An eye for the absurd

Something walloped my brain a few days ago as I waited for the subway. It struck me that this would make an excellent departure point for one of those non-sequentally plotted films: you know, where the camera zooms in on, say, the old lady pushing her wheel-bag just over my left shoulder, and then the movie traces out (discontinuously, of course) her story: from her graduation from Havergal Collegiate in 1963, to a scene where she throws out her trucker boyfriend from a seedy apartment building in Dallas-Fort Worth, to her pained browsing of the fruit market just a few minutes ago, to three hours from our departure point, where she is busy hurling racist insults at a Chinese exchange student in Tim Horton's. We then have a time-lapse scene of Steven Chang's life which compresses the death of his father from asbestos mining in Hunan, him failing to woo a pretty girl in his high-school Marxism class, him throwing up from turbulence, him trying to order a hot-dog from the Bulgarian vendor in front of Sid Smith and failing, him wandering the streets impassive but jealous of the group of friends laughing and joking. That night he will buy himself a bottle of wine and finish it. We fast-forward thirty years, as he tries to sell an ancient hybrid car to a skeptical couple. We then return to the subway station, where we see three (two female, one male) teenagers ascending an escalator. The guy is hitting on one girl, but the other one is playing interference. An argument erupts. In American Sign Language. At the top of the escalator, another teenager is distracted by the ASL exchange long enough for his "girlfriend" to save up the incident as proof of negligence. That night she throws a teacup at his X-Box. Shot of girl running down the street at 3 a.m.. He falls asleep masturbating. The next day, he forgets to check a 16-year-old's ID at the LCBO where he works. That 16-year-old turns out to be the granddaughter of the old lady we entered with. The 16-year-old's night of whiskey-guzzling starts a chain of events that culminates in a candlelight vigil at St. James' Cathedral for the speedy recovery of Esther Barthes, one of the congregation's great patrons. But the camera is not concerned with that: oh no, it is following a water-strider that somehow ended up on the church's eavestroughs. It is ejected down that tube that drains the eavestrough and ends up crushed by the Bulgarian hot-dog lady, who is running to try to beat the deadline on her sociology essay, and then she has to stop by her Annex apartment to feed Michael, her wolf-hound, then go grocery shopping, then she can rest for half an hour and then go to work. Across the street, a scrawny Chinese fellow is ogling her. That night, he and Steven are laughing hysterically from the JD at the subway platform, waiting for a last train that will never come, but the clearly Taiwanese station attendant will not tell them...

And so on and on.

Consider: "When listening to lyrics in a language you can't understand, the music is greatly enhanced, if only because there is the possibility that the lyrics are not trite, cliched, sentimental, or insipid. Take, for example, Jaan Pehechaan Ho by Mohammed Rafi. I have no desire to know what he is saying. But that's some quality Indian rock n' roll."