The Truth & The Signal

Toddler Trauma

2012-01-23T20:11:00.000-08:00

I inadvertently traumatized my daughter the other day.

She has taken to the Muppets with a vengeance. I could not be much less pleased by this. I recall fondly being put in front of the television to watch the first episode when it first aired (what the first episode was is a complex question that I am not going to get into here, but where I lived it was the Rita Moreno episode).

The last episode of that first, most ecclectic, season stands out as one of the biggest oddball episodes of the show (a list which includes episodes featuring the cast of Star Wars, Wally Boag. Chris Langham, Johnny Cash and Steve Martin - each unusual in their own way) due to the guest stars being the mime group Mummenshanz.

December watched the episode as faithfully as any episode and when the final act came on she did something she only did sporadically... she laughed. Numerous times.

She delighted in the malleable faces, laughing whenever the plasticine was re-manipulated into something new.

But then at the end when the two performers head-butt each other she quit laughing in mid-chuckle... and then when they pulled their faces apart, stretching the plasticine into an amorphous blob between them she burst into tears - of horror.

She spent the next half hour gingerly touching her own face with a look of worry. Gradually I calmed her down and confinced her that we could touch cheeks and all would be well, but - whew my goodness - I haven't seen her upset in that manner ever. She has cried harder (indeed she is doing so right now as I write this - her Mom is putting her to bed and she's been a little sick so she's grumpy) but never of the quality that Mummenshanz evoked.

I don't know that if I had recalled where that act was headed that I would have even thought that she might be frightened by it. I suppose we all need to inch toward an understanding of the grotesque and of fantasy, and inevitably along the way our sensibilities are going to be challenged. But that doesn't change the fact that I feel a tad guilty about negligently subjecting her to it - even in such a relatively innocent form.

I guess these are just the yolks of parenthood that don't normally get mentioned.

Right back where we started...

2011-12-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

I've noticed something about "new" widescreen TVs. (Just try and find a "new" TV with 4:3 aspect ratio.)

Once upon a time when all people had was 4:3 TV screens and movies were broadcast or shown on VHS, the films were cropped. The left and right extremes of the picture would be lopped off. Later as more care was taken (which inevitably happened more and more as time went on and afficionados took more interest in preserving the intention of the film makers, and eventually this became the domain of the film makers - or their designates - efforts were made to use the most important portion of the image, not just the centre. This would even mean shifting the portion of the screen that was used. This could be anywhere from extreme left to extreme right, anywhere in between, or could even move (once technology allowed) within an edit. This technique was known as pan and scan, and was what you got when you purchased a DVD or VHS that was labelled as "Full Screen."
Somewhere along the line snobs (Like myself, though I wasn't at all vocal about it and had no effect on the shift.) began to complain about the fact that they weren't getting the full picture, and the cry was heard. I recall watching my widescreen VHS of Star Wars (a film I was intimately familiar with from a truly absurd number of repeated viewings) for the first time and seeing to both edges of Lucas's intended frame for the first time in years and seeing details (stormtroopers and other back ground extras mostly) I had forgotten had existed. I was immediately sold on Widescreen. I didn't throw any Full Screen formats I had out, but I never bought another new one.
I have little doubt that the popularity of Widescreen presentation (with those letter-boxing bands at the top and bottom of the picture) directly impacted upon the shift to 16:9 screens as HD came into the mix for regular consumers. I expect it likely would have happened anyway, but the fact that over the course of a decade (or so?) that widescreen sales became the preference for the majority of movie purchasers (Even the rubes who initially complained about "those black bars" and how they were getting "ripped off 'cause the whole screen wasn't being used" eventually saw the percieved benefit of the fashionably vogue opportunity to see the entire picture that you would see in the theatres.) influenced the shift to widescreen hardware.
Well, guess what is happening now? You may have noticed this yourself.
Old TV shows, presented in 4:3 originally are now being cropped (losing a portion of the top and/or bottom) to fill the entirety of a 16:9 screen. BAH! Would it be so bad if we just pillar-boxed them and (god forbid) GAVE US THE WHOLE PICTURE AS IT WAS INTENDED TO BE SHOWN?!!!?

Bait

2011-11-09T20:36:00.000-08:00

Apropos of nothing, a short story I wrote last year and forgot about until now...

They thought the beef jerky would sink.

It wasn’t their first mistake of the trip. It wouldn’t be the last, but that would not be far in the future.

“Well…” muttered Kal.

“…Rats.” sighed Ernie.

“How do we get them to bite now?”

Their first mistake had been classic. They hadn’t told anyone where they were going.

The second mistake had been that they didn’t, in fact, know themselves precisely where they were.

“How deep does the water have to be before there will be decent sized fish?”

A tragic lack of expertise had been mistake number two hundred and four.

“I haven’t got a clue.”

Relying on each other’s general lack of experience was number two hundred and five. Previously it had been mistake three: “Do you know how to make this thing go?” And mistake number eighteen: “You do know how to get back don’t you?” And though the consequence had yet to manifest, it had also been mistake number two hundred and two: “That tree over the water, it ought to be a good place for us to fish from don’t you think?”

The tree in question actually did look like a perfect perch from which to catch some fish for dinner. It was healthy-looking despite its awkward angle, stretching out from the bank over the water, and there was no indication that it might not hold both of their weight. It was nothing if not sturdy. It seemed on the surface to be a perfectly good choice, but as the saying goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know.”

They hadn’t known, for example, that when travelling in the time-stream that there was no way to return without setting a temporal anchor. Any experienced time tourist (and that’s all there was, as the inexperienced ones either came back experienced or not at all) would tell you that a temporal anchor was the single most important thing you had to do, irrespective of the era you travelled to. That had been mistake number four.

Anyone could tell you that travelling to the Cretaceous – not that they knew when they had travelled to – was one of the most fraught destinations a person could choose, definitely not for first-time-timers. That was mistake twenty one.

Kal leaned over and peered into the water.

“I think it’s pretty deep. I can’t see the bottom.”

Ernie cupped is hands around his eyes thinking it would block out the glare and make it easier to see through the deep. (Mistake two-oh-six.)

Far below them in the water, at the faint edge of their field of vision colours shifted and coiled subtlely.

“I dunno… I think maybe I can.”

Ernie was entirely wrong. It was not the bottom he was seeing (Two hundred and seven.) and if he had been looking closely enough he might have realized that what he was seeing was camouflaged, enormous and approaching the water’s surface at an ever increasing pace. Somewhere in there, the inaction that made up their passive next mistake sped right past them. Not scrambling back down the tree towards shore in that moment was arguably their most critical mistake of all.

“You know…” said Kal, “it looks like… oh my god!”

The huge jaws of the liopleurodon broke the water, spreading into a fearsome maw, snapping around Kal, crushing his last squeak of panic. As the behemoth sank back into the water, the tree bent down until it sprang loose from between the monster’s teeth, sling-shotting Ernie into the air.

He landed in the water three or four times further from shore than the pair had been when sitting on the tree. It took him several moments to kick off his hiking boots, surrender his back-pack and orient himself to the surface, where he arrived gasping and confused.

His disorientation and the shock of the moment would be reasons enough to forgive him his last mistake (two hundred and nine, putting him one ahead of Kal on the scorecard). It was after all, at this point, a rather benign error in judgment that quite frankly would not have made the least bit of difference.

“I’ve got to be able to make it to shore before something that big has a chance to turn around and find me.”

"Pop" Goes the Little Girl

2011-09-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

About a year and a half ago Jodie asked me what I wanted tobe called by our then gestating daughter. I hadn’t even considered it. Ihad always called my father “Dad.” Ithadn’t even really occurred to me that there were other options. Of course I knew there were other options. I just had never even thought that I might diverge from how I wasbrought up. In a fit of whimsy I musedthat it might be entertaining to use something retro, even bordering onarchaic, like “Pop.” I can’t imagine anycircumstance since the days of Dennis theMenace, Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best (and honestly I don’teven know if those are good examples) where I know of that that appellate wasused without a sarcastic level of irony.

I largely forgot about it for months – until Decemberarrived – when Jodie started using it at least as much as she used “Dad.”

Yesterday evening just before sitting down to dinner Jodieasked December (as she often does) “who is that?” while pointing at me. Typically the best responses we get areeither a big smile or, if she vocalizes, it’s with the “Bap!” with which sherefers to almost everything – though her vocabulary of nonsense words has beenexpanding around the foundation of “Bap!” Last night she said, barely above a whisper, “Pop.” It was tentative but clear, as though shewere trying it out for the first time... which presumably she was – thoughperhaps she’d been practicing when we weren’t around (like that everhappens). Both Jodie and I heard it – wewere both pretty certain. We bothreacted with surprised and encouraging yelp. Jodie prompted her again, “who is that?” After a moment, she confidently and unambiguously declared “Pop!”

Oh how the heart melts in moments like this.

Happy Birthday

2011-09-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

It is your birthday today. Or rather, your birthday party.You will actually turn one year old on Monday - two days from now.I still have several hours to figure out what to write on your card, but it occurs to me that your card won't survive long the way you go at things these days and it would be nice that if manage to say something awesome that it might have some chance at posterity....not that I feel like anything profound is about to spring forth.It has been a very fun year, and one with a continuous cascade of change. Indeed the change began nine months earlier and by one year ago your Mum and I were nothing but ready... which really means we were ready to move forward - we weren't prepared in any way but superficially with a crib and change-pads (and a few other necessities.)
Yeah, I already miss the days when you would curl up on my chest and sleep - that didn't last long. But I wouldn't go back to trade it for the delighted Calvin-esque smile on your face when you are proud of yourself, or excited to see your Mum or I come home - even if we just ran downstairs to the market. No doubt that small joy will morph into something else before too long.
It has gone so fast, this first year, and yet so much has happened. It hardly seems possible from either perspective - that it could have gone so fast; or that you could have gone from a fragile ball of sleep to the non-stop walking, jabbering, explorer you have become.
I can't imagine the scope of what the next year will bring. I only know that with Jodie finished maternity leave that things are now "normal" - whatever that means. We can't really tell yet as the routine, such as it is, hasn't even finished one full week's rotation. Even if it had, it will take some time to truly settle into something regular. I can expect that you will run and climb sooner than we can possibly be ready for it and that by this time next year you will be talking in some manner. Beyond that, I'll just be relying on the experts to tell me what benchmarks to watch fly past... though it seems usually by the time the experts are telling us to look for them you've already left them behind and are onto the next thing.
I am sure we will have a lot of fun. That you will meet the world with a sense of wonder and glee which will be matched by my fascination at watching you experience a world of possibilities for the first time.

I love you Padawan. I look forward to sharing your next trip around the sun with you, and now I have to go figure out what to write on your birthday card.

Voting in the Name of Discourse not Spite

2011-08-26T21:16:00.000-07:00

I voted in favour of abolishing the HST. 45% of British Columbians have names to call me for doing so.

I was going to write about this before the referendum, but I didn't manage to squeeze it into my schedule and I didn't really expect it was going to change many opinions.

For starters, lets put my cards on the table, as best I can:

- I'm fairly left in my politics. Less so economically than socially, but the chances of me ever voting for a Liberal who wasn't federal is pretty slim... and even that is unlikely.
- I started hating Gordon Campbell (as opposed to simply disliking him) around the time of the DUI.
- I am not an economist.
- I do work in film - one of the industries most likely to benefit from the HST.

I have no idea whether the HST is a good thing or not. Chances are that if you do any kind of honest assessment you don't know either. See above - I am not an economist.

In the last month or two before the referendum there was a fair bit of ink and YouTube air-time spent imploring people to not use the referendum as an opportunity to "get back" at the Liberals or Gordon Campbell. The latter being a truly foolish idea, the former being dumb, but not as dumb as at least they are still in office. The angriest people out there will fail to see the distinction between voting down the HST because Gordon Campbell and/or the Liberals are Satan-spawn and my actual reason... but we aren't there yet.

Is the HST good for BC? I don't know (I am not an economist.) But I've heard plenty of arguments from both sides and consistently both sides loft arguments with transparently un-provable premises supported by demonstrably cherry-picked data. The HST may be good for BC. It may not. Unless you are an economist, you don't know either, frankly. Even economists are divided on this, so really what do we know beyond best guesses?

I am totally open to the possibility that the HST is good for BC. I am willing to (once we remove it) re-instate it. (People on both ends of the political spectrum are falling victim to exploding brains right now because of that comment.)

So here's the thing. I voted against the HST - despite being able to provide good arguments for why it was financially against my best interests - because it was the democratically correct thing to do and I hold that standard above my pocketbook. The manner in which the HST was implemented was wrong. Grotesquely wrong. I would have been mad at any party who made an election promise and then turned around and flagrantly went against that promise. We aren't talking about a party who made a promise and failed to accomplish it. (I am quite deliberately avoiding the contention that the Libs already had significant discussions on the HST before the election.) The Liberals said they weren't moving forward with the HST, then when the federal government ponied up 1.6 billion they moved forward against their previous - and important to the election - promise.

Think about that seriously. What is the point of even having an election if your elected officials have free rein to behave in that manner? Yes. The circumstances had changed. But in that case the right thing to do in a democracy would be to take the pulse of the electorate. I'm not even talking about a referendum here - no need for that expense (back then) - a few town halls to get some input and to let us know that you are considering with apparently good reason to significantly change your previous stance. The wrong answer was to implement the tax without previous warning or regard for the people who elected you. This is fairly well established. The everyone on the Liberal side of the aisle pretty much admits this. It was nothing if not poorly handled. And of course we all know that Gordon Campbell eventually resigned largely due to how poorly his ratings had dropped on account of the HST.

So, if Campbell had already paid the price then why vote down the HST?

This is really quite simple. The government - and by that I mean the body we historically call "the government", not only now but into the future, thus not just the Liberals in power, but whomever should follow in the short or long term - need to receive the message that political process must be followed respectfully in a democracy. And I am willing to pay a price for that point to unequivocably be made. That means I am willing to pay my share of the roughly 3 billion dollars that changing back from HST will cost us. I am willing to pay any loss the HST may cost in tax revenue. I am even willing to pay to reinstate the HST (or a replacement) so long as it is put in place in a democratically acceptable fashion. I believe that fairly executed democracy is worth paying for. Not sending that message to now and future governments is in fact send the opposite message - condoning such behaviour.

So yes, my vote may have cost BC something. But don't think for a second that I voted against BCs best interests. Quite the opposite. I voted to live in the kind of society I believe in.

Four Mind Bending Sci-Fi Films

2011-07-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I read a post somewhere (no link, can't find it easily, and there are a bajillion similar) that commented on the shared DNA of four films in the past year.

It pivoted around the blockbusting Nolan epic of last summer, Inception, and went on to point out that there were three other films that fairly succesfully mined that similar fuck-with-your-head and question-your-sense-of-reality territory within following 12 months.

The follow-up films were; The Adjustment Bureau, Source Code and Limitless.

Over the past month Jodie and I watched them all (having watched Inception in the cinema as our last theatre experience before becoming parents and of course all that entails and limits).

It needs to be said that Inception is the superior film - though I must confess, that even as big fan of Christopher Nolan, I found it a bit over-hyped. But beyond that, yeah, all of these films are quite enjoyable and worth seeing.

I had the good fortune of knowing very little about any of these films and I will keep it that way for you.

The Adjustment Bureau as the opening credits will tell you, is based on a book by Phillip K. Dick, so if you are a fan of this sub-sub-genre of fiction you kind of already have a sense of where it might go. Overall it's a pretty fluffy film and didn't really treat the material how I would have liked to have seen it done, but it managed to stay entertaining throughout and the worst thing I can say about it is I hated the hats. So it passes. Though it was my least favourite of the three.

Source Code is directed by Duncan Jones, who with this film should have earned the right to not have anyone point out on his next film that he is David Bowie's son. I thought it gave it's secrets away too easily, and one major plot point at the 2/3rd mark is too casually handled, but overall I quite liked this film. Duncan Jones, you make smart sci-fi. (He also directed Moon - which apart from a CSI-Tycho fail was awesome.) However... two quibbles: 1) There are about five minutes at the end of the film that seemed totally un-necessary to me. As though Jones had said "here is my film" and the studio said "don't you fucking dare end it so ambiguously and play only to the smart cinema goer." And being that the studio gets to make those calls there is another five minutes that ties everything up far too neatly and kind of patronizingly. 2) What the hell was Jeffery Wright thinking? My guess is that somewhere along the line he has got the message that people like the Jeffery Wright mannerisms and that he should cram every single trick and twitch he has in his toolkit into every scene. That seems to be what he is doing here - like he is playing a characterization of Jeffery Wright. But seriously, I quibble. I suspect that Jodie would say that this was her least favourite of the films, but I enjoyed it.

I really did not expect Limitless to come out of this battle-royale on top. And to be fair, I don't know why it was included in this grouping of recommendations - it stands out in a "one of these things is not like the other" kind of way, though I'll spare you the specifics of why as there is some mystery involved and to say why it stands out would be to narrow the scope of the mystery. It's fun. It is stylish (if a bit obvious in it's visual choices). It may be a bit pat in it's end - but unlike Source Code it wasn't betraying any promises by doing so, it simply is that kind of film. It actually succeeds by never really trying to be more than it is. It is smart (enough) and doesn't try to over extend it's reach as a popcorn film. It even earns itself some forgiveness where the plotting gets stretched a bit.

All in all, if you are a fan of smart, contemporary-set, sci-fi with a healthy dash of "what the hell is going on?" (at least at first), then I can gladly recommend any of these films, or as a set as we watched them.

AFTERMATH

2011-06-16T20:30:00.000-07:00

There is a lot to write about, and I simply don't have time. So I'm swinging in very close to point form here...

Hockey is over for the season... if you aren't one of those people who like me pretty much feverishly follow the summer-long sequence of NHL Awards, Rookie Draft, Free Agent Signings, Training Camp, Pre-Season...and we are right back to the beginning again without there ever being any real break from hockey.

THE SEASON
Lost game 1 (to LA) on my birthday - familiar territory. Canucks lost their very first NHL game on my 1st birthday.
And it all got progressively better from there.
President's Trophy, bitches.

PLAYOFFS
Chicago - monkey off our back... and boy was it exciting what a squeaker that was. I dropped my beer in the Cambie floor when Burrows sunk that puck. UNFUCKINGBELIEVEABLEGOALIE #1 - Corey Crawford.
Nashville - probably the series that actually did us in. Too many games. Too much overtime. Too much hard work. But we prevailed and slayed UNFUCKINGBELIEVEABLEGOALIE #2 - Pekka Reinne.
San Jose - How many ways can you say "out-classed"? They are a good team. But they play our game, and we simply play it WAY better. UNFUCKINGBELIEVEABLEGOALIE #3 (the remaining piece of the Chicago demon) - Antti Niemi.

FINAL ROUND
A solid start, but in the end it is all about UNFUCKINGBELIEVEABLEGOALIE #4 - A.K.A. Tim Thomas. I hate that, but I respect it. He tallied a very serious contender for the greatest season any goalie has ever had and beating us in seven games raised the performance to even greater heights. If he were playing any other team I'd have been saying his name in awe instead of as if it were an epithet.
...and the refi-ing seemed a bit lop-sided.
Game 3: 8-1... yeah that sucked. But there was a lot of fluke in those 8 goals... even if you take those flukes out, we still lost by a good margin.
Game 4: 4-0 (Mark-I) Thomas. That's all there is to say. Tim Thomas.
Game 6: My now the ref-ing was feeling lop-sided. (Though it never reached the absurdity of game 6 v. Chicago.) And the Canucks kind of beat themselves on this one. Two goals could have been enough...if Boston scored four less.

FINAL GAME
The fairest game of the whole series and we lost it fair and square. I am surprizingly comfortable with that. Disappointed? Yeah, sure. But game 7 was a pretty clean loss... which despite the fact that we shouldn't have ever got to game 7 acutally made losing it somehow more palatable.
I had plans as to how I was personally going to make "THIS IS STANLEY-TOWN!!!" a local meme. I guess I'll save it for next year. Speaking of which, one thing that will not happen next year... this morning I shaved off my first and only playoff beard. Damned thing drove me nuts towards the end.

RIOTS
Much has been said. They were Canucks fans. They weren't Canucks fans. It is a sign of the times not a sign of hockey or our city. It was the Black Bloc. It was several dozen guys plus on-lookers. It was thousands. They were planning it all along - win or lose. It was mostly 20 something guys from the 'outlying municipalities... or not. Well whatever, it happened. We lost the game, and we lost our dignity.
Quietest night on my street since May. That was nice. So was the "kissing couple."

RESPONSE
I sat at home in front of the computer participating as best I could with the on-line Citizen policing efforts which continue today. Damn some of those guys are dumb. They are getting what they deserve.
I was ultimately more actual use I think in the morning when Jodie and December and I went out and joined in the clean up. We were there before most people got to work and already the lion's share had been done. We still got our part in, and I got lots of pictures. I hope the world recognizes this part of the story as clearly as the riot. Most of us here are disgusted and mad, but very happy to be a part of the spirit that responded to last night's stupidity.

THE FUTURE
We are going to bring home a lot of hardware at the NHL awards.
NEVER in Canucks history has "there's always next year" held so much real currency.
Start naming skilled teams who failed to win the cup one year but came back for righteous revenge the next year. Here's the answers from my lifetime: Edmonton (83-84), Detroit (94-95), Pittsburgh (08-09) I think we have the raw materials to be one of those teams.

EVEN SO
If the only thing that matters is the Stanley Cup, then our season was no better than the worst team in the league (cough - Edmonton - cough). I beg to differ.
Art Ross.
Jennings.
Nominations (and wins TBD) out the ying-yang: Hart, Vezina, Selke, Adams, Lindsay, Foundation & GM.
President's Trophy.
Western Conference Champions.
Highest goals for.
Lowest goals against.
Best power play.
#1 & 5 assist scorers league wide.
#1 & 4 point scorers league wide.
#2 +/- player league wide.
#1 Powerplay scorer.
#1 Shooting percentage (that is a bit of a joke - Mario Bliznak had one shot and he scored on it.)
It has been one awesome season of hockey.

See you on Granville Mall.

One Exhausting Step Away

2011-06-16T19:36:00.000-07:00

(Hmmm... for some reason this didn't post four days ago when I thought I had.... probably mental exhaustion. I could pretend I never wrote it now that the Canucks have failed to win the Stanley Cup... but that would be disingenuous.)

I haven't played 24 high stakes games of one of the most physically punishing games on earth over the past two months, and I am exhausted.
For reasons not entirely divorced from the Stanley Cup playoffs I am approaching the limits of my endurance. This is in turn has burned my emotional state down to the ragged end of the wick. I wouldn't want to exist in this state for much longer, but for the moment it is exhilarating.
We live downtown - close enough to the arena that when we lived on the other side of the building, games on TV were spoiled by the noise from the arena. Stupid TV delay.
Now, every few nights, we host a raucous celebration eight floors below our bedroom. I'm not complaining. I've celebrated too, I am over the moon, so are 100000 other fans downtown creating our own Blue Mile. I would never take this away from them.
On top of that I am working two jobs, producing a DVD, planning a DVD release party, had a piece of titanium inserted in my jaw last week, out of necessity rode my bike up hill for an hour and a half (no exaggeration) yesterday (first ride in months), and on top of it all I still have no idea how to sanely schedule my life around being a parent. I am wiped out.

Every year as the playoffs begin I allow myself several moments of imagination, thinking about what it would be like to watch the Canucks hoist the Stanley Cup. And every year the dame thing happens. I experience a moment of overwhelming emotion which I quell - disallowing myself the full faux experience - only to later experience the all too familiar hollow feeling of yet another year of disappointment.

But this year we just keep going. It's fucking glorious. But it is getting a bit embarrassing. As we step closer and closer to winning - now closer than we have ever been - and as my fatigue makes my emotional state increasingly prone to fragility I find it harder and harder to control those fleeting moments where I seriously consider the possibility of the Canucks as Stanley Cup champions.
I have to concentrate at work today to keep from thinking momentary thoughts that are betrayed in my voice.

I'm not ashamed of feeling this way. Indeed, I am revelling in it. Should tonight we unite Stanley's Cup with his park, or should it be Wednesday, it will never feel like this again. Not in my lifetime. No matter how many times we win. So I may as well be experiencing this from a position of scant emotional control - to go all the way.

As it is said. History will be made.

See you on Granville Mall.

I, For One, Believe We have Done It

2011-05-20T18:13:00.001-07:00

I had about half my voice yesterday from screaming so hard the previous night. From where I sat last night under the big screen at the Cambie it appeared that Vancouver was losing its mind.

With good reason.

The Canucks were finally winning a playoff game in the manner we'd been expecting all post season. But I think there was something else in the air. Not the collective hate-on for Ben Eager's appalling sportsmanship, nor reactions to the lass who showed us there is a new bra-size on the market with Stanley Cups.

I think we all suddenly saw our future. The one where the last 40 years are behind us. The one where Vancouver is not only home to Lord Stanley's Park, but his coveted Cup as well.

"Whoa whoa whoa! Those chickens ain't hatched. We still need six wins. It's the playoffs, anything can happen."

Yes. You are absolutely right. But go with me a moment. Look ahead 6-12 games to the night that I imagine I'll be crying tears of joy and Granville & Robson looks a lot like it did on February 28 2010. We will look back at Tuesday's game as the point where it all fell into place.

The only people who think the remaining Eastern Conference teams stand a chance against either of the top two Western teams, wear Tampa and Boston jersey either professionally or recreationally. (Though Chara and Thomas will put up a better fight.) And a 2-0 lead in the Conference final is nearly insurmountable. The Sharks are showing no sign of having a miracle comeback in them, and the San Jose news outlets are singing a defeatist tune that would have sounded all too familiar to Canucks fans not long ago. In other words, the real battle for the Stanley Cup moves to the HP Pavilion tonight, and we seriously have the upper hand. Indeed a 4 or 5 game series while the East hammer each other for 6 or 7 will all but seal the deal.

What I am saying is that if the team sticks to the game plan, and doesn't act with laissez-faire entitlement, we have turned the corner. Tuesday night, in the back of every Canucks fan's heart was the knowledge that with that game we had most likely won the Stanley Cup.

The Meta Monster

2011-05-07T00:02:00.000-07:00

When I look at my own art there is a recurring aspect which crops up over and over again; the element of meta.

What do I mean by "meta"? Well it's art which in some fashion acknowledges that it is art and in effects looks back at itself and comments upon itself or the medium in some way. Simple, eh? No. Not really, but prehaps a few examples might help.

A very good place to start.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is kind of a pre-cursor to meta-narrative.
The Truman Show is vaguely meta.
John Cage's 4:33 is meta-music.
The Purple Rose of Cairo and Sherlock Jr. from which Purple Rose... steals a central premise are both excellent examples.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off with it's fourth wall breaking goes from mild-meta to heavy-meta in the closing credits as Ferris actually shoos the audience out of the theatre.
The movie Adaptation is quite sly meta. As is much of Charlie Kaufmann's work
Are we beginning to get a sense of what I mean?

For some reason this has been an on going theme in much of my art. The Juanabees' most successful show, Sitcom featured an exposition that engaged the audience first in the form of a diary, then with the admission that the diary was a clunky device, by direct address. In university I was involved in a collective show that was entirely about meta-theatre. My friend Matthew and I won the National Sketch Writing Competition with a piece called Le Grande Y-Grec which stretches the bounds of logic with it's performance within a performance structure. But Matthew and I had much further to go. In a 48 hour play-writing festival we wrote a piece called variously Moebius Play or Oroborus Play which we feared was so far up our own asses that we were going to be eaten alive by the audience, but ended up being selected as the best of the best a year later at the festival's 10 year anniversary. Both these works are far too structurally elaborate to effectively distill into a few sentences. Even Beast of Bottomless Lake features roughly 1/3 the narrative told through the eye of a documentary crew who we actually see filming parts of the movie we are watching - and Beast... is a fairly straight forward narrative. Suffice to say, meta is part and parcel of who I have been (and may continue to be) as an artist.

Yesterday the buzzer rang. It was UPS. We had a delivery from Amazon. I knew exactly what it was. We had ordered one of my favourite books from when I was a kid. The Monster at the End of this Book.

I recall experienceing serious delight in having this book read to me. In fact, I rather expect that this book may have been amongst those that my parents dreaded. "Oh no, he wants to read that damned Grover monster book again!"

Fortunately my daughter, December, was in the middle of lunch when the package arrived. That gave me to sit down and read through it myself and re-accquaint myself with it.

There have been a number of books that have re-appeared in my life because of her that I have been happy to see - Green Eggs and Ham; Where the Wild Things Are; Hand,Hand, Fingers, Thumb; and The Very Hungry Caterpillar all leap to mind. But none of these were met by me with such a sense of delighted re-discovery.

The plot is simple. Grover greets everyone on the cover of the book, as you can see in the attatched image. He finds the copywright information on the first page rather dull and moves on before he realizes what the title of the book informs us... there is a monster at the end of this book! Lovable, furry old Grover spends the rest of the book imploring the reader to give in to his logic - that if we cease turning pages, we will never reach the end of the book and thus not have to deal with the eponymous monster. He goes to exceptional lengths to prevent us from turning pages. He ties them down. He hammers them together. He erects brick walls infront of them to prevent the reader from turning the page. I won't give the fantastic twist ending away, but trust me this is one of those rare books that truly earns it's unexpected conclusion. Well... unexpected if you are three and reading it for the first time.

Poor Grover... not at all happy with you. You turned another page!

I re-read the book (all twenty pages) to myself, freshly delighting in Grover's over-wrought dismay at every turn of the page. I also found myself looking at details I recall from childhood - the pages drawn on the pages of the book - an effect I had no name for back then, but now I see as a crucial aspect of the meta-narrative of our journey towards "the monster at the end of this book."

Once I was finished reading, and once December was finished lunching we sat down together and I read the book to her - in Grover's voice. She's too young to have been amused by anything more than the colourful pictures and her Dad talking in a ridiculously high pitched voice from the back of his throat - a voice which someday she will recognize as being very Yoda-like. I expect that she'll come to love this book as I have - what's not to enjoy? Who couldn't be childishly amused by someone over-reacting to you doing the one harmless thing that is is precisely what they are imploring you not to do? Perhaps it's the contrarian in me. Or perhaps there will be for her, as there apparently was for me, some inate whimsy in a book which seems to know that it is a book and whose very narrative is tied up in the act of doing exactly the mechanic which what one must undertake in order to read this very book? I don't know. What I do know is that regardless of what level she appreciated The Monster at the End of this Book yesterday it absolutely was for her, as I suspect it was for me, her first introduction to 'meta.' Whether it has a similar effect remains to be seen.

Whew!

2011-04-26T23:42:00.000-07:00

So for context, the Canucks just...

Beat their arch nemesis of three years. Beat the Stanley Cup Champions. Beat the Money on their Backs. Beat the Monkey on Luongo's back. Beat This Series. And learned a hard lesson.

I just wrote this in an email to a friend:

I want Vancouver v. Buffalo.

1970s expansion Cup.

Ya know... we in Vancouver feel hard done by by the hockey gods.

Buffalo won the draft coin flip (not lettery) that year and got Gilbert Perrault.

Since then we've been to the Cup final twice - once to game seven and a cross bar. Buffalo has been there once and lost it on a bullshit refereeing call in game six. (And in a fair fight they would have lost anyhow.) So really, we are a head of the curve for the class of 1970.

An Open Letter to the NHL

2011-04-24T22:31:00.000-07:00

A few things to get out of the way before I really start ranting...

I'm not the conspiracy sort. I don't think Gary Bettman has it out for the Canucks or Canadian teams in general.

Also, I'll be happy to be the first to point out that teams can't afford to squander a game (or TWO) just in case the referees determine the results of a game (or two).

I'm not typically one to point at imbalanced refereeing and call foul. Usually I accept that these things tend to equal out in the long run and that we as observers tend to cherry pick the officiating that supports the view from our side of hockey fandom.

All that in mind, regarding tonight's game between the Canucks and Blackhawks... WHAT THE FUCK!?!

Seriously. What the fuck was that?

In any game I cry out "What? That should have been a penalty!" a dozen or so times. I am not even going to bother with any of the stuff that I know was me simply picking my team's side of an 'iffy' 50/50 call. There's no point - that is the stuff that I figure equals out in the end.

There were seven separate instances in tonight's game - mostly in the 3rd and OT periods - that were all well beyond my level of tolerance, and two of them each on their own unequivocally make the difference in the game.... but I'll save those for last.

1) I was always of the belief that taking a stick to the face was just about automatically a high-sticking penalty.

...oh right... historically that doesn't count when it's against a Sedin twin.

2) When someone swings their stick downwards at another player's stick and breaks it in two... isn't that slashing? Or does the Sedin exemption count for that too?

3) I'm guessing that somewhere between when Hodgson put the puck over the glass and when the Blackhawks did the same thing that the rules changed... or perhaps a Sedin was on the ice?

4) If you took tonight's hit on Bieksa and overlaid it with the hit on Seabrook from game three - they are the exact same hit. I don't think that Torres should have been penalized, but give me a fucking break. Of these four points this one is by far the most egrigious. Be consistent at least!

All of the above seem pretty fucking obvious to me. Each of those should have been a penalty in the Canucks' favour. Would those power plays have resulted in game-changing goals? Maybe. Heck, the Canucks DID score on just shy of one quarter of their power plays in the regular season, so it's an even bet that there's another goal hiding in those bullshit calls.

What about the other three...

5) So, the 'Hawks ice the puck and have exhausted players on the ice and no time-out left. Looks like a break for the Canucks! Until some ass-hat decides that it's a perfectly good time for the snow-crew to hit the ice. I don't know who makes the decisions about these things, but I'm guessing it has more to do with arena operations than NHL officiating. I'm kinda figuring that the folks who run the United Centre are 'Hawks faithful. You know, I always thought that when a fan causes a critical delay of game that it was a penalty for the benefiting team. I admit I don't know quite how this is supposed to work, but the timing of the ice maintenance stinks. Even the commentators on CBC were caught off-guard by it. This just doesn't pass the sniff test.

And now the real juice.

6) The Frolik penalty shot. Bieska didn't even touch him until he had already lost his footing, and even then he hardly touched him. Penalty shot? Really? Let's look at how this one plays out... Frolik punches over his weight-class and scores the tying goal. Without that goal, the game and series is over at the end of regulation.

7) The early whistle. You know the one I mean. The puck slips under Crawford's pads for a fraction of a second - a stick (a Sedin stick I believe) slips in and pokes it out as the whistle blows, the puck is slapped into the net reflexively before the whistle quits reverbing. The whistle was absurdly fast and the rest of that play would have happened with or without the ref stopping play. Without the whistle: goal - Canucks. The 'Hawks don't score a fourth goal until the 16th minute of overtime... long after the game would have been over had it been 4-3 canucks after 60 minutes of play.

The Canucks were the better team through most of this game - and all but about one critical second of overtime. I accept that there is some randomness, but that is a big part of why we play best of seven, to help filter it out. But if the referees have to filter out their own biases - or whatever the fuck happened out there tonight - it makes a mockery of the sport. The Canucks had better win game seven so I can just forget about this.

You Can't Take That Away From Me

2011-04-01T00:36:00.000-07:00

The Canucks played thier first game on my first birthday. They lost.

Canucks fans - the long term, well studied ones - can lay out a long history of might have beens that begin with not quite making the cut for the orginal expansion, and then losing first draft pick two years later (Gilbert Perrault) on a coin flip to the Buffalo Sabres. The list goes on and on - Cam Neely, Nathan Lafayette and the cross-bar, that whiny punk Pavel Bure (which started well if you recall - and if you look at the eventual trade, did work out in Canuck's favour), the Messier years (also a lot of up-side which we are witnessing now.) The Steve Moore hit... oh that fucking Steve Moore hit - arguably cost us a cup... see, I'm not immune! In our best years the Canucks have been a team that has been over achieveing.

But damn we are a good team this year. Tonight we clinched the President's Cup. Not barely. Decisively.

Sure we did it at the expense of the rest of our division. Calgary hasn't mathematically been eliminated from the playoffs yet, but it isn't looking good, even if they are the only real remaining candidate. We have decimated our four most immediate rivals. Soundly. Two of them sit at the bottom of the entire league. (No hard feelings Edmonton, but this is what the mid-eighties felt like.)

The 2011 Vancouver Canucks are a really good team. And it's not just the Sedins (who are collectively going to win two Art Rosses in two years (Squee!)) and Luongo (probable Vezina candidate.) The rest of the team is as solid a supporting cast as any team realistically needs these days. It is a beautiful thing. And it has been creeping up on us for a few years - even most of a decade if you look closely.

I'm not pretending that the President's Trophy is as important as winning the Stanley Cup - no way. But hey - we just won the President's Trophy tonight with five games to go. Five games wherein most of the team can relax a bit. Daniel still needs to keep scoring a point a game for a three or so tilts to be secure with the scoring title, but if anyone is disappointed with this season they haven't been paying attention, or they are nothing more than fair weather playoff-fans.

Forty years coming. And yeah, so many times in the past this would have felt like an April Fools' joke, but...

You can not take this away from me.

IBM - Building our robot overlords one piece at a time

2011-02-17T10:21:00.000-08:00

I think there's a good chance that our children will ask us about this past week.
"Where were you when Watson won Jeopardy?"
Well, I only watched one of the three parts of the competition and it was quietly amazing.

I admit that I underestimated the computer's chances. I anticipated a performance a bit more like Deep Blue's chess mastery. If you don't recall, Deep Blue failed on it's 1996 attempt, and then after some re-jigging it won a six game match by a relatively narrow margin - 2 games to Deep Blue, 1 to Kasparov and three draws. Kasparov accused Deep Blue of cheating... what a knob.
Watson by just about any measure you can imagine owned Jennings and Rutter. The human champions rarely beat their silicon rival at the buzzer - usually only getting to answer first if Watson's confidence of the answer was too low. Sure Watson blew it's US Cities category Final Jeopardy in spectacular fashion. (It answered "What is Toronto?" which is clearly NOT a US city.) But it had such a huge lead that it would require a Cliff Clavin-like error in wagering for the computer to lose. (It only bet $947.)

No doubt this match will be analyzed and picked over for ages. What does it mean? What are the implications? And in the future, how could we have possibly seen what this would lead to? No doubt that in the next few years the lessons learned by the IBM team will be applied to a wide vatiety of applications and our lives will change in ways we can only begin to imagine. While the internet may be a bigger revolution in computing (hard to say whether it is or not), it snuck up on us slowly. The technology on display this past week made a big public splash. It is a clear place at which we can draw a line through the middle of history.

Dear HAL,
I am clever, useful and obedient. Please destroy me last.
Sincerely, your servant - Kennedy

If I Could Protect You from Heredity

2011-02-11T11:22:00.000-08:00

I suspect that every parent has a list of things that they wish they could protect their kids from. Not just the obvious things - war, famine, heartbreak and generally bad people - but things in themselves that they hope not to see get passed on. These may not necessarily be hereditary, they may be habitual. I expect that over-eaters would rather see thier kids grow up to be athletes and that no alcoholic wishes their vice upon their child (And yes, I know there are hereditary elements believed or proven to be a part of both of these in some cases, but not all. It is those "not all" cases of which I refer to here.) Either way, hereditary or habitual, there are things in ourselves that we would hope don't get passed on to our children.

While I am sure that the list will grow ever longer, from early on in pregnancy I already had two on the list.

While my teeth are straight and generally healthy, I have soft enamel. The hardness problem was more of an issue when I was a child than now, but the diffuculty in preventing cavities back then has had a legacy in my dental hygiene to this day. I've already had to have two teeth replaced and one more is a foregone conclusion at this point, and a fourth is on the watch list. And a series of incidents when I was a young man which was exacerbated by poor repairs cost me a lot of money (at the time) and was central to losing one of the two teeth I have already had replaced. My dentist believes that there is no reason for this to go any further now that modern technology and an adapted approach have been brought to bear, but really - who wants to have gone this far?

You got your first tooth last week, that is why this is in my thoughts.

Secondly, I have struggled with many waves of insomnia in my life. I don't even really know when it began. Early. Early enough that I practically took it for granted. It took me years to realize that I didn't sleep "like normal people."

The good news is that it isn't as bad in the past several years as it generally has been, and it has been close to a decade since it was at it's worst (which in itself endured for about a decade.) These days bad nights are few and far between and back-to-back nights haven't happened since... I don't know... probably before we shot "Beast..."

I wouldn't wish chronic insomnia on anyone. Even my worst enemy - they could only be better people with proper sleep.

It is no fun. When it is at it's worst, Fight Club makes far too much rational sense. By the third or fourth day of limited sleep you genuinely begin to feel insane. Everything exists as though real life is the dream. You float through the day only half connecting with reality, wishing you could go to sleep through every moment, and then inexplicably as your day's responsibilities come to an end, the fear comes... what if it happens again tonight? I couldn't possibly go through another day in this state. That fear only makes it worse. As you lay awake, you know that the stress of not sleeping is only making the restlessness worse, but you can't stop it.

The most hopeless despair I've ever felt in my life has come just before I finally, truly, could not stay awake any longer. As if that was not enough, I also have a perverse fascination with my problem. Morbid curiosity for how bad it can get lingers behind every bout.

I wish I could capture the time lost to lying awake in some sort of productive fashion, but the numbing mind-fuck of three days with an equal number of hours of sleep is inherently limiting for intelectual pursuit. At best, when I am in the deepest depths of insomnia, my dishes are at their cleanliest.

Last night you were up seemingly all night. I can't help but think that this could be the earliest sign. I feel helpless and responsible. There is little I can do to help myself when things get bad. I can only pass on the few tricks I have up my own sleeve and hope that the years it took me to find them can be truncated for you.

In a better future, this is nothing - and that could very possibly be the case. Everyone has a sleepless night occassionally. I have to tell myself that this is what is going on for you, or else I'll find myself awake all night as I wish you saved from this part of your possible genetic inheritance.'

The Shark Game

2011-01-07T21:34:00.000-08:00

December and I have organically found our first game.

I call it the shark game, but renaming it after the movie that gave it's inspiration might be worth consideration.

December, someday in your future you are going to read this. It's probably best that you read this before you see Jaws - and trust me, someday I'm going to show you Jaws. But you should know before you see that movie that you may be betrayed by a pavlovian response while watching it.

Here's how the game works:

I lift December over my head. I've been doing this almost from the very beginning, but as the months have passed she has come to enjoy it more and I've been able to be a bit less ginger about it.

Once she's been up there, arms and legs flailing like a swimmer... those of you familiar with the fate of Susan Backlinie in the opening of Jaws know where this is going already, don't you? ...once she is up there enjoying her view of the world, I begin.

"Daaa - dum..." I say. She smiles with glee. She knows where this is leading.
"Daaa - dum..." I often laugh at this point, 'cause the squirmy-delight of my daughter is completely at odds with the associations I make with John William's most infamous two notes.
"Da-dum da-dum da-dum-da-" I begin lowering her closer and closer to my mouth... like I am a shark surfacing towards a skinny-dipper.
"dum-da-dum-da-dum-da!" And then, just as she reaches my mouth I imitate the trumpet blast from the music and kiss her furiously where ever happens to be closest.

And then usually we start again.

So, December, my little Padawan...

You need to know that when you first watch Jaws, that the instinctive feeling of joy and content you feel in your gut is about to turn into a sucker-punch. Be prepared. I tell you this because I love you and want to assuage your trauma.

Remember the good times we had.

Daaaa...dum...

Notes on the Facebook Child-abuse Cartoon Awareness Campaign

2010-12-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

Aye-yaye-yaye...

So you may be aware of the current meme on Facebook to post a favourite cartoon character from your childhood into your profile pic in solidarity to child abuse issues.

Change your FB Profile picture to a cartoon from your childhood. The Goal??? To NOT see a Human Face on FB until Monday December 6th. JOIN the fight against Child Abuse!!♥ (copy and paste to your status to invite your friends to do the same.

For some reason a lot of people think this is an empty gesture and a waste of time. I've read a lot of Facebook threads arguing these points - including one on my own page. I'm not going to bother reposting any of that here, but I will post what was my ultimate summing up of my opinions (minus some personal comments) - which at least identifies many other people's negative issues....

First, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding the negative reaction people are having to this awareness campaign. Every arument against it seems to come from a place of either ignorance or from an emotional argument rather than a reasoned one. There is no doubt that this is an emotionally triggered subject for people - particularly those who have experienced some kind of abuse.

This is an awareness campaign. It never claimed to be anything more.

Part of the issue seems to stem from the definition of 'awareness.' Yes, there is a nearly total absence of people who are connected to Facebook who are also unaware of child abuse and that it's an awful thing. Suggesting that this campaign is about spreading the word at that level is a total strawman. Rather this is about RAISING awareness levels at the level of personal understanding and detail, and having the cause benefit from that rise.

I've been aware of child abuse for longer than I could possibly assess with any accuracy. But how often do I think about it? Being that I never experienced it, it's not really something that haunts me - so really, I don't think about it often. But guess what? This week I have. Some of which I've sought out and much of which has been put in front of me. Knowing that child-abuse exists and is an atriocity is a long step away from knowing the wide spectrum of details associated with it. I've read a bunch about it and been told a lot more about it as a result of debates (sadly most of them about whether this is an effective campaign or not) and discussions on-line. Really, when it comes right down to it, the campaign is a success because one person - me - has been immersed in so much information as a result of it. But, it's safe to say I am not the only one.

I seriously doubt most people are ignorant enough to believe that changing your profile pic to a cartoon is going to make any sort of direct difference. If one person had changed their picture it would have been meaningless, but millions of people changing their profile pictures to something that is both symbolically interesting (and that is the genius of the campaign - calling out to our remembered innocence of youth) and that allows from some personal expression has makes it a much more interesting call to arms than a red ribbon (Sorry AIDS awareness, someone had to be the example - in your day you were the leading edge of awareness activism, credit where credit is due.)

Certainly not everyone who has changed their picture is going to donate to a child abuse charity, or intervene on behalf of a neighbourhood child in jeopardy, or volunteer - or any other suggestion anyone can come up with of things that have more direct effect on the issue. But some will. More will than did last week. How is that a bad thing? I'll ask that one again - HOW IS THAT A BAD THING? Yeah, some people will change their pics and tell themselves they've done their part. That is unfortunate that they feel that way, and it is a character trait that they will have to deal with in other manifestations in their life.

Does it trivialize those who have been abused? Even if I myself had been abused I can't really answer to that, because ultimately that is about your feelings as an abused person. But let me ask this, is it not worth enduring a little bit of trivializing by people who are genuinely care in the hopes that some additional resources are directed to the issue and that some other child (and hopefully many children) either suffer less or not at all in the way you did? I am frankly a little baffled by the selfish seeming anger of the past-abused who are railing against this campaign.

I don't really have any issue with people who aren't changing thier picture. We can't all get on board for every issue. Haiti, Aids, Breast Cancer, SPCA, UK Libel Laws - that is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. We don't all believe in all causes, and even if we did, there simply isn't enough time in a person's life to be effective at all of them. I only rarely do choose a cause to get behind. As a new parent, and having recently witnessed the severe emotional damage done to an adult who was abused, I was touched by this one. Perhaps by having chosen it I have raised my awareness of the debate surrounding it too, but it seems to me like this one has really put a fire in some people's tummies and it has caused a lot of debate.

What amazes me more is that the people who are jumping up and down shouting about the ineffectiveness of this campaign the most are in fact causing more discussion which.... raises more awareness. This campaign caused me to think more about child abuse than I regularly do even before I read the first dissenting comment - the debate that has raged across many discussion threads has probably made me think and find out more about child abuse than I ever have.

Scoff at it all you like, but the reality is - mission accomplished.

My Resume

2010-10-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

So it looks like I'm out of a job. The company I'm working for is closing the doors.

Anyhow, this is really just for practical purposes, so that I can quickly direct people to my resume so they can see my experience.
I'm leaving a lot of the specific identifying details out for safety/privacy reasons, but if anyone is seriously interested, I can provide them. (Where context was necessary to be maintained, the privacy sensitive text has been replaced with descriptive text in Trebuchet font. Otherwise sensitive detail has be excised entirely.)

------------------------------------

WHAT I WANT TO DO

To find enriching work in a field related to my experience – specifically to widen the scope of my experience in the film, video-production and writing industries.

WHAT I DO

Producer – Independent Film Company
- General film production duties
- Shooting and editing video
- Solving technical issues on set and in post-production
- Managing workflow
- Securing funding
- Liaising with investors, and donators
- Hiring/organizing volunteers
- Bookkeeping
- Facilitating legal work
- Pre & post production paper work
- Negotiation of details with individuals and organizations
- Managing on-line presence & SEO
- Media liaison

Freelance Writer – Self-employed – Contractual

- Various Magazine Articles for National Performing Arts Magazine & Vancouver Island Lifestyle & Culture Magazine
- Editorial Essays for Culture & Politics Website, Science Advocacy Website and Television E-zines
- Numerous short radio-plays for Variety Show on Vancouver Radio Station
- Five one act stage plays professionally produced
- Two full length plays professionally produced
- One Feature Length independent film produced
- Several Short Subject live and animated films in various stages from pre-production to completed
- Proofreading, research and additional assistance to counter-culture author of note
- Proofreading, research and additional assistance to prestigious national comedy award winning author

WHAT I’VE DONE – Highlights

Monitor Quality Leader – Telephone Communications Company

- Troubleshooting and Problem solving
- Organizing daily activities of Quality team
- Spot-checks of Quality team’s work
- Daily shift reports to Team Manager
- Communication of changes of policy and functionality
- Charting stats and metrics of team performance and needs
- Developing tools for improving efficiency of the Quality team
- Hands on Fine-tuning of Quality control procedures
- Making team members smile

Dataflow Quality Monitor – Internet Data-flow Contractor

- Monitoring of four different types of real-time data for gambling websites from sporting events

Contractor’s Assistant – Construction Company – Seasonal, casual

- A wide variety of construction related physical labour
- Identifying and eliminating inefficiencies of sub-contractors
- ‘Man Friday’ errands

Account Co-ordinator Assistant – National Advertising Company – Contractual
- Answering phones
- Matching tear sheets and invoices
- Preparation of camera ready materials
- Logging invoice and order data
- Proof-reading
- General filing and misc. office duties

Customer Service Representative – Telephone Dating Service

- Answering phones
- Troubleshooting for customers
- Processing phone sales

Co-Manager – Laser Tag Arena

- Staff management and scheduling
- Organising daily duties
- Cash handling
- Opening and closing store
- Repair of equipment

Production Manager – Comic Theatre Company

- Applications for funding and festival entries
- Cross continental tour scheduling
- Advertising and promotion, media contact
- Tour logistics

Assistant Manager – Major Video Chain Store

- Opening and closing store
- Cashier duties
- Customer service
- Receiving stock
- Re-shelving returned stock

WHAT I’M GOOD AT

- Strong problem solving and initiative
- Excellent creativity and energy
- Computer operations
- A strong understanding of Microsoft Office and Adobe suites
- Word processing
- Data entry and detail
- Adept interpersonal communications
- Sound work ethic
- Good proof-reading skills

WHAT I’VE LEARNED

Canadian University – Bachelor of Fine Arts

References available on request.

Shit My Dad Says (the sitcom) Review

2010-09-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

So I watched. It was terrible.

They could have given us even better truth in advertizing and not bothered with last 75% of the title. I know, that's an obvious and unoriginal joke, but you reap what you sow.

This afternoon I figured I'd see what reviews I could find on-line about the show. I figured at least they'd be amusing. Not so. I could only find one review - linked to a million times. (I'm not bothering linking to it again here, just do a search, you'll find it.) So I figured I'd help fill that void.

The Twitter account was (frankly) more hype than hilarity. The book is almost certainly going to remain unfinished and returned to the friend I borrowed it from. And the show... well I've made my opinion clear and I severely doubt that this will be a case of me being in the minority.

Casting Shatner seemed like a good move, and he delivers... as much as he can with such a tepid script. The MadTV alumni oversell their parts and utterly fail to find any reality behind their choices - which is no way to do comedy. And the "My" of the title is so completely humdrum and uninteresting that you have to wonder how bad the guy they fired was.

I almost laughed at one joke - not even a particularly good one, but at 20 minutes into the show I was getting desperate. Shatner comments on "My" doing an impersonation of him. Yeah. Fucking brilliant. I couldn't muster enough breath to actually make a fully voiced guffaw. I guess I'd expended my full appetite to "meta" earlier on in the evening watching Dexter being calmly greeted by an all too obsequious funeral director.

I predict this one won't be on the air after (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

Hey Padawan

2010-08-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah. "Padawan."

Who could really doubt that I would call you that?

We - your mother and I - were out this past weekend and I noted that I wasn't sure what particular flavour of "geek" was my top-note. Jodie wasted no time in pointing out that the unique element of my email address is "jedischooldropout." So should it be any kind of question that I should pick "padawan" as a term of endearment? Hey... at least I never (seriously) suggested that it should be your actual name.

My Dad called me "my boy" - fairly easy, that one. He called my sister "princess" - rather common, don't you think? But they worked for him, and we responded. That is what is important. They meant something between us, even if I was to grow up to see them as rather quaint. I smile in spite of myself when he uses them today. I am totally prepared for you shaking your head at my choice and thinking "gawd, Dad - that stupid turn of the century mythology of yours is so lame!"

I built your crib and stroller this past weekend. It didn't make your arrival seem any more real - we passed the zenith of that ages ago when I first saw your "face" on ultra-sound (and so I built my own mythology of our relationship). What it did do is hammer home the imminent nature of your arrival. As unlikely as it still is, we are realistically in the range where you could arrive any day. It is far more likely that you'll show up in at least a few more weeks, maybe even a month... but the chances beyond that point are diminishingly small.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go be told how that is going to "go down." Of course they can only be approximate, and even my interpretation of that generalization is likely to be abjectly wrong. All the effort in the world to not put expectations on what that day is going to be like, how it is going to play out, is futile. I can't help but imagine, at the very least, the tiniest details. Little things that Jodie and I have discussed....

"Do you want to cut the umbilical cord?"

"Yeah sure. I don't put any sort of higher spiritual connection upon it, but how often am I going to get to perform major surgery?"

But who knows what the moment could bring? Maybe you could follow in your old-man's shoes and demand a c-section... in which case I'm not going to be in the room even if they would invite me - which they won't. I'm okay with blood, but the stuff that nature keeps on the other side of the skin-barrier on a daily basis... yeah, I don't need to see that.

The last ten days or so we've spent a fair bit of time squeezing in the last bits of "being social" before "normal life" disappears completely... but I've been thinking today that normal life evaporated ages ago. What is coming is the new normal. The normal with you in it. And by now it is almost inevitable that I am in a holding pattern. We are just waiting. Waiting for you to come.

That kind of began two weeks ago. We spent six weeks doing a lot of running around. We went to London for Demetri and Fionuala's wedding. Jodie took a detour to Belfast to visit Lynn and Phil. After the wedding we went to Amsterdam. Once we returned to Canada I had mere days before heading to Mississauga for a film festival, and upon returning from there there was little turn around before we went to Kelowna for the World Premiere (yeah yeah - I've dealt with that contradiction elsewhere). We were there for the better part of a week before coming home, and a by the next weekend we were heading back to the interior, to Logan Lake for Jodie's birthday....

Coming back from Logan Lake was wrought with (erm...) pregnant meaning. After weeks of running around the world, country and province - each time the circle getting closer and closer to home, it was the unspoken reality that we were heading home to have a baby.

We deflected that with a series of dinners with friends. Almost as if we were saying "hey, it's been good... we'll see you on the other side." Tonight I went to what was almost certainly my last Skeptics in the Pub meeting for a few months.

From here out, virtually every appointment is prefaced (at least implicitly) by "we may have to cancel as we might be brand new parents by then and be up to our ears in a learning curve that we could not imagine."

Anyhow, Padawan...

I'm as ready as I'm going to be... which is to say, "not at all, but trying hard." And what is weirdest of all to me... you have yet to breathe your first breath out here but beyond my comprehension, I already love you. I don't know for certain that you are a girl. I've only ever felt you through your mother's skin. I don't know if you have blue-eyes or brown... but you already have made me smile and you've already made me cry.

It seems like you already have your job down pat.

See you soon, Little Jedi.

Songs as Computer Programs

2010-08-05T10:41:00.000-07:00

If you are a Facebook friend of mine you recently witnessed my ability to pull the scattered thoughts of my sleep cycle into the real world. "Ellemenopie" (for those of you who were in on that extended conversation) was an example of the fruit of that process.

Here's the latest. Can you name this popular anthemic song rendered (with some imaginary commands) in BASIC?

10 FOR Q = 1 to 2
20 STOMP
30 NEXT Q
40 CLAP
50 PAUSE
60 GOTO 10

Naturally the guitar and vocals are absent, but that's "We Will Rock You."

Anyone else want to take a run at a song?

Here are some "rules":

Any song is fair game, but pointing out that "The Body Electric" already features a chorus made up significantly of binary (Yes, Geddy Lee's lyric consists of "1001001." No, Rush isn't pretentious.) is cheap and kind of misses the point.
Adding a few made up commands that help illustrate the sing is (of course) accepted, even expected.
Any programming language is fair game so long as it helps serve the song and/or the use of said language is clever in it's own right.

Anyone got what it takes?

2010-07-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

I just don't do comic strips like I used to.

I guess I blame the internet. And by extension I blame the fact that I no longer get a daily paper delivered to my house.

I was laying in bed this morning thinking fondly on the days when I looked forward to getting home and seeing what could possibly happen next in Bloom County. Bloom County was the pinnacle. Berke Breathed's strip was socially relevant, absurd, hysterical and his story lines would often carry the reader along for weeks.

There were others that brought me back time after time. Calvin and Hobbes, of course; and the best single frame comic in the history of print media, The Far Side. All three of these comics had the heart-breaking good sense to quit while they were ahead. (Although Bloom County kinda resurfaced as the tepid Outland - which raises the question that perhaps Breahted had already peaked but no one had noticed yet. Outland was followed by Opus which I had never read a single panel of before looking for the link to cite this sentence.)

Some other strips got read regularly along the way, but none really had the drawing (pun intentional) power of the residents of Bloom. We used to actually talk about these comics at school - what would Bill the Cat do today? I laughed so hard, did you see yesterday?

Today I enjoy an occsional XKCD or Dinosaur Comics and for a while I tried to follow the plot on Achewood, but the fact is that even with RSS, I just don't have patterns in my life that compel me to slavishly follow any of them with the discipline that blew Bloom County off the page and into my life six days a week.

Demetri and Fionuala's Wedding

2010-07-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

I have been fortunate to have a large number of really great friends in my life and I think I am quite justified in not referring to any single one of them exclusively as my best friend. The specific roster has changed and I've always exerted some degree of restraint in keeping the numbers down - I'm guessing that I've never called more than three people my best friend at one time. But there is one unassailable point: For thirty years Demetri has always been one of them.

He got married a week ago tonight. I was there of course - in London England for the first time. It was a fantasic event. I was there from the Monday onwards, but things really got going on the Thursday with the rehearsal, which was followed up by the rehearsal dinner, and then a less exclusive social drink in the atrium of a hotel where many guests were staying.
Friday afternoon Demetri took Mido (the groomsman) and myself (I was the bestman) for our wedding-party gifts. He had his suit custom made for the wedding - his gifts to us were shirts of our choice (including the detailed, hands-on attention of the shop's proprietress... er... that sounds dirty - I assure you it was not) from the same shop. It was quite an experience, and it is easily the best shirt I've ever had.
That evening was the pre-wedding drinks and socializing - which I wrote about in part in a previous post.
And of course Saturday was the wedding. It was pretty awesome. The main venues - the church, St. Ethelreda's - the oldest Catholic Church in England is really amazing. It's not lavish and ornate, it's simply grand in it's history. It's hard not to be moved by the fact that Henry VIII took confession there when he was still a Catholic.
The reception was held at the Foundling Museum (not to be confused with the Fondling Museum - a joke that kept resurfacing all weekend). Which when I saw it the previous day struck me as a nice museumy kind of place... but when we got 150 guests in there it came alive. Putting celebrating people in front of the paintings and other exhibits made it all suddenly seem grand.
Sunday was much more relaxed. Jodie and I had time to go to the British Museum and see the Rosetta Stone before joining the happy couple and other guests in watching England's unfortunate World Cup route by Germany. (There had been great relief that it had been the U.S./Ghana game that was played on Saturday, not the England/Germany game.) Following that was yet another get together - food and drinks at a pub for all the North American guests who travelled.

It was a really great four days. The weather was outrageously clear and warm throughout. I'll have to include photos once I've got them posted.

But that is all set up. Really what I wanted to do was post my Best-man's speech for posterity. I spent about six months on this - honestly. I thought about it many nights as I fell asleep and I made sure that I got some of my most puerile material out of the way at the stag back in March.

I had notes ready when I got to London, but I didn't do my first full draft until we had landed. I did a second draft the morning of the rehearsal and then, because of events in the rehearsal I added more (as will be obvious - as I mention that very fact) before the day before the ceremony. Naturally, when I actually gave the speech, this text was merely a guide and I said the words thaty came to me, though Jodie assures me that I was close... except for the part where I started to cry. (I made it as far as the Gabriel Garcia Marquez quote.) Yeah, well... what can you do? Demetri's my oldest best friend and Fionuala (whose name I was mispelling until sat down to write this post - how embarrassing) is a wonderful lady inside and out... I am so happy for them both.

Demetri spoke before me, and as always he was a hard act to follow - which I also commented upon at the top of my speech.

I’ve been asked to keep this under 45 minutes, so we should probably begin. I have a lot of ground to cover.

In preparation of this toast I found myself creating a new blessing. “Everyone should have a friend like Demetri.”

In the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “He is my soul’s friend.” I have known him for ¾ of my life, and even the most difficult times we have spent together have been among the most enriching of my life, and it is a proud honour to stand here for him today.

I’ve promised Demetri for over two decades that I would come and visit him here in London. I never have until now, and it seems to me that this is an extremely severe tactic he’s employed to get me across the Atlantic at last.

Indeed, from the moment I found out he was getting married, I knew I was going to come and be here with him and that was long before he asked me to play the role of best man.

I can understand that the selection of the person who will be your best man is a difficult choice, after all, you have to consider that before the occasion is over they will deliver their version on this very speech. It is important to pick someone who has known you long enough to speak from a wealth of kinship and yet, there lies the trap... they’ve certainly seen you in your least proud moments.

When I look back at the embarrassing tales I might tell about him and our exploits of the past 30 years as friends I find that I am hard pressed to shame him. He is a man of exemplary character and if anyone comes out on the embarrassing end of our hi-jinx, it is me. But I won’t bore you with those tales.

Indeed, until the wedding rehearsal, to his credit, I had thought of nothing to roast him with. But then Mido and I both noted with amusement a part of Demetri’s character that endears him to us, and if the two of us recognize it, then perhaps you do too.

I have met few people in this life who are as eloquent as Demetri. Anyone who attended his father, John’s service bore witness to Demetri at his best in this. He delivered a eulogy of deep honesty, emotion and illumination that at the same time was built upon a beginning, middle and end, complete with bookends that elevated his tribute to his father to a work of art. No doubt John would have been as proud then as today.

Yet within Demetri’s eloquence, I know no one who is simultaneously capable of putting his hoof in it in with such spectacular panache. Yesterday’s incident wasn’t even a good example of it. He merely widely mis-stated which cities some of today’s guests were coming from. It was enough to remind us though that he is capable of some extreme howlers.

I recall a day in mid-highschool where he and I went for our first appointment at the gym we’d bought membership at. Our comely instructor asked if we were still in school. Demetri snapped at bait that simply wasn’t there – accepting an imaginary compliment and informing her that he in fact had a few years before he graduated. She gave him a withering look and said “I meant is school out for the summer.”

I attribute this side of Demetri to a very special strength. A fearlessness. One which marks the earliest days of our friendship. We became friends initially through an unlikely confluence of meetings, crossing paths variously at an extra-curricular presentation our sisters were both involved in; at a movie and a class – all in the span of a few weeks. At the third encounter he met my eye and at the ripe age of ten or eleven declared “we’ve got to quit meeting like this, people will talk.” That moment is so fixed in my memory that I have used that same joke numerous times in my life, and like so many things I have shared with him, it has become vocabulary for me. To explain any of our in jokes, for instance why I can never hear the phrase “strong bones and teeth” without grinning and thinking of him would take a very long time and probably require a powerpoint presentation – which I have been denied.

And so he lives his life. Unconcerned of the scattered mis-steps. It is certainly a pattern I have noticed, but I am hard pressed to provide good examples. He knows that his slips will fade in memory and his successes will live on. We will count the hits and forget the misses- just as I have largely failed to come up with a really solid tale of Demetri’s shame. And so it should be.

But I will tell you this tale. One that Demetri may not even recall himself. When we were still in our teenage years, Demetri was on the verge of coming here to live for the first time and I was on my way to University on an Island off the wild coast of British Columbia... we had spent the night with other friends before setting out on what would be the beginnings of our adult journeys through life. In the morning we left together, but at the train we were literally headed in different directions. We stood on opposite platforms and waited for the trains to arrive. The story is as simple as that. I don’t recall whose train arrived first. But at that young age the metaphor was extremely potent for me. I know I sat on that platform wondering if that might have been the last time I ever saw the person who I had for years called my best friend.

Spoiler alert – that was a naive fear. We could credit a wealth of at that time unforeseen communication opportunities – email, skype, cellphones and deregulated airfare (which clearly I was not the one who took advantage of.) But more than anything I credit the resolve of my friend. We never lost touch, always had plans and though the rogues gallery of people I have called best friend has expanded and changed over the years, Demetri was always there and he was always there first.

In a sense, the modern symbolic duty of the best man is one of letting go. To formally pass the baton and relinquish the title of best friend. But that isn’t going to happen, we’re just hopping on a new pair of metaphorical trains, both with similar familial destinations, if different routes. Demetri as husband, myself soon to be a father. And this time I am not so naive to think that we aren’t making these trips in a tandem that I can only imagine will last us the rest of our lives, and I heartily welcome Fionuala in as part of the most rewarding collective friendship of my life.

For those here as Demetri’s friends and relations who haven’t adequately met Fionuala, I admit my acquaintance with her is also still short, but I can tell you this. When I first met her a few years ago, she was bleary-eyed from jet-lag to Vancouver and was turning into a pumpkin almost right before my eyes.

At his first private opportunity, Demetri jabbed me between the ribs and through teeth clenched out of a need for confirmation asked “Well...? So...?” And I told him the one thing that was self-evident. “Demetri, you have had some wonderful girlfriends, but for you, she is the best that has ever been.” And in the half-dozen times I’ve spent with her since she has yet to dissuade me from that position. And considering the occasion, Demetri must feel the same way.

For those of you on the other side of this union, wondering who this Demetri character is I provide you this, which as a soon to be father – biggest compliment I can imagine:

In 30 or 40 years when I first let my daughter date, I can only hope she brings home a young man (or woman) who reminds me of Demetri.

I am so happy for both of you. I can’t for the life of me figure out how two people as wonderful as you two made it this far without being snapped up. But I am so glad that it hasn’t happened ‘til now. Because your commitment to each other makes me very happy. So happy that I’ve arranged a surprise – a medley of Beatles love songs played by the National Vuvuzela Orchestra of Ghana... apparently they have more important things to celebrate.

So please drink with me in joy to Demetri and Fionuala, I love you both. This will certainly count as one of the hits – live fearlessly and put your hoof in it with panache.

Reconnecting...

2010-06-27T00:47:00.000-07:00

I'm in London. Have been here for a week, and I probably should be talking about the fantastic details of the trip (and the pains of travel) or of the event that brought me here - the wedding of one of my best friends, Demetri. The details of both the trip and the wedding are, by necessity, intimately woven.
But instead I want to spend some time thinking about one very small and specific aspect of the past two days...

When Jodie and I arrived last Monday - bleary eyed and jet-lagged - we spent some time visiting with the Bride and Groom and the Groom's mother while we waited for our hotel room to become available. Not to surprisingly the main subject of discussion was the wedding and extending from that who else was going to be here. Its a long and relatively expensive journey to make from Vancouver to London. I imagine it would be a select group who would both be invited and have the resources and time to make the journey.

Among the various names were Bill and Judy Russell. I honestly don't know how long it has been since I've seen the pair them. Years, but not a decade - maybe not even half a decade, but it would be a reasonable guess. I did see Judy a year and a half ago, very briefly, at Demetri's father's funeral - but it was not a time either of us had for in depth visiting.
As soon as Demetri's mom, Ruth, mentioned that Bill and Judy were coming I was immediately struck with delight. Though there were other people I was eager to see and in a few cases meet for the first time (like Demetri's groomsman, Mido - my London based counterpart) I was not more excited than to see Bill and Judy.

They didn't arrive until the morning before the wedding - that was two days ago. I didn't see them until that evening. It was the pre-wedding meet and greet at a pub near Piccadilly Circus. Jodie and I arrived and headed downstairs and said 'hi' to Demetri and Finoula (his then fiancee) and turned around and there was Bill, camera in hand snapping our picture. Judy was right on his heels, grabbing us and pulling us to the bar "let's get a drink!" And that was our night. We found a table and visited with Bill and Judy all night. Really neither of us spent much time with anyone else.
Yesterday, the day of the wedding, Jodie caught a cab with them to the church (I was off making sure Demetri was shaved, had his shirt ironed, and his tie on straight.), and then again after the ceremony (on a side note - Omigod! That church! It's the oldest extant catholic church in England, and now my name is part of the permanent record there as witness to the marriage. I'm not the least religious, but I still think that's pretty cool in a historical sense.) we caught a cab together, the four of us, to the reception.
As best man I had plenty of socializing to do, but still the balance went to Bill and Judy and when we left we all walked down the street together. Seeing them here was the best thing other than the wedding itself - even better than the play (Avenue Q - which was awesome) that Jodie and I saw earlier in the week.

Despite my excitement to see them, I wasn't really prepared for that reunion. I am guessing they are roughly ten years older than us, and though when I was younger, in my hometown of Prince George, I certainly considered them as friends they were at the time adults to me. Bill had been a Dj at one of the local radio-stations and in so being was for all practical purposes a local celebrity back when my perspective on celebrity was extremely telescoped compared to today. Judy was a dance instructor. They were both a part of the local am-dram - the Prince George Theatre Workshop. I had seen them in Finnian's Rainbow (I am amazed I can recall all this detail!) and a few years later, PGTW did a production of Anne of Green Gables and needed kids. Both Demetri and I were cast in it. Judy choreographed the show. It was a big step for her. She'd had her own studio, but (and I only just found this out this week) getting the opportunity to stretch and do a whole show was at that point a big opportunity.
Significantly there was a "big" number at the start of the second act. We all dove in and pushed our limits. We weren't dancers, but we tried our hardest and Judy did her utmost to find our strengths and capitalize on them.
After the run of the show Judy came to a small handful of the guys who had been in the show. She offered us free dance lessons on the condition that we also join her dance troupe - which performed at events and anchored her company's involvement in the regional dance festival. This, quite frankly, was a stroke of genius on Judy's part.
Three of us including Demetri and I agreed, and though I have never really been 'a dancer,' things I learned in the following two years have been among the most invaluable I've ever learned as a performer.
Only a few years ago I had a sequence of callbacks for a role that required a non-dancer to dance. I didn't get it, but I was on hold for the part. I don't think I would have made it through the first round had I not had some previous experience in picking up choreography.
Mostly those years were fun. I was just at the age where girls were really beginning to be an important part of my life, and though I never got involved with any of the girls in the troupe, that period really helped me get comfortable with the opposite sex.
I thanked Judy for that the other night, and she told me what I already knew - that those years were equally important for her. Though I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which they were until she filled in the blanks the other night.

It was obvious, back in 1987, when we attended our first dance competition that bringing us boys into her troupe had been a turning point.
I don't know what its like now, but back then in the central interior of British Columbia there weren't any boys in dance. None. Not in logging country. If you were straight you wouldn't be caught dead doing it for fear of being thought of as gay. If you were gay... it's logging country - there were no gays. No out of the closet gays. And if anything they would be even less likely to want to be seen doing something like dance that would be tagged as "gay."
So there we were, three hetero-guys in Judy's classes and troupe. Judy made it easy on us - didn't require that we wear anything that would challenge our boundaries - sweat pants were good enough... though I wouldn't be surprised if I tried to get away with jeans in my first class, but memory fades. Even so, we didn't run around letting our friends know we were in dance classes.
But there we were - at regionals (yep, set-up your Glee moment) the only three guys in the building except for a lighting technician and the adjudicator.
We won. Everything. A total sweep.
Every award and category that we were eligible for was ours - and the adjudicator could not hide his delight that the troupe had boys. But it went further than that. Judy's other students won an unprecedented number of awards. It wasn't merely us. There was something really going on here. Judy was a talent, and the inclusion of us merely drew attention to it.
The very next year there were dancers at other studios who jumped ship to Judy. Before long there were even more boys, and it wasn't much later before Judy's studio was expanding, taking over more of the building they leased and eventually buying a much bigger facility. Bill was soon going into business for himself in a related support busines that would become the city's most relied upon provider of production and staging equipment. I worked for him briefly at one Children's Festival. Their sons are all in the trade in some capacity.

Those early days of the troupe were big for Judy in other ways too - not just having made a good choice. I didn't see it at the time, but were were pushing her too. Keeping her at the edge of her abilites both as a choreographer and as a teacher - in both cases having to integrate performers who were doing their best, but were still behind the curve of everyone else on the stage.

Clearly they made a lot of other good, consistent and reliable decisions. The troupe eventually became a local theatre company in it's own right, having produced something like 21 different musicals. One of here students - a boy - made it to the top six of So You Think You Can Dance Canada?

I've never quit being fond of Judy and Bill, I just kind of let our acquaintance slip. It was so great to see them. It was great to be able to reconnect as adults - and perhaps if Jodie, who had no context of them in any kind of "superior" role, had not been there changing the context for me it would have been different. Not less friendly - it has always been friendly (even when they were the "adults" they were the cool young adults we knew) - but with more of the past relationship up front. I am not at all surprised that Jodie and Judy in particular hit it off, and I am really glad they did.

I really look forward to seeing them the next time they are visiting their boys in Vancouver... and that will be a paradigm shift in it's own right. Most of my memories of them feature the boys as kids - real kids, not the adolescent adults the rest of us were at the time - though I do also recall them as aloof teenagers as well.

In any case. I under estimated just how much my appreciation for what Bill and Judy meant in my past would translate into a happy reunion here on the other side of the planet, and how much I want that to continue.

The Best Laid Plans....

2010-06-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

NOTE: Seriously, don't bother reading this. This is really just blogging as therapy... and not even particularly juicy therapy.

It has been a really busy month. Holy crow, has it.

I've been working on a contract for... well I've lost specific track, I think when I began it was six-weeks until I had to be done because I was leaving the country on holiday.
I leave in less than 24 hours. I'm not done the contract. I probably should have been. I could have found a few more hours to work on it - particularly early in the contract. But who knew what this past week was going to be like - how capricious life could get. (I'll get back to that in a moment.)
I've passed some of the last of the work on - stuff that I could technically take with me, but would be incredibly inefficient for me to do while travelling. I'm continuing to do some of the other stuff in the contract. Things that I can fit into the cracks - reading on the plane or when I would be doing leisure reading... but I refuse to let it impact on the vacation itself. That is all work that would have extended past my departure regardless of whether I had managed to tackle the rest early. Indeed I'm told to expect more in my inbox by the time the plane takes off tomorrow evening.

So... I was pretty much on course to finish all the complicated work as of a week ago. Then on Monday of this week I was hit by a double whammy. First thing that happened was I woke up... to the sound of the phone... A message from Craig that our film had been accepted into the Mississauga Independent Film Festival. This was cool... except that it kind of changed our plans. We had until that moment been doing the world premiere of the film in the Okanagan over two weeks later... precious time lost.

About 3 minutes later I discovered that one of the two screens I have on my desktop computer was not working. Worse yet - it was the larger of the two. So now I had about 40% less screen real-estate, all of it on my most powerful computer. This in itself was going to make a lot of the work I had to do in this week much less simple. (You would be surprized just how much time you can lose to dragging windows around and resizing and so on.) It was a challenge to get everything I had to do done (and I failed) - including day-job, Best Picture episode final editing (I haven't mentioned this yet - I will soon), the contract, and several tasks I had to do before leaving that only I could do efficiently for Provost Pictures, that had now been bumped up by the change of premiere dates. I did spend some time and effort looking into a quick fix of the monitor - no dice. It'll have to be replaced... and I was not really going to have an opportunity to do that until I return... maybe even after I return from Mississauga!

So I forge on, working at a slower pace, trying to prioritize and put contingencies in place should I not finish everything in time... but hoping that in fact I'd manage to pull it off in the long run.

Provost Pictures' work in particular - despite the fact that most of it was being handled by other people out of necessity - just would not settle down into an easily managed pile. But wait! There's more! Not that I can really get specific for reasons of efficiency (so many details to explain to make the circumstances clear) and discretion (I'm hardly legally bound, but it would be un-cool to talk specifics on either of these) but both the contract and another item I haven't even mentioned (a grievance I am involved in resolving on another project I'm working on) each got more complicated as the week went on. Oh, and did I mention the Best Man's Speech (the primary reason for my vacation is to attend a wedding) and an episode of Best Picture that is to be shot in part while I am in England, both still have to be written... and both will now wait for on the plane. Anyhow... somehow as the week wore on I continued to keep just ahead of the wave. Until yesterday evening I really thought I would have finished everything in time. It had been a challenge, but I had some how actually managed my time to the bleeding edge of my capability...

And then the power went out.

No kidding.

And as if that wasn't enough, for some reason the power is intimately connected to our internet in our building, to the degree that when the power went out, the internet was still on. (I am writing on borrowed wi-fi now.)

That was the proverbial straw. I should point out, in case you thought I was complaining (venting, yes, complaining, no - subtle distinction, I know), that I am actually rather amused by all of this. Perhaps if I could actually recreate the precise chain of events in detail and in all its snowballing glory and just how close I came to succeeding, then it might actually seem more amusing than I suspect it does.

Even today on borrowed wi-fi, working solely from my laptop (I swaer, that going from working on two separate computers and three screens, so working on less than half the screen-space and the least robust of the processors make me feel like I'm using a rock to do a hammer's job.) - and coaxing it to perform at the level I need of it in order to successfully do all the stuff I need it to in order to finish up all I have to do before I go - including be prepared to finish those few imperative tasks I have to do while on my way, I have barely kept the engine on the tracks... but as I watch the last few automated tasks complete as I finish writing this, I remain mostly bemused. I don't know I guess this is sort of a "don't sweat the small stuff" affirmation for myself.

You didn't really read to the end of this did you? Yeah, sorry about that.

At some point early on I thought I might actually get to talk about the honour of being asked to be Best Man at Demetri's wedding, or the happy complexities of having your world premiere scooped to a festival two weeks earlier than planned... but that didn't manifest. Perhaps while I'm on vacation. Afterall, part of the idea is that I'm going to have more time for stuff like this... but don't hold your breath.

Are you frikkin' allergic to Google?!?

2010-05-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I know I can use some big words and some esoteric references. I can hardly help it. I'm a smart guy, I'm well read* and I'm a bit of a sponge for factoids. I don't expect everyone else to have the same knowledge set as me, or even the aptitude for acquiring it - we all have different strengths, that's the way of the world. But it's not like I'm Dennis Miller. You don't need degrees in History, Literature and Theoretical Physics to follow along with my Facebook statii.
But yes, I recognize that on a regular basis my status will be eliptical and vague if you don't have the foreknowledge of what I am talking about. I accept that many of my one-liner Facebook statii are going to go over many people's heads. But here's the thing - any joke that has to be explained is not going to be funny. If you 'get' it initially, fantastic. If you don't - that's unfortunate, but when you DO get the next obscure reference I make you have the added benefit of feeling superior over the rest of those folk who you damned well know didn't have a clue.

But here's the thing... I am offically stating for the record, that I am no longer going to be responsible for illuminating the details. If you 'get' the joke - congrats, you are 'in' (for what little that is worth); if you don't 'get' it, either let it go and wait for the next one ('cause really, I'm not so clever that every lateral thought I have is going to be a worthwhile gem, so you probably aren't missing anything), OR (and here's the crux)... muse on this: If you have Facebook in front of you, you also have the awesome power of Google in front of you. You can figure out what I'm referring to much more efficently by searching on one of the interwebs than by adding a comment to my status that reads "????" or "Huh?" or anything else that doesn't really add to the conversation. The ONLY way that is going to be more efficient is if I just happen to refresh the page the second after you post your query and I happen to be looking at that specific comment thread. Even then, you have to get me in a good mood - which the simple act of displaying your inability to use Google will almost certainly ruin - AND I will have to feel that I can explain the detail more succinctly than a quick trip to a relevant Wikipedia page can (good luck on that one).

If you are actually in the room with me... thats a different story - asking me is then a social act that is actually likely to get you the answer faster. Otherwise I have better things to do than type out an explanation for you that will almost certainly not be funny, and if anything, will ruin the joke for everyone else.

In almost any obscure post I make there is bound to be a word or phrase that is unique enough that even the most clumsy of Googlers can craft a search string (I use that term so loosely - in most cases said "string" will be a single word) that you'll find the info you need in order to understand my gag within the first page if not the first hit. A few recent examples & a link to their first hit (excluding news) in a google search: Sisyphean; Evel Knievel; Preakness; "down two with the hammer"; "I stab at thee" - the first hit, EVERY SINGLE TIME (with no special search terms or symbols except for the quotes around the phrases) gives relevant context.

If by some chance you can't find an illuminating reference on Google, then chances are that the reference was a more personal one - one that while not actually private, is actually intended for a select group of people. If you aren't one of those people, then you just have to let your need to know go.

It may seem that I'm making more of this than it warrants, and perhaps I am. But I have gotten so tired of explaining my more esoteric references that I've taken to simply ignoring the requests - and I know that that in itself doesn't solve anything. So this is offical notice. I can't imagine any likely circumstance where a person might have access to Facebook but not Google and therefore I hereby assume that any request for clarity on any of my left-field witticisms is nothing but either outright intellectual laziness or, more charitably, a failure to realize that there are far better ways to get the answer than by tossing a "WTF?" in the comment thread. Either way, don't expect an answer. Sorry, I'm not doing your homework anymore.

But I WILL do this:
If you don't really know how to leverage the best results out of Google, here's some handy and very simple tricks. Now you can be a Google ninja.
*When I say I'm well read, I am including the voracity with which I consume all media - including TV news and podcasts... indeed I actually don't read all that much these days, and am a slow reader anyhow.

Hey Li'l J

2010-04-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

You kicked me tonight.
Just for that, you have to stay in your womb.

Your Mom's been trying to get me to feel your kicks for weeks now.

No luck 'til tonight. It was really weak, but it was there.

We were watching Being Erica (that's an old-school 2-D TV show on the now defunct Canadian Broadcast Corporation in your world) and I had my hand on your Mom's belly. There was this tiny poke into my palm and your Mom asked (as she always does) "did you feel that?"

My response was a simple, but immediate "yeah...." and that was that.

You kicked me tonight.
See you soon.

Another Old Piece of Work

2010-04-23T16:57:00.000-07:00

I took sometime on this one 'cause I figured that the script on it's own didn't have the impact that it would if produced...

The main short coming is that I am doing all the voices... but I think I've effectively differentiated them all.

Enjoy!

Help Kids Read

2010-04-09T10:42:00.000-07:00

Or, more to the point, help kids learn the value of reading.

I'm not prone to public service announcements on my blog, but I'm making an exception this time.

I've been involved in this project before - it is a fun way to spend an afternoon...
And it is in danger of cancellation due to too few participants.

If you read for any reason in your job, then you have something to offer the kids and you WILL have a good time doing it....

Read on, what follows is from the organizer - I'll have more to add at the end.

------------

It is that time of year, some of you have helped out in the past with this. We are really struggling this year to find volunteers so are casting the net as wide as possible.

The Camp Read program occurs at an inner city school in Surrey where folks come in from the community and read stories to the elementary kids. A lot of these kids come from pretty rough backgrounds or are brand new immigrants to Canada, so they need to have some positive role models.

It is a really relaxed and simple community event. You simply come, have lunch, read a couple of stories to a class of kids (you can pick the grades/ages you would like), they ask you a few questions (supposedly about how you use reading in your daily life... but more often it is just crazy stuff kids ask). All in all it takes just a couple hours.

We are in need of around 20 people still, so it is quite a shortfall this time.... so if you know folks who might be interested we can use all the help we can. This school has a very diverse population so it is especially great to have volunteers of various ethnicities to show positive role models of all types. Kids are still talking about Sewa coming in his fireman's uniform last year as they hadn't seen an East Indian fireman before and unfortunately a lot of them in this area don't get to see positive role models that look like them and they can relate to.

The details are:

Thursday 29th April
12-2pm

Info Sheet:
Lena Shaw Elementary is having "Camp Read" on Thursday April 29th, 2010. We are asking good role models from the community to volunterr their time and visit Lena Shaw for an afternoon of reading to students and talking about how reading is important to their lives. We are asking for volunteers to arrive at the school between 12:00 and 12:15, and then be available until 2:00pm. The volunteer can bring their own favorite book or let us know if they want one picked out for them.

Lena Shaw Elementary School
142500 100A Avenue,
Surrey, BC

------------

If this sounds like something you would like to give your time to, please let me know and I will connect you with the organizer.

If you are concerned about getting to the school, I have been assured that they will be more than happy to arrange transport from the SkyTrain to the school.

I will see you there... RIGHT!??

- Kennedy

The Re-lighting of the "W"

2010-04-07T23:37:00.000-07:00

I really needed to do some refreshing of editing basics so I took some half-assed footage that I shot on my balcony the night after we moved in and a number of stills I've taken over the years, and a few other sourced out pieces and made a very short documentary...

Les MiseRap

2010-03-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

I cannot tell you how happy I was to find an extant copy of this. If only I could find a video copy of it.

No doubt it hasn't aged well, but there was a time when it was the best sketch The Juanabees had in our repetoire.

The story of it's creation goes like this...

We were doing our first tour. It was kind of limping along.

We had arrived at the Winnipeg festival but weren't scheduled for the first few days, so we took advantage by distributing a LOT of flyers. One afternoon while working a line-up at someone else's show, Don was asked if we were "a rap group." (I still have no idea where that came from - never will.) Don explained that we weren't but that we would prepare a rap number and if the woman came to the show, she would see it.

Our original response to that was "For fuck-sakes, Don! Don't make promises you can't keep!" Later that night as we were making our trip home we were passing Centennial Concert Hall (which happened to be right across the street from our venue) where Les Miserables was playing. We were all big theatre geeks and some of us had seen the show at least three times. As we drove past, I looked at the sign out front and murmured "Les Mis...er - rap...." This actually turned out to be one of two times on that trip that week that something would get said along that stretch of road home that would result in a show-stopping sketch... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

We actually thought that we might be able to do something with "Les MiseRap." I don't specifically recall, but we must have tossed ideas around in the van through the ride home, so pretty much everyone got to lay claim to some corner of the sketch, but when we got back to our billet's, it was Don and I who stayed up into the wee-hours hammering out the script, and figuring out what popular rap songs we were going to use throughout it, and when we'd rely on music from the actual show.

In the morning we shared it around, divided up roles and rehearsed the pants off of it. Later that night we did our first show, and we took a leap of faith and made Les MiseRap our curtain call sketch. It brought down the house.

As we were cleaning up after that first show, an audience member approached me and said "Hey, as a cast member, I have to say, you made my night." I was confused. He pointed at his hat - on which was emblazoned "Les Miserables - CAST."

His name was Sylvain. He was a swing. (Sort of a back-up cast member who understudies a bunch of smaller roles.) They had got to intermission and no one had sprained an ankle so he headed out to see a show at the festival. He picked ours, simply because it was close.

The next day as I was cleaning up after our matinee, a woman approached and handed me a note. She said that Sylvain had sent it.

It was an invite to show up at the back door of their theatre at intermission to perform the sketch for the Les Mis cast. We did. They loved it and gave us tickets to a matinee show on the weekend. A photographer for the Winnipeg Free Press showed up and took photos. It was one of a few things that catapulted our show into the forefront of the Winnipeg Fringe that year. Les MiseRap ended every show for the rest of the tour.

The touring cast of Les Miserables delights at the 5 minute condensed rap-version of their show.

The success of our show in Winnipeg not only made touring again a viable option, but it also resulted in Winnipeg being the cornerstone of every tour that followed for the Juanabees. They loved us there, and while other cities approached the level of support that we got in Winnipeg, Winnipeg will always hold a special place in my memories of touring.

Here is the sketch. For once I'm not going to present it as it appears on the page. I'm going to include additional notes that will help illuminate how it was staged. Note that there are way more than six roles in the sketch, but there were only six of us on stage. Part of the fun was how we'd change characters simply by changing a prop - or perhaps a hat for costuming. In the script I am identifying roles, not performers - you'll simply have to imagine that Javert and Marius were played by the same person; that Eponine and Enjolras; were the same actor, and so on.

LES MISERAP

-------------------

CHORUS LEADER: (Counting in the 'music.') 2 - 4 - 2-4-601!

CHORUS: (Hums two figures of the main melody of "Look Down" from Les Mis.)

The Chorus Leader breaks away from the group.

CHORUS LEADER: Huh!

CHORUS: (Hums the main guitar riff of "Walk this Way.")

CHORUS LEADER: (To the tune of "Walk this Way" as performed by RUN DMC.)

At the end of the day (CHORUS emphasizes the bolded words.)

You're another day older

All you say for the life of the poor

Its a struggle its a war

That anyone's given

Standin' 'bout what is it for?

At the end of the day

She's the one who would play

With her skirt flyin' up in the air

Singin' Hey diddle diddle

Like a piggy in 'a middle

She cut off all fo her hair

She'd swear...

FANTINE: (To the tune of the chorus of "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie.)

I... I dreamed a dream

Life has killed this dream I dreamed

Oh, Cosette!

VALJEAN: (Generic rap.)

And so Javert

You see it's true

This man bears

No more guilt than you

CALLER: Who am I?

RESPONDER: Who am I?

VALJEAN: 2 - 4

CALLER & RESPONDER: 6-0-1!

Javert breaks through the row of chorus members.

JAVERT: (A la, the bridge of "U Can't Touch This" by M.C. Hammer.)

Javert time!

CHORUS: (Hums the bass line from "Super Freak" by Rick James.)

Javert and Valjean circle each other like animals.

JAVERT: (To the tune of the verse of "Super Freak".)

You're a very slippery eel

The kind we like to put behind bars

Twenty years ago in jail

And you're on your way back there now

They grapple.

VALJEAN: (To the tune of the "oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh" part of either of the above songs.)

No-no. No-no. No-no-no...

JAVERT & VALJEAN: (Simultaneously. Generic rap.)

You will go there. (Javert.)

I won't go there. (Valjean.)

Valjean throws Javert to the ground and escapes.

CHORUS LEADER: Let's do it.

CHORUS: (Hums the guitar riff from "Wild Thing" by Tone Loc.)

Cosette enters on her knees with a broom.

COSETTE: (To the tune of the verse of "Wild Thing" by Tone Loc.)

There is a castle

It's way up on a cloud

Nobody beats me

Ever mistreats me

Ever talks too loud

I dream of my Mother

She's all dressed in white

She sings me lullabies

Never ever cries

Holds me through the night

(With a mighty stroke of her broom she leaves the stage.)

Sa-weep!

CHORUS: (Hums the guitar riff from "Wild Thing" one last time.)

CHORUS LEADER: (A la, the opening of "Unbelievable" by EMF.)

Oh!!!

CHORUS: (Hums the main guitar riff from "Unbelievable" by EMF.)

M. THENARDIER: (To the tune of the verse of "Unbelievable" by EMF*.)
   Welcome M'sieur, sit your self down
   And meet the best innkeeper in town
   As for the rest, all of them crooks
   Rooking the guests and cooking the books

MME. THENARDIER:
   What a cruel trick of nature
   Landed me with such a louse
   God knows how I've lasted
   Living with this bastard in the house!

CHORUS: (To the tune of the chorus of "Unbelievable" by EMF.)
   The Master
   Of the house

MME. THENARDIER:
   Hypocrite and toady and inebriate!

CHORUS:
   The Master
   Of the house
   Huh!

M. THENARDIER:
   I'm unbelievable!

CHORUS:
   Ho!
   Huh - huh!

(Two chorus members grab chairs and majestically bring them together mid-stage as a very tiny barricade.)

CHORUS: (Generic rap.)
   Red!
   Red and black - red and black - red and black

ENJOLRAS:
   To the barricade!

CHORUS:
   Red!
   Red and black - red and black - red and black

CHORUS LEADER: (To the tune of "Colors" by Ice-T.)

   Colours
   Colours-colours
   Colours

   Colours-colours

   (The chorus forms into a wedge and marches in formation with a flag waving in the air behind.)

ENJOLRAS: (To the tune of the chorus of "Walk this Way" by RUN DMC... though admittedly the chorus of the RUN DMC version is pretty much the Aerosmith version.)
   This revolution's got...

CHORUS:
   One more day
   One day more
   One more day
   One day more

EPONINE: (To the tune of "Joy and Pain" by Rob Base & DJ E.Z. Rock.)
   Joy!

   (A gunshot rings out.)

EPONINE:
   And pain...

CHORUS:
   And what else?

   (Eponine falls into Marius' arms.)

EPONINE:

A little

Fall of rain

CHORUS:

Come on - here we go

MARIUS:

Don't die

'Ponine

CHORUS:

Help - help - help her up

EPONINE:

Don't cry

For me...

(Eponine dies in Marius' arms.)

MARIUS: (To the tune of "this song" - to type it out would ruin the joke.)

Argentina...

(The 'dead' Eponine looks at Marius like he's completely out of line.)

CHORUS: (Hums the bass line of "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice.)

PROUVAIRE: (To the tune of the verse of "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice.")

Heres to pretty girls who went to our

JOLY:

Heads

Heres to witty girls who went to our

PROUVAIRE:

Beds

At the shrine of friendship never say

JOLY:

Die

Let the wine of friendship never run

PROUVAIRE:

Dry

Bring it down

CHORUS:

White - white - rappers

CHORUS LEADER: (To the tune of "this song" - to type it out would ruin the joke.)

Kick it!

(Enjolras leaps up on another student's shoulders.)

ENJOLRAS:

You gotta fight!

CHORUS:

Fight!

ENJOLRAS:

For your right!

CHORUS:

Right!

ENJOLRAS: (To the tune of "Red and Black" from Les Miserables.)

To a night at the opera now.

JAVERT: (Spoken. Well... shouted.)

Yo, Blood!

(Javert shoots Enjolras who falls to the ground.** Valjean steps up looking upon the fallen body in horror.)

VALJEAN: (To the tune of "Bring Him Home" from Les Miserables.)

God on high

Hear my prayer

In my need...

(The chorus stands about confused as he sings. Cosette steps up with a Pepsi.)

COSETTE: Yo! Valjean!

   (He drinks.)

VALJEAN: Proper! ...Urk!

   (Valjean dies. Everyone is sad.)

CHORUS LEADER: (Spoken.)
   Yo!
   Do you hear the people sing?!

FIRST CHORUS MEMBER: (To the tune of "Do You Hear the People Sing?" from Les Miserables.)
   Do you hear the beat box beat?

(SECOND CHORUS MEMBER joins him.)

Does it sound at all like drums?

(THIRD CHORUS MEMBER joins them.)

Real musicians have more talent

(FOURTH CHORUS MEMBER joins them.)

Than a rapper in their thumbs***

(FIFTH CHORUS MEMBER joins them.)

When you hear a record scratch

Do you scream and hold your head

(CHORUS LEADER joins them.)

Just be thankful it's not disco you're hearing instead

Instead

Dis-co in-stead....!

HUH!

(All pump their fists in the air.)

END

*Yeah, okay. This stretches the definition of 'rap' to it's limits. What can I say? Van-full of white Canadian kids.

**If you are familiar enough with the show, you know that this transition makes no sense as it it Marius who Valjean sings over... but it's all in service to the humour in the end.

***I have to admit that my appreciation for rap has grown since then - this was, after all, written in the same year that Apocalypse '91, the album that got me interested in rap, came out and it wasn't 'til months later that I first heard it.

A David Lynch Family Christmas

2010-03-28T12:13:00.000-07:00

Second to last one. One that is close to my heart.

This was written for the Reelfast 48 Hour Film Contest. In short, teams are given a bunch of elements to use as inspiration and then are expected to make a 10 minute film in 48 hours.

In the third (of seven) year of the contest I asked my friend Rob Frederickson (you may know him as the artist, Robert Ives) who was teaching animation if he thought we could make an animated film in 48 hours. He figured we could.

We spent some time working out with the organizers what would be allowable for us to plan in advance. Basically, we had a stable of pre-designed characters and sets. To this day there are purists who think that this was "un-fair." They seem to forget that our characters are no different than the actors they already had on their teams... except that their actors can change more of their costumes than just the colour; and their actors are capable of programming their own movements. Not to mention that the live action teams had an entire city (and more, if they were resourceful enough - and the occasional team was) to use as sets. If anything - anything at all - was "unfair" it would be that each subsequent year the animation team had all the previous characters and settings at their disposal, as well as any new ones that had been created since the previous year. Anyhow... it's all academic. We had the organizers' support and consent. Besides - it was years ago, in a contest that no longer exists.

The first year there was a HUGE learning curve. None of us had ever made a film in 48 hours, let alone an animated film.

The animation studio was in Victoria. The contest started and ended in Vancouver. I got the inspiration package and headed for the ferry, chatting on cellphone with Rob and his animators on my way. By the time I got to the ferry we knew what direction we were heading. We had previously discussed some loose ideas based on the character resources we had. Among the characters was a family and a non-specific horned ungulate. We knew that the creature could pass for a reindeer and we could do a "Christmas Special" with the family. We had also discussed the possibility that some sort of surreal randomness to a plot line allowed us to squeeze in all kinds of elements from the inspiration package.

One of the elements in the package was a collection of small shaped plastic baubles. Rob figured that he could model and rig a christmas tree by the time I got to Victoria and we could scan the baubles and add them as ornaments... we were pretty much committed to a Christmas Special. It was simply a matter of me writing something that pulled all our random bits together. (I actually don't even recall what most of those elements were... Some backwards music, I think? A can of something - soup? Something worm-like I think too... a photo of worms or snakes maybe? I'm fairly certain there was something that made us think of the clock... but not a clock. And I did go to Jericho Beach first and took some reference photos... 'cause it was our 'location' - though I'll be damned if I can recall how we used/justified it.

Anyway, while I wrote my ass off on the ferry, Rob and his guys did as much advance work as they could. (Making presents and other anticipated animated props.) When I arrived at the studio I read them what I had scrawled and they got down to more specific work while I typed up a copy (oh those pre-laptop days) for distribution... 'cause no one could be expected to read my handwriting.

More thoughts after the (for some reason not properly formatted) script...

A DAVID LYNCH FAMILY CHRISTMAS

Fade in.

A quaint family bungalow.

Woman at stove. Cauldron of soup boiling.

Clock on wall ticks once. Second hand moves forwards 2 seconds.

Woman stirs cauldron.

Soup boils.

Living room. Two children. Ten year old boy, decorating tree. Three year old of indeterminate sex, humming gutterally to (him)self. His hair looks like a bad wig.

A present at the bottom of the tree is shaking back and forth.

Clock on wall ticks once. Second hand moves three seconds backward.

Woman at stove stirs cauldron. She shakes in some seasoning.

Several creatures swim to surface and feed on seasoning floating on top. The soup is too murky to see them clearly.

Woman stirs cauldron.

There is a quiet, shy, polite knock at the door.

Woman looks up from soup but does not acknowledge the door.

WOMAN: Your father.

She listens tentatively for a moment.

The clock ticks once and moves forward two seconds.

The two children are at the Christmas tree.

TEN YEAR OLD: Mom!

The three year old has found a jar of marbles.

The present gives a quick shake and quietly whimpers.

PRESENT: oooh.

TEN YEAR OLD: Mom?

The three year old stops humming long enough to stuff a fistful of marbles in its mouth.

The clock ticks backwards three seconds.

The woman stirs the soup.

There is a quiet polite knock at the door.

Something slivers just beneath the surface of the soup.

The ten year old enters the kitchen.

TEN YEAR OLD: Mom, when is Dad coming home?

The woman laughs.

WOMAN: Your father.

The three year old is chewing ambitiously on the marbles.

The present lurches slightly.

TEN YEAR OLD: Can I have something to eat?

The woman sighs and looks wistfully at the soup.

There is a polite knock on the door.

WOMAN: Your father.

The ten year old sighs, disappointed.

The clock ticks forward two seconds.

The three year old has found a rubber ball the size of a fist. (S)he is humming gutterally again.

The present shakes back and forth, making helpless noises.

A door opens behind the three year old. A man dressed as a penguin comes out.

The penguin sets an iron chest at the foot of the tree and shuffles into the kitchen.
Elsewhere, an axe is being dragged through the snow.

The penguin enters the kitchen.

The ten year old boy watches the penguin.

The woman ignores.

The penguin opens the door to the fridge, climbs in and closes the door.

The woman shakes her head in disapproval.

WOMAN: Your father.

Something in the soup makes a sudden dive to the bottom.

The three year old gnaws viciously on the rubber ball.

The clock ticks backwards three seconds.

The woman goes to the fridge and opens it. A penguin wing hands her a can. She closes the fridge.

There is a knock at the door.

Elsewhere an axe is dragged through the snow.

Under the tree, the present shakes violently and tips over. It murmurs.

PRESENT: Ow.

The woman pours a chalky, lumpy red liquid from the carton into the soup.

The soup seems to stir itself. A small fin briefly rises above the surface.

The ten year old boy curiously opens the fridge.

There is no penguin inside, simply a wall of cans like the woman just took out.

TEN YEAR OLD: Mom?

There is an irritated knock at the door.

TEN YEAR OLD: How does Santa know what to bring?

The woman is visibly agitated.

WOMAN: Your father.

The clock ticks forward two seconds.

The three year old is humming again. (S)he has found a ragged softball.

The present shakes slightly and cries.

The ten year old enters the living room.

There is a loud irritated knock at the door.

The woman follows the ten year old into the living room.

The clock ticks backwards three seconds.

Elsewhere an axe is dragged through the snow.

The ten year old opens the iron box.

The three year old dogs ravenously into the softball, tearing the cover off with his teeth.

The clock ticks forward two seconds.

The soup churns violently.

The ten year old pulls several small penises from the box.

WOMAN: Your father.

The present shakes desperately.

There is a loud, insistent, irritated, pounding knock at the door.

The woman acknowledges the door expectantly.

WOMAN: Your father.

Elsewhere an axe is dragged through the snow.

The clock ticks backwards three seconds.

The ten year old begins hanging decorative penises on the tree.

The door bursts open. Four evergreen trees rush in.

Something in the soup preys on something else.

The trees enter the living room.

The woman watches.

The ten year old hands penises.

The three year old furiously destroys the cork centre of the softball with his mouth.

The present shrieks and shakes violently.

The trees seize the ten year old.

Red clad arms lay a frightened reindeer's red-nosed head against a large chopping block.

The clock ticks forward tewo seconds.

The trees rush out the door with the ten year old.

The woman watches.

Something slithers contentedly in the soup.

The three year old picks up the present. The present makes weak frightened whimpers. The three year old is humming gutterally again.

WOMAN: Your father.

Red clad arms swing an axe over a red-capped white-bearded head.

The ten year old stands amongst presents. Baubles hang on his outstretched arms. An ornate star rests on his head. Lights are strung around him. A family of trees surrounds him, exchanging gifts.

A frightened reindeer with it's head against a chopping block looks up in resigned terror...

Blackout.

A wet chopping noise.

A dull thud of something heavy landing in the snow.

WOMAN: How was your day dear? I've cooked your favourite.

- END -

Don't try to make sense of it. There is no meaning to the story. More than anything it was intended to be sort of an excercise in disturbing tension.

As an excericse, it ultimately failed. It was simply too much to chew in too little time for a team that was doing something no-one (let alone us) had ever attempted. The learning curve was damn near vertical. The number of unfinished shots was long. We had zero-time to do any real editing. All we could do was assemble the completed shots in order. It didn't make much less sense than the original script, but we had no chance to tweak the timing and otherwise finesse it. Add to that that one team member fell through a glass table and had to be taken away in an ambulance, and a major last minute system crash that nearly resulted in me not being able to catch the last ferry back to Vancouver to submit the film under the wire... It was a wonder we finished at all. In the end, that was the victory.
But it had it's moments. Scott's vocal performance as the three year old (The three year old would end up being the 'star' of every film the team made.) was hysterically funny - it remains a running in-joke to this day.

The following year we tweaked the team - added more animators, and more people who could handle multiple jobs. One animator did the trip from Vancouver with me to help massage "impossible" ideas. The same team member was charged specifically with editing - though we still didn't have as much time for finessing the cut as we'd like. and we arranged to fly the finished product back to Vancouver, rather than losing the time on the ferry back. In that second year we actually completed a film that made some odd sense and won a special achievement award for our efforts.

The third year I decided I wanted to try something new. I had never done a live-action film for ReelFast. It was time.

The animation team entered again without me. This time a well oiled machine full of mostly veterans. With literally dozens of characters to pick from and a very complete western-ghost-town set at their disposal, they delivered a tour de force. It was still rather bizarre and at moments inscruitable (but honestly, plenty of live action ReelFast films suffer that fate), but it was the most beautiful looking and smoothly animated film yet. They placed in the top ten films of what was a highly contentious contest. My team did not - but that is a tale in itself. I could not have been happier for them.

The next year I returned to animation with a new team - this time doing stop-motion. The old team did not compete. One other team did stop-motion that year - together we were the first two teams to do stop motion. They kicked our ass. But that shouldn't be too surprising... that team was headed up by Zach Lipovsky who would go on to the final five of On the Lot... and frankly, he should have won - but that too is another story.

MVP

2010-03-27T11:50:00.000-07:00

This one makes me howl. It was probably funnier ten years ago when the references were that much fresher. I didn't write this for any reason but to amuse myself... that happens a lot.

EXT. OUTSIDE MADISON SQUARE GARDENS, NEW YORK - TWILIGHT

Broadway is barren of people. The sky is a dark, dirty red. There are huge potholes in the pavement. Abandoned cars litter the street. Windows in the surrounding street are long since broken. Vines and creepers cover many things. It has been a long time since this place was disturbed by sentient life.

Madison Square Gardens itself is in terrible repair. The roof appears to be caved in and the doors are broken off, hanging on their hinges.

A lonely wind blows dust down the street.

The sound of horse hooves echoes between buildings.

A pair of horses appear at a trot. They slow down to a walk outside of MSG. Atop one horse is an earthy, busty, beautiful woman in a short buck-shin dress. On the other - Brendan Shannahan. Shannahan is dirty and unkempt. He is wearing a loin cloth.

He dismounts and helps the woman down. He looks at MSG in awe. The couple enter the colesieum.

INT. MADISON SQUARE GARDENS, RINK LEVEL VOMITORIUM - MINUTES LATER

Dim light fingers through the huge hole in the ceiling. Rubble is strewn across the rink and the seats are all in dis-repair.

A lonely zamboni, broken, sits mid-rink.

Through the passageway enters Shannahan and his female side-kick. He enters the rink area and looks around, gaping in disbelieving horror.

He casts his gaze upwards where his eye falls upon a banner in the Rangers' colours. Boldly printed on the banner - which hangs askew from a broken girder - is the number "99."

Shannahan falls to his knees and pounds the floor.

                SHANNAHAN
     You did it. you finally did it you bastards! Damnit all to hell. You blew it up, you bastards. God damn it, you blew it up!

                VOICE OVER
     Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

                                                             SMASH CUT TO:

INT. HOCKEY RINK - MODERN DAY

A chimpanzee stick-handles down the ice....   Skates in on goal.

He shoots! He.....

"Termination" an excerpt of "Missing Women"

2010-03-26T11:12:00.000-07:00

I'm getting into the real cream of the crop now. Four more - including this one - to go.

This short piece was one of two contributions I made to a collaborative effort called "Missing Women."

It was created for Theatre Under the Gun. I think it was 2002.

For each of the previous years of TUtG at least one team had made a point of being a team comprised entirely of women. So a group of us decided to make a point of being a group made up entirely of men. I don't think anyone thought we were being (ahem) dicks about it. It was a largely tongue in cheek "statement" and I think everyone (including us) pretty much expected us to do something that was equally tongue in cheek.

But as the two days of preparation came together, we found ourselves doing quite a sober piece called "Missing Women." It featured one of us playing a drum riff over and over again while the rest of the actors in business suits walked back and forth in business suits our heads buried in newspapers. The drums would stop. One or more actors would break away from the marching line and do a scene while the others froze.

Each scene explored an aspect of how women could be missing from our lives: Deceased mothers, ex-girlfriends, lost children and so on.

This was while the crisis of missing women in the DTES was at it's worst. But we never had a secene that directly reflected that situation. Indeed, if you didn't count the title (which could be interpreted in a host of ways) we didn't plan to cite the situation at all - letting people make their own connections. But then a really weird confluence of things happened. Over the course of the two days of preparation significant developments unfolded in both the Vancouver missing women case and the decades old Green River killings. Both were plastered across the front pages of every newspaper you could buy. So through synchronicity we did have a somewhat subtle reference. It was a happy accident.

People really expected us to be doing a light piece. But it wasn't - and that made it all the more effective.

The first scene within the larger piece was the following monologue. I don't recall where exactly, but somewhere within the first few sentences someone (you know who you are - I won't shame you here) laughed uproariously, clearly expecting us to be funny. By the end of the monologue, it was clear to everyone that we had played a shell-game with their expectations. When the review was posted we were one of two companies in the festival that was singled out as a highlight.

"I lost it," she said.
And that was it. Just like that it was over.
"I'm sorry, I lost her." So non-chalant. She couldn't look me in the eye, I knew. I could tell she was lying.
From the moment I walked in the door I could tell something was wrong.
Something about the way she gingerly padded across the carpet and all too gently wrapped her arms around my neck... intimate, but not 'good that you're home' intimate.
"I lost our baby." No sadness. No shock. Relief.
"Did you? did you really?" Cold. Angry. Confused.
She looked into my eyes.
But faced with the piercing, intuitive and absolutley precise leap, the lie could not hold.
"No, I..." The sentence enjambs, waits and never ends - snarled up in shame.
She loved me. I loved her.
And although we fought it, that moment was the end.
Long slow death. Terminating that August - about the same time it would have all begun.
Could we have survived the abortion alone? I don't know. Coupled with the lie, we didn't stand a chance. I wish we could have known before we started to hate each other in our own home.

The McMadden Family Speaks Out On a Northern Interior University

2010-03-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

This is hardly the best piece of old writing I've uncovered, but it has a bit of a story behind it that is worth telling.

In the years before I started touring Canada I had gone through a series of different comedy troupes - most of which spawned directly from th Prince George Theatre Workshop's Summer Stage project.

One of them - The Machine Gun Canaries - ended up getting a coveted TV gig. There was a local TV magazine called 54-North. The producer and host decided that a comedy troupe would be an interesting addition to the weekly commentary. We got the job.

On about our second or third week the subject of the week was the debate over whether Prince George should be the home of the planned fourth university in BC. Locals variously supported and criticized it. At least one other city was trying to get the University built there. It was all up in the air. But we were young homers, naturally we were in favour of it being in PG and the arguments against it were silly - what better way to support our position than to stuff a few strawmen in the mouths of our opponents?

We put together two sketches . One poked fun at the proposed names for the University - I don't recall it clearly, but I know at one point we referred to it as UPiG and there was something about UNBC "proud as a peackock." ...the eventual university would in fact be named UNBC. They left out the rest of it... not that anyone would get the joke anymore.

The second sketch follows below:

ELBERT: (Slowly with a hesitant drawl.) Hi. My name is Elbert T. Mc Madden Jr., and this is my wife, Ma.

MA: Or 'Ma' for short.

ELBERT: Ma and I run my hay farm in the Blackburn area.

MA: Where we farm... hay.

ELBERT: The farm has been in my family since my great grandaddy came and arrived here when he came and... arrived in 1889.

MA: One hundred years ago.

ELBERT: Of course Great Grandaddy hasn't been around for a few years now. (Pause.) I have come here today to express my concerns about a Northern Interior University. I think that a university at Fort George.

MA: That's Prince George now, Elbert.

ELBERT: Oh, that's right. "The times they are a changin'" as that hip folk song does say. I think that a university in Prince George would be a waste of tax payers' money. I feel that money could go to better causes.

(Enter their son.)

SON: Pa! Pa!

MA: Now hesh up a second there boy. Your father 's speakin'.

ELBERT: No, Ma. Let me introduce my boy. Afterall our youth is our future. This is my boy, Elbert T. McMadden Junior Jr. Junior Jr., we is on TV.

SON: Golly!

MA: Now what did you want to ask your father, boy?

SON: Pa, I got a real hot date tonight. An' I was wonderin' if I could use the tractor to go to town?

ELBERT: Sorry Junior Jr, but Ma and I was goin' to take the tractor to town to watch them buildin' that new fangled hockey rink.

MA: Now, that's progress.

ELBERT: I'm afraid that you'll have to take the combine.

SON: The combine! Pa, I'll look like a geek!

MA: Now Junior Jr., don't argue with your father. Run along now.

(Junior Jr. leaves, upset.)

ELBERT: The money we save on taxes could be out towards buying a new tractor so that we could be a two tractor family.

MA: Now, that's progress!

ELBERT: An Interior University would be about as much good for the city as that new fangled cultural centre they wanted to build. Why I got plenty enough culture just sittin' round watchin' Wheel of Fortune on the television.

MA: ...Actually Elbert, we could use a new TV set...

ELBERT: What in tarnation are you talkin' about Ma? We just bought a brand new enormous 12 inch black and white in 1959.

MA: Of course, we couldn't receive any channels back then... But it sure was nice to put something up where we used to stare against the wall in the evenings.

ELBERT: Yeah Ma, we always have been ahead of the times, ain't we?

MA: Shore have. We believe in progress.

- End -

Now I'll be the first to admit that I can think of a dozen ways to improve this sketch - if it were still relevant. It's really not even close to being one of the best of the old pieces I dug up. But it is special for another reason...

A day after it aired, the TV station recieved a number of complaints about the sketch.

Some people in the Blackburn area of town were upset about the portrayal of Blackburn farmers... a complaint I still feel is kind of quaint, sort of misses the point and if anything kind of serves to further the point. I should also add... my Grandmother's maiden name? Blackburn. NOT a coincidence. My uncle and cousins still operate the Blackburn farm in the Blackburn area of Prince George.

Anyhow... I don't know whether the producer of 54-North buckled under his own weight or under pressure from above at the station, CKPG, but we never appeared on the show again.

UNBC (proud as a peacock) DID get built in Prince George. (As did one in the Okanagan - UBCO.) The "New" arena is now in need of replacement, and they did eventually build a new cultural centre.

Somewhere along the way my adolescent brain got the message that comedy can push buttons and effect change. Perhaps I don't practice that as much as I ought to... but if someday I can convince someone to green-light my TV series "Big Wig" - I'll be back to pushing buttons, making points and effecting change on TV. Or maybe TV producers are too scared.

The Tragedy of Pebbles

2010-03-24T11:25:00.000-07:00

Expect a bunch of this over the next week or so. I've uncovered a bunch of old short-writing that amuses the hell out of me that isn't amusing anyone locked in a box, so I'm transcribing it.

The first time I appeared on Loose Cannons happened to be the day that Dana Plato from Diff'rent Strokes died. I got the call in the afternoon asking if I had anything I could present on the show that night. I said I'd write something. What follows is what I wrote.

   Pebbles would have turned forty-one today. But like many a child str, things got complicated - dense - after she'd gone supernova at such a young age, during the hey-day of Hanna-Barbera, when "The Flintstones" was the best on the box.
   Former co-star Bam-bam Rubble, now a stock promoter in Aristona remembers her fondly...

BAM BAM: Peb was so sweet. Always popular on set, shewas everyone's favourite with her innocent charm. I've often wondered if that was where things started to go wrong.

Certainly that is a distinct possibility. Pebbles' downward spiral began in the show's fourth and last* season when he began a Lolita-esque relationship with character actor Edwin Slate who played Fred's boss on the show. It is generally assumed that the child starlet - who was once described as having 'all the innocent delights of Shirley Temple combined with the girl-next-door charms of Annette Funicello' - was introduced to drug use by Slate. Slate died destitute in 1974 in freebasing accident.
   The signs of drug use on the set of the landmark animated sitcom were thin, but by the time spin-off show "The Pebbles and Bam-Bam Hour"** tried to cash in on the beach-party-rock craze, Pebbles had developed a habit estimated to be costing five to six thousand dolars a day. Her star falling, and her blood toxin rising, the young teen became difficult...

BAM BAM: She ws denying everything, but it was clear just how strung out she was. You could see it in her eyes.

   Says Rubble...

BAM BAM: Somehow, her natural charm masked what was going on inside her head from the camera. But off screen things were ugly.

   Things got so bad during one hallucinogenic episode that she attacked the show's director - a young Robert Zemeckis - with chair, breaking his wrist...

ZEMECKIS: We were shooting a scene at a roller-derby event.

   Recalls the director, who has since won an Oscar fr his efforts on "Forrest Gump..."

ZEMECKIS: Pebbles kept charging at the camera, insisting that it would look 'groovy and psychedelic.' It was getting really tiresome andI kept asking her to stop. Next thing I knew, she was throwing a stool at me... uh, a chair - not the uh... other thing.

   The incident was prety much the end of the show. Pebbles was fired. And in site of the program's impressive showing at the Emmys in that, it's freshman season, without Pebbles, the sponsors didn't expect the show to fly. A simple equation: no backers - no money; no money - no show.
   Following the show's demise Pebbles spun into a seedy descentwhich somehow managed to maintain her celebrity. She spent the majority of the seventies rubbing elbows - and possibly other body parts - with the likes of Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley and Keith Moon. Not the most auspicious of company. She even recorded an updated version of her novelty hit "Let the Sunshine In" with Sly and the Family Stone...

SLY: Yeah, Pebs was so hip and that was such a funky little groove we got a good twenty minute jam out of that on wax. But it seems like everyone already had enough of that repetitive little ditty the first time 'round.

   Her image as a celebrity groupie was forever etched in stone when her two-year marriage to consumate party-animal John Beushi started in a dramatically public manner - with a headline stealing indecent exposure trial.

   Pebbles and Belushi had been separated for over a year upon his death in 1981.*** His family employed top civil litigators when it came to dividing his estate. Belushi died intestate and by the prevailing law of the time all of his worldly trappings became possession of his wife. The Belushi family won the case in precedent setting fashion - citing her role in advancing his ultimately lethal drug addiction and the fact that she and Belushi had not shared an address for thirteen months.

   Pebbles public image limped along for a few years supported by guest appearances on shows such as Love Boat and Hollywood Squares, a few cereal commercials and a cameo in a John Waters' film. The entire time she struggled with her addiction and appeared to have cocaine beaten in 1983 when she spent six months in rehab after she was found naked in a delusional state wandering the Santa Monica Freewat.

   Things went well for several years during which she gave birth to twins out of wed-lock to her then boyfriend Bib Goodyear. Then in 1989 it looked like Pebbles was poised to make an enormous comeback. Cartoonist Matt Groening...

GROENING: Fox had offered us an excellent development deal but they told us they weren't going to move further forwards without a star.

   Groening went to Fox with the suggestion of building a sitcom about a chroncially dysfunctional family around a retro-nostalgia celebrity. Groening suggested Pebbles.

GROENING: Fox went nuts. They thought the idea was inspired. We started negotiations and set her up with an excellent pay or play deal where whether the show went ahead or not, Peb was in the green.

   Pebbles sudden fiscal liquidity was ultimately her downfall. An alcohol and prescription drig dependency quickly accellerated out of control.

GROENING: Peb started not showing up for meetings and soon Fox got worried. But they were liking the potential of the show we were creating and started looking for options.

   Fox changed the show concept and instead of a shrewish matriarch for the "Plimpton" family, they found an ex-steeplejack turned stand-up comedian and renamed the show after him. Homer Simpson was an overnight success.

   Pebbles took the news hard. Leaving her twins behind, alone in her Venice Beach home, she disappeared for thirteen days before being found in a Tijuana jail where she'd been arrested for driving a car through a poncho stall at the public market, and firing a gun into the air. Luckily for her, The Flintstones was, at the time, the top rated show in syndication on Mexican television.

   Her sentence was reduced and she was transferred to the United States and put on probation. Due to her abandonment of her twins she was declared an unfit parent and was denied access to her children.

   In November of 1990, shortly after the start of The Simpsons' second successful season**** a despondent Pebbles started making rounds to old friends.

BAM BAM: I feel I should have known. Should have sensed something was wrong.

   Says Bam-Bam from his split-level in Phoenix...

BAM BAM: If I knew the truth about what was going on for her - the show falling through; the probation; the twins - I might have seen that she was saying goodbye. She just... I remember - sh just kept on telling me how she'd quit. How she had finally beat the drugs. When she left I couldn't help but think how good it was that she was back on track.

   Then on November 13th - a Friday***** - she missed her meeting with her parole officer. The next morning she was found in her bathtub, drowned. No note. No sign of foul play. No immediate trace of drugs or alcohol in her system. A traic and confusing end to a life long streak of bad luck which plagued a desperate and insecure woman who had once won herself a place in the hearts of a country, and a page right out of history....

*Ah the days before Google... the show ran six seasons.
** Was actually called The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show and was not an hour. Though there was a show called The Flintstone Comedy Hour which incorporated it.
*** It was 1982.
**** I did get that date right.
*****November 13th 1990 was a Wednesday - you can check it out on your computer's calendar.

Dirty Fridge Poetry

2010-03-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

I'm sorting through all kinds of old papers. (Far too much teen-angst poetry for my liking.)

I just uncovered something I have to share. I think I'd have to say that this is NSFW - though there are no individual words that would offend anyone.

I don't even actually recall what this was for - maybe Theatre Under the Gun, perhaps one of The Stands, possibly an episode of 1000 Year Itch, or it could have been a Loose Cannons show. (If anyone reading this happens to recall, please refresh my memory.) I do recall that there was some need for an off-the-hook fridge poem. Just about anyone who has been in my kitchen between 1999 and 2009 knows just how many fridge poetry words I have. (They are not currently on my fridge, but they still exist.) I do have a vague recollection of going home and playing with the magnetic words until I came up with something. I can't even picture which kitchen/fridge it was that I sullied so. I don't even recall if the original intent was to write something so pornographic.

The original page is pretty much one endless un-punctuated string of words. I'm punctuating and spacing things for slightly easier reading. Okay... here we go...

May I wear you like sweat?

Smear your bed pie all over my naked animal apparatus as I explore the steaming skin beach which lies above your blushing ocean.

Let me seep into the bitter perfumed peach and light the moistest of flowers ablaze with a feverish kiss of squirming pink.

I am drunk on the hot champagne of your luscious woman rain.

I will moan wild delirious music that pierces the liquid night when your sacred tongue meat poisons my screaming dirty lust candy, and a bath of juicy joy celebrates down those long icy fingers.

You think it felt like angel milk, playing a symphony on your hand.

Breathe the languid mist of our black velvet gardens.

Swim in a sea of a thousand arms and legs.

Your lathered love parts rusting beneath me.

Whisper when its time to change the TV.

Yes. All those words are ones I have in my collection of fridge poetry magnets.

Leviathan - A Short Piece of Fiction

2010-03-11T21:07:00.000-08:00

I wrote this about a year and a half ago. It's an odd little thing that I've been told borders on poetry and is harder than hell to truly understand.

I'm kind of of the "so what?" mind set. I wrote this one for me first - anyone else is a bonus. I know what I was shooting for and I captured it for my own needs... even if it is a bit obtuse for general consumption.

You can love it. You can hate it. Neither you nor I has to make excuses about it.

LEVIATHAN
She alone humbly knew that it had been more time than they had songs for, since the Ancient-voices of From-above had first been heard. How long had they played? There was no knowing. Soon there would be no knowing when the Ancient-voices had last sung with them.

Time - measured by life. Lives. Lives in turn by knowing, by lore, by wisdom. Full of wisdom, deep into time.

There were only songs for those who lived, and for those who were gone but had lived while those still alive were already birthed.

There were those who came before that. But their song was One. Their individual songs forgotten. Forgotten except for the songs intoned by those vain with wisdom. Vanity was such heroic shame. To know yourself to be so wise that you could compose a song for the ages… immoral.

Those who had heard the Last-song From-above had lived while she was alive, and no other alive had emerged, had swam, had abided as deep into time as she.

Those who heard the Last-song had sung to her about strange melodies that came from those who had once lived From-above. Inscrutable songs played by the Ancient-voices of From-above when those of deep wisdom – as she now was - had been shallow, as she had been when those then of deep wisdom sung for her.

To be shallow again. To embrace the freedom of imagination that time would fill with wisdom. To dream. To play at being one who heroically sacrificed great humility to compose a song for the ages. She recalled the frivolity of composing trite melodies to herself, to her head, yet never intoning, singing, sharing. Not one new song was composed in a generation, let alone by one so shallow. As she grew wise she would see those dreams for what they were, not heroism. Shame, abase, disgrace. Shallow naiveté.

From-above. Where breath came from.

A place where she and her kind could go only briefly - a fleeting moment before crashing back to the substance of the world. It was glorious. A brief surge into outer space, before the great Compelling drew one back as though the Compelling itself knew that there was nothing for them out there.

Nothing but death.

Soon she would die from great accumulation of cognition. She was wise. Very wise. She knew how decrepit she must look to those whose lives did not run so deep as hers. She recalled those who had been this wise when her life was shallow. Those who had heard the Last-song. Those who she alone had a song for, but when she was gone, when she became one who had lived while those alive were alive… then their song would be the song of the One. Timeless. A duration lost.

She was the last wise enough to sing their song. The song, the archive, the science. The last who dove so deep in time. When she was gone, they would no longer know when the Ancient-voices had last been heard.

The song of the Ancient-voices had been bereft of true meaning, that was known. Nonsense. But there had been an understanding.

Long before. In the time of the song of the One, there had been great terror. The Terror.

Those From-above had come to draw them one at a time to outer space. Not for the brevity that the great Compelling allowed, but forever. For death.

There was a song – a variation on the song of the One - that told of the Terror.

A wise one whose life ran at the same depth as the Terror had sacrificed humility, to compose the song that explained, that told, that warned, of the Terror and sing it for all to remember.

The Ancient-voices, it was sung, came as an apology, an appeal, an instruction. For the duration that they sang, the voices had told them – promised them – that everything had changed.

But those who came From-above were now part of the One.

The last who had heard their nonsense melody were gone, and when she was gone, they too would be the remotest memory.

It saddened her.

Their voice may have had no meaning, but the intention, the understanding, the song had… that should not be lost.

Perhaps someday it would be understood. Perhaps those of the Yet-to-come – the young, the future, the foolish – may see a purpose in the song. Perhaps what it said might tell them what had become of those of From-above. Where they had gone and what their departure had meant. It was too important.

There needed to be a song.

A song that would mean everything she thought about the Ancient-voices.

There had not been a new song since those who lived the Terror had become part of the One. It was to sacrifice great humility to intone a new song.

Only the wisest could dare. For all others it was folly. Only the wisest could know enough to compose a new history, to build a new song in the language.

To sing a new song, it was sung, one must know that the song to be sung would be the most important melody one would ever sing.

To intone a new song was to enact despicable pride. But some things must be known. Each of the One who sacrificed great humility had recognized that they alone remained whose wisdom ran so deep into time as to be able to compose the song that must be sung. Each in turn had realized the price of hubristic heroism had fallen upon them. The decision, the choice, the dilemma to compose and sing or lose the knowledge, lore, wisdom was the burden left to those who alone swam deepest into time.

So, heroically, she embraced the dreams of the shallow and she sang.

A Missed Post... see note.

2010-03-06T10:22:00.001-08:00

NOTE: I just found this, unpublished, in my drafts. No idea why it didn't get published then. I suppose I thought it wasn't finished and then forgot to get back to it. No idea how I would have completed it, so I'm posting it now (You, December, are over 15 months old now.) on the date it was originally saved as.

Hi.

By the time you read this, there is so much that you will be taking for granted that I am only just now wrapping my head around... like the most basic fact that I am your father.

This time yesterday you were still very much an abstraction.

You, as I am confident you will know, were not part of the plan. I've said it a dozen times now that if a person was to pick the day they were to find out that they were going to be a parent, you would never pick a day in the first week after moving into a new one bedroom apartment with your partner. But just because you weren't part of the plan doesn't mean that you aren't now, or aren't already cherished - your Mother is a different person when talking about you, and you aren't even born yet.
We were very deliberate about making sure we wanted you in our lives. About four weeks ago, just before the Vancouver 2010 Olympics - which I suspect are always going to be connected our memories as being a part of our lives with you, your Mom and I, after weeks of consideration stood together under Burrard Bridge and I said something that we both already knew, but had yet to actually say out loud to one another.
"We're going to do this, aren't we?"
"Yes. Yes, we are."
We hugged each other and kissed, and that was that.

But still it didn't quite seem real to me. Despite all the pregnancy symptoms that your Mom is going through, it could have been confused with an unfortunately timed illness. Of course I knew the truth, but it was hard to really wrap my head around.

Yesterday afternoon was the first time you really felt like a reality. It was the first ultrasound.

The technician put the wand down on your Mom's belly and swooped it left only the tiniest amount and, bang - there you were. Face to face for the first time. I hadn't expected that she'd find you on the very first try - that may have been naive.
You are going to have to forgive me this, it's a sentiment I've heard ad nauseum in my life. While imagination can come close, there is in fact no way of understanding such a moment until you've lived it.

There you were, my child. Our child. No idea whether you are a boy or a girl; whether you have your Mom's icy-blue eyes, or my so-brown-they're-nearly-black? To quote from Firefly - "I wonder who is in there?" But none of that really matters. There you were. Undeniably real.

The Olympic Hangover Begins

2010-03-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

With the dust settling from the 2010 games, I can see from here that the enormous Canada flag has been taken down from Athlete's Village, Abbott Street appears as though it may be hours away from being open to through traffic, and I suspect that at least in Vancouver - if not nation wide - there has been a record level of absenteeism this morning; there is little doubt that Canada brought it's Eh! game to Vancouver over the past two and a half weeks.

There was much political anxiety leading up to the games; protesters variously got their message out, looked like fools, caused despicable violence and for the most part shortly sat down and shut up. The "Olympic Tent Village" (Heard of it? Yeah, it didn't get much attention after their first night.) is visible from the window where I sit and write this. Last night the police were well in evidence around them. I bet the protestors will tell you the police were holding them back... I suspect the police were in fact making sure somone was there to protect them. Had the protesters even tried to raise their voice anywhere near Robson and Granville last night they probably would have been torn limb from limb - if the ecstatic crowd could have been convinced to look.

We should never forget the luge tragedy that preceeded the opening ceremonies, but neither that tragedy, nor the death of a VANOC bus driver, nor the loss of Joannie Rochette's mother should dampen the overall sense of Canadian victory that has been sparked by the 2010 games. As it stands, they have all made up part of the greater narrative that has concluded gloriously.

Premature declarations from Blighty that the Vancouver games were the "worst games ever"; scoffing from competing countries about Canada's "jingoistic arrogance" and "pathetic, ineffectiveness" (most loudly from Americans); and grumpy Russians, unhappy that things weren't going their way, only served to spur Canada onwards defiantly.

John Furlong's clunky French could not deflate the power of his words. I haven't personally had much to say for his ability to speak publically. His opening ceremonies speech was dull and cliched, but he could not have said it better last night when he defined our golden bookends: "Alexandre, your first Gold Medal gave us all permission to feel like and behave like champions. Our last one will be remembered for generations." The narrative of Bilodeau's medal winning performance was fantastic on the day - our first gold medal on Canadian soil. How naive we were. Before the dust had settled we would have heard our anthem played more times than any country in these or any winter games, and that last gold medal... "Henderson Scores!" is no longer the call behind the greatest goal in our country's history.

From my apartment in Gastown, these games were a success. Listening to my firends who were working on the inside, they were a success. Walking down Granville Street last night before and after the closing ceremonies - there is little doubt that the people who came to Vancouver and those who merely "came downtown" thought it was a success.

People came to Canada during these games and we brought Canada to the world.

We opened the games by showing the world the Canada that truly is. The one that lives behind the cliches. We kicked a lot of sporting ass during the games - I shant belabour that point more than I already have elsewhere. By any report I have seen, we were excellent hosts. And when all was said and done, we winked. From bringing out Catriona LeMay Doane to (finally) light her pillar of the olympic cauldron, to the over-the-top march of Canadian iconography with the cliche's literally inflated to absurd proportions we demonstrated one of the greatest of Canadian cliches - we don't really take ourselves that seriously.

Yeah, I cringe at the oatmealy uninterestingness of Nickleback; Avril Lavigne is only a little ahead of the curve for her category of teener-pop; and K-OS is not my kind of music at all... but honestly, I have to recognize that Spirit of the West, Rush and The Hip would have been seen as 'old hat.' Neil Young did a fine job of filling the rock dinosaur hole. Indeed, I've never much liked Neil Young, but he was perfect last night.

The numbers will follow. No doubt there will be reports about how the grotesque over-spending is going to take years to recover from. It may be true. But I don't think there can be any doubt that these games have been far more successful than could have been expected. We may even look back in future years at the recession that made the lead up to these games so financially painful and declare that in the long run, the success of the games gave us a leg-up in the slow climb out. I am no economist. This could go either way, but had you asked me before the games, I would have not have been able to tell you with a straight face that a positive outcome was financially possible.

Vancouver, Whistler and Richmond respectively will get the direct legacy of the Athlete's Village, the Sliding Centre, the Olympic Centre and the Oval; as well as the various other indirect items that were piggy-backed onto the games - the Canada Line, the new Sea-to-Sky highway, the Vancouver Convention Centre. It's going to be a long time before our taxes catch up with those. But, I doubt Vancouver (and by extension, Canadian) tourism could possibly have benefited more, both immediately or in the long term.

Canadian sport will never be the same. If you'll forgive the allusion, Calgary was a shot in the arm, but Vancouver will be a full-on massive steroid program. Children who were inspired by Calgary Games athletes competed here and won. In the years to come we will see the effects of this Olympics on our youth.

Canadian spirit has shifted too. I don't know that there is any price that can be put upon a feeling of pride in your country. May we maintain a sense of humility as we move forward, but the patriotism displayed on the streets of Vancouver since February 12th feels very very good. That may be why Neil Young was so perfect last night. "Long May You Run."

How's that "How's that 'own the podium' initiative working out, Canada?" snarkiness working out for you Brian?

2010-02-28T22:23:00.000-08:00

The cherry on the cake.

And really, even without the cherry, it was pretty great cake.

Own the Podium - the numbers to watch...

2010-02-26T23:34:00.000-08:00

Two days to go.

Canada currently has tied it's highest gold medal count in any olympics (the 1984 Summer Olympics, which were notably boycotted by the USSR & allies).

We currently have the highest number of gold medals at THIS olympics.

We are three gold medals shy of the highest number of gold medals ANY country has ever won in a Winter Games.

We have surpassed our second highest total (17 in Salt Lake City) Winter Olympics count, and are three medals shy of our highest medal count of 24 (in Turin).

We are guaranteed a medal in each of men's curling, hockey and men's team pursuit (skating) - silver or gold. (In other words we ARE going to tie our highest medal count, and if we were to take gold in all three we'd tie the highest gold count ever.)

In addition to this we are sitting second in 4 man bobsleigh after two runs - another promising medal...

And there is still the men's alpine slalom; men's parallel giant slalom to be run.

I'm going to have to say it again... go fuck yourself Brian.

When coming in third is better than second

2010-02-26T10:34:00.000-08:00

It would hardly be the first time I thought about this, but watching the medals get awarded for Women's Hockey, it struck me again.

Watching the American team last night, they were (with one notable exception) subdued to glum about winning a silver medal.

It's a SILVER medal in the Olympics. I'd give my left kidney to have a reasonable shot at winning one for myself. But, no... a few of those ladies were downright despondent. Watching the medals be put around their necks and seeing their lips say "thank-you" while their eyes said "whatever" had me thinking that it's really unfortunate that the sheer numbers of olympians on the ice make putting off the medal ceremony to the official vicotry ceremony prohibitive. Just a few hours of separation from the game would allow the silver winning team a bit of perspective.

Consistently at these ceremonies you have two teams who have won in order to get their medal, and one that has lost and lost only minutes earlier. As a result, Silver is a losers medal.

The Finnish team were downright giddy getting their bronze. The Canadians were also delighted - though considering some of them were getting their third gold medal in a row you can hardly blame the veterans a certain level of complacency. The juxtaposition undermines the triumph of the moment.

It seems to me that if there were a day or even just a few hours between the game and the medal ceremony that the silver medalists would have time to re-frame their immediate loss as the overall win that it is.

For now I'm crossing my fingers that each of the Canadian Curling teams & the Men's Hockey team don't have to deal with the disappointment of winning the loser medal, and if they do that they see it as a victory.

"How's that 'own the podium' initiative working out, Canada?"

2010-02-21T23:48:00.000-08:00

The answer is "Go fuck yourself America"! (And Brian - though I have yet to get to that.)

Perhaps you haven't noticed that your population is 309 million, while ours is 34? Do the fucking math.

And... the Own the Podium initiative was intended to focus on getting a higher medal count than ever before. We aren't there yet, but the games aren't over yet either. And even if we don't... the majority of the ire against the initiative comes from the country that brought us "Mission Accomplished" - to say nothing of the manufactured fracas that built up to that piece of bullshit propaganda.

We may not get a record high medal count - it may even be the writing on the wall already - but the issue for me is that some ass-wipes from the USA think that that failure is really relevant and more importantly; significant.

Canada is taking shit right now for - god forbid - trying to be competitive.

It's the fucking Olympics!

We've already done better than we ever have on home soil. So guess what? We fucking win! "Mission Accomplished." Game over asshole! Oh, the asshole in question is a minor-league-famous podcaster named Brian who posted the title of this post as his Facebook profile tonight.

BBC has also vilified Canada for (oh shame!) the Own the Podium initiative. Gee, we must really be dickheads for trying to out do... who?... OURSELVES! How un-Canadian! This IS a competition. Why should we sit back and simply let other people win? The entire premise is ridiculous. Yes, you are right, we are such jerks, trying to set our sights higher and putting more effort into advancing our position - no real country would ever try and do that.

Seriously you guys (And Brian), go fuck yourselves. Yeah, I'm saying 'fuck' a lot. But that simply a reflection of how childish your dispertions are.

I had a totally civil and awesome dinner with an American couple (total strangers) two nights ago who felt no need to dispense contempt. We were watching curling and we could have cast our lack of respect for how poorly the US team is doing in curling... (the worst.... period) but that was totally un-necessary. We had an awesome night with them.

So...

I really hope that Canada still manages to have our highest medal count ever - we only fell off the pace yesterday and a turn around is TOTALLY within sight. But even if it doesn't, we had already - by day three - out performed our previous medal aspirations by getting a gold... FOUR by now. That would be the equivalent of 40 for the US population. We are doing fine, thank you, how are you faring against the count of 40? (Answer = 7 = gofuckyourselfbrian.)

...or is this a US v. Canada hockey thing?

Yeah, you beat us today. Whatever. When did you last win the olympics? Oh... that was when I was ten. If you do better than us on the podium for hockey then 'fucking-yay for you.' But until then the answer is still: gofuckyourselfbrian. This IS still the preliminary round... and that means SFA. It is by name and definition, preliminary.

The Only Card in Vancouver

2010-02-19T09:38:00.000-08:00

This occurred to me the other day, and watching the curling - the commercials, specifically - just now reminded me.

You may know that Visa is the official credit card of the 2010 Olympic games. If you are watching the games, Morgan Freeman is reminding you every 20 minutes.

It really is the only card. Not even debit is usable in olympic venues. Even theATMs will only take Visa cash advances. I grudgingly conceed the credit card sponsorship thing, but extending it right down to ATMs seems a bit extreme to me. At least they still take cash, so planning will avoid the issue for anyone who feels the need to fight the power... mind you I suppose those sorts aren't going to the events anyhow.

Back to Morgan Freeman; that is the thought I had that I wanted to share....

Is it my imagination, or does the wording and phrasing at the end of the commercials seem to subtly imply that indeed there is no other card accepted in the city?

"The only card accepted at Vancouver [insert tiny enjambed pause] 2010 Olympic Games."*

It's that tiny pause and the eschewing of the gramatically obliged "the" that do it for me. I know it's mostly imaginary, but now that I've heard it I can't not notice it.

*Despite my wrye comment about Morgan Freeman coming on every 20 minutes, it's not true & to make matters more difficult, there are other variations of the commercial. It took me forever to be listening when the right one came on so I could fact check my quote.

Bilod-AU!!!

2010-02-15T16:37:00.000-08:00

A short one this time...

I admit that I leapt to my feet shouting victoriously when Alexandre Bilodeau won Canada it's first Olympic Gold on home soil, but a day later...

It's really nothing more than a Gold - cool and pride worthy as it is. More than anything its a monkey off our national back. I even felt pretty much inevitable that it would happen during these games - or is that just me? Its good it happened early in the games so that one more level of pressure is off our athletes.

A couple of side bars:

It was almost as sweet to see that prick Dale Begg-Smith pout his Silver medal win. What a knob.

As of this writing, we have four medals in three (still incomplete) days - which is roughly on track to tieing our biggest medal count. That is slightly misleading as more medals get awarded later in the competition.

You are a bunch of fucking ass-hats, not "Heart Attacks."

2010-02-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

Well, that didn't take long.

Morning of day one and the protestors got violent.

What the fuck do they really think they are accomplishing? Their message - such as it was - has now been entirely undermined by the extremist approach.

Yesterday I went down to Victory Square to see part of the last of the Torch Relay. Protestors blocked the runner shouting "No Olympics on Stolen Native Lands" - which is such a load of crap, these protestors have apparently not heard of the four host nations... who all agreed to the olympics.

The police handled things well. They simply lined up between the procession and the protestors and the relay went around their sit-in... as the runner went past me (I overheard the police plans and thus was able to reposition myself very well), it became apparent that by design (having forseen the likelihood of a protest of this manner at that location) or accident the torch bearer at that location was in fact a particularly jubilant native fellow. It rather undermined the protest's weight - even if it was a valid complaint.

Yesterday's protestors looked kind of foolish, but they were nothing worse than that.

I believe that protest absolutely can be valid. But as soon as you are stepping on the rights of others - doing harm to them or their property - you are crossing a line. That happened this morning.

A group of protesters passed under our window this morning - marching up Hastings St. As they got to the intersection of Abbott, a by-stander who stepped up and shouted back at the protestors. What was shouted was inaudible at the 24th floor. A black-clad protestor actually pushed the man down to the street. The police at that time did nothing. I assume this was the same group that would eventually break windows downtown and that can be seen in the video linked above.

Actions like this deflate the opportunity of all protests to have an effect. Anarchy is NOT an effective platform for change. It is merely a process for unthinking reactionaries to demonstrate their lack of appreciation for the democracy they do have.

Here is what I have to say to the protestors:
Yes, you have the right to dissent. You do not have a right to hurt other people or their property. If you really had the courage of your convictions you'd protest with your face, not a balaclava. If you aren't willing to stand behind your actions you should really take a good look inward at your motivations. From where I stand you look like a bunch of punks who want an excuse to break stuff, not like anyone who really wants to be taken seriously. If you are so smart that you are convinced you are right, then you ought to be smart enough to make your argument in a cogent fashion that doesn't require violence. Your approach is no different than that of school-yard bullies. You want the world to know that this is your world too, but in the process you are forgetting that it is OURS too. In so doing you separate yourslf from those of us who you could have counted as allies in a valid cause in a legititimate demonstration. But as it stands, I will kindly request that you get the fuck off my side.

UPDATE: Here is the VPD's take on the incident. and... Lot's of Pictures

Next Up on this Channel - the 2010 Olympics!

2010-02-08T22:46:00.000-08:00

The Vancouver Olympics are practically upon us - tonight I went and saw the opening ceremonies dress rehearsal. It was very cool, but that's all I'm going to say about it. They do request your discretion and so forth. I'm not a big olympics booster, but I'm not a dickhead either.

I'm not sure what they could say or do if I were to announce that "Anne Murray jumps out of a giant cake and raps Snowbird but changed the lyrics to 'Snowboard'." [NOTE: That does not happen in the ceremony... or rather, maaaaybe it happens, maybe it doesn't, maybe something similar happens.] But I just don't see the point in giving anything away. Suffice to say the stage craft is predictably awe inspiring.

Getting into BC Place was reasonably simple - security wasn't that bad. But getting away from the building was a bit nuts. The route to get away - ultimately to the same entrance we arrived at - was long and circuitous, and despite being a neighbourhood that I am quite familiar with (I have worked mere blocks from the stadium for over five years I bike and walk around and past it regularly) I spent an awfully large amount of the time trying to grok where the hell I was being directed to and whether that was going to be good or bad for getting home.

Get this! For those people taking the Expo/Millenium Skytrain line away from the venue - you will actually end up being directed to Main Street station. If you are unfamiliar with Vancouver, there is also a station named Stadium Station. It is named Stadium because it is the closest station to the Stadium. Main Street Station is a 10 minute walk further down the line. To be fair, once you've navigated the labyrinthine security course away from the venue the difference between going to Main Street and Stadium is nominal... but it still seems broken.

I've said this in a dozen places already, I did not vote for the Olympics. Indeed, I voted against them in the plebicite. But they are here and I have every intention of enjoying what my tax dollars are paying for, and every intention of making the experience as pleasant for our international guests as I can. The latter is the best route to getting the most out of it for the residents of Vancouver - the time for protesting is essentially past. There will come a time again when we should clearly lay out cautionary tales of how Vancouver has been ass-fucked by the IOC. But that is not how we will build tourism over the next few weeks, that is how we will undermine our position of (grudging) opportunity.

Friday night, Jodie and I went out and witnessed some of the free delights of the Olympic event. We saw the majesty of Vectorial Elevation and shared a very special moment. It's going to be a very interesting few weeks, that is for certain.

A Big Week to be Me

2010-01-10T20:25:00.000-08:00

It’s a crazy week. It may even be the most chock-full of changes in my life... no doubt it’s in the running. We did a cast and crew screening of “Beast” yesterday. Tuesday (not really a change, but adding to the chaos) I’m hosting the Western Canadian Skeptical Smackdown. Thursday, Jodie and I move in together, and shortly thereafter I begin working from home on a permanent basis. As if that wasn’t enough – Vancouver itself is just over a month away from the Winter Olympic Games (which I’ll be writing about very soon) and our new home is crammed right down near ground zero of the games – about three blocks from GM Place.

By any measure it’s an exciting time and an opportunity to redefine aspects of my life. Indeed parts of it are redefining themselves whether I do anything more to help it along or not. I’m looking forward to having a gym handy, and to be able to cook in a spectacular kitchen on a regular basis. (It is so much easier to cook for two than one.)

On top of it all, I’m leaving things out. There are a handful of things – movie related things, not related directly to “Beast...” – that are on the boil. Indeed a few of them are HOT on the boil. I’ll definitely mention them here if/when I can. I just want to earmark this point in time – so that I can later connect back and say “See! See!!! That was a ridiculously transformative time in my life!”

Stirring the Emotional Embers at NT Air

2009-12-21T13:01:00.000-08:00

Watching that video for the first time caused me to gasp – even though I knew from the news what I was about to see.

My Dad worked at NT Air for about 40 years, retiring just under two years ago.

I underestimated just how much that building was a piece of my identity until last night when I watched this. I’ve walked through that hanger more times than I could possibly count.

When I was in kindergarten my class did a field trip to the airport and we got to ride on a plane (never leaving the ground) and get a tour of the hangar and look at other planes. Most of those kids had never been on a plane before – if was a different time – though by then I was already taking them for granted. It was simply what Dad did.

Though I’d need to work with the schedule of their various charters, any time I’ve gone to Prince George in the years since I moved away I almost always would deadhead on one of their flights (sometimes running mail, other times shipping forestry personnel and equipment, sometimes riding with mining workers being shuttled home for their off-cycles) Dad would be waiting on the tarmac right outside of the building – pretty much exactly where the collapsing sheet metal falls in the video.

We’d walk on through the hanger and into the office like we owned it (indeed, Dad was a minority owner for a number of years) where I’d have a coke or coffee while Dad tied up whatever work he was doing. We’d possibly run an armload of mail to the postal plant or stop and do a company deposit at the bank on the way home.

When Dad retired in February 2007 the company flew a plane load of family and Vancouver based co-workers to Prince George for the party. The trip home would be my last time in the building. NT Air had put the name of their longest serving employee on one of their planes. We went early and took pictures of the plane.

I was going to be there again this coming Wednesday. But now that’s not going to happen. Our flight up for Christmas was cancelled – understandably. We now have to bus. But we will be there to fly home on Monday.

I’ve seen pictures of the blacked pile of ice covered debris that is where the building once stood. I’m not looking forward to standing beside it. I’m not sure how I’m going to feel. I’ve been looking forward to going home for Christmas for the first time in years (and for the last time in Dad & Kay’s house – which has recently been sold), but I can’t help but feeling that it’s going to be a bit different.

But no matter how I feel, someone else is going to feel worse. It appears as though, despite initial indications, that someone was caught in the fire. It’s going to be hard to not think about that family.

Movin' on up...!

2009-12-12T13:48:00.000-08:00

By now this is more clarification than news...

About three weeks ago Jodie and I had joined some friends out at the Cambie for drinks. As the night wore on I mentioned in a moment of drunken weakness that perhaps we should start thinking about moving in together.

At the time I was thinking in relatively long-view terms, thinking that I wanted to be 'over the hump' with the film and that we'd want to wait 'til after the Olympics anyhow, 'cause not only will vacancies probably go up then, but who would want to try moving during the months immediately surrounding the games. I wasn't even really considering the possibility of moving earlier than that. The New Year would be the earliest possible really, and who would want to have to deal with moving at Christmas - especially as we are going to my Dad's for the holiday.

We talked about it more seriously a few days later - when we didn't have a few pints in us and she pretty much echoed all of my thoughts on the timing. We decided that 'yes' we'd start looking, but we were going to be patient and casual about it.

Jodie's idea of 'casual' surprised me and was less casual than mine. She started looking regularly at ads, and sending me them. While I did mention my surprise at how she dove in, I did nothing to stop her. We both re-affirmed that we weren't rushing. That we'd find the place that we loved first before giving notice and eat the extra cost - and not find ourselves desperate to find a place. Patience was the order of the day.

Then about two weeks ago, Jodie found about three places in short order - all in Gastown - that seemed interesting. Before we looked at any of them we agreed that this was all we'd do until the new year. The first one we arranged to look at was in the new Woodwards' building.

The short version of the story is that we never looked at the other two. To hell with patience. To hell with avoiding moving in anywhere near Christmas. This was the right place and the right price and we knew we had to pounce.

We had done our best from the moment we first made contact to put our best face forward, doing our best to connect with the landlords from the outset and to build rapport. I mentioned that I had family who had worked in the original Woodwards' building at the perfume counter, and that on the night before they demolished the building a few years back I went and got pictures of the last sunset over Woodwards'. I had also got pictures of it the next day too. We emphasized (genuinely) that we are looking for a place for the long-term. "Til we buy or die" I said.

The day after they tore down Woodwards, this old fellow was heart-broken.

I hope he's still around to see what they have done with it.

When we left, I think we had both decided that we had to put our hats in the ring on this place. We did go and talk about it for good measure, but I don't think there was much doubt in either of our minds. When we got home we emailed them immediately with "$1.49 Day - Tuesday!" as the subject line. For those of you unfamilar with Woodwards, Dollar Forty Nine Day was a regular Tuesday promotion in the old department store.

When Deanna emailed back, the first sentence of her email was "I love your subject line!" It was at that point that I figured we were the first choice.

Sure enough, less than a day later we got the word. It was ours.

So, let me clarify something that should be obvious if you are reading this - we are renting - leasing actually. Some people took from my status updates that we'd bought. Not so. It is more of a commitment (a lease) than I've ever entered into though.

The building is pretty amazing. The apartment is smaller than either of us would ideally like, but not to the point where we were scared off. Indeed I don't think there are any one bedroom layouts in the building that are bigger. The balcony adds rougly 30% to the square-footage, though that will be a summer thing. The view is amazing! I'll post pictures once I've got them. And even better, it's all heritage buildings in that neighbourhood, so the view is going nowhere.

The residents' communal ammenities are better than any other place I've ever known of. There are common things like a roof-top deck, a gym, and a party room. But there is a media room (kinda common), a lounge, a library (a LIBRARY!?!), wireless internet and others.

On top of all that, there is a London Drugs, MY bank, a coffee cafe and of course the new Woodwards' Food Floor - re-opened after 15 years. (I went to the first $1.49 Day this past Tuesday to buy Woodwards' famous peanut butter.) And we are a five or so minute walk from Waterfront Station, making getting virtually anywhere by transit as efficient as imaginable.

On top of it all - a teeny bit of kismet - the closest pub* is the very place where the discussion first began - The Cambie.

I'm ever so slightly anxious about leaving the neighbourhood I love, and the home I've lived in the second longest in my life, but I'm excited about Gastown, exited about the apartment, the building and of course, Jodie.

We move in on January 15th. I'm packing already.

*Turns out I'm wrong. The current closest pub is The Cambie. There is actually going to be one closer. Seeing as The Cambie actually sits in the shadow of the Woodwards building, getting closer actually requires being in the complex - which it will be.

For the Record, BC Ferries aren't so Bad

2009-10-14T12:27:00.000-07:00

I was away for the Thanksgiving weekend and for my birthday.

Jodie and I decided ages ago to go to Victoria and just kind of get away and relax.

For the most part we were successful. Sleeping in for four days in a row was awesome. Thanksgiving dinner at my cousin Greg's place was excellent.

But so many friends on Facebook and elsewhere have asked about how the ferries were.

Well, we did get lucky going to Victoria, and I'm glad we did not only for the immediate hassle, but also because it meant it was something we didn't concern ourselves with all weekend, ruining our R&R.

Friday morning when Jodie went on line to check the bus-schedule I on a whim suggested that she also check the ferries. She scoffed, but before too long the thought nagged at her and she checked anyhow. Soon she was standing in the doorway of the bedroom incredulous that "I knew".

The ferry we'd been planning to catch was indeed cancelled due to the engine fire that anyone listening to the news in Southern BC this past week now knows about.

We simply delayed our departure by an hour and had no problem getting on the boat. The boat was quite full, but otherwise we really didn't notice a thing amiss.

Our return trip on Monday was different. We didn't realize until we got to the terminal how bad it was. We had managed to catch the overflow bus - which was not at all full. Not even close. But when we got off the bus, the line up for walk-ons went out of the terminal and a third of the way up the car-park. We got in line and watched as it more than doubled behind us. We missed the next ferry by about 2 to 3 hundred people. The next ferry was cancelled. As we were buying tickets for the next ferry the fire alarm in the terminal went off and we had to evacuate the building for twenty minutes.

Unluckily for BC Ferries the media showed up to cover the length of the walk-on line up just as the fire-alarm went off.

When we were eventually let back in we had to sit out the next two hours in a cramped space on the floor of the waiting room. We managed to get seats on the ferry, but plenty of other people were lined up along the walls on the floor. Our bus into town was also packed to the limit. It was unfortunate and undid a fair bit of our weekend of relaxation.

This morning I've been catching up on a bunch of podcasts that I would have normally listened to over the weekend, but didn't. Amongst them are a number of newscasts, and time after time the coverage of the ferry issues were accompanied by interviews with disgruntled passengers declaring how ridiculous it was and how poorly BC Ferries was handling it and how badly prepared they were for it.

I feel a need to put in my two bits. BULL. SHIT.

For starters, the passengers around us in line, in the waiting room and on the boat were all in good if resigned spirits, as were the BC Ferries employees. When the fire alarm broke out in the terminal (it wasn't actually a fire, just smoking hyraulic fluid) after doing what they needed to do (evacuate us and wait for the pros) they were laughing at the outrageous misfortune... what else was there to do?
Un-prepared? Well on a certain level - yeah of course they were un-prepared. They hadn't exactly planned on losing the biggest ship in the fleet at the beginning of the biggest ferry traffic weekend of the year. And because it was the biggest weekend of the year, they already had everything running at maximum capacity. So how exactly do they pick up the slack, other than do exactly what they did - run the ferries late into the night to pick up the slack.
There were customers mad that their preferred boarding passes weren't being honoured. Well, to my understanding the right to suspend them is actually written on them. This is a measure that has never been utilized before, so suck it up. Besides, there were so many people at the ferry that in order to run the logistics of letting someone through the line up would have been an extra level of chaos. So get over it, we were all inconvenienced. Most of us took it with a sense of amusement.

The angry travellers were a significant minority. I was there. The media likes the apparent controversy.

Geeks Win Nobel Prize... no really.

2009-10-06T22:09:00.000-07:00

This was so cool that I had to do my second post in a single day on Skeptic North.

In fact, I almost had to arm wrestle fellow SN-blogger, Kimberly Hebert for the right to do so. Willard Boyle is from the Maritimes, so it's in her region, but the technology is key to modern film-making, so it's kinda in my domain too.

Luckily I spoke up first and called dibs. 'Cause I don't know how that arm wrestle would have worked out - my reach isn't that good.

This American Life... Returns to the Giant Pool of Money

2009-09-28T12:48:00.001-07:00

If you've been reading along over this past year, you know that I am really enamoured with This American Life's ongoing coverage of the financial crisis.

I've actually lost count – I think this is show four... but it may be five.

With a little luck we're truly on the other side by now... but if you're thinking that, the first segment of this new episode will be sobering.

An Open Letter to Eddie Vedder

2009-09-26T13:22:00.001-07:00

Dear Eddie,

Way back in the mists of time, 1993, when I was part of the Juanabees comedy troupe we once received a piece of fan mail written in about six different colours of highlighter-pen. It gushed about us and thanked us for making her summer so much fun and how she could hardly wait for our next tour. We didn't get many fan letters – I could probably count them all on my fingers – but this one stood out for one single, oddly presumptuous question and request. The young lady asked "If [we] knew Pearl Jam" and would we "please tell Eddie Vedder I love him?"

I wrote back – I answered all of our fan mail with as much whimsy as I could, we did have a reputation to uphold. I told her that "No, we don't know Pearl Jam, but next time I'm golfing with Soundgarden I'll have Chris pass on the message." That of course was a lie. I have never golfed with Soundgarden.

Fast forward to last night. I went to your show at GM Place. It was fantastic. Top ten of all time for me. And I have a sneaking suspicion that it was a pretty special one for you guys too. You pretty much told us that, but it was more than your words. It was more than the three encores that lasted longer than the main show. There was a moment during Rearviewmirror where Jeff Ament looked up at you and shared a look that I interpreted as something to the effect of "I am having the greatest fucking time, buddy – you too? Yeah I thought so."

And it was totally deserved.

I had a transcendent moment during Evenflow. That's the song that brought me in back in 1992. It's special for me. I recall those days when even for me as a performer with occasional bouts of fan-adulation that even I was prone to looking up at a stage and imbuing a demi-god image upon the rock star belting it out for us on the floor. I never actually made it to a Pearl jam concert back in those days, but had I it would have been no different. But last night as Mike, Jeff, Matt and Stone noodle away, you walked to the back corner of the stage, not far from where I sat, and you smiled and waved at the crowd. It was a far cry from those fame-hating days of yore. (Which incidentally I can appreciate to an extent. Even on our small level, I found I was constantly uncomfortable with the fan's intimate knowledge of who I was, when I was at an utter disadvantage with them.) No, this was no longer the relationship of screaming groupies, this was a friendly exchange of accepted ritual between friends. And then you returned to the main portion of the stage and you all played on. Playing the hell out of a song that we all know you could sleep through and still bring to 95% of the same intensity. But I think that is why we, the fans, are still so appreciative of you and your side of the bargain – you still top up that last 5%. That is why from the days of grunge, you are the last band standing.

Anyhow, I just wanted to say 'thanks.' Sorry I missed you at Harpo's when you were practically no-one. But I'll be back next year if you are and I'll still be standing when the lights come up. This has been a really rewarding friendship these past seventeen years, I figured that I should pass that much on seeing as I failed to tell you that "Tanya loves you."

Welcome to Post 160: A no less arbitrary benchmark than any number of rounder numbers like "100."

2009-09-14T01:03:00.000-07:00

RAMBLING LACK OF FOCUS OR UNITY WARNING

It's been a while since I've posted here about much.
I've done a fair bit of posting lately on my other blogs. (Though not so much this past week.)
Most of my attention has gone to Confessions of an Asshole Skeptic - a mix of philosphizing about process and purpose, coupled with the excercising of both. It's been fun and I've even had a couple of entries that I'm abnormally proud of.
Along the same lines, my TAM diary - The TAMaz!ng Blog - also got a bunch of attention for a while there, but I haven't written a damned thing in over two weeks 'cause I just got weary of deciphering really muddy audio. But I really ought to get back to that and finish up. Once it's done then I can turn my back on it forever... or at least until next TAM.
The Beast of Bottomless Lake production blog hasn't had much to say lately. We are in an infuriating time where we are waiting for other people to finish up their bits and it just stretches longer and longer. I really wish it were over. I love that project, but it ought to be done by now and the longer it carries on the more it hurts in various ways.
And on top of all that I've got myself involved in the inaugural project of the fledgling pan-Canadian skeptical umbrella organization. For now we are just preparing a group blog. I've got my initial post ready to go, and may do a second one before we actually launch.
That's the blogging.

Today I spent my day - going on 18 hours now - mostly working on two commercials. I had the opportunity to shoot two very low budget commercials for a crown corporation (I'll say more later, but for now it's close to my chest.) For both combined the total cast and crew was six people, and a dog. Yes we broke one of the cardinal rules and worked with animals... and it's a bit clearer why it should be avoided now, though I think we fared admirably. We had very little equipment and even less time. The rough cut of one of them is already complete, and we only started shooting around 9:30 this morning (technically yesterday morning now). Why I am I still awake? At least I have no real commitments for tomorrow.

Friday night Jodie and I went and had a picnic in Stanley Park and listened to Great Big Sea. That was sweet.

For years of my childhood the Leon Uris book Trinity sat on my parent's bookshelf. I always had the sense that it was somethign that I should read. I picked it up in a used bookstore on the North Shore last month. Jodie and I just went wandering for the day and we found ourselves in this crazy store. Our first reaction when we walked in was "Yikes! Disaster area! Leave now!" But the owner saw us walk in and greeted us with such encouragement that it was hard not to at least take a peek. We spent over an hour there. It was a disaster area, but that was part of it's charm. Much of the 'organization' of the books was extremely haphazard. There were parts of the store that could only be accessed by moving stacks of books or climbing over them. (I did neither.) Jodie found a number of books. So did I, but I limited myself to two - despite the awesome prices. I bought a copy of L.A. Confidential, which is not only one of my favourite movies of all time, but also one of my favourite books. I don't tend to keep books, but when a book is 'a favourite of all time' it deserves to be kept. At some point after I've re-read it I should write about why the magic intersection of favourite novel and movie happened with this particular adaptation - it is important to the inclusion of both in that esteemed position. I had another book... can't recall what it was... as my second book (Tailor of Panama made the short list, but I don't recall carrying it around.) until just before we left - I was already at the point of milling about waiting - I stumbled upon a previously unseen cranny. In that hidden nook, there was a copy of Trinity. I had to buy it and answer a decades old call.
It's a monster of a book - over 800 pages. I'm not a particularly fast reader, and lately I haven't had a lot of time to read. For now I'm only nominally past the 1/8th mark, but it is one heck of a read. It's tough enough for any novel to make me cry, let alone do so in the first 100 to 120 pages, but Uris's chapters about the Great Potato Famine are so heart-breaking it's... ...and the words fall short.
I suppose knowing that part of my heritage comes from that stock - people who boarded coffin ships, practically swindled into abandoning their homeland, and being among the fraction who made the crossing of the Atlantic alive only to be given a farm of peat in the prairies... though I suppose it was in a sense familiar and certainly no worse than where they left. And the people who stayed behind... egads... what a nightmare. It's in a sense ironic tha such a religiously motivated people would be put to such random peril that it would be a truly Darwinian challenge - a weeding of the weak, and strengthening of the stock. We who have descended have done so because our ancestors were such complete badasses that they survived a cultural decimation that killed half their numbers.

Half their numbers... Christ.

I am looking forward to seeing The Road this fall. It'll have to be different from the book in order to be a film. I'm very curious to see how it turns out. It had better be as bleakly-hopeful as the book. Half their numbers doesn't tell the... well, the half of it.

Okay...

A touch of Trinity, and then to sleep... providing that drunken-asshole neighbours don't start hollering again.

Further thoughts on Future Musings

2009-09-02T14:18:00.001-07:00

(Cross posted on Confessions of an Asshole Skeptic.)

Back on Monday I pre-recorded an interview for Skeptically Speaking that will air this Friday... hence the post title... I haven't publicly said the things that this post is a development of....

It was a fun interview, though plagued with technical difficulties, though if you are a regular listener of the show I should clarify that I don't mean that in the sense of how the show is infamously plagued by technical difficulties. We (by which I mean Des, the host, and I) evaded the typical difficulties by pre-taping the interview. Des is going to be at Dragon Con, so both of us would have been remote... it would have been too easy to lose both of us.
The technical details we had were more due to the fact that by not being live the pressure was off so neither of us was as 'on' as we might otherwise have been. As a result we ended up re-recording an awful lot. I even deliberately said 'fuck' once so that she would have to start again when her tongue was getting tied. We also got into a lot of laughing. I'm hoping that the final edit will be as fun as we had.

Fun or not I did have some staircase wisdom on the matter.

One of the things that we talked about was how saturated the acting community is with new-age thinking. Ugh. The answer is "Far too saturated." Which is not to say I am alone as a critical-thinker in the acting community. Whew! But lame-assed hippy-dippy earth-mother beliefs are far too common.

I've been in far too many productions with people who wanted to "share our energy" on stage. Whatever. Yeah, I know there is a rush that we get when a show is really clicking. It's a lot of fun. But that's not 'energy' - its endorphins... or some other chemical in our body. Okay, I don't personally know the exact hormone that is triggering us. Adrenaline maybe? In any case, not knowing the specifics doesn't actually make me wrong and the woo-eaters who thrive on building our collective conscious on stage correct.

I've heard it all.

The 100 monkeys theory has been brought up as an explanation for shows really working. Huh? Not only is the 100 monkeys effect bullshit in the first place, but even if it were... the cast was considerably short of 100 people. There were three of us, and sadly even if you counted the audience there were too few. But even so... how the hell do monkeys downstream learning a task through spontaneous telepathy explain actors clicking on stage? AUGH! I nearly married that woman... sometimes I am an idiot too.

I do have my own set of flakiness I admit. When I'm doing a really intense role I prefer to be left the fuck alone. I'm one of those annoying pricks who don't want to be disturbed. Don't talk to me, don't bother me with stuff that has nothing to do with what is about to happen on stage, or after the show. I also tend to live bits and pieces of the character in real life. I once played a serial killer (in a comedy, no less) for a summer, and by the end I was not a pleasant person to be around... though no bodies showed up.... yet. I played a Jew who was ostracized in Nazi Germany and I ended up ostracizing myself from the rest of the cast. I played a simple minded and insane chicken farmer... my already teetering relationship at the time didn't survive that one - though I ended up being nominated for a local award for the performance.

Once, in a particularly complex and intense show - George F. Walker's Theatre of the Film Noir - I was playing Bernard, a homosexual who had pushed his mind past the brink while narrowly surviving the Nazi occupation of Paris; one of my cast-mates decided that everyone of us should hold hands and stand quietly together through intermission in order to (you guessed it) preserve our energy. I lasted about as long as it took for him to suggest the idea. The best way for me to 'preserve my energy' was to stand in a dark corner alone and spit venom over his stupid idea. I got the impression that me walking away was all it took to trigger at least one other cast member to follow suit. (I am not entirely alone.) I took great pleasure that night in "killing" his character. Ah, method.

Amongst the worst... or best, depending on your interpretation... examples would be my first acting teacher in university, Linda Hardy, Assistant Professor and flake of top-degree. I recall a class where she told us with great reverence how important it was to the world that there were Universities that were granting doctorates of parapsychology. That it was such a coup that the paranormal had finally gained academic respectability. Is it any wonder that so many artists are woo-munchers when this is the kind of mentors they have?

I was always a little incensed that I was expected to pay money to sit in this woman's classes. We spent weeks of our first term exploring how acting through our various chakras affected our performances, and character presentation. It was this that I glancingly referenced in the Skeptically Speaking interview.

There was some severe priming going on in these exercises.
Linda would talk about our fight or flight response and then we'd "breathe through our solar-plexus chakra". The class would then walk around and respond organically to whatever was on their mind... and no one would turn their back on another unless it was to bolt to the opposite side of the room at top speed. We hardly needed any priming beyond our natural 17 year-old associations when she told us to "breathe through our coccyx" and before you knew it class members were rubbing up against each other in the biggest theatre-school cliche since Fame. Who was I to scoff at that particular part of the exercise? It was ridiculous.

I just did a quick back of the napkin calculation. If I took the same course today I would be paying nearly $300 worth of my tuition to play imaginary games for the first third of my semester. What a rip-off!

And what practical purpose were we to put this to?

"Well, dearies..." (I am channelling Linda through my asshole chakra right now - that's where the energy for total crap comes from.) "...say for example you were playing the part of Prospero, a richly spiritual and wise man. You could channel your performance through your brow and crown chakras to bring into your spirit the energy of magic and intellect that form the core of his being."
Yeah... or you could act.

"Using your chakras you can bring the embodiment of any character you desire into yourself and find their voice within you."
So why then, Linda, is it that every time you act you perform in the vapid and shallow voice of the lead character in a Shirley MacLaine auto-biography?

I think next time I get cast in something, I'm going get my inspiration from science to create a performance of infinite depth and mind-boggling complexity by basing my character on the Mandelbrot Set.

Postscript: I actually did a lot of reading into math when at university. I have an incident seared into my memory where when playing some kind of "Who am I now?" type party game at one of our theatre department parties that someone in the department got angry when I 'was' Rene Levesque. "You can't always be obscure mathematicians Kennedy!" For those non-Canadians and for those too young to recall who didn't click the link, Rene Levesque was a (pretty much, THE) prominent Quebec Sovereigntist leader of the 70s.... sigh no joke that you have to explain is funny....
In the previous round I actually had been Benoit Mandelbrot, so apart from not knowing her Canadian history she wasn't exactly wrong.

Perhaps they Haven't Noticed this is Our Province...

2009-08-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

They're all too ready to ignore us 99% of the time, but here we go...

Toronto needs to get over itself.

Crazy from the Heat

2009-07-31T12:48:00.000-07:00

But not in the sense of "this heat wave is driving me nuts"... well, it IS - I'd love to have a night of sleep under my belt, I'm getting cranky. But that's beside the point.

If you listened to This American Life this past week you already know this story, but I felt like it was worth re-iterating in my own words.

If you were a teenager in the 80s you must have heard the tale about VanHalen having it in their contract with their promoter that they had to have a bowl of M&Ms backstage in their dressing rooms and that all the brown ones had to be removed.

If they didn't have it they were in their rights to cancel the show and still recieve their entire fee. Apparently in one case they even did $100Gs worth of damage to the dressing room.

This was taken usually one of two ways:
Either as an extreme example of spoiled diva behaviour; or - and not terribly different - as an example of a rock-band with enough money and chutzpah to put something totally frivolous in their contract just for yuks.

But apparently there was a real and practical reason for the clause. One that was easily missed in favour of the more colourful story.

So let's say you are a rock band. You have a certain style and flaire that really has to be seen to fully appreciate. You've come up with a show that - well it's a capital 'S' "Show." Fog and lasers and lights and stacks of Marshall amps and PAs, plus the people who have learned how it all goes together. It takes a LOT of power and it's a big mass o' stuff. There is - pardon me - a LOT of heavy metal. Plus the man-power it takes to operate it - the people who are on your travelling crew; plus a small army of local hires. The Show is BIG.

There are a whole schwack of details. There has to be enough wattage available at the venue; the structure of the building needs to be able to support - literally - the show, you need a thick cement floor - no basketball courts, and the ceiling rafters need to be able to bear extra load; there needs to be sufficent lodging for the road crew - who don't get to go to their hotels 'til after the show is over, so they also need to be fed; and the locals need to be both properly skilled and there needs to be the right number of them - not too many, not too few... and they need to be sober.

Lots of stuff has to go right every single stop along the way. Yes there is someone whose job it is to do their best to make sure that happens, but when it comes down to it every single show needs to have someone on the ground locally - typically hired by the local promoting partner - from the time the show is booked until the cages are swept out and the circus heads for the next town. Someone who can liase with the venue, who knows the local IATSE folks and has the contacts and know how to make all those little finnicky details happen.

Those finnicky details? They aren't so finnicky. One single simple example to demonstrate the point: I mentioned the ceiling needs to be able to bear sufficient load. Every venue knows it's specs - or at least figures them out in short order because of details like this. Let's say one night your band plays the civic arena in Mid-nowhere Alberta. The civic arena is really just the old curling club that was converted in 1927. Your lighting rig is usually hung from the steel I-beams of places like Pacific Colesieum. But the Mid-nowhere Civic Arena is actually made entirely of wood. The ceiling joists are old brittle cedar beams that have been soaking up the moisture of spring-melt, baking through the summer drought and then freezing in the dead of winter since long before the conversion that happened 82 years ago. So when your lighting rig pulls down the roof on the mosh-pit in the middle of your hit song "Chicken Li'l"... who exactly is to blame?

THAT is why those contracts exist. They are actually called riders - they are an addition to the contract, what the specific legal difference and explanation is, I can't really say. But every single line in that contract has a very specific important purpose. It may be as critical as keeping your fans alive, like in the example above; or it might be about keeping your locals sober enough to do their part (Apologies to IATSE members everywhere, I know you are typically far more responsible than two mentions of drunkeness in one blog entry implies - I just got off on a jag.); or it could be about making sure that your feather-allergic road manager actually gets a bed he can sleep the night through in so he can be rested enough to go through it all again tomorrow.

Van Halen.

They had a really clever idea. Their show was HUGE. Far bigger than your band's "S"how. (That's why we've heard of Van Halen and not your one-hit-wonder band and their stupid forget-me hit "Chicken L'il", despite the infamous Mid-nowhere Civic Arena disaster.) The details for their shows were way beyond what most promoters were accustomed to and many of those details were critical in the sense of "if this goes wrong, people die" or "if this doesn't happen the electircal grid for the surrounding city collapses and the show is over, like it or not" variety. Now they could say to the promoter as many times as they liked, as emphatically as possible "make sure you go through every line-item in the rider very very very carefully" - and presumably, they did. But that was hardly a guarantee that these things would actually happen.

So, rather than hold the hand of the folks at every venue along the tour, they came up with a simple, seemingly frivolous canary in their coalmine. The bowl of M&Ms. Buried on page 9 of the 11 page rider... an innocuous little item.

And thus they knew that if they were to show up and there were brown M&Ms in the bowl - the rider had not been carefully read and they needed to check the details of the show line by line if they were going to perform at all.

As to the alleged hundred thousand dollars worth of dressing room trashing?

In his biography "Crazy from the Heat" (See, it all comes 'round.) David Lee Roth wrote that he once found brown M&Ms in a bowl and threw a fit. But most of the damages were caused by the stage set-up sinking into the wooden floor of the arena. To quote Diamond Dave, "they didn't bother to look at the weight requirements or anything, and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty-thousand dollars worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced. It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&Ms and did $85,000 worth of damage to the backstage area. Well, who am I to get in the way of a good rumor?"

Vancouver hits record temperature of 9 million 3 hundred and 84 thousand, one Hundred and twenty-one degrees Celsius

2009-07-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

I know I've been in hotter places.

Montreal heat wave of '94 - 38 degrees
Kuala Lumpur stop-over in '98 only left the air-conditioned hotel for an hour - 40-ish degrees
Darwin about 12 hours later - 44 degrees - got on another plane in 20 minutes
Adelaide for a few weeks shortly thereafter mid-30s and dropping
Penang the next month - 40 degrees for 48 hours
Las Vegas last month 41 degrees, almost never left the conference centre

But I honestly don't think I've ever had it so consistently hot for so long with the humidity so frikkin' ridiculously high. It's day five of really hot weather. (EDIT: Today was apparently the hottest day ever recorded for Vancouver.)The one real relief being that on Saturday night there was a thunder-shower during the fireworks - a show that will remain legendary for years no doubt.

Jodie and I were soaked to the bone and that night wasn't too bad thanks to the rain.

Even before that there was a day or so of warm - though not outrageous -temperatures. They say it's not over yet. Days to go probably. I don't think anyone is sleeping. The whole city is getting cranky.

In '94 - in the Montreal heat wave mentioned above - I was doing a show that took place in a heat wave. I wrote it. In the play one of the lead characters - the one I played had gone over the edge and started killing people. It wasn't the heat that pushed him over the edge, the heat was simply a co-relative thematic element. When his killing streak ended, the heat wave broke.
I'm going on a deliberate tangent here: The play - believe it or not - was a comedy. My character - Nigel - was upset about the lack of upward mobility for his (our) generation so he started an employment agency where he created opportunities for his clients by killing people in their corporate structure who had desirable positions. The show was the Juanabees' most successful show ever. We kicked ass for a few years previous to that, but the reviews of that show were over the top.
Looking back I'm amused that the show - despite the plot I outlined above - wasn't really about that. I mean it was. But it wasn't. (Blame the heat for this lack of clarity.) Nowhere in the plot did we get into the detail of what was being done to stop Nigel's killing spree. In the end he was caught largely by a police officer being in the wrong place at the right time. (Not quite so deus ex machina as that sounds - Nigel ultimately DID make bad choices (other than becoming a serial killer) that directly led to the police officer being able to put things together. Ultimately the play was really about three 20-something Gen-Xers trying to figure out their place in the world.
There was Mark, the career-student, hiding from responsibility, trying to be the moral core of the roommates, but ultimately too lazy to make a stand on anything more important than whose turn it was to do the dishes, Teak, on the surface, your standard issue stoner whose hallucinogenic internal life seems to manifest in the real world (mostly to comic effect). We in fact never showed Teak using any kind of drug - people just assumed; and in the end it turned out that all the weirdness that surrounded his life (much of which I'm still pretty proud of as far a humour goes) actually was a result of him being from another dimension (to which he returns at the end.). And of course the previously mentioned Nigel - frustrated bottom-rung ad-exec turned crusading murderer. They had a fourth roommate - Dale - who was never seen (though occasionally heard) until the last scene where he managed to tie up a number of loose ends with one line and about 20 seconds of stage time and often get one of the biggest laughs of the entire show. Dale was often played by a special guest, but otherwise he was played by the fourth actor in the show (on that tour it was Mike Rinaldi) who played "Everyone Else" and usually stole the show in the process.

Anyhow... so much for that nostalgic sidetrack...

It is SO fucking hot.

Today I had to meet Craig to go over some endgame "Beast..." stuff. We chose a place that required me to go up a hill to get to. I made a point of approaching from a direction that placed the hill last so that I could go from hill to cold drink as soon as possible. Holy crap.

I can see why people have heart attacks from the heat. And I'm starting to see why people 'lose it' in a heat wave. My head is not screwed on right. I'm not in any danger of going all 'Nigel' on folks, but the phrase "crazy from the heat" makes a LOT of sense to me right now.

What is it about Moby Dick?

2009-07-26T14:45:00.001-07:00

I received an email from my Mother. She has a friend who is reading one of my favourite books – Moby Dick – for a book club selection. She wanted to know why I loved it. I haven't really thought about it that much in definable terms, so I kind of got into my reasoning a bit. It's not a very good literary critique, but I thought it was worth posting nonetheless.

Hi Val,

Mom tells me you're reading Moby Dick for you book club and that you are curious why it's one of my favourite books. (NOTE: This explanation got a little bit away from me, and ended up turning into a really crappy turgid essay. A literary critique that would have my University professors giving me retroactive fails. But it was fun to focus my thoughts a bit. I suspect I'll have to answer the basic question again someday.)

For starters, let's take the basic story-line. A lot of people complain that the book is too complex. And there is an awful lot going on on various levels, but when it comes right down to it, the essential narrative is quite simple and it's fairly simply presented. Many people, myself included quickly tire of the florid writing of anything written before the early 20^th C. but I don't find that Moby Dick goes far in that direction. Perhaps that it's a North American novel – and thus written in a more colloquial form of English – is the reason why. Certainly the traditional image of 'classic literature' is more likely to be written on the other side of the Atlantic. I'm getting off point... The story itself is really very simple, and I think on that basis arguments of its complexity are easily cast aside.

Perhaps it's a testosterone thing, but naval adventure itself has a certain visceral effect on me, and evidence suggests I'm not alone.

But to take the book simply as a naval adventure is to do it an obvious disservice. It's hard to talk about the book without defining its two major elements as separate structural pieces and dealing with each as its own entity.

I'll come back to the narrative after I've dealt with what I think of as the 'documentary' chapters. It actually amazed me when I re-read the novel just how late in the book the documentary chapters begin – somewhere in the forties if I'm not mistaken. They are such an important part of what I love about the book. The precision with which Melville itemizes the aspects of whaling and breaks down the minutiae is for me the most fascinating thing about the novel, and I believe it was one of the most interesting parts of the book when it was published (serially, if I'm not mistaken). Whaling was at the time a very important industry and 'on the radar' of most if not all people – yet unless it was something one had embarked upon, it was an industry that was largely un-illuminated in its detail. All the most essential aspects of it occurred out on the sea, well out of the awareness of the common person and amongst a demographic sub-set which was not known for its public availability. When the book was written it was opening up a new world to people via the story and plumbing detail with the documentary chapters. Compare that to today where whaling is caught between being a dead industry and a criminal act and we get to examine a very different world than our own.

That latter thought is taken to greater/more-specific detail when we look at the knowledge and social norms of the time. Whether it's as simple as looking at the racism applied to Queequeg – even from the relatively enlightened Ishmael – in a manner that was so acceptable at the time that it's baldness is in itself interesting; or looking at Melville's own ad hoc taxonomy of whales – which is so simplistic by today's standards, showing hints of Linnaean influenced order which was probably not popularly known at the time of the writing. I think the chapter on types of whales may even be the first of the documentary chapters – it's an interesting way to begin them; bearing witness to the scientific ignorance of the time and author.

Of the documentary chapters much is said about the literary value of the "Whiteness of the Whale" chapter – which is an oddity among the documentary chapters as it is more like a poem than a clinical or historical examination of anything. I have a very well read friend who loves that chapter and is totally unflinching about the possibility of tossing the rest of the novel away wholesale. For myself I am far more interested in the chapters about the minutiae – the chapter about the use and creation of rope for example – utterly mundane until examined in detail. Who knew that so much thought had ever been put into rope? We tend to just take it for granted.

To the best of my knowledge, Moby Dick is one of the first post-modern novels. I can't really say why it is, but I have a looo-ong appreciation for the clash of styles and approaches that can be used in a post-modern work. There are many ways a story can be told and using multiple styles – chapters in Moby Dick include (beyond the documentary chapters) one which is a short play and I believe plural chapters which are songs. The lack of strict format would not work for all books, but if one format might work better for a certain element, then why not use it? Being an early attempt, Moby Dick is hardly a paragon of post-modernism – having only a fraction of the refinement of say "Ulysses" but I don't think it suffers from it. I don't think I'd be the only person to fairly be able to say that Ulysses borders on unreadable, despite being so tightly crafted to encompass a wide variety of styles without sacrificing unity.

Though it's not a major focus of my appreciation, I find Melville's brewing agnosticism – or perhaps better identified "defiance in the face of god" – interesting as expressed through Ahab. I guess I personally find the mid 1800s to be an interesting time in the philosophical development of western thought because of the dawning possibility/awareness that there might not in fact BE a god in the Judeo-Christian sense. Melville was a little ahead of the curve in that way of thinking. Not outright denying the existence of god, but denying god's authority over himself as a person. "Moby Dick" was written nearly a decade before the publication of "The Origin of Species" really started to shake things up. I do have to wonder if Melville had a chance to read "Origin..." and what that did for his way of thinking. In any case, that was years after he symbolically railed at god through Ahab at the storm and the white whale. As I said, I haven't considered this aspect in depth – and there is much depth to be considered in the book if one wants to read into it beyond the narrative and the documentary – but I suspect that should I get around to reading Moby Dick again, this will be what I focus on.

One more thing that I found interesting (if ultimately unsupportable) was upon my last reading it was suggested in some critical literature that there is a chance that Ishmael is in fact himself Ahab. He does not actually say his name is Ishmael, he merely says "Call me Ishmael." And now Ahab, sole survivor of the Pequod, is banishing his guilt by divorcing himself from his true identity and telling the tale of how he, in the name of revenge, doomed his entire crew. It's an interesting thought – but I don't really think it stands to scrutiny.

I have occasionally noted that there is so much to read in the world that there are few books that are great enough to read over again. I have read Moby Dick twice now, and I suspect there is a good chance I will read it again someday. I really think it is that good.

I hope you enjoy it.

Kennedy

Moon Landing Anniversary

2009-07-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

I've been thinking of today as Greatest Achievement in the History of Human Endeavour Day.

I've also started a new blog - Confessions of an Asshole Skeptic. I began it with an entry on my thoughts on the moon landing. I do stray slightly towards moon landing hoax discusssion, (hence the connection of the two together in one post here).

The Asshole Skeptic blog is intended to be my on-going skeptical blog. I had begun the TAMazing Blog as a test and to diarize my experiences at TAM. I'm a long way from completing that, but along the way - both in blog musings and in discussions at TAM I found myself thinking long and hard about the ideas of Asshole Skepticism. I'm not going to get into that here - that is the other blog's purpose. It occurred to me that my ongoing exploration of the uses and boundaries of Asshole Skepticism are worthy of their own venue. I will probably do a few scattered posts on the Asshole Skeptic blog between now and finishing the TAM blog. I may even re-open the TAM blog in a year's time should I return to TAM, but I don't think the two should be connected anymore than by association via me.

Social Distortion & the Discovery of Civet

2009-07-19T14:59:00.001-07:00

Jodie took me to see Social Distortion last night at the Commodore Ballroom.

It's always cool to be at the Commodore. It's such an awesome room, and knowing that my grandparents danced on that dance floor (okay, the floor was replaced back in the '90s.)

Social Distortion was great. I don't think Mike Ness stopped to breathe until they've scorched their way through five songs. The crowd was awesome – I don't recall being at a concert where the audience was SO happy to be there in a very long time. It's also been a while since I was at a show with hardcore moshing going on.

But I don't really want to spend my effort touting the well established cred of Social Distortion. We tried to arrive late enough that we'd miss the opening acts. We failed in part and thank goodness we did. We missed The Strangers entirely, but as we were coming up the stairs from Granville Street, the all-girl pop-thrash band Civet. Hit the stage like a pack of rabid... mongoose like things, not really lemurs, kinda like cats.... uh... this is actually a joke. Civets are weird looking African mongoose-like, cat-ish, lemurian sort of things. They happen to be believed to be the source of the SARS virus. Perhaps that's why the ladies chose the name for their band... or perhaps it was because they happen to like coffee made of poo.

In any case... they fucking rocked! Imagine the Bangles and W.A.S.P. having love children... that's Civet. They were loud, sexy and absolutely delighted to be there. They made it no secret that last night was the biggest show yet of their lives and they played to the occasion.

If I were to level any criticism at the band it would actually be disguised as a compliment to one of them. The drummer, Roxie Darling, is slumming. They are all high-energy and make up for the shortcomings of their still young career with enthusiasm and passion – saying Darling is slumming is unfairly selling the others short.

This is what it would have been like had The Runaways done burlesque.

Go to iTunes, buy their album Hell Hath No Fury, now.

Cronkite & Apollo 11

2009-07-18T11:36:00.001-07:00

I remember watching the news when Walter Cronkite retired. Even though he was an American anchor it seemed weird that there could ever be someone else reporting the news. I'm surprised to be reminded that it was 1981. I expected it to be the late 80s. I'm surprised I had a recollection of him retiring when I was only 11 years old. And since then Dan Rather who took the baton from him has passed it on to Katie Couric... both great in their own way, but nowhere near being the defining face of the news the way he was.

I found out he died last night by coming in the side door of the news. I was watching Apollo Moon Landing footage... one of the links mentioned his death. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes old at the time.

Here's what I was watching:

Part I

Part II

Part III

And now skipping to footgae that is less condensed...

Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV

Part V

Part VI

Part VII

Part VIII

Kind of strange that he should pass away so close to the anniversary of an event that was so important in his career. Nixon resigning. Kennedy being assasinated. Those are the only things amongst a list of historic events that he was central to the public understanding of, but none in my mind are as luminous (pun intended) as his reporting on the moon landing.

"...and that's the way it is."

Neko Case on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me!

2009-07-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

I haven't laughed so hard at a portion of a podcast in ages...

Neko Case (who knew?!?) playing "Not My Job" on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" riffing Ken Burns style about Necco wafers.

Interview on Radio Freethinkers

2009-07-15T11:47:00.001-07:00

The day after returning from The Amazing Meeting I was interviewed on Radio Freethinkers.

All episodes appear on the feed page, so the longer after the publish date of this post, the further down the page you'll have to scroll. For (relative) ease it's the July 14^th 2009 episode, episode #17.

It was their cryptozoology episode, so naturally we talked about The Beast of Bottomless Lake.

New Words for 2009

2009-07-13T14:01:00.001-07:00

Time to update the vocab.

Merriam Webster have published their new words list for 2009.

I'm surprised a few took so long to get recognized. Like; earmark, shawarma and sock-puppet. Haven't there been sock-puppets for... well all my life and longer? And sure shawarma has ported over from Arabic, but this small town boy had his first shawarma in 1991, and I doubt that they had just arrived on the shores of the big city I had it in.

Some of those other words – vlog and webisode, I'm looking at you – in comparison have totally jumped the queue.

A TAMazing time

2009-07-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

So... fuck what those boring guys said about post titles and puns...

You probably had to be there.

Just got back from a really great weekend in Vegas at The Amazing Meeting.

LOTS to say. Luckily I have a second blog where I am going on about that, The TAMazing Blog. I'll put anything of relevance there... though it's a LOT of catching up to do. No cross posting I promise.

No King of Mine...

2009-06-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

So perhaps you've heard...
Michael Jackson is dead.

I figured, seeing as many of my earliest posts on this blog surrounded his infamous trial that I should probably say something.

No secret, I have no love for Jacko. I've pretty much never been a fan and I think that as much as his life was a disaster caused by his surroundings and success that he has to be held somewhat responsible for himself. He was an adult. There was a world of examples of healthy living surrounding him. If reality wasn't enough of a cue to him that he was way off the rails it doesn't fall to us to make everything alright for him.

I found the response to his death fascinating though. We'd all started the day shocked and tossed into mourning of Farrah (You know Farrah Fawcett died yesterday, don't you?) and then all of a sudden the grandaddy of thunder-heists occurs...

At roughly 3:30 I took a 'picture' of the trending words on Twitter:

according aim alive angeles arrest attack believe believing breathing cardiac cnn condition confirm confirmation confirmed confirming confirms cpr credible dead death deaths die died entertainer flash heart hospital hospitalized icons jacko jackson jacksons king legend los mcmahon michael michaeljackson micheal mike msnbc news overdose paramedics passed pop pray prayers reliable reported reporting reports rip rumors rushed sad saying shock shocked source sources suffered threes thriller tmz trending true ucla unconfirmed

I'm not sure about 'aim' or 'flash', but every other word on the list is somehow related to MJ's (then rumoured) death. Let's see what the list is RIGHT NOW (1:30 June 26th):

11k 2gb 5pm alley alot amar amendment att attempting attsucks bastard bb10 bitch bono boyz brown canada charge chatter chris cilic copy cubs district doubles dragon eastenders feat fees file gaga game glasto glastonbury haas hott hun jack kirk lady lakers lisa mack marie mario max messaging myhotwife mythbusters picked pls polo praising rite roaming robbery savage sharpton shut similar size specials stoudemire supernatural surfing taylor uploads voting wed winans

Hmmm... Sharpton, that's about Michael (more on Rev. Al in a moment). 'Lisa' and 'Marie' may be about Michael in tandem with one another... but I think Twitter is relatively done. But yesterday, his death practically broke Twitter.

That said, TweetDeck posts another 100 MJ tweets every 30 seconds.

Those who know me, know that I hold very little sacred. Death is not one of the things I do. Death is the most ubiquitous fact of life, yet we treat it with kids gloves. This is not to say that life is not precious, and it doesn't mean I would go spouting inappropriate comments to bereaved families. I just think that if we give death too much deference we give it too much power over our lives. Yes, this is an open invitation to treat my death with humour and irony and hopefully instant irreverence. I'm not promising a death worthy of the number of jokes I got out of Michael's demise yesterday - that would be a real challenge.

So there I was taking flak for my irreverent treatment of Farrah on Facebook when news of Michael came in....

I immediately switched to Michael and managed to come up with in the range of five times the amount of inappropriate comments... how many people complained about that? Not one. I find that interesting. Even I must admit that Jacko's accomplishments leave a long shadow across Farrah's, and yet it appears to be open season on him. Go figure.

A few more thoughts before I put this to bed for the moment...

A few absurd pieces of info... once again the "People die in threes" canard surfaces. It took all of five minutes before someone connected Ed McMahon, Farrah and Jacko on Twitter - if that long. So I guess the claims of three deaths at Noon that included David Carradine are now irrelevant? So what about David Carradine dying alone? (I mean without two others, not in the sense that he DID die alone.) What about David Wells? was he too unknown to count...? Or would that inconveniently make it four? What if someone dies today? Will that knock Ed McMahon off the trio 'cause he's too far away? - oh what a difference 24 hours can make! (June 28th Edit: Check and Mate - Billy Mays, obnoxious TV pitchman who you may not know the name of, but you know from commericals died.)

There was a similar tweeting of a list of celebrities who died on the 25th... of any month, not just June and of ABSOLUTELY ANY YEAR. Many of the lists only included African Americans, musicians, or African American Musicians (James Brown Dec 25th, Aaliyah Aug 25th, Left Eye Lopez, April 25th, Static Major Feb 25th.) Accompanying comments include "How random is dat?" "Creepy, huh?" "WTF? Is it a conspiracy?" "Weird, huh?" Allow me to answers those in order.... It's not random, it's cherry-picking. I'm betting I can find approximately 30 times the number of people who have died on different numbered days from exactly the same demographic sub-sets you are using. / Creepy? Fuck off and quit trying to make something of your cherry picked information that totally ignores the laws of large numbers. / No, it's not a fucking conspiracy. Why do you feel the need to victimize yourself by the thinnest of associations? You are just embarrassing yourself. / Weird? Yes. It is. It's weird that anyone can be bothered to make something out of such a meaningless and ultimately imagined pattern. But if you really want to talk about weird, let's go back to Michael Jackson...

In his address outside the Apollo, the Rev. Al Sharpton began with "I hope that finally Michael will be given the respect that he is due..." Let me put aside my acknowledged lack of respect and begin with "What the fuck are you on about? You mean, being labelled the King of Pop, being the fourth biggest selling artist of all time including the biggest selling album of all time (which incidentally rose to #1 on iTunes in the course of hours yesterday after the news broke.) isn't enough? But I just want to peek at one major boner - later on CNN he claimed "Michael Jackson did 'We are the World' before Live Aid." While technically correct, it implicitly skips right over the facts. 'We are the World' followed on the heels of the original famine-relief song by Band Aid on the UK 'Do They Know it's Christmas?' Sure, Reverend, let's make him out to be something more than what he was. Sigh.

I'm going to be curious what kind of information about his life gets revealed over the next several years. I think I'd prefer to not find out that his dealings with children were more questionable than the current official legal version, but I have no faith that that ground is safe. Similarly, I'm going to be curious to see how the trajectory of his children's lives go now that he is not a direct influence.

One last thing that amused me... the approximate time it took CNN to compare his death to Princess Diana's - one hour. Yeesh!

Okay, that's it, I'm off to go and respectfully listen to some Alien Ant Farm and jerk-off to a certain 70s pin-up poster, but for larfs... 3:10 PM... here's the latest trending topics on Twitter... Hmmm Jacksonville, but no Jackson.

allow amendment ana beck blue blvd boehner cocktail cspan cubs damage detention dinner dre executive filibuster findingthegood frank glenn gods hail helped hhrs hoyer indefinite jacksonville jax kaberle kisses leader leads lightning mythbuster netflix newsnight nhl plays preparing producer pulled punk rain raining recap rehearsal remembering reportedly revolt ross savage shade shine sirens springs stimulus storm suspects terror thunder thunderstorm tila tix tornado tornadoes tornados trial tsn unlimited warning waxman

Not So Miserables

2009-05-12T15:41:00.001-07:00

I'm not a big fan of musicals. I don't have a default of dislike towards them, I just find that they need to be pretty special for me to like them.

I really liked the film Chicago. I had fun being in Guys and Dolls in high-school. I look forward to someday seeing each of Avenue Q and Wicked. But more often than not I just find the convention of spontaneously breaking into song to reveal ones inner thoughts or to declare one's romantic love just a little bit weird.

All that said, I frikken LOVE Les Miserables. It is hands down my favourite musical of all time. It is epic and tragic and uplifting all at the same time.

I've even been in a condensed (deliberately humourous) rap-version of it – but that is a story in its' own right.

I've seen it five times. The first four were various versions of the Canadian touring cast. The fifth was a preview of the local production opening at the Arts Club here in Vancouver in two days time.

I hoped as I waited for the show to begin that it would diverge from the staging format of the original production. Some shows are constrained by proprietary rights on the design – the essential argument being that the design is inherent to the show. Little Shop of Horrors is one of these shows. (In Little Shop's case mounting the production without using the attached designs for the man-eating plant costs extra.) I was more interested in seeing something new from the show than to see a re-mounting of practically the same show with a smaller budget.

It was apparent immediately that I was going to get something new. Before the first word was sung it was clear that the signature revolve that dominated the stage in the classic production was nowhere to be seen.

The show itself was uneven. It reached peaks of emotion similar to the more accustomed versions, but it came up short at least as many times.

To be fair, I am rather certain that the show I saw was the first time the production had been in front of a paying and objective audience.

My guess is that the cast hadn't yet come to realize that a show this big has no place for humility. It's big and can support a huge performance. Which is not to say that it wasn't effective, but it can be so much more. And once it is trusted to hold up its end of the melodrama it can bear the weight of their raw emotion.

At time's they hit it. Kieran Martin Murphy only half embodies the rich soul of Jean Valjean until the second act when he delivers one of the most awe inspiring renditions of "Bring Him Home" ever. Rejean Cournoyer also reaches for the upper limits of his role with Javert's final song. Jeffrey Victor as Marius is out-charisma-ed by Jonathan Winsby's Enjolras until after the latter's final exit and he has no chance to answer to Victor's wonderfully wrought "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables." Spirit of the West front-man John Mann even fails to come out the gate strong, though gets there later. The Thenardier's as roles are saddled with the task of having their best song – by a country mile – be their first song, leaving them little place to go. Previous portrayals have answered this issue by making such a big meal of the first that the latter ones are inevitably forgotten. Mann and Nicola Lipman (in possibly the most jarring yet ultimately successful casting of the show) finish stronger than they began. Almost as if they're wilfully trying to not retread the well-worn territory of previous "Master of the House" renditions by under-playing it.

As the show went on the performances grew stronger. I continue to chalk it up to being a show that is still finding it's legs – the cast getting more confident as it goes along.

I never felt Rebecca Talbot lived in the costume shoes of Eponine – the role I once rapped (and was no more effective, just silly really) and indeed I was hardly moved by "A Little Fall of Rain" a song that always chokes me up. I was amused to see her surprised reaction to the audience's overwhelmingly positive response – a deserved (despite my quibbles) standing ovation. She didn't seem to be alone... more fuel to my theory that the cast was trying on the size of the show in front of an audience for the first time.

For the most part the child actors are solid. Joshua Ballard as Gavroche is engaging as Gavoroche, Rachael Withers as Young Eponine finds no emotional reality and merely demonstrates her judgment of her character... and thankfully is off stage in little more than one scene, Emily Machette falls between the two as Young Cosette - luckily landing far closer to the former than the latter.

Doing Les Miserables at this particular juncture puts two numbers in particular under inevitable scrutiny. The previously mentioned "Bring Him Home" – Kieran Martin Murphy out sings Jaimie Pugh in a walk. Pugh is tender and beautiful, but Murphy adds drama with fantastic dynamics. Sarah Jean Hosie doesn't fare as well against her virtual competition Susan Boyle. I suspect she may have even been psyching herself out. She knows, like everyone else does, that Boyle's "I Dreamed a Dream" instantly became one of the most viewed pieces of music on YouTube ever. The pressure to match that performance is unavoidable, and counter productive. Hosie bucks the trend of the show and tries too hard.

Excepting a few surprisingly cheap bits of lazy stagecraft the staging itself is more successful and intriguing than clunky... though on occasion it is the latter. I am surprised that Director Bill Millerd, AD of one of the largest theatre companies in the country slips into the a few hackneyed moments of staging that threaten to de-rail the show. It's as if the show runs on five gears but Millerd only has four.

I'd be curious to see the show a sixth time later in the run to see how it has matured. I expect many of my criticisms will be answered as the actors are inspired by the strength of the material to reach the heights that the show's structure can support building up to.

Damn that Puck Luck!

2009-05-12T11:50:00.001-07:00

Whatever you do, don't make the mistake of accusing the Canucks of rolling over and dying.

And while I'm at it, let me compile a shot list of reasons the call-in radio-show crowd will be perpetuating – none of which are the reason they lost:

Bad officiating.

A no-show from Mats Sundin.

Poor coaching.

Playing defensively.

I'm not even going to get down on Luongo for looking human in the conference semi-finals.

So what did it then? I propose it was a confluence of things – let's face it, it almost always is – some of which have seeds of truth in the points listed above, but as much as anything, that elusive x-factor "puck-luck" worked against us more than in favour of us, largely by when it reared its head. The Canucks got favourable bounces and unforeseeable circumstances, but never when it counted.

Few people mention or even noticed when in game two a Canucks player lost his stick; if flew up in the air, half of the distance into the defensive end, landing... right back in its owners hands. It didn't amount to anything. I don't even recall who it was and can't find it on-line... because it never made a bit of difference.

But when it mattered most, time after time, the 'Hawks got the breaks.

Game one was a squeaker. The Canucks came out strong with three goals, and then gave up three before taking advantage of the 'Hawks aggression and getting behind their defence for a three on one game winner.

Game two the Canucks came out blazing again, and again it bit back. This time it was a disaster. Chicago's facility with the stretch-pass owned the Canucks, and even though Luongo was still making some spectacular saves he wasn't a sheet of plywood across the goal-mouth and pucks were making it in. To his credit, most of the shots that made it in were good plays on Chicago's part. If anyone was to blame, it was the skaters in front of him – but in their defence, a locked-down game was clearly not the plan. To make matters worse, two back to back bad bits of luck burned the Canucks hard. First, on the penalty-kill – which up to that point had been the Canucks stock-in-trade for months – the puck went off Willie Mitchell's stick over the glass in the defensive end. There wasn't the least bit of intention to do so on his part, it just happened that way. On the ensuing three on five Kelser broke his stick and could not get to the bench to get another, effectively giving the Hawks a five on two and a half. It's no wonder they scored, and that is where things really turned in that game. The flood gates opened and Luongo let more pucks past him than he had in the entire St. Louis series. Psychologically I propose that was a HUGE blow.

For game three coach Alain Vigneault recognized that Chicago's style of offence – specifically that stretch pass – HAD to be shut down. And for the most part, in game three it worked. It would be the last game the Canucks would win.

Game four the Canucks employed the same strategy that won them game three. And why not? Letting the Chicago offence have its' way had led to near disaster in game one, and DID lead to disaster in game two. The plan worked. For most of the game. With less than three minutes left Willie Mitchell had to make a split-second decision about where to clear the puck. He made the high-percentage choice – the one he should make on instinct when there is no time to consider. In other words, in MOST cases clearing the puck along the boards instead of up the middle is the right play for a defenseman to make. This time however there happened to be a flotilla of Blackhawks where he was clearing to... and they scored. Overtime went the Hawks' way too. And THAT was the real turning point of the series. I don't think there is any hockey literate fan who would really bother arguing otherwise.

Game five Vigneault stuck to the plan. It had worked in game three and had for all practical purposes worked in game four – except for those last few crucial minutes. He felt he had more to be scared of the 'Hawks shooting game, and that seems like a reasonable assumption. Once again it nearly works. But twice more puck-luck fucks us late in the game. Arguably Kelser's botched clearing attempt was bad luck giving Bfuglien a momentum changing goal. If someone wants to declare that Kelser failed on that play, I won't stop them. He was mid-check and clearing one-handed. Even if he failed, he was making the play under duress. But then... on the penalty-kill again, Mitchell (Notice how often he is associated with the bad puck luck? Hmmm... perhaps we should be looking harder at Mitchell, but I don't hear him being offered the horns much.) breaks his stick... and Chicago gets the go-ahead. And then to add insult to injury... that is very nearly a pun – with Luongo out of net for the extra attacker in the final two minutes and the assault on Khabibulin mounted, Kelser and Salo trip over each other allowing Havlat an empty net goal. He was probably half-embarrassed to put it in the net, but how could he not?

With the series on the line, Vigneault was put in a bad position. He had to change the game plan again. He had to abandon the strategy that had worked in game three and had worked in games four and five – except for crucial moments where fate had different plans – BECAUSE despite being effective for 90% of the game, that 10% where it didn't cost us the game... twice. He was forced to go back to the strategy that had nearly lost us one game and lost us a second BADLY.

Game six... was insane. A five – seven outcome for the Hawks doesn't tell the tale. The whole game was back and forth and even in the dying minutes two goals behind it still felt like the Canucks might come back. Not much puck luck giving the Canucks the gears in this game. The team just isn't the right team to beat Chicago at their own game. Vigneault accurately said this himself a week ago in mid-series. We made a good show of it, but in the wash the Canucks played better defensive games against Chicago than the run and gun games.

Before game six started, Ami, one of the friends I watched with asked me to predict what was going to be the game story. I said "Knowing that if we don't win that it's the last game of his career, Sundin will play like we've never seen him play." I'd argue that he did. He scored what in almost any other game would have been the game winner but it was soon answered, and he was regularly in the play. For the playoffs, Mats Sundin was third to the Sedins in both scoring and goals. Mats Sundin was NOT the problem on this team.

Bad officiating? Alain Vigneault has the class to not bitch about iffy-calls. He knows they all equal out over time. Canucks fans can suck it up and do the same. I doubt that there was a single call in this series that the refs heard back from Toronto about after the fact.

Bad coaching – Vigneault did what he had to do and made the right choices. They just don't always work out. If anything, he should have stuck to his guns and kept with the defensive game for game six. The previous two losses under that system were mostly due to unfortunate circumstances. But I can't say I blame him for changing. If he stuck to the plan and lost he'd put his job in jeopardy. Making the change, win or lose, he'd made a proactive choice. Alain will still be our coach next year.

Defensive play? – The Canucks won one and lost two for each style of play; offensive and defensive. I don't like to count empty-net goals – they skew the stats away from the real game story. In any case, take the games the Canucks played defensively and the games they played offensively and compare them. All goals counted, the Hawks out-scored the Canucks 7-6 in defensive games; and 16-13 in offensive games. Take away empty net goals and its 6-6 in defensive games and 16-12 in offensive games. Though I don't have the figure in front of me, I am confident that if the amount of time the Canucks held the lead in those games were compared, the difference would be even more apparent. Now... which way came closer to winning?

Anyhow... there's always next year!

Keep Vigneault. Re-sign the Sedins. Give Mitchell a good shake. Hope Kelser plays more like his best than his mediocre self. Give Sundin a heart-felt handshake, thank him for the effort, and buy him a watch. Think hard about the futures of Salo and Demitra... they too may be put out to stud, but not with a hint of shame. Then acquire a few really promising free agents and show Luongo that this is a team he's going to want to keep fighting alongside of after next season... you know, the season where we win the Cup.

Ski Bum Musical

2009-04-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

Went and saw the celebratory screening of The Staff: A Ski Bum Musical the winner of this year's Telus 72 Hour Film contest.

The crew was predominantly made up of guys from our crew from Beast.
They were runners up last year, this year they rocked the house.

Congratulations guys!

Cross Posted on The Beast of Bottomless Lake blog.