The neighbors' Christmas tree is gone. We dragged it two blocks along the street and then past Kitsilano Pool -- frozen, with a flock of confused and vaguely embarrassed-looking seagulls standing around on the ice, as though they knew something was wrong, but couldn't figure out exactly what. Then past the closed concession stand and the Wind Swimmer statue on top of its pole overlooking the pool, across the expanse of field where there are usually knots of people either playing soccer, throwing a football around, hurling Frisbees or, of course, that inexplicable Hacky-Sack thing, which always makes them look like a bunch of sadists trying to tease a bean-bag to death . . . or maybe bore it into submission. Hacky-Sacking ("hackying?") must be great if you're stoned; it looks astoundingly boring otherwise.
A big yellow chipper in the parking lot next to the beach gulped denuded Christmas trees and spewed their chewed remains into a bin on the back of a truck. The folks running it were right in the middle of a pulping round when we approached. Henry and Spencer both stared as the trees were fed into the blades at the back and almost instantly came firing out of the mouth of the spout on the top of the thing in a gout of dark green peppered with blond wood chunks. I kept thinking about Steve Buscemi's character in "Fargo," with Marge Gunderson saying, "and that must've been your accomplice in the wood-chipper . . . and those three people in Brainerd . . . and all for a little bit of money . . ."
There was lull in the tree-shredding: they powered the chipper down and waited for more cars to come creeping into the snowy parking lot and leave another object of pagan worship on the pile. It wasn't clear how big the pile had to be before there were enough accumulated saplings to fire the chipper up again. But the drop in traffic and the few trees in the existing pile seemed to indicate they wouldn't be firing it up again any time soon. So we stomped through the snow to Starbucks for a hot chocolate (for those five and under), coffee (for those over five).
After that we went back to the chipper just in time to watch them zap through a pile of Christmas trees that was about the size of a minivan and a half. Then it was back home, with a lot of snowball-throwing and marveling at the people running a sailing race in the snow on English Bay and considering how exotic this kind of thing seems here. Snow down here next to the water seldom happens. And this kind of winter -- the kind with snow -- lasts about a week or ten days here . . . at least, that's what it did last year. Compare that with the Toronto winters we're used to, the ones that start in late November and conclude sometime in early May, and which are memorable for a couple of perennial features: the endless weeks of gray, slushy drear, the cold snaps whose temperatures make your face hurt when you step outside and are usually accompanied by brilliant sunshine, and the false dawn of a thaw in January or February that melts everything just enough to encase everything in an impenetrable carapace of ice several inches thick.
Here, it's gray and rainy with this bout of "winter" in the middle -- usually just long enough to make you glad it'll be gone in a week instead of hanging around until the end of April . . .
After the tree was done with and we'd had a bunch of snowball fights and were sufficiently wet and cold, we returned here. I finished reading a rotten novel called "L9.99" (you'll have to view that capital L as a British "pound" symbol) by Frederic Beigbeder (originally titled "99 francs," and listed in some places as "L6.99," which seems to have been somebody's idea of a joke, as though it had been reduced in price). When you're reading a good novel, it gains heft; the characters come into sharper focus and the world in which it occurs gets realer because of the accretion of detail and description. "L9.99" does the opposite. The more of it I read, the less real and believable and plausible the characters got, until, by the end of the story, they were inane caricatures who'd become so annoying you couldn't wait for them to completely disappear.
The book is an achievement. It's not often you find the adolescent dingbat politics and superficial lack of understanding of Naomi Klein or Adbusters fused to the clumsy, affectless McDonald's-menu prose style of Bret Easton Ellis in service of the blindingly obvious apercus of Baudrillard, complete with the French habit of overthinking and over-analyzing some aspect of pop-culture ephemera and coming to conclusions that are so bizarrely and deeply wrong they're laughable . . . and all of it leading to the astounding revelation that some aspects of advertising business are not terribly deep or sufficiently selfless and/or noble. Wow. This is all marketed, of course, with the breathless excitement of encountering someone with the fearless ability to speak truth to power. And the fact that M. Beigbeder (or, as I've come to think of him fondly, "Monsieur Bagbiter") used to work for Young & Rubicam and got fired when his boss read the book is held up as proof of its worth and his bona fides. It's implied that the firing was occasioned by Beigbeder's "telling it like it is," but it seems more likely that his boss just fired him because the book was bad. "Sorry, Fred, we can't have anybody who'd write anything this bad working here. What will our clients think? What will other agencies think?" Or, even more likely, Bagbiter was an annoying wiener, and his dumb-ass "book" provided the perfect pretext for getting rid of him.
The British publisher decided it'd be a good idea to translate not just the language -- from French to English -- but the references and "signifiers" from French to English as well. Why stop there? Why couldn't translator Adriana Hunter couldn't have come up with a better plot, chopped out the embarrassing passage wherein every famous person who's died since World War II is posited to have faked their demise in order to live in some post-lapsarian state of cosseted indulgence on an island in the Caymans, cut about 75 pages and fixed things like the misspelling of Paula Porizkova's name and the misattributed and misquoted song lyrics? (And that's a much worse sin in something striving for some kind of hipster doofus cachet, like this book, than it might be elsewhere.)
In addition to those problems, the book seems almost quaintly dated. Published in 2000, it's got that whiff of pretty minor, inane concerns being inflated to the level of real problems: "oh, dear . . . advertising is everywhere . . . and, um, well, it's probably bad, because, um, it isn't good, right?"
But that was only the start. After 9/11, an event one might have hoped would make people who write books like this stop writing books like this, Beigbeder wrote "Windows On The World," in which he imagined the attacks from inside the towers. He said the media's presentation of the attacks was too clinical and sanitized, and that the only way to know what truly happened was to invent it. Wrong, wrong and wrong. I can only guess he was talking about the French media's reporting, since that was not the case here in North America . . . and one of the most detailed and heartbreaking aspects of the reporting on that cataclysm was a French documentary ("9/11"), which I guess he wasn't aware of, either. Or maybe they didn't show it on TV in France.
The excerpts of "Windows on The World" I read offered more of the same tired, adolescent tedium that's Beigbeder's standard product, and for which there must be an inexhaustible appetite somewhere: "clueless French intellectual pontificating about 'American cultural imperialism' and the hollow pointlessness of modern existence while decrying some cartoon version of capitalism that no actual capitalist would recognize." Apparently there's no human experience -- no matter how shattering, life-altering or terrible to contemplate -- that can't be grist for an "explanation" of its "real meaning" by some ideology-damaged European "intellectual." Maybe if we had smart, well-written, intelligently conceived and elegantly argued cultural commentary from people who bothered to try to be be informed or engaging instead of the kind of self-important, noisome, empty sloganeering scribbled by people like Frederic Beigbeder to consider, that wouldn't be such a big problem, now, would it?
