the past three hours) and came home where William and Paul played Lego (William got a Prince of Persia Lego set the other day - see above) and I made vanilla gelato.
Margaret is home now; we can now eat some of the amaretto cheesecake I made yesterday.

movie night

Internet is really slow this weekend, putting me out of the mood to do things like this blog. I can't believe computers are getting slower every year, perhaps someone should write a book about that.
Academy Awards were tonight. I won a nice pot of cash at the party that Margaret went to while I stayed home with William. They say I'm not allowed to win next year if I don't attend, but I'm pretty certain they said that last year. Margaret went dressed as Julia Child. William and I watched Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks". I think he was a bit freaked out a few times but stuck with it. He is starting to appreciate the thrill of getting scared. Yesterday his friend T., whom we invited for a couple of long play dates due to her sister needing surgery on her broken leg, directed William to a site called scary maze game that concludes with a big shock (you've got to have the sound on your computer turned up loud for full effect) and now the difference between fear and shock is foremost in his mind. We've taught him that the most scary things in a movie are created in your imagination, not on the screen. This was really the case in Mars Attacks. The scariest part was the alien disguised as a beautiful human woman but you don't know when or how it is going to attack.

staying warm

Except for walking William to school (at about -30 degree temperature), I managed to stay in the house all day today. I also stayed relatively focused, getting significant amounts of my grading done. I rewarded myself with building Lego this evening, restoring the Aqua Raiders shark that Margaret and William put together a couple of years ago and was NEVER to be taken apart. It's missing a couple of fins, they'll turn up on a space ship somewhere.

Margaret's Christmas cards

A couple of weeks ago, Margaret was invited to join Operation Cards From The HeArt, a group of artists to the CBC to draw or paint some original Christmas cards that would be auctioned on EBay for the food bank. Her first card just sold today. Her second, a snowman playing air guitar with a broom, just went on-line.

Life is Like...

William went to Gavin DeLint's son Jack's fourth birthday party today but was in a bad mood the whole way there. I assumed it was because he'd been up late last night (nearly midnight) but as he attempted to sleep on my lap (quite out of character) I began to suspect he was also sick. We exited after the cake and went home where he suggested that he get some rest. I installed him with another Animorphs book (the 39th he's read) and a hot water bottle and went down stairs to roast a pheasant. When Margaret got home she noticed it was cold in the house. We quickly determined that the furnace wasn't working (it had been first thing in the morning) so we called the guy. He came fairly quickly, while Margaret was out getting cat food because our not-so-picky cat refuses to touch the new brand we bought a few days ago, and he finished before she got back. There was a chunk of dryer lint covered insulation lodged in the air intake and that made a switch trigger. That was a $133 piece of lint. William finished the whole book by mid afternoon and started to feel better. He stayed up late again, starting his 40th Animorphs book. We have three more out from the library, then we are out of avenues to get more unless we start ordering them on=line. There were about 60 of them in total.
Paul called to direct me to this snowman, his face is plain snow, perhaps it melted off, perhaps it was never there. It was directly behind Allan's house.

twisted teaching

Due to the odd twist of the schedule, I taught my second Film 411 class this evening but still have not taught my first Film 400 class of the term.
Margaret finished the puppets for my Sock-vlle video series today. There were four characters that never had puppets previously. Otherwise, I'm re-using the others from 1994. I still haven't recorded the voices and I still need the buildings made or drawn, and then all the animation and stuff, but still I feel good about there being progress. Now it's time to dig into old photos to give Chrystene some ideas for what the characters in my version of A Midsummer Nights Dream should look like. I thought it might be fun to have some of them modeled after people I know, but now I'm wondering if that is only going to taint my perception of those characters? Oh well, I'll certainly be happier than if I just had them all look the same.

last day of William's birthweek

Saturday, today we had the big kids party for William, went to the park, had a bug hunt, played, had cupcakes that I baked yesterday and Margaret decorated this morning, broke the wasp-shaped pinata that Margaret made over the past couple of days (the secret is to make it out of tissue paper, not newspaper, so it is possible for a kid to break). Supper at my parents house, then attending "The Extras" theatrical performance from Curtain Razors in front of city hall, then home to make the people and sharks with frickin' laser beans on their heads out of Lego. Oof. I need a day of just going to work, the social calendar is killing me.

New videos

Two new videos for you today, one Professor Delusia, which was the first one that we shot and was all done in camera like Melies would have done them, and one video I've been playing with for a week on William's Lego blog. William's friend Rowan was over today and I shot material for another video, at their insistence, but have not done anything with it yet. New Dance Horizons' Secret Garden Tour began this evening, William and I went to a couple of them and Margaret is volunteering at one.

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This morning we got into the Cathedral Festival lantern parade, marched down Elphanstone to the Balkwill centre, shooting super-8 along the way, and attended the picnic and comic jam there. William was really into the comic jam, which was run by Allan Dotson. William, inspired by his Stink books, created two pages of "Idiom Comics", illustrating such things as "he lost his head" and "he got up on the wrong side of the bed" and "it's not the end of the world". I contributed by drawing the head on a surrealist inspired exquisite corpse drawing (in combination with Allan, Gavid DeLint, and Margaret) - which of course turned out really well, despite my contribution. This afternoon we attended Rob Bos's art opening in his bathroom.

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This morning I met with the Aboriginal End of Life research group. I had a chance to ask Elder Betty about William's concern that he shouldn't read any books after winter ended. She says that fantasy types of stories shouldn't be told after the solstice (June 21) but education based stories could be told.
This afternoon I finished a version of my website. I'm going to try to upload it with Kalyn's help tomorrow morning. I solved my sorting/data base issue with the spreadsheet in a crude fashion. I created hyperlinks to the web pages within the spreadsheet of titles. I then sorted the page in the ways I needed and exported the appropriate portions of the page for each sorting choice the website will have. Thus, in the end, the website just presents sorted lists, it doesn't do any sorting itself. To add new material, I will need to first add it to my spreadsheet and export it into the necessary choices (each film will be in a minimum of three lists; chronological, alphabetic, and at least one genre). However, after making a mistake with the list and having to redo them all, I found that I can do this update in about 5 to 10 minutes, so not a big deal.
Margaret got her hair cut and when she got home I shot my Warhol video of her. I've not finished all the manipulations of this video set, but I now have all 15 of the source images (see photo: this is not the background I used, I shot outside with a grid pattern from the deck behind her).
This morning the courier arrived with my three boxes of film stock consisting of twenty 100' rolls of 16mm colour negative, ten 400' rolls of 16mm black and white negative, 1000' of 35mm black and white negative, and the super expensive 1000' roll of 35mm colour reversal!
Tonight there was a retrospective screening of Ian Toews's films at the Filmpool. I wrote the program notes and am posting them on my other blog. Ian liked them, which is always the worry about such things.

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As I write this, William is in bed, supposed to go to sleep. He says he's sad and lonely. He says he is slad.
This evening I went to the "Unscripted" session at the Dunlop Art Gallery. Some interesting points were made about art and cities, but it wasn't the madhouse that I heard the last session was. I began grabbing interesting words from the air to create a new "Mr. Saul" film, probably for the Cathedral festival. I also convinced Jeannie Mah, Elwood Jimmy, and Lorne Boeg to appear in my Modern/Warhol video/films. Margaret and I saw the Warhol exhibit today (her for the first time, me for the second) and I spent most of the time watching the 90 minutes of films I'd not had time for previously. I realized, while watching them, that I shouldn't be doing a 10 minute set of portraits in Warhol style, but obviously I should do 15! I'm calling the set "15 minutes of famous". My role call is now Tyler Banadyga, Leesa Streifler, Eric Hill, Carle Steel, William, me, the three new ones, and six more I've not shot yet. Margaret will be one of them, that leaves five.
I thought I had one of the three dvds done for New Dance Horizons today, but when I looked at it, the image disappears inexplicably after the first two minutes. I recall there was some sort of error when exporting the video, but it looked in tact. I guess I was lazy and didn't check it far enough in. Grrrr. I need this done and deleted off the hard drive so I can move on.
Saw my doctor this morning, he says there's nothing too wrong with my liver (recall test with giant needle a couple of weeks ago) but abnormalities could be from some fat on my liver and I should look into my levels of triglycerides. Hitting the books again I guess.