The · second · draft · of · JC's · existence

This watching 20 movies a week thing is starting to resemble work! It's also starting to resemble an unrealistic target...I was at it all fucking day today with breaks and I only got 3 watched. It's really hard to type non-stop for that long, plus I add about a third again of each running time to rewind for transcription sake. So I go have baths, or read, or, sigh, kill time on the web, as I was supposed to not be doing!!

But I am compelled by my good fortune in the grant department and my urgent desire to GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY to at least try to hit my targets (that is, 20 movies/week for the next 12 weeks, minus 2 weeks for Galapagos and a possible second annual Florida excursion with Suie).

And of course the shitty movies are the long ones! All you "Red Dawn" fans probably love Iron Eagle, right? I actually enjoyed it a bit despite it being, you know, neurotic fascist trash. It's so ridiculous, and the whole thing is predicated on massive US military security breach by the kid, and anyway I liked Lou Gossett. Maybe my standards are being lowered by all these Eric Till comedies. Two more I's tomorrow and then it's on to the J's - and yes I will be putting in an appearance at the St. Catharaines Prorogue schlamozzle. I might even walk there. This city is ridiculously diffuse but it's supposed to be a nice day plus I need the exercise real bad. Bed-couch-kitchen-bath-repeat. If anyone tries to start a chant of "Yes We Can-a-da" however, I'm leaving immediately.

Still reeling over the grant. So good to have my attention focused. Less time for angst, although I'm still not exactly high on the hog. I wish my friends would stop telling me what they earn annually - I just hit 10 grand for the year and I'm like, whoo hoo I've hit the big time. But at least I'm broke on MY money now instead of my mom's, a heartening trend.

Also, reading a pretty great book called "Who Killed The Jingle?" by Steve Karmen - the guy who wrote "I Love New York", "Weekends Were Made For Michelob", "Hershey Is The Great American Chocolate Bar", etc. It has its fogey tendencies - not only does he bemoan the loss of traditional American values (like advertising jingles) but he talks about researching something over the phone "before we had Goggle", spelling in original. But he also dishes the dirt. Did you know that jingle writers used to go in the studio and pretend to be singing with the jingle jobbers because the singers were the only ones who got royalties? Fascinating window on showbiz. Plus he got his start writing nudie-cutie soundtracks.

Finally, my birthday is coming up in March so please buy me one of these.

Remember them? Angry Women? Modern Primitives? Just read #10, Incredibly Strange Films. Very rewarding with lots of good info. Still, I am again pining for an editor. Same piece of trivia three times in one article? Interrupted and never-completed and utterly unimportant thought left in the transcript? Did they edit ANYTHING out of these interviews? Good on them for publishing woman writers, but that essay on the Joe Sarno flick is a completely unreadable botch - did anyone even proof it? And why is it that they are quite ready to discuss the flaws of any filmmaker EXCEPT the ones they interview? (I know the answer to this).

I know the point of the book is that hidebound rules of technique are distractions from the quest for true artistic inspiration. So it figures that they let the writers 'do their own thing'. But I don't need hipsters trying to sound like academics, I really don't.

Loved it anyway of course.

Hey! It's 2 am! I'm in Guelph! Everyone else is asleep already! I ate pizza and pretzels and am now severely bloated! Drank seven beers and didn't feel a thing! We had a Steve Martin party! Watched his Muppet Show (brilliant) The Jerk (lots of fun) and All Of Me (he's great, the movie is a mess)! Guess I'll go for a walk in the snow now and ponder the wonderful things that are about to happen now that history has made its annual turn to the future! Hope you had fun too! And sleep well yourself! :)

Ed Fielding died last night.



I originally knew Ed from my time hanging around Buddies in Bad Times in the 90s. We did open stages together and his daughter Flannery stage managed my Rhubarb! play

Later on he took over my role in "The Blue of Noon" at Symptom Hall, after I decided not to participate in the remount. It was eerie watching him take my place. I always felt a bizarre kinship with him after that.

Years later, he played the principal in my big movie, "Grilled Cheese Sandwich". He was one of the only 'real actors' on board and I know Mandy who played the lead had a great time working with him.

I had a chance to hang out with him several times through his ordeal. The first was a brief check-in early this year, at an event held in his honour featuring a social and choir. He was frail and hoarse and there were a lot of people there and I hadn't seen him for ages and was like, what do you say to a dying man at a social? But I treasured the moment and saw him weeping during the choir's performance.

A few weeks later I visited him at St. Joseph's, and he was very melancholy and talkative. He talked about his father's death, about a troubled romance that ended with him turfed out of his own house, about many things. I brought him a DVD of Grilled Cheese Sandwich, which he had never seen - I never found out what he thought of it. I also typed out for him a copy of the A. J. Liebling essay "The Jollity Building", the story of the world's greatest swindler and about the most life-affirming thing I could think of to give him.

In October, he had moved to a nursing home, and I met a friend there and we took him for a walk, up St. George and through a park and down the steps at Casa Loma. I was amazed that he had such an ambitious walk in him; I bet he suffered more than he let on. He had just returned from a meeting with a new doctor which had begun with great expectations and ended with crushing disappointment. He bought a secret pack of smokes and we talked about Fielding Estates winery in Niagara and his long association with the band Guh. I mentioned that I wanted to make a documentary about Symptom Hall and he was very interested in being interviewed for it. I brought him a copy of the TVAC compilation whose launch party he could not attend.

In November, he invited me over to share blueberry jam that a mutual friend had made for him. But when I arrived he was feeling bad with a lot of pain on one side of his body. He was days away from moving into the apartment his daughter had found him, where he looked forward to painting and writing. But he seemed to feel that things were slipping away and that his days of producing new work were winding down. We spent a lot of time playing with Google Street View to get a look at his new place. I promised to come by when he was in to try again on the jam, and thought to myself that I should interview him soon.

I wondered how he would deal with living on his own in this condition, especially with the bathroom down the hall. Not well, it seems - I hear that he fell a couple times. But I admired his determination to remain independent. Inevitably it reminded me of my dad, listening to him making his last bacon and egg breakfast, and him getting violently ill afterwards.

While I was in Montreal this weekend, his condition deteriorated. He died around 3 am on Sunday, within the hour of my return.

I don't care about the movie. I learned from my dad that my impulse to preserve disappearing fragments of life on videotape is trivia that at some point starts to get in the way of living what's left of your life. Nothing wrong with it, but it recedes in the grand scheme of things.

But I'm very, very sad that we never ate that jam.

Thinking about how much depends on doing all we can when it is there to be done, to think less, to fret less, to doubt less, to trust myself, other people, the world, to live.

I want to thank you Ed for sharing your dwindling time with me in such a trusting and inspiring way. I will take you with me.

Check this shit out.

I made a movie about this mural and about the Weyburn Mental Hospital where it lived for fifty-odd years. It depicts the Regina Riots and was painted by James Eadie, who was an inmate at Weyburn at the time. Priceless Canadian history and art.

When I heard the building was going to be demolished and the mural with it, I contacted everyone I could think of - government people, labour people, museum people - to try to save it. I was repeatedly assured that the mural was damaged beyond repair, that the operation would be impossibly expensive, that it simply couldn't be done.

Then a bunch of demolition contractor guys get together and do the whole thing in their spare time. For free. Because they get it.

What a relief. And what a lesson.

Since I've moved my movie review fetish over here, and blogging the foggy details of my personal life gets cumbersome, let's talk about my reading habits!

Just finished "Don't Slip On The Soap" - the second book by Andy MacDonald whom some of you know (and all of you SHOULD know) as the proprietor of Andy's Dummy Farm, the greatest roadside attraction ever in Canada. I bought it when I was there eight years ago but only got to it now, anticipating a sentimental compendium of hard-livin' anecdotes. Well there's lots of hard livin' but damn little sentiment. Instead there's buckets of good-natured absurdism - the opening chapter, which tells the story of how his twin brother swallowed his arm while they were in utero, sets the tone - crossed with a surprising amount of cheerful venom. Most of this is directed at his father for whom he has not one kind word in the whole book - bet there's more to that story than makes the page. In between are incessant digs at school, church and anyone pretending to moral authority. Occasionally there's an anecdote that's nothing but embellishment, and some of the devices get repetitive, but this is not just your standard issue Maritime eccentric, he's clearly some kind of visionary iconoclast for the ages. He should only get the Order of Canada - he'd probably swallow it by mistake.

(for the world to see...and me to link to...)


( more pix! )

On the CBC (or your news feed of choice, I dunno), had you ever heard Abdullah Abdullah's name before about two days ago? Was every single election report not cast in the mold of "Will it be Hamid Karzai? Or....some other guy?" I'm not saying the media stuffed the ballot boxes, but talk about foregone conclusions. Not a peep about policy debates either. All I heard about was how the army was going to fall back about three days before the election so it didn't look like they were calling the shots. How stupid do they think they/we are?? Wait, don't answer that.

Recipe from my mom, liberally adapted to suit what was in the kitchen...

GRANOLA

5 cups large flake rolled oats
2 cups pecans, cashews and almonds, coarsely chopped
1 cup combined flax seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds
1 cup wheat germ
1 teaspoon grated nutmeg (you can usually buy nutmeg whole in most grocery stores and then grate it yourself.  Much better than the ground nutmeg)
1 Tablespoon cinnamon
salt
3/4 cup dates
3/4 cup cherry raisins
1/4 cup canola oil
3/4 cup maple syrup
 
Preheat oven to 300.  Toss the dry ingredients but not the raisins together, then add the oil and sweetener and toss again to coat them thoroughly.  Spread the mixture on two sheet pans and bake until golden, turning every 10 minutes so that it browns evenly.  When done, after about 30 minutes, add the dried fruit and let it cool completely before putting it into a container.  As it cools, it will lose its stickiness and become crunchy.  After it cools, store in a tightly covered jar.

Frijoles Borrachos (drunken beans)

Combine in large pot:

1 lb dry pinto beans
1 onion, chopped
6 cups water

Bring to boil, then remove from heat, cover, and let sit for two hours.

Having done this, then add:

4 seeded, diced jalapeno peppers
3 large tomatoes, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 beer (I used Corona)

Bring to boil again, then simmer for 5-6 hours (actually I left it for 8). Half an hour before it's over, add salt to taste.

MMMMMMWOW!

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
(Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
What a tangle of bizarrely compatible threads this movie is. It's certainly not the first coming-of-age vampire movie, but I've never seen another with this film's sense of generic balance - the lurid through line of the horror plot exists in utter harmony with the kitchen-sink and high school bullying stuff. While there is a tremendous amount of tenderness and feeling in the characters' interaction, it's success isn't measured by how much we 'care about the characters'. On the contrary, the emotional content is swimming in a sea of distance - there is NO imputation of good/evil here, just humans (and otherwise) dealing haltingly with the brutal contradictions of their circumstances. The chilly, low-key Scandinavian setting is perfectly disorienting, as is the pervasive deadpan humour - such as Eli's stumblebum Renfield, an old fella whose mysterious motives/backstory take a back seat to his unfailing and ultimately suicidal incompetence. It's so measured, so calm in its forward motion, that its Big Moments are even more startling - the horror is continuous with the everyday. But that doesn't mean that it can be controlled or understood - it's just there, and I think that's why this movie elicits such strong reactions from many. It's a hard one to shake off.

STAR TREK
(J. J. Abrams, 2009)
How much of it is me and how much of it is the movie? While I'm a Star Wars guy myself, I did grow up with the series, a Spock fan before I could write, and it goes without saying that this movie fully exploits the cultural benchmark it franchises: everyone can have fun with the uncanny casting, largely played for surprisingly deft comic relief. And while I could care less about the Trekkies, you can't help but admire the way this film sets out to circumvent purist quibbles: by opening up a channel in time, it creates an alternate 'reality'. This happily relieves the filmmakers of many cumbersome obligations to the source material, thus allowing it to concentrate on the true nucleus, the 'logic versus emotion' conflict embodied in the Kirk-Spock partnership. And by exploring this tension both between and within these characters, it achieves something quite remarkable. Not that I've been keeping track, but I doubt there are many space operas out there with this much invested in its characters - and with this kind of sweeping emotional resonance. Which immediately removes it from the Star Wars column and puts it closer to the epic war-buddy films of the classic Hollywood studio era - although I've never cared for one of those the way I care for this one. Shout out to Scotty's little green buddy, who astonishingly establishes himself as the most empathetic secondary character with about thirty seconds of screen time and zero words spoken.

So on April 11 the National Post did an article about Trash Palace, and I decided I wanted two copies for my archive and would therefore buy a National Post for the first time in my life.

So I call customer service and tell them I want a back issue. I then get bounced to about five different extensions until I land on someone who tells me that I will receive another phone call shortly telling me where to pick them up, and that they will cost $1.50 each.

A week passes by - no phone call. So I call the same number again. This time they say that it is impossible for them to transfer me to the department that handles back issues, but they will pass on my inquiry and get back to me.

Another week passes by - still nothing. So I call that number AGAIN. This time I get a woman who cheerfully takes my order for two copies, which will be mailed to me. So can I have your credit card number please? How much will it cost? "I DON'T KNOW - around ten bucks maybe?" Trusting soul that I am, and so fed up with these people, I give them my credit card number.

A week later, the two papers arrive.

Today, the papers arrived AGAIN.

So I now have FOUR copies of the National Post for April 11, 2009 - and gratifyingly tangible evidence that the unholy rag is in utterly unsustainable chaos. Maybe they'll fold finally! (Oh, and the article was fine - headline sucked, but can't blame that on the author)