patrickwadden

It was a blistery, bastard of an evening, and we were on the outside looking in. A long street, with windows nipped by snarling cold. Faint glimmers of light streaked out onto the street as shadows danced in front of it. Tungsten & Incandescent.  Two houses with lights on. Shadows moving around inside. Animation.  The first was ornate. People positioned perfectly. Gathered around a glowing box watching it. Small glowing boxes danced around their visages. Noise came from everywhere & sounds were trampled. The decor is sparse and the people too. The smell of eighty dollar candles marked down to forty wafted about, colonising the space above the IKEA vase & phoney flowers, settling behind the credenza and hiding around the hutch. There was a package on their doorstep.  Smoke escaped through the top of it. A pimply plump boy put it there as ordered by an app. He was very hungry. The second was cramped. It was loud, it was conversational. It was smelly, but it smel...

In 1992, the Progressive Conservative party of Nova Scotia made a decision that has let down the citizens of the province ever since: to privatize the energy in Nova Scotia. Starting its infancy as a state-owned company in 1919, Nova Scotia power prospered over the next century, building power plants & stations, attempting to harness Nova Scotia’s abundant natural resources, renewable & not. As we shift further into a sustainable & renewable system in the coming century, having this necessary resource controlled by for profit conglomerates will hinder the province & its people.   There’s no two ways about it, electricity is a human right. As humans seem to drift further apart in the material world; the connections, in both senses of the word, that loosely tether us are of the utmost importance. To operate a necessary commodity for profit is to hurt the collective for the benefit of individuals. It’s obvious & easy to observe this deleterious phenomenon in m...

The straightedge, the normals, & the everydayers never make for good films. We’re obsessed with the underbelly of society, the outcasts and the actions they take for their own justified reasons. Thus, the Crime genre in film has stood for over a century to offer the cautious tales of those who decide to get money the easy way; the quick and dirty way, only to let us watch them figure out it’s all none of those things. Of course, by means of ‘getting money’ the more apt synonym is obtaining power, as access to a surplus of capital is always the goal of every crime film & we’re along for the ride to see what they do with it. In 1931’s ‘The Public Enemy’, Tom is loosely shown to be motivated from a family perspective. The prohibition on alcohol offers a way to peddle, push & plunder to provide for the Powers matriarch. Alternatively, some 60-odd years later we find the inversion of this in ‘Shallow Grave’ where our protagonists are well-off, well-educated young adults who don’...

I remember when I was young I used to pick out shapes & animals in the smoke stack clouds. The days were warm back then, and warming all the time. The large swathe of green that I was lucky to call my lawn. Green as far as the eye could see. Nothing but. I miss my car. I miss the sound it made of the old engine kicking up life, the slow billow of its lungs exhaling. I miss the feeling of the AC blasting on a hot day like Sirocco, or being able to put my hand out of my window. I remember my music shaking the car. When stopped at a light idling, the sampler of everyone else’s radio and quick judgements. I miss going places in my own space, something that I could call mine and dirty it to my liking. The plight of searching & searching for a space in a crowded car park. It’s natural and intrinsic, that sweet cathartic release of finding a spot that’s close enough that I don’t have to walk far. John Cabot Thrill.  I miss flying places. That feeling you’d get in your stomach with...

As I was walking, two people passed me. One to my left and one to my right. It’s a city we’re in. Cars buzz by and so do the people. The pace of life more staccato, forte, & allegro. Pretty words for the cacophony one pays a pretty penny to surround oneself with. Fire in the Badger Holes. As a measuring stick, other people are quite good. Friends and Family are often too close, but your common plain everyday person is best. Sure, they’re unique in their own way but when you spin the colour wheel you get a pastiche green. You’re on a Vomitron.  Being in big places makes things feel big. Actions, Feelings, Nouns & Verbs aggrandized my metropolises. It’s only when you’re using the yardstick of others that you can feel differences. And what’s more you than what you’re not? It's oft to feel like you’re on a conveyor belt. The ones they have in airports that take you from white-walled corridors to more white-walled corridors. You are going somewhere, a desired destination but you...

  An endangered species in these here modern times, 'Michael Clayton' is a stylish & sleek legal drama that unfurls itself so intricately that when it finally does show you all the lines connecting all the dots, you're ensnared in the web yourself. I don't know what happened to these things. Like our contemporary politics and much else in the culture like social issues or... any issues I guess; things are just far too binary. The much-maligned pejorative 'the great divide' in regard to American leanings, pick your colour and cheer, nitwit; is due mostly to 'you're either with us or against us'. It's hard to stay on board with the publicly adorned entertaining films that come out now and still feel like an adult. Everything is selling you your past back to you bit by bit. They're either in the nostalgia business or manufacturing nostalgia. Never lived through the '80s? That's okay, here are some cherry-picked made-up memories throu...

  hullo! so, for the summer of 2023, I'm gonna give birding a go. i just felt like a facet of my nerdom felt unrequited and i had to explore it & figured dedicating a summer to finding real-life geocaches that move and utterly terrify my sister would be a fun hobby to add to the list. if you're looking to get onto the same quest, I'm mostly just trying to find the thirty or so odd birds from this website here but anything else is a bonus!  I'll be using the app 'ebirds' by Cornell to track everything as well as spamming my Instagram to get that sweet sweet social validation and maybe I'll find the propulsion to make something out of it when September ends. Good song.  Ta! happy birding :) 

  It's a terribly difficult thing to try to straddle the line between good melodrama and allowing the viewer to feel that the stakes are low but virtually heightened. Romeo & Juliet does this so amazingly perfect, so much so that it transcends the genre and becomes a deep inward examination of heightened adolescent emotion.  I'd like to say the same for 'Breathe' but that's where I'm cut short, knowing that it's not the same but finding it hard to explain why. I guess there's only one Bill.  Perhaps there's a lack of personal experience here, blocking me from feeling the stakes, & inhabiting the mentality of the characters to take over me. After the screening, a classmate justified some actions taken in the film by saying 'well, she ruined her life.' It's at this impasse that I found my disconnect. She only feels like her life was ruined. In reality, we know that she actually has a very supportive group of friends, a loving parent...

 

  There’s a brief sequence in Truffaut’s ‘Les 400 Coups’ where we watch young Antoine & Renee accompany Renee's sister to a puppet show. The two lads are flanked by hundreds of young children, completely enamoured by the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ play being put on before them. For a second, we see a young boy resting his head on another’s shoulder in absolute awe. Notably, Antoine and Renee are not nearly as gripped by this attraction as the other children that Truffaut’s pensive camera sits on. In fact, they’re not watching at all, but rather discussing their upcoming theft. An unfortunate loss of innocence, they no longer belong to this group of young innocents simply enjoying the show. It’s fitting for a character so dear to Francois’s heart that it’s hard to separate his childhood from Antoine’s. Cinema and literature can serve so many purposes. Escape. Education. Excitement. Empathy. So many more words that start with the letter E. I think it’s worth investigating another i...