theMediaman.com

Several years ago I took a trip to Japan and wrote almost daily on my web site. At the time, I wasn’t even using the word ‘blog’… it was an “online journal”. It was only after that when I decided to start writing a regular blog of my thoughts, frustrations and other innane topics.

While I was there, the only thing that astonished me more than the horrible colour schemes in the billboard ads, were that very few of them had imagery. Aside from logos and a telephone wingding, they were almost always just text. For many years I just chalked it up to cultural differences, until I read “The Death of a Copywriter?“.

As Copywriters are prone to do, the situation is initially illustrated as more dire than it truly is. However, the first half of the article does have a valid point in how Canada’s multiculturism and “new Canadians” require more visual cues in ads than are required in Japan.

In Japan, I remember seeing a lot of Japanese, and little else. In 2001 when my life in Toronto was measured in months, I could still remember living in Barrie, where my high school graduating class had less than a dozen people who were not white. However, even Barrie felt culturally diverse when compared to Osaka.

It would seem that Japanese language-only billboards exclude a very, very small percentage of the population, even less than performing the same action in a white-bred, redneck city like Barrie.

On a whim, Simone and I trekked out to KW to visit Reg et al. We managed to pull in Mel, but Homeowner-Ben was tied up. Right now he’s suffering from the long hours of a “Version 1.0″ company. I saw an IBM slave reading Microserfs on the bus today, and now I wonder if Ben has read it.

Reg lives in a part of Waterloo that used to be populated by wild animals. Now there is a thriving suburban village out there. I think it extends past St. Jacobs, and Reg is (due to recent construction) now one street away from bat-country.

When we pulled up to his place and got out of the car, the silence was deafening. I’ve spent a long time in Toronto, and my “time away from it all” this year was spent on the waterfront at the cottage. I had all but forgotten what it was like to experience silence… it was slightly unnerving.

We had a warm-up drink, played the first level of God of War II (now I’m anxious for the GoW PSP game), then picked up Mel. We stopped briefly past Ben’s workplace in order to pursuade him to shirk his responsibilities and go drinking with us, but he was far too responsible for us. Dammit.

The decision to go to Morty’s was made simply by calculating where’s a place where a bunch of mid-twenties/early-thirties people wouldn’t look out of place in a University town in September, and the fact that it was close.

Two of the best places to eat near King and University were Morty’s and Stanley Burger. Stanley’s turned into a Quizzno Subs shortly after I left KW, which just feels wrong. It’s like having your favourite Mom & Pop cafe turning into a Starbucks.

Morty’s wings were as brilliant as ever. They had that new Rickards White on tap, but I was torn between trying that and going for a Waterloo Dark. I could have wieghed options like how likely it would be that I would find one or the other in Toronto, but really it came down to what I wanted with my wings. Waterloo Dark was closer to what I wanted, so I enjoyed a pint with my big-ass, honey garlic wings.

My night-driving isn’t as good as it once was. Where once I could leave Kitchener after a Thursday night of clubbing, drive home to Barrie, and still get up early to drive to Richmond Hill for work, I find that leaving much after midnight is risky.

(Simone is barred from commenting on my old age being a factor here… she was asleep before we hit the 401.)

Regardless of the late hour of our departure, we got home well after two. Following two days of chicken wings for dinner I swore that I would eat less protein and more balanced meals for the rest of the weekend.

On Sunday, Simone made chili for lunch. Oh well.

I’m falling further behind on documenting my New York trip, but something happened last week I can’t stop thinking about.

Simone and I went to see Harry Potter on Thursday night. Rushing from the Lick’s on Eglinton to the theatre, we stopped in the 7-eleven so I could pick up some snacks. I miss the contraband now that they don’t prevent you from bringing in your own food. Still, it wasn’t the adrenaline rush I was going for in this case, it was the sugar rush.

When I walked in, there was some commotion at the counter. I walked by it and picked out my chocolate bars (two for $2!).

Walking up to the counter, I watched as some bald guy was trying to buy smokes. Apparently, his ID was in French. It certainly looked legitimate, but I didn’t see specifically what kind of ID it was.  What I heard next from the older lady speaking to the uncomfortable teenager with her behind the counter was, “if you can’t read it in English, you don’t have to accept it as ID”.

Now, I’m not entirely sure that’s correct. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not. A Canadian ID is a Canadian ID as long as it’s written in one of the two official languages.  If it was a Quebec ID card like a Health Card (again, I didn’t get a good look at it but it was orangish in colour), I’m certain it would be written exclusively en français.

The guy trying to buy smokes was clearly upset, and probably at least a bit offended.  I’m not going to play sympathy with his role, because that won’t illustrate my point (which I’m getting to eventually). However, I won’t say that he’s wrong either.

Showing the older woman that I just wanted to buy two chocolate bars, I got her over to the second cashier to ring it through. As she was doing so, she said back to the other fella, “let me tell you a story”. I was focused too much on not involving myself to remember the details, but the story did illustrate a circumstance where she visited Quebec and was refused service because she only spoke English.

You know when you leave a situation and you think of the perfect thing to say later? (”Yeah, well the JERK store called…”) This wasn’t it. I thought of the perfect thing to say right there and then.

It wasn’t harsh. It didn’t take sides. It was more like a comment where they wouldn’t be sure if I was agreeing with them or insulting them. The issue, as I will discuss later, is understanding WHAT I was insulting.

“No,” I would say. “If it’s in French, then you have to accept it. We are in a bilingual country,” as the Francophone had pointed out earlier. “However, Quebec doesn’t play by the rules the rest of the country does, so only French ID is accepted in Quebec.”

Part of me want’s to sympathize with that fella, since he’s the victim of prejudice in this circumstance.

Another part of me, the one that grew up with Quebec getting special treatment from the Canadian government - at the financial and social expense of the other nine provinces and three territories - wanted to simply give into the bigotry and say, “now you know how the rest of us feel”.

Since moving from the white-bred, redneck city of Barrie to the functionally multicultural Megacity of Toronto, I’ve been filtering more and more of what I say before I say it. I figure that’s a big reason for my occasional bouts of stuttering. It’s not that I’m thinking negative thoughts or racial slurs, it’s just that so much more of what I say could be blown out of proportion. A misheard comment could result with foot-in-mouth disease when I was in Barrie. Here, a misunderstood comment could be a racial slur.

I admit that if I had said that comment out loud, there would have been some venom in my words. My hesitation wasn’t the fact that the guy didn’t look like the kind of person I wanted to risk upsetting, although that was a contributing factor. The idea that I’m an English, white, heterosexual, Christian male aged 18-35 means that any comment I have regarding any minority race, religion, race, sexual preference or gender equality issues can very easily be interpreted as 1) sympathetic to the cause, 2) patronizing, or 3) prejudiced. My words always have to be chosen carefully so that I don’t get misunderstood as 2 or 3.

To sum it up, I wanted to insult the Quebec Government’s totalitarianism and the Canadian Government’s protection of such Nazi-esque laws…

…but I’m sure it would have come across as a “dumb frogs” comment.

Actually, maybe to some extent it was. Sorry, I’m not perfect. I’m just some Redneck*.

^{Disclaimer: Using the term “Redneck” is okay because I’m White.}

The second day of our trip started early with breakfast in the hotel. “Continental Breakfast” seems to include more and more the further south one travels.  Additionally, the donuts that they seem to consider “breakfast” get bigger and more laden with icing. There was also to be breakfast served at the conference, but I didn’t want to be stuffing my face while fellow professionals were trying to strike up a conversation.

We only had a few blocks to walk, but we had trouble finding the building…or more specifically, the entrance. There are a number of thin-X shaped intersections because Broadway goes on a 30 degree offset from the grid pattern that ALL the other roads in New York follow. We found the right building, which looked like an ornate, concrete sugar cube. The door we tried to get in was not only too large to move, but also locked and without any discernible door handle. We walked around the building and found that we were in fact not on the correct side but the one thirty yards over.

The Future of Online Advertising conference itself was quite interesting. While I could go into details about the events, you’ll find more in-depth analysis of the content by searching for it. I would rather focus on the superficial elements.

Simone brought her laptop, and I - not having one - brought my PSP. In some ways, it was the wiser decision. It’s more portable, so I only had to toss it in my pocket to carry it around. Also, the battery lasts 5-6 hours before needing a charge, even with constant WLAN broadcasting and page rendering. Anyone there with a laptop would tell you how difficult it was to lay claim to the small smattering of powerbars set up at the back of the room. There was a laptop tent-city set up by the end of the day with users in a circle, all plugged in so they can feed their sweet, sweet Internet addictions.

 The two downsides to opting for the PSP are that the page loading/rendering on the PSP is really slow, and it can’t always connect to public WLANs. There was a wireless Internet access point set up for the attendees, but it didn’t work properly for most of the first day. I think they were unaware of exactly how many people would be trying to connect simultaneously. Most routers can handle up to 254 connections, but I have little doubt it was exceeding that.

The food was fan-TAST-ic. Breakfast was a collection of the common stuff - muffins, croissants, etc. But also had really sugary yogurt, three different types of juice, and some burned coffee. Served (or ‘butlered’, as they called it) for lunch were small containers with morsel-sized fish & chips, eggplanty things, and many other clever hors d’ourves. Much more impressive.

Simone and I opted to hop out to one of the countless deli’s in the neighbourhood. We found a kosher deli across the street where she had pizza and I had a calzone. We figured we’d get the genuine New York experience while we could.

After the event, we grabbed some dinner. Now that I correct myself, we went to Jack Dempsey’s on Day 2, not Day 1 - contrary to my previous post. On Day 1 we went to a rather overpriced Japanese restaurant. Our hotel was located in Little Korea. “Little” indeed, it’s only one street and two blocks long! But where there’s Koreans, there’s <quote>Japanese<unquote> restaurants. While it looked quite authentic (and the prices would certainly allude to that), I’m not enough of a connoisseur to discern from Korean or Japanese sushi.

Regardless, it was fun living in a place where every second storefront was a Karaoke bar (including one with a black awning simply called “EMO”) and every night we’d come home and pass some fella on the sidewalk comforting his way-too-drunk girlfriend, pre- or post-puke. Fortunately, the street stunk of garbage so you couldn’t smell the puke.

While there are no shortage of such streets in midtown Manhattan, the spot we were really looking for on our second night was Times Square.  Simone went snap-happy, and I have little doubt I would have too if I had my camera. Even though I had only seen it a few months earlier, it was a thrill to see the Broadway front of Phantom of the Opera… a short distance from Les Miz and other such shows. I did notice that a rather large number of current shows were derived from motion pictures, instead of the other way around - like Evil Dead: The Musical and *gasp* Legally Blonde.

We did go see STOMP while in the East Village a couple days later, but if we had even a couple more days I would love to have seen one of the shows right on Broadway. One that intrigued me was Talk Radio. I really enjoyed the movie (directed by Oliver Stone) and the Tony award winning star, Liev Schriber, is perfect casting for the part. As I write this, it has already finished its run. I’ll cross my fingers that it will tour to Toronto, but I won’t hold my breath (hee hee, two euphemisms in one sentence).

We spent some quality time in the Virgin Megastore as well as the M&M’s shop and the Hershey store (competitors, right across the street from one another… SCANDAL). I couldn’t remember whether or not the WWE restaurant/store had shut down, but from it’s absence I concluded that it was gone.

There was a good collection of CBGB merchandise in the Virgin Megastore, but it just didn’t feel right buying underground T-shirts from a multi-national homogenizer of all things music. I was hoping that there would be at least one crappy, little store in the Village that could sell us CBGB crap. Since the real CBGB closed down in 2006, we had the haunting feeling that we’d be back.

Feeling mostly healthy now. Besides a side-project I’m working on for my screenwriting group I’m ready to start writing about my trip to New York City.  Probably a good idea as my memories are moving from the short-term storage to long-term storage, and that’s never a 100% copy.

Simone and I only had about six weeks notice that she had won two tickets to the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference in New York City. Both of us were ready to go, but neither one of us had a valid passport. They had expired within the last two years. We did the paperwork as fast as we could, got the signatures from respectable professionals, Simone submitted her paperwork through a Receiving Agent while I submitted mine right at a Passport Canada office. While I was told that it would be sent out “May 16th”, I received it on the 15th… about three weeks after I submitted the application. Simone just got hers yesterday (June 25), over two months after she sent it in. She blames the fact that her birth certificate says “Quebec” while mine says “Manitoba”.

Regardless of the circumstances, she had to take the bus from Bay St. Terminal all the way to midtown Manhattan. I’ve taken many bus trips over the years (including one that rivals what Simone went through) but I’m a little happier zoning out and having quiet time than Simone. She has more reasons why the trip was unpleasant, but that’s for her to discuss. 

Regardless, Day 0 (June 5) had her hopping on a Greyhound at 10:30 pm. The plane tickets were non-refundable, so it would have been a waste of money for me not to take the flight. She travelled all night and arrived the next morning.

Since she was going to be travelling very close to her suitcase, we concluded that she should take the massive, monster luggage and we’d both fit our stuff in there.  That way, I could jump out of the plane and into a cab at the airport going both ways without having to wait for my luggage.  In exchange, I drove her to the bus terminal (both ways) and got the monster luggage on, and helped her when she got back from Toronto. I’m not sure how fair she thought it was, but it also ensured that nothing got lost en route and sent to Fiji.

Day 1: A fifteen minute walk (but $45 cab ride) away from the bus terminal was our hotel. Sadly, it was worth the money to make sure she got there okay. By the time I made it to the hotel ($40 cab ride from La Guardia airport) she was already sound asleep. Not surprising, since the hotel room could only be described as ‘cozy’.

By some weird coincidence, the artist behind Real Life Comics was in New York this month. I didn’t meet him or anything, but he’s publishing a really great series of comics around experiences.  I’m going to be referencing them a lot over the next few posts. 

Once she had woken up, we decided that we had to start taking advantage of the daylight. We’re in New York City, and we’ve only got five more days before we have to start on our way home again. We went over our short-list of “To-Do’s” and settled on going up to the top of the Empire State Building.  It was, after all, only one block north.

We first grabbed dinner at an Irish pub named after Jack Dempsey. Irish pubs in Manhattan are like Tim Hortons in Canada… you can’t help but trip over them. There were only a select few beers on tap, but some worth giving a try.  I had a Brooklyn Lager, and I would have one again if I saw it on tap here. Simone was impressed by the homemade veggie burger.  I was less impressed by the shepherds pie, but I’m not really sure what a “fantastic shepherds pie” might actually taste like.

After dinner, we got into a 45 minute lineup to go up the fabled building.  The interior is still decorated in the distinctive Art Deco style. From the top of the building, you can see the top of the city. Roofs of every building in Manhattan, including the ones that would later stun us with their height when seen from below. We both got a lot of really great photos from up there (coming soon). I made sure to toss a penny off the top, and we (again) had a conversation similar to the one later mimicked in Real Life Comics.

We had a conference to wake up early for the next morning so we went back to the hotel, squeezed through the door into our room, and went to bed.

(Hopefully subsequent posts will not be as long, since I’ll only be covering one day at a time.)