I first encountered the music of Jason Collett on the soundtrack to Alan Zweig’s Lovable, and have since bought a couple of his albums. I noticed in John Sakamoto’s frequently fun weekly Anti-Hit List that Collett has released a couple tunes from his upcoming album. Here’s one of ‘em…
You can download it at the Arts & Crafts link I posted above.
For those of you in Tronna, he’ll be playing a series of December dates at the Dakota Tavern, which looks like a nice venue. And you should go.
Here’s the trailer (not the best quality, admittedly, but better than nothing)–playing with (the execrable-looking) Beowulf in the States–for Cloverfield (which, apparently, really is the name of this thing, go figger), opening in January.
Monsters, wheeeee!!
Definitely gonna sit at the back of the theatre for this one. The handheld camerawork is gonna be upchuckworthy, for sure. 
While I was dogging it through the back stretch of this year’s Death Race, I was thinking back to what I’d written on the wall at the pre-race runners’ expo, the day before the race… In front of a 50-foot-long wall, each runner was handed a magic marker and asked to write our name and our reason for running the race. I paused, pondered, then wrote, “It seemed like a good idea at the time”–one of my favourite examples of Famous Last Words. (Incidentally, for my tombstone, it will either be that or a quote from “Bright Future in Sales”, by Fountains of Wayne: “I gotta get my shit together/’Cause I can’t live like this forever”)…
But the final stretch and then the post-race sensations (even including the calf- and thigh-cramps that made my eyes bug out in surprise!) changed my mind. The feeling of accomplishment washed that self-doubt down the drain. And that feeling of accomplishment that I get after a good run (or, admittedly, after a good post here, haha) is worth a helluva lot to me. So I don’t think it’ll turn out to have been the first and last half-marathon I run (well, unless something unforeseen happens, that is).
But one thing I’ve noticed in my post-race runs is this: I am enjoying them a lot more now that I don’t have (what sometimes felt like) the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.
That’s how the race felt to me while I was preparing for it. I think it was partly because I’d never run a race that long before (although I’d run that far before–just not in a race) and partly because I was working through an injury in the last five weeks before race-day. The Great Unknown was this: could I prepare adequately?
In theory, I knew what I hadda do to best prepare myself. I mean, I did have a training schedule from the Running Room, and it spelled out how far, how fast, and how often I should run each week leading up to the race. But the injury meant that I couldn’t really follow it very closely. I mean, I started out doing the speed training but quit that when the knee started acting up. Never did get to the part where I was supposed to do hills. And the distances I could go from one run to the next had very little in common with what was prescribed in the schedule. One day, I might be able to run exactly as far as the schedule said. Then, a couple days later, my knee might act up and I’d have to cut the prescribed run for that day in half. It left me feeling pretty hesitant about my prospects in Toronto. I didn’t know how important the training schedule’s prescribed prep might be. I did know that a veteran runner I know uses those training schedules all the time. And I believe he tries to stick pretty closely to them.
And here I was, following the schedule about as accurately as I follow the average recipe. This is not a good thing. ‘Cause I don’t follow recipes as closely as mebbe I should. That means I can’t bake to save my ass, but I can cook. With cooking, you have some leeway to wing it. Not so with baking, I’ve discovered. Like posted speed limits, I tend to think of recipe instructions as suggestions. So if I’m cooking chili, that’s okay. I can usually fix it if I only have one eye trained on the recipe and lean too far in one direction. If I’m baking a cake and make the same sorta mistake error in judgment, I’m basically fucked. As is the (would-be) cake…
(This cake is not one of my own failures. I just found this photo on the interweb. Incidentally, could they have found an uglier table cloth? Sweet jayzuz, I feel like I’ve just been poked in the eye with a stick!)
So. Would the training schedule be more like a cookie recipe or a soup recipe? The uncertainty was a bit nerve-wracking, as you might imagine. And that took a lot of fun out of the running.
But we know now that it turned out okay. Would I have had a better finish-time if I’d been able to follow the training schedule to a “T”? Beats me. I’ll have to try again and see.
In any case, in the past six weeks since the race, the fear of the unknown, the stress of the injury, and the pressure I felt because of those things and because everybody knew I was doing this has all lifted. And my regular runs have been thoroughly enjoyable. I was out splashing through the rain a couple nights ago. I was out in a bone-chilling wind tonight. Smiling throughout each run. Shaking off my work day. Snapping my fingers to the music on the iPod. Feeling relaxed and confident enought to even start to incorporate into my runs a little of the chi running technique (after half a dozen clinics–all of them delivered as free “refresher courses” after the first one, thanks to my instructor–and reading the book, it has started to sink into my brain and body a bit). It feels great to have the fun back.
I am really not sure what the BFD is over the nekkid photos of Jiri Tlusty that have cropped up on the interweb in recent days. Some ninnies bray that he has besmirched the Leafs’ reputation but what a specious claim that is. If anything besmirches the Leafs reputation, surely it’s the team’s play and the corporation’s greed. And let’s not forget the creeping dread that fills the hearts of Leafs fans everywhere whenever Bryan McCabe hops over the boards nowadays… (shiver)
I mean, those are the things that embarrass me as a Leafs fan. Not Tlusty’s (very average) willy. Or his boy-on-boy mock for the camera with a friend. And, no, I’m not gonna post links to the photos. Go find ‘em yourself. I did. It wasn’t hard. (Well, it was semi-hard.)(*ahem*)
Did Pierre Boulle have the gift of foresight?
