As it turns out, fortunes are being made reviewing consumer products on-line, and with that in mind I have launched a site ( The Sanitarium) which I hope will dominate the Hand Sanitizer Review landscape and make my family obscene amounts of money.

This is my first review:

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Welcome to The Sanitarium!

How do you think you’re going to die?

Terrorism?

Sex accident?

Wasting disease?

Climate catastrophe?

The truth is it’s possible you might die from any one, or any combination, of the threats listed above, but according to science we are most likely to perish from some super bacteria that will come like a thief in the night and kill all of us who had not been properly eliminating infectious agents from our hands.

It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that not only is choosing the right hand sanitizer a matter of national security, but it’s also a matter of life or death.

Choose carefully, my friends!

Sanzer Hand Gel

Wow!

The first thing I noticed about this hand sanitizer was just how amazing the ad is! It’s almost as if Sanzer isn’t promoting good hygiene at all, but is instead offering serial killers some great and fresh tips on how to dismember and store victim parts. It really makes you wonder what it would feel like to chop off somebody’s fingers and put them on display, you know? No matter, regardless of intent, Sanzer sure knows how to get your attention, but still, I had to find out, is the product as good as the ad?

Experiment:

Remove the raccoon that is trapped in the garbage bin in the alley with my bare hands, apply Sanzer hand gel, and then wait 48 hours to see if I get sick.

Notes:

1. Sanzer Hand Gel really stings when it comes in contact with any open wounds.
2. Sanzer Hand Gel does not remove the choking stench of raccoon and blood from your hands, clothes, hair, memory or glasses.
3. Sanzer is flammable, and if squirted while holding a lit barbecue ignitor directly in front of it, will work as a kind of flame thrower. Unfortunately, fire is of little use in deterring raccoons, so Sanzer’s effectiveness as a weapon is not universal. ( This product may not meet your Apocalypse Bunker Hand Sanitizer needs)
4. Fourty-eight hours after the application of Sanzer Hand Gel, my hands and arms were still swollen and oozy, but my fever was under control and the violent and dark thoughts had begun to subside, thus earning the product a solid 7 out of 10.

On our first day at our new school my friends and I wore crisply pressed overalls and carried Charlie’s Angels or Star Wars lunch boxes, each one containing a meal which a mother had lovingly and thoughtfully prepared. We knew nothing of pessimism, and the kids waiting for us there looked at us like we were a different species, as if emissaries from a past they had never known.

Exponentially cooler than we were, these kids all seemed so much more grown up. I was in awe of how independent and worldly they acted, as if totally free from childhood. They hadn’t just hit puberty they’d shot past it. They knew all about sex and drugs and rock n’ roll, and when they fought, blood was drawn. In short, they radiated everything that I, still prepubescent and utterly innocent, was not, but very much wanted to be.

At this time, as teenaged life was accelerating mysteriously toward me, I watched my first episode of Saturday Night Live.  I was probably eleven years old, maybe twelve, and all I knew about the show– mostly gleaned from my sister who was four years older than me– was that it was on late, and was racy and dangerous in the kind of way that adults, or at least parents, didn’t quite approve of.

The first sketch I watched was called Night on Freak Mountain, which was awful in all the ways that are typical of Saturday Night Live. It didn’t matter, though. It was about drugs, and it was late at night, both of which to me seemed inexhaustibly cool. (Later, it was Mr. Bill who ignited my grade seven imagination, probably because I still related to toys.)

No matter, it didn’t spark a love affair. I never became a dedicated fan or made a point of watching the show, and for the most part, like a lot of people, thought it lame. In fact, as far as I was concerned, it was the opposite of cool, but if you’re of Generation X, SNL served as a kind of water cooler around which you invariably orbited, and whether we liked it or not, it was imbued with a gravitational force that ended up bending our lives.

Although I had no intention of watching the SNL 40^th anniversary special on Sunday, I ended up doing so, and quite simply, it made me happy. It played like a history of the pop culture of my life, and seeing all the people who composed its landscape was touching. Sweet, celebratory and maybe even a little bit sad, the show was like returning to my old high school or university campus, a precinct that really only exists in memory. And so I toured the grounds, marvelling at all the familiar places and feeling refreshed by the faces of all those I had once known, and those that had receded from memory, too, everything once again feeling vivid and limitless.

SINUS INFECTION

Definitely won’t be going back anytime soon! I could not smell a thing for five weeks, my face hurt and my temples were so swollen that my wife started to call me Frankenstein. The green discharge from my nose was oddly fascinating, and the occasional day off work was nice, but it’s still not enough to earn a recommendation. In the end, my experience with a sinus infection was very disappointing. (Also, duration of visit WAY too long!!!)

OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE DISORDER

**********The condition makes me feel VERY, VERY, VERY safe and VERY, VERY, VERY focused. I think I do some of my VERY, VERY, VERY best work in this state. The condition makes me feel VERY, VERY, VERY safe and VERY, VERY, VERY focused.**********

 Recommended.

Recommended.

Recommended.

INGUINAL HERNIA

It wasn’t the most painful experience of my life, but the weird, little bulge in my groin was a freak-out, and quite frankly I didn’t like thinking about the mechanics of it at all. I mean, my intestines were poking through my abdominal wall? That’s just gross, and it really doesn’t sound right. However, when I was having surgery done a nurse was required to shave my pubic area and she had to pick up and move my penis in order to do this. I’m not a freak or anything, but it was a real porn scenario and I have to admit to kind of hoping something was going to happen, so that was kind of thrilling.

Another up side of the hernia is that I was able to get out of doing TONS of stuff. As far as illnesses go, this one comes quite highly recommended, and depending on the doctor, you can get some excellent pain medications.

ANTHRAX

No walk in the park. STAY AWAY!!!

BURSITIS

Like the hernia, this is an excellent excuse condition. Although it sounds like it should really only effect old people, it’s something that athletes deal with the most, so it’s actually kind of cool—a “healthy sickness,” if you know what I mean. It can hurt like a bugger, but it usually doesn’t and the treatment is typically just rest, so if you want to get out of something (like walking around Ikea all Sunday) all you have to do is say that your chronic bursitis and your knee is just killing you. It’s kind of like having a handicap pass for your car.

TOURETTE’S SYNDROME

Not nearly as much fun as you might think—get something else.

At the core of the velocity and visual charisma that characterizes his films there’s always a sense of sadness, of a longing that can never quite be realized. However, that sorrow, which is always gently romanticized, never comes to the painful fore but is used more as a prop, with the characters ultimately marching eccentrically past their emotional baggage to their self-determined destinies.

Some people see this as a failure on Anderson’s part, proof that he will never become an adult director but will always fuss about in a kind of Never-Never Land where nostalgia, loyalty, ardor and boyish courage take the day. For me, that’s enough, and I’m content in middle age to settle into the soft spot of these modern fairy tales for boys.

However, I’d heard great, almost hysterical things about The Grand Budapest Hotel, with critics and friends hailing it as a masterpiece and Anderson’s best, most accomplished work yet.

For me, coming in with higher expectations than I would typically have, the movie was a mild disappointment. It was so precious and stylized that it may as well have been animated, with the familiar cast of actors playing little more than cardboard cutouts that Anderson had dressed up in costume and quirks.

His tyrannical directorial hold made it a somewhat airless affair, and the movie, which rolled like clockwork, ended up being a parade of constituent elements without ever actually evolving into a movie. The technical virtuosity that governed it rendered the experience like watching a miniature play through a keyhole, and the typical emotional, nostalgic and romantic resonances that Anderson usually creates in me were absent.

No matter, I liked the movie, but it could have been bigger and braver, more about people and less about the gorgeous and strange myths they lived.

Well, it turned out to be one of those movies in which you are quickly conscious of the fact that it’s long, by which I mean you’re swiftly bored. It was impossible to penetrate through the surface of the images splashing in front of us, and instead of being immersed in the complexities of a grand narrative, we felt kind of like we were flipping through the pages of a pretty magazine while waiting for something better or more important to take place.

This might have been intentional, as it’s a relatively accurate thematic representation of the core of the source material, but it made for a pretty lousy movie. I mean, if we’d been handed a catalogue and told to go sit in the dark with earphones on– where passages of the novel were read to us–we probably would have had a deeper, more connective and personal experience.

There are a number of reasons for this failure, I think, one being that is was shot in 3D, and I’m not a big fan of this developing novelty. To me it’s a special effect that’s at it’s most useful when animating the unreal or exaggerating cataclysmic disasters.  Instead of rendering actors more real and life-like,  it reduces and flattens them into one dimension, draining all life and subtext from them.  They’re about as emotionally penetrable as robots or mannequins, and as they stand in front of you there’s absolutely nothing compelling in them.

I had no interest or attraction to anybody in the movie. Hell, I didn’t even want to go to any of the lavish parties that were being thrown. Everything was just a summoned mirage to me, perhaps like the one that drove Gatsby toward his green light, and maybe that’s the difference between experiencing a work of art as a boy, and then returning to it later, in middle age,  discovering that the fields you played in as a child were not tall stretches of eternity, but just small, scrubby accidents of geography. 

Live, his songs become crazed, feral creatures. Having broken free of their studio imposed straightjackets, every piece he plays becomes bloodthirsty, an unpredictable, ever escalating apocalypse unto itself. Honest to God, his shows are as much of an assault as they are anything else, and you always feel a little bit like you’ve just born witness to a terrible crime.

Bent and crouched low at the edge of the stage, his black-clad arms waving and pointing to the summoned crowd, Cave was a spidery prophet. The stories he imparted all carried danger and urgency, more condemnation than warning. It was primitive, as if shadows of incredible passion and horror were being cast angrily upon the wall, and there was an utterly brilliant, almost supernatural feeling to it all.

Behind him and singing in support of all this was a small choir assembled from grade 5 and 6 students at a public school here in Toronto. There’s really no conceivable way that they could have known anything about Nick Cave or had a clue what they’d gotten themselves in for when they signed up to sing with some pop star at a downtown concert hall, and I could not stop imagining what was going through their heads. It must have been traumatic and nightmare-inducing, like seeing a train, gloriously in flames, skidding off the tracks and shuddering toward you at a million miles an hour, while you, pitifully, tried to pedal away on your bicycle.

Astonishing, just astonishing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdau-45Rpxc

(Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds performing Stagger Lee in Montreal March 22, 2013)

staggerlee

(My brief 10-second video of him performing the same song in Toronto the next night. Note the bad seats.)

However, soon enough I found myself distracted, focused more on placing the actors in their previous incarnations than whatever was unfolding on the screen.

“Look, there’s the guy from Parks and Recreation!”

“There’s Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights!”

“I think the guy from The Sopranos is wearing a fake nose.”

“Man, that Jessica Chastain looks exactly like a young Julia Roberts!”

I don’t typically do this sort of thing when I’m watching a movie, so I figured that there must be something about Zero Dark Thirty, in particular, that was calling forth such a response. It was simple, I guess, the actors seemed more real to me than the characters that they were playing.

There was nobody in the movie that I liked or was particularly interested in, everybody seeming little more than a collection of suits doing their jobs. This might have been the directorial intent, but it kept me at an emotional and visceral distance, and the entire movie seemed procedural rather than human.

It was hard not to think of the TV show Homeland while watching, and how much of a better, deeper exposition of similar terrain it was than Zero Dark Thirty. I mean, I really, really liked Homeland, and had all sorts of feelings about the characters in the show, rather than about the actors hired to be those characters. Cable TV, with long narrative arcs, has become like reading a novel, while movies, with just 90 minutes or so, (or in the case of Zero Dark Thirty, 157 minutes) has to tell you a kind of hieroglyphic story, one that has to have an immediate commercial punch. And so TV shows, now digested slowly, as seasons rather than episodes, are like novels, and movies are more like an episode of a TV show, bound by all the limits of the prime time formula. It’s ironic, this, but such is life, and it is funny to observe that the consensus best movie of the mainstream this year, pales in comparison to one of the best TV shows of the year.

Sententious films like Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty–arguably made for critics and awards shows– rarely end up serving the audience, whereas films like Pitch Perfect or The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, that are built to serve the audience, are actually much greater critical accomplishments. When the intent is to create something serious for an audience, or the critics that hover above the audience, rather than something authentic or organic within the artist, the results are always distant and insufficient, a suggestion of intent rather than the realization of it, and that artifice will always keep the true audience at bay.