Once more dyed the rich red colour of sockeye salmon

real outfits for the lads: Smug Mountie is drunk with lemonade and power
real outfits for the lads: future redneck rancher is two seconds away from whuppin' you
real outfits for the lads: you can't see it, but this kid's wearing chaps.
Flashy Gene Autry sling style holster, with artificial firearm and Curse of Gene Autry
Real outfits for the panicked Home Front

Vitals

Written by the guy who hums to himself as he paws through the dumpster

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

Design by
Die Schmutz

Worthwhile Palinode Pages:
Humpty's Menu:
one - two - three - four - five - six - seven - eight - nine - ten - eleven - twelve - thirteen - fourteen

Can't Stop the Link:
palinode's bloggier blog
The Modern Word
open brackets
smartypants
friday-films
luvabeans
buzzflash
new world disorder
sex & guts!
the memory hole
national pist
Milkmoney or Not
mirabile visu
The Web Revolution!

Fueled by rage and fresh roasted peanuts

it's an update

Six days on the road and I've finally discovered that my hotel has a public computer. I honestly didn't figure The Battery Hotel & Suites for a public internet access lodging; the place has an Eastern European, post-Stalinesque feel about it, as if the top suites were reserved for travelling Party dignitaries, and the basement laundry room were once a Stasi torture cell. There's no elevator to our suite (which is inconvenient when every day starts and ends with hauling cases of film gear down flights of stairs and back up again); every tenth ceiling tile droops down slightly; the entire place is painted in shades of dirty white and industrial-strength green. Our suite, which is quite large, is freezing in the morning, and a constant thrumming of machinery emanates from the walls. After an hour or so it fades into the background of your consciousness, expressing itself not as sound but as a constant prickling anxiety and a need for sleep.

In keeping with that post cold war feeling, the hotel also boasts a restaurant of great reputation in St. John's, but after having eaten there one evening, I got the impression that reputation is pretty much all that's fueling the oven. The food is heavy and tastes of past generations. No vegetable, for example, is allowed to leave the kitchen without a generous ladle of cheese sauce. This is the restaurant that your grandparents would go to once or twice a year, for anniversaries and such. Now the downtown streets of St. John's feature a frightening battery of really good restaurants, and the dining room with the million dollar view of the St. John's harbour has been left behind, like a Sands hotel cowering before the Luxor.

For some reason, the most disturbing detail in the hotel lies behind a door in the back of a laundry room: a full bathroom. Sink, toilet, and tub. Not a laundry tub for delicates and unmentionables, but a proper bathtub with a shower rod and curtain. It's the shower curtain that produced the vertiginous unease. What, is someone living in the laundry room? Am I going to find a hot plate behind the dryer? It's details like that which make this hotel such a worthwhile home base. Tomorrow, though, we're checking out of the Battery Hotel and driving to a little town four hours away, there to try and drum up some interviews and footage on a disaster that happened nearby some sixty years ago. I look forward to coaxing televisable lines out of senior citizens in rural Newfoundland, shouting over their deafness and patiently sitting through the palsied shakes that strain their voices through a kind of jitter filter.

Retracted on 2003-10-30::9:38 a.m.


parode - exode


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