Hockey...

Hockey hockey hockey hockey. Played in my first tourney; we lost every game. By a lot. And drank a lot in the locker room and laughed our asses off. I loved that. I am getting better but still so terribly bad.

And watching Olympic hockey.

And thinking about what I like about it. Hockey has made me so happy in the last few years, watching and then doing. Something so pure and rough and simple about it. And there's a lot of generosity to be had, in-between the chippiness and ego. Chivalry is not dead, at least not in the Whitehorse women's hockey league.

Ovechkin, Malkin and Datsyuk, oh my!

Even though they lost tonight. I like those Russians.

And flowers, because it feels like spring these days:

Happy

Don't think about it too much.

Barry Goldwater

I am reading a short, sweet little autobiography by Steve Martin, where he talks about the small things that brought him to the stand-up comedy circuit.

Life influences are strange and you almost never get them right. I don't know why I got to be the way that I am. Sometimes I think I do but then a small memory will trigger me, and I'll realize I've got it all wrong.

I heard from an old friend this fall. I met him when I was twelve, and later on, in between bouts of abuse (the great kind, where your closest guy friends ridicule you and wrestle you) we became off and on lovers. My first introduction to sex included him offering me a choice: green condom or blue? (Blue, of course. C'mon, who would choose green for their first time?)

Anyway, we never totally lost touch, but I'd only get an odd email out of the blue, or call him up once every few years in Vancouver, and we'd go out and get drunk, and I'd feel exactly the same as I did when I was twelve.

But it had gotten to be more than a few years when I emailed him this fall, hoping he was still reachable. I sent a thoughtful, friendly email, telling him what my life was these days, and asking him the same. This is what I got back, in its entirety:

Remember when I beat you at Trivial Pursuit. Man were you pissed. I even remember the answer. Barry Goldwater. It was a total guess. I wasn't even sure who he was but I answered quickly and confidently. You were sure I cheated. I know it's been hard knowing that despite all your scholastic successes and book smarts that I'm smarter than you. I know you play the violin and I play hockey. You went to university, I got my G.E.D. You kayaked through pristine locations and I smoked weed. But remember that game. I'm sure that was just one of many smack-downs I dealt you. You sure hated that. Sure Barry Goldwater was a guess but the universe always gives us what we need. Barry Goldwater was there for me. It's all right there. Don't think for a minute that I don't know you're smart. Your intellect is very high. So you can imagine how I feel about myself. You and I both know how smart you are so I'm pretty satisfied.

That was all he said, but I think it was all I really needed to know.This message made me happier than I had any right to be. I walked around with a smile all day, and all my relationship choices - good and bad - since, made a new kind of sense. I felt lucky.

Night skiing etc.

Full moon night ski tonight, fast and bright through the dark trees. The wind was warm.

Last week I went to the neighborhood bar hoping to catch a hockey game. The bar is near the airport and when I got there, the big screen was playing The History Channel - that's what it said - and that's what I gasped aloud, feeling kinda pissed, and then several tablefulls of silent men turned to me, and one said "We're aviation junkies." The show was called something like Northern Ice Pilots and seemed to focus on a bunch of cargo stuck somewhere in nowheres NWT, while people got angry somewhere else and made a lot of irate phone calls. The men were rapt, and chuckled in unison when the dispatcher yelled down the phone and the mechanic tried to spin a frozen propeller. We drank our beer and I ate a club sandwich and watched them watching.

I met someone new at work. One time I told her I'd slept poorly and she said she had too, but it was okay, she just got up and went on the computer to "check on her animals". She said she follows a whole bunch of animals on webcams around the world. She told me she's an elephant person, but lately she's been into checking up on a whole bunch of baby pandas. All those tiny pandas and their video cameras. This week I heard someone ask her about her weekend and she said she'd done "nothing much, gassed up at cheap gas."

People's lives. The wonder and variety in the world.

Pictures of people I don't know

I like my camera because it allows me to take pictures of people I don't know without being too obvious about it. Here are some from the past couple years:

Two men on their cell phones in Helsinki.

Also in Helsinki: two friends with green glasses.

On the couple theme, here's a bunch of pairs that fascinated me:

This St. Petersburg couple were posing for someone else.

Also in Russia, I took about a million photos of this couple with cool hair. (I also like the expression of the bored cafe attendant).

Not really a couple below. This woman was touring a museum accompanied by three burly men in jean shirts. Their look said Khazakistan to me.

Happy couple in New Orleans.

Also in New Orleans, dancing couples:

Could this sleepy guard in the Winter Palace look any more Russian?

This woman loitered in the Hermitage hallway. Her bruised knees fascinated me. I didn't get a very clear shot because I was afraid she'd accost me. She looked a bit crazy.

Beautiful woman in a restaurant on Main Street, Vancouver.

Beautiful woman on a train from St. Petersburg.

Actually, I could do a whole post on all the beautiful women I ogled in Russia...

Thinking about architecture

Last night I read an interview with Guy Nordenson, a structural engineer, in my The Believer magazine. Nordenson worked with Isamu Noguchi, Buckminster Fuller, and, recently, with Steven Holl, on a project called the Linked Hybrid Building, in Beijing. It looks so fricken cool, a cluster of linked apartment buildings, joined by pedestrian bridges high in the sky. Look at all the description and pictures here.

(As an aside, after I read that article I thought how fun it would be to have a baby and name it Buckminster.)

I have been lucky enough to visit a couple of Holl's buildings. I liked the Chapel of St. Ignatius, in Seattle, particularly, especially the doors, hand-blown glass lamps, and the lovely light on the curved white walls. I don't have photos, but you can read about it and take a virtual tour here.

I saw the same curved white effect at the Kiasma Gallery in Helsinki.

Kiasma inside:

Kiasma outside:

And then this morning I dragged my sorry ass out of bed by 9 (I know) for the opening of a new architectural marvel in Whitehorse, called by the unfortunate name Women's Annex, at the Whitehorse Correctional Centre. This building was designed by Kobayashi + Zedda Architects, and they did a fine job.

Not that I have anything against starting my day off in jail, but this didn't even feel like a jail: it was so thoughtfully and practically designed. Simple but perfect for the purpose, with some good touches, particularly the way the light was captured and held in the hallway, lessening the institutional feel, and the many windows, some at chest height. My favorites were the long, recessed windows beside each bunk bed. Those will be appreciated.

The mucky-mucks seemed pleased with the building, and I heard the residents were too, running around and putting dibs on their rooms.

I felt proud of my friend Jack and lucky to know him. Since I now know how to put links on my blog, here's a link to Jack.

Like every art, architecture has a language. The Linked Hybrid Building is described as a "porous urban space," and, in the article I read, Nordenson described the Statue of Liberty as "a speech act in the marketplace of urban ideas." Ha ha ha. That shit kills me.