I laughed out loud last night when I was clicking through the music store in Windows Media Player and a Flash advert came up with a silhouetted woman waggling her arms back and forth, dancing for all she was worth. What was the banner ad for? Mortgages! Sweet f*all to do with dancing or coolness or music or… anything.

I tried with the best of my geeky powers to capture the moving Flash version of the ad so I could post it here, but I wasn’t able. It’s just so shamelessly wrong and stupid and irrelevant that I found it funny. Not “I appreciate that company’s self-aware sense of irony” funny — because it just occurred to me that maybe that’s what they were going for, the “so bad it’s good” factor. No no. It’s just pure, misguided, bad boardroomthink.

Actually, it reminded me of a snort-through-your-nose-funny article on Cracked.com called “If Banner Ads Were Forced to Be Truthful“. While looking up the URL just now, I found that they’d parodied this exact ad.

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Today was “Family Day” in Ontario — whatever that means — so I had the day off. I spent the day out in the city, trying to be productive, though it’s still so easy to fall into tourist mode and just look at this place.

I spent a while planning my projects for the week in Chocolate Soup, a cafe in the Old Town, and just before I left to walk back home, I used their loo. I was taken aback to see that the pipes still had their original insulation: hair. That’s one exposed building material that would be a pretty hard sell nowadays.

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Who’s Your Dandy?2

Another Queer Night of Poetry & Music

Tuesday March 11 — 7:30pm
Word Power Books
43-45 West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh
Free
(we will pass the hat for the artists)

Featuring

Graeme Hawley, Hamish MacDonald, Nine, and Zorras

After a highly successful inaugural event in November, Who’s Your Dandy? returns to Word Power Books on March 11^th with another fun and unusual lineup of writing and music. You’ll be treated to a mixture of performance poetry, fiction, zinester tales, and poetry-music fusion like you’ve never seen it before.

Who’s Your Dandy? is the kind of event that reminds you what’s great about living in a city. Going on a rainy night to a free performance of queer poetic experiments and deeply funky music — this is the anti-Into the Wild. The performers’ voices are confident, incisive, and, best of all, playful. Hold onto your overpriced flat, indie culture’s happening here! SSSS.
“” The Skinny

www.blissfultimes.ca/whosyourdandy.htm

www.word-power.co.uk

Bios

Graeme Hawley was a milkman in Oldham before becoming a postman in Edinburgh. He published his own first collection of poetry, Reclamation Marks, in 2004, and is currently saving up to publish his second collection, Everyday Things. He won the Big Word Slam in 2006 and was on the winning team in the Three Nations Slam in Bristol. He wrote this himself in the third person.

Hamish MacDonald is an author and copywriter who, seven years ago, finally gave in and followed his name back to Scotland. He’s the author of three novels, including Idea in Stone, a magical realist tale about Edinburgh (which you can buy at Word Power). He publishes his novels through his own micropress, printing and hand-binding each book. www.hame.land

Nine grew up in Northern Ireland and moved to Edinburgh in 1996. She writes the zine If Destroyed Still True, and edits the LGBT section of The Skinny magazine. In the past, she bluffed her way through music journalism, and wrote porn for a couple of anthologies. She gets nostalgic for teen angst, travels to places where she knows nobody, drinks too much wine, rants about politics, and writes about all of the above.

Zorras is Sandra Alland and Yudnara J. They blend poetry with music to form a performance that is neither and both. They are dedicated to making you laugh and think. With tape recordings, guitar, drums, singing, a megaphone, poetry and plain old storytelling, Zorras become multimedia superheroes before your eyes.

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, multimedia artist, performer and activist. Her poems, plays, stories and articles have been published and presented across Canada, the US, Mexico, Bermuda, England, Scotland and Spain. Sandra has published two books of poetry: Proof of a Tongue (McGilligan, 2004) and Blissful Times (BookThug, 2007). www.blissfultimes.ca

Yudnara J. is a singer, percussionist and composer. She has performed and recorded throughout Venezuela, Aruba, Spain and the UK, with such musicians as Rigel Michelena, Gustavo Dal Farra, (El Rabo del Ojo), Antonio Bello (4 of Us), Charanga del Norte, Kabanayen and des loups. Yudnara has also performed and composed with Saira and Contrabajo. www.myspace.com/contrabajoband

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‘Cause apparently it’s still snowy as hell in Prince Edward Island (and cold in Toronto).

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Last night I went with the gang to a club night here in Edinburgh called “Vegas”. It’s a self-consciously retro night with showgirls, Rat Pack music — the whole megillah. I’m not a clubby person by nature, but it was a great night out.

The venue is bizarre — sulphurous-smelling brick vaults beneath the Old Town. I love those old spaces, but the flashy nightclub clashed with the dark underworld feel of the place. Somehow, though, it worked. The atmosphere was really friendly, too; I think that’s because nearly everyone there made an effort, they didn’t just roll in off the street. The girls were dressed to the nines in shimmery dresses with moulting boas, and the men were at their gangsterish, swingery best.

It occurred to me yesterday as I was out and about preparing for this that how I experience the day is really given by the story I’m telling myself about it. I know this is called “narrative psychology” and is nothing new, but in that moment I really got it. I told myself that I was having a Big Day, celebrating my life in progress, which is a pretty good one, and the rest of the day really did go like that.

I managed to take some pictures.

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Puny humans! I scoff at your portions!

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p>No, you’re not going to find me written up on The Smoking Gun. I just had this scary serial killer snapshot taken in a little photo booth today, then mailed off my passport application. It’s totally non-news, but I want to keep the blog from going into hibernation.

It’s chilly in Edinburgh. Usually the rain here just blows around and suggests precipitation, but lately when it’s rained the rain is wet. Yesterday it even snowed, and the flakes were huge and hit my face like big, wet mittens.

Lately I’m eating like Brundlefly — all kinds of sugary junk. And last night after leading the second session of my writing workshop (gosh, I like the people in it), we went out for pints and all I ate was crisps and peanuts. Come to think of it, I’m drinking an awful lot, too. Having pints in a pub is the default post-event activity, and when I’m hanging out with people I like — which I’ve been doing a lot lately — I just want to stay and keep going. It’s fun but it’s a bad habit on a schoolnight! I can’t help it, though, ’cause my social life is quite healthy just now, and there are all kinds of people in my life I have friend-crushes on. They’re just cool.

That’s all. Nothing else to say at the moment.

When people say “Smile! Smile!” and take a long time pressing the button on the camera, my face goes into weird contortions. But there we have it: it’s official! If you ignore my stupid head, you can kinda see that they gave us really nice heather and tartan boutonnieres, as well as our certificates.

I was grateful for having Philip and Patrick there with me. They were my first two mates when I came to the country, and I’m happy that we’re still good friends.

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Last night I went to The Golden Hour, a performance night at The Forest Cafe. I had to squeeze into a chair in a corner, and my “Crowds annoy me!” thing started to kick in, but I stuck around ’cause my new friend Sandra Alland was performing in the second act.

Sandra’s a poet (as well as another ex-pat Canadian), but last night she was trying something a little different, combining her poetry with music provided by her friend Y Josephine. Together they called themselves “The Zorras”, and the end result was something I can only compare to the work of Laurie Anderson — beats and music and thoughts and emotions, raw but breaking easily and often through to humour, tickling and hooking my ear with sound patterns and original thoughts. The set was a polished and high-energy treat, and the room broke into cheers and whistles and applause when they finished.

I know it’s cheating, but God it’s easy to love my friends when they demonstrate how talented they are at something they care about.

The Zorras were followed by a large, stringy-haired guy in thick glasses who called himself “Pockets” and came up onstage with a ukulele held together with shipping tape with red words on it — not “Fragile”, but something like that. My initial response was “Ohhhh-kay,” but then he started to play that thing like it was a proper guitar, and he rocked the house.

Actually, he started his set by saying, “After I play this first number, you’re going to want to go out and buy a ukulele tomorrow.” And he was right.

But I’ve got other stuff to do. Ooh, like get ready for my citizenship ceremony.