My Spare Time

In my humble efforts to become a "Renaissance man", I take time to appreciate the imaginative, artistic, and inventive side of life and the astounding creations of my fellow Homo sapiens. Here's a little list of some of the things I try to learn more about, as well as some blurbs on what I've found particularly whimsical or intriguing.

I love learning what other people find interesting, so drop me a line and teach me something.

Architecture & skyscrapers
I'm an architecture buff with a passion for skyscrapers. As the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca wrote, "There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog." I'm particularly fascinated by the grand old Gothic Revival and Art Deco skyscrapers of the 1920s and 30s and today's Post-modern monoliths. Here are some of my favourite buildings. Raymond Hood, I.M. Pei, and Arthur Erickson are my favourite architects.

Cities & urbanism
I love learning about cities, urban life, and, strangely, lobbies of buildings, elevators, subways, rats, and anything related to life in undergrounds. (I am a certified metrophile—and perhaps even a flâneur! The urban world, dilapidated and ugly as it can be, is fascinating and mysterious; no surprise that there is even a line of cosmetics called Urban Decay.) Three cities which fascinate me are Vancouver, London, and Moscow. I'm also interested in the North-central European cities of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Brussels, Luxembourg, and Prague. And I wouldn't mind travelling around those places in an Aston Martin car...

Fiction & writing
As a former English student, I like to loiter in used bookstores and read. I'm particularly fascinated by the following:

See also Eddy's Reading Room

Art
I really like artists of the Realist tradition, particularly painters who explored urban life:

Other artists I enjoy: Dutch portrait master Rembrandt; Surrealists René Magritte and Marc Chagall; Fauvist Henri Matisse; and Abstractionist Georgia O'Keeffe. One of my favourite series of paintings is Claude Monet's Houses of Parliament (simply because I love London, fog, and the Parliament buildings so much).

Canadian television and radio!
I've always loved Canadian television and radio programs because they have a grittiness and realism that you don't find with some of the more sensational American equivalents. Below are some of my favourites from past and present. I particularly like those programs which conspicuously and unabashedly take place in large Canadian cities. My favourite Canadian actor is fellow Vancouverite David Cubitt (of Traders and E.N.G. fame).

As it Happens (CBC Radio), CityTV West (Vancouver), Da Vinci’s Inquest (Vancouver), Danger Bay (Vancouver), Dear Aunt Agnes (Toronto), Degrassi Junior High (Toronto), E.N.G. (Toronto), The Fifth Estate, IDEAS with Paul Kennedy, The King of Kensington (Toronto), Loveline (not Canadian, but a great radio program, just like the Dr. Joy Browne Show, which I highly recommend), Man Alive, Marketplace (Toronto), Neon Rider (Vancouver/Fraser Valley), Night Heat (American show, but takes place in Toronto), North of 60 (native community, Northwest Territories), Northwood (North Vancouver), Report on Business Television, Royal Canadian Air Farce, SCTV, Street Legal (Toronto), Traders (Toronto), Urban Angel (Montréal), Venture, YTV. I also love the documentaries on BBC Radio 4 (not Canadian, but almost as good).

I'm an only child, so TV was my best friend growing up. My favourite shows were:
Spy drama Mission Impossible (1966-1973, CBS and 1988-1990, ABC). Detective dramas: Matt Houston (ABC), Father Dowling Mysteries (ABC), Profiler (NBC), The Pretender (NBC), Touching Evil (British, PBS), and Mystery (PBS). Medical/rescue programs: Dr. Kildare (NBC), Marcus Welby, M.D. (ABC), Emergency! (NBC), Trapper John, M.D. (CBS), St. Elsewhere (NBC), and Rescue 911 (CBS). I also liked the show Midnight Caller (NBC). Late 1970s sitcoms: Maude, The Jeffersons, WKRP in Cincinnati, and Taxi. 1980s sitcoms: Benson, Gimme a Break, Mama's Family, Kate & Allie, Who's the Boss, 227 (which, along with The Golden Girls, make for my two favourite sitcoms of all time), Amen, Head of the Class, Designing Women, and Roseanne. I don't care for much from the 1990s and on, except for Frasier. Comedians and actors: Bea Arthur, Marla Gibbs, Roseanne Arnold, Lily Tomlin, Mel Brooks, Bill Cosby (and The Cosby Show), Vincent Price, Diana Rigg (The Avengers, Mystery!), and Vanessa Redgrave (in Girl, Interrupted—my favourite movie). Documentary programs: Frontline (PBS), NOVA (PBS), and Scientific American Frontiers (PBS). Court programming on Court TV. As far as talk shows, I only like The Charlie Rose Show (PBS) and ONE-ON-ONE with John McLaughlin (from The McLaughlin Group, PBS). I don't generally like movies, but here are some I've particularly enjoyed.

Music
Most of my favourite music is from the 1980s and early 90s. I like a lot of R&B (especially Lisa Stansfield, Janet Jackson, Jeffrey Osbourne, and Johnny Gill) and Quiet Storm (Anita Baker and Luther Vandross). I'm also particularly fond of Rick Astley, Michael McDonald, Simply Red, and Steve Cole. See my favourite songs here. To expose my neurons to something different, I try the following:

Robert Miles; minimalist (Philip Glass); orchestral pop; Vivaldi, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, and Stravinsky's primitive, exotic orchestrations; cello music of Boccherini, Pablo Casals, and Jacqueline du Pré; Gregorian chants.

Keeping up with strange and bizarre news
Curious news from around the world: News of the Weird, Exploding Cigar

Classic comic strips
Andy Capp (Reg Smythe), Beetle Bailey (Mort Walker), Charles Schulz and Peanuts (my favourites: Charlie Brown, Lucy, and Schroeder), Hägar the Horrible (Dik Browne & Chris Browne), B.C. (Johnny Hart); and our main man, Ziggy (Tom Wilson). I also like The Better Half (Randy Glasbergen).

Historical figures I love to read about
Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)—steel magnate and philanthropist who gave away all his money and who wanted to see a library in every American city, "Free to the People"; newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951); third American president Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826); cosmetics queen Estée Lauder (1908-2004); and camera inventor George Eastman (1854-1932).

Causes I support
Here is the list of the causes I strongly champion and support.

And, oh yes, my philosophical bents
For the philosophically-inclined, here's where I currently stand, in flow-chart form. The relations between these philosophies may not be immediately clear (or may even seem bizarre), but after giving it a lot of thought, I find many interesting connections and parallels between them...

Philosophical Skepticism:
Protagoras
Pyrrho
Hume
|
V
Phenomenology
|
V
Existentialism:
Kierkegaard
Sartre
Albert Camus
Gabriel Marcel
Karl Jaspers
Berdyaev
|
V
Rousseau on education
|
V
T.S. Kuhn
|
V
(Moderate) Post-modernism:
Foucault
Derrida and Deconstruction
|
V
Humanistic psychology:
Rollo May
R.D. Laing
Carl Rogers
(on education and on non-directiveness in general)
 

A short note: I feel I am "moderately Post-modern" in that I see the value in Phenomenology and Deconstructionism and, although I value people's search for actual truth, I also see value in considering what new possibilities there might be in a world in which there weren't "truth" and absolute "meaning". I appreciate the Post-modern belief that focussing almost obsessively on finding truth can distract us from living in the moment and appreciating things, texts, and people for what they are to us as individuals. This protects us from inadvertently distorting and perverting valuable experience by excessively molding it to fit different philosophical paradigms.

Eddy M. Elmer

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