Monday, October 6th, 2008
The concept of Sarah Palin coming to office has pushed every other consideration in my life, into one corner of my brain apartment.
This I swear: If McCain gets voted into the White House, I will buy some guns the next day, and move into the woods.
Because the world will be FUCKED.
I might as well get ready for the impending apocalypse, and head out of civilization on the bounce. Pickup some supplies from Canadian Tire and run.
RUN.
Go to K-country and hole up in a cave, and await the impending fall of Western society. When every other person is stumbling around, trying to find food and shelter, I’ll have my cave pimped out with well-water, and bear skins.
This is what its come to.
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
Typically, when Stephen Harper speaks, I’m anesthetizing myself in the kitchen with a generous belt of Wild Turkey. When the news of his intent to cut $45 Million dollars worth of federal funding to Canadian Arts and Cultural programs hit my ears though, the medicine was too far away. My face was stuck to my monitor, like a bad cartoon, and sweat was pouring out of me. I read the news with near hysteria, and I could feel the terminal bubble of air traveling upwards, prepared to shatter my cortex. I was immediately struck by a nerve racking spasm, as lightning shot through my brain, forcing me to curl up in a ball on the floor and weep.
The knee-jerk reaction is to curse this man as a Clown and Fool; a brutal fixer with little compassion, but that would be observing Harper skin deep, and failing to mine the true stupidity within.
The terrifying aspect of it, is that I agree with him: federal funding to the Arts isn’t being spent properly.
There. I said it. Now we can all freak out and call me a shitface. But wait… why would I say that? I’m an artist. A writer to be specific, of film, “journalism”, short story, animated shorts, I do all sorts of things, I’m Canadian, and I’d like to have some money. Why am I not burning this man’s house down right now?
Federal funding for the arts isn’t a good or bad thing, per se. Like many of the projects the government conjures up, and we allow them to invest in, it produces some positive and negative effects; life is a rich tapestry. The most obvious criminal brute who feels this effect is Air Canada; a blight on our society and on travel plans the world over. Propped up by funding from us, it continues to fall victim to the suck-tide. The services Air Canada offers gradually slide downwards, and in consequence it requires more bail-outs, more funding. I don’t think there’s a soul I know who regards Air Canada as anything more valuable than a snot covered kleenex.
And here’s the rub…Harper seems content to continue funding it, in spite of the fact that it’s a business that LOSES money annually, to a tune that I was actually AFRAID to lookup while I’m writing this. The only defense I have against violent paroxysm is ignorance.
So what about the Arts? Is it the same scenario? Do we breed mediocrity into our cultural programs by keeping them alive? If you’ve ever tried to get funding from the National Film Board, your answer will be yes.
Harper does what most of us do when we think about Canadian creative pursuits: we lump it all together in a huge shit-pile. We need to recognize the divide. And so does any Prime Minister of this country.
A big first step is to actually look past the “gala’s” Steve, and find the divide between “Cultural Entertainment” and Canadian Culture. Here’s a handy guide: Inukshuk - Canadian Culture, Due South - Piece of Shit. The gala comment clearly indicates that You, Steve, clump any creative effort together in one category. Our entertainment industry needs to be taken off the life-support of government initiative and forced to bootstrap itself to life, otherwise there will never be any of the negative feed-back required to winnow out the losers from the movers. When any idiot with a HighDef camera can get a government grant, and deny that funding to a genuine fireball genius who can demonstrate the evolution of Native survival from conception, with a beaver pelt and a pen knife, than the system has no checks in place to stop the evil pig-demons from kicking down the door, and spraying Grandpa and the kids with Uzi’s.
You get what I’m saying, right?
Sadly, Harper could have pulled it off, but he has no respect for Cultural pursuits. He didn’t have the brains OR didn’t have the inclination, to spearhead a movement for CHANGING the way the Arts get funded. Which is clear to any mortal foolish enough to read his comments regarding the cut itself. His vision of Culture within Canada is pegged on events like the Juno’s, and he fails to look any further.
We have a rich tapestry of history and racial diversity, and with it comes the opportunity to alchemize the constituents of that diversity into meaningful, cultural art. And it’s bullshit to claim that “ordinary people” aren’t interested in the Arts. Ordinary people are the progenitors of our Art and Culture Steve. You moron.
Monday, September 15th, 2008
Axe is busy on the outline for our movie, and new Treatment, I’ve been tasked with making some new Axe and Crom comics so we can relaunch the site in the new year.
I’ve spent most of the last hour reading online comics, supplementing my weekend of Calvin & Hobbes gorging. I remember a conversation I had once with a director at the Pump House Theater (I was doing a bit part in Raggedy Ann&Andy, ya ya, fuck you) and he said that the hardest thing to do on stage was 2 minutes of something meaningful. He was trying to impart the idea of Fidelity of Thought to me. At least in regard to stage production…which may seem narrow minded, but I assure you it is not. Skits, comics, these things require you deliver a single concept quickly, and clearly. Calvin&Hobbes is a study in this ability, since Watterson usually had 3 panels to say something witty, and he did the job with disturbing consistency. I’m trying to crack open his skull and feast on the gooey insides…
Metaphorically.
I wrote a review for Chris Gheran & The Graveyard Gang over at r4nt.com which should be going up pretty quick, just need to polish it up, I’ll keep everyone posted…I dunno why though….
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
So the movie is still happening. In fact it’s been taking up much of my time, and I’ve changed jobs, so that’s not helping me write useless blog posts to waste your time and life.
HAH!
Axe is currently working on the Outline of the movie, while I’ve been tinkering with Treatments and scenarios. We’ve been close for a long time, but only in the sense that once you reach the trade winds, you can get to mexico eventually, whereas before, you might blow all the way to hell and die of thirst.
It isn’t even a question of close now, it’s basically done, we’re just trying to fit the pieces together in a way that we don’t hate ourselves for. This movie business is fucking harder than they let on, at least the way we do it.
Which is the way that doesn’t suck donkey balls.
Crom out.
Friday, August 1st, 2008
But didn’t. And I suppose, in the scheme of things, I could still go, I would just have to jump ship and haul ass to Seattle. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the time.
But I can recall an age when those considerations were meaningless and stupid; bygone days where I quit my job after a moments pause, in order to continue the 24 hour marathon of Quake and Syndicate Wars. Or driving through a blizzard to take a friend home for christmas, and when the car slides sideways, I don’t fret…I just turn into the slide and wait for traction to return, humming along to the Nazareth playing out of the radio.
Now I have “responsibilities”. This is a watchword that our parents used with great frequency, and it’s often touted by the establishment. I don’t think anybody should be deliquent in them, but sometimes I wonder if we should blast a few of them out of the water. Days like today, days where I realize that a finite chunk of my existence where I could be enjoying intercourse with stalwart gaming peers, vinyl clad punk girls, and technical elite, has been traded with sitting in a dimly lit room, inputting numbers into a machine that is as thanksless as it is a bitch to operate. It makes me long for a stub cigar shoved into my clenched teeth, while I annihilate someone with a thrice-barreled machine gun. Looking after my mother’s plants instead feels somewhat empty by comparison.
Now I could be one of an infinite number of men who’ve reached a point in their lives where they discover that nightly binge drinking in their underwear, while screaming at a television screen showing the explosive adventures of an enviable, well-hung hero has been replaced with a 10pm bed-down, and steamed vegetables with skinless chicken. The result of which is a stronge urge to purchase a frivilous motor-vehicle containing no more then 3 wheels, and to drive said into the brush with an intention of acheiving no less than 25 feet of vertical flight for a period greater than 5 seconds; an attempt to capture the serendipity and care-free joie de vive encapsulated in every Social Distortion lyric ever sung. But I don’t think I am.
I think the image of “growing up” in our society has been concretized by the pop-culture as a picket fence, sub-urban lifestyle, with 2.5 kids and a VW Toureg in the driveway. Whenever somebody comes along and suggests that a grown man could be just as happy, playing the drums till 2am every Friday night, while consuming a six of his favorites, and eschewing the notional validity of starting a family, everybody starts questioning his sanity, or evoking the deadly “Mid-life” analogy that is so popular. You’re either a loser, or a lonely asshole: society possesses no in-between.
I’ve wandered from the path I started on; lamenting my failure to reach PAX this year, but I think my point is that next year I’m going to make it a point or driving there two days early, drinking a quart of Wild Turkey, and attending the Convention with vigor and brazen-rakish-hellfury. Perhaps the most important thing about having responsibilities, is knowing when to stop giving a fuck about them.
Thursday, July 24th, 2008
Being on Twitter is bad for me. I’m the kind of guy who wants to inflict a single, witty sentence upon as many people as I can, in a bi-hourly schedule. Hence why I blog so poorly.
Friday, June 27th, 2008
I read a lot of webcomics.
Like…a lot. I used to work in an office where my job consisted, mainly, of filling in a number of colored blocks on an excel spreadsheet, and making sure that within a given time, I spread the needed amount of work to be done, evenly with those blocks. Simultaneously, I was supposed to make sure that I didn’t use the same blocks too often.
I know, this sounds oddly like one of the original games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It also sounds like…Scheduling. It WAS scheduling. The relevance to my point, is that filling in the colored blocks required very little of my time. In fact, in a given day I could fill in the blocks in approx. 15 minutes. Now if you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that with that kind of …alacrity, I was left with 7 some-odd hours of time each day to sit at my desk and stare into nothing like a malfunctioning robot.
So I started reading webcomics.
I had Penny Arcade on the radar for a long time, but having read it as often as I did, there wasn’t much in the archives to rely on to maintain my sanity. I started reading PvP, Dominic Deegan, Scary-Go-Round, Goats, Wigu.com, VG Cats, and an endless list that could take up the rest of this post, but whatever. There’s shitloads of webcomics out there, and I read many of them.
And a lot of them suck balls.
Like…genuinely awful work. The art in a lot of them is half-assed, but that’s something that I can get past pretty easily. What amazes me, as a writer, is how fucking shitty the story in a lot of these are. And to top it off, is something even more insidious, and I’ve even DONE it.
Referencing OTHER comics and pop culture.
Oh god. I feel dirty every time I do it, but there are more than a few comics that make it their exclusive demesne.
I’ve been an advocate for a long time of referential dialogue. I believe that referencing popular cultural moments from television, film and music, have the capacity to raise the bandwidth of our communication. Not only can I convey the circumstances of an event, but I can also place you in a specific emotional context, all through referential dialogue. That’s powerful stuff.
My issue with webcomics, and in the greater sense all creative endeavours, that rely solely on referential dialogue, is that they lose the thrust of their own message in the act of co-opting the referent. Using these symbols isn’t a bad thing, until your own intent is lost. At that point we’re simply engaging in emotional masturbation.
So I don’t want to name any names, but god damn it Kurtz, sometimes your work chafes my friggin’ nuts.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
And nobody changes their mind about SHIT.
I was privvy to a second-hand conversation about Anime a little while ago, in which the proponent of said claimed that nothing could ever be considered Anime that didn’t come from Japan. And that he wasn’t interested in anything other than the “bleeding edge” (a phrase I fucking HATE btw) content coming out of Japan.
That was it. He dismissed everything else, out of hand.
Fuck. There are few things in this universe that will instantly arouse my ire more than somebody who just writes something off without even considering it.
For instance: Many moons ago, I was somebody that took a massive shit on anything that Michael Bay has ever directed. But I realized, to my consternation, that I really hadn’t seen much of his work. It was a reputation that I believed in, not empirical data. I must SEE his work. SO I watched Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon…now the next movie would have been Pearl Harbor, which probably would have killed me, but since I was too busy nibbling the barrel of a shotgun, I was unable to press “play”. I had determined, for myself, that his work was the lowest quality schlock. If they didn’t hate one another, Bay and Uwe Boll could start a club.
My point was that I was doing something that I myself hated. I was dismissing him out of hand, without having seen any of the work I was shitting on. Now if you’ve ever compared JPN vs. US animated items, you can probably understand 2nd Hand Conversation’s objection to North American content. It’s shit, a lot of it. Okay pretty much ALL OF IT.
But here’s a quote from that conversation:
“Someone has to prove to me that, over a long period of time, original english stuff is better than stuff produced in Japan”
Are you fucking kidding?
Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
I’ve been sick as a bugger for the last 3 days.
My brother made some off-hand comment about his throat being scratchy, and the next day I woke up with Typhus. or Polio. I can’t figure out which…
I’ve been tasked with the job of coming up with a Lexicon for the Panda Girls treatment. A document specifying particulars words that will bear high significance in our world. I compared it, on the Axe and Crom comic site, to words like “Switch”, “Plugged In” “Agents” (some of these are two words….sue me).
It can feel like an exercise at times; writing these words for Axe and the movie. But all too often I realize, midway through something, that it wasn’t just Axe sending me to the Bronx for a sugar cookie: He had something specific in mind, and the outcome will be important. This is a good lesson to take away: Sometimes, you’re wrong.
Jesus…sometimes I’m RIGHT. The rest of the time I’m just shitting things up.
I’m going to drink a bunch of Neo-Citron now, and pass out for nine hours.
Later Bitches,
C
Friday, May 30th, 2008
Jesus Creeping Shit.
Of all the days, it had to be this one. Zeus and God put a bet on it, and someone paid off Loki to fuck me.
Yesterday, around 4p.m., I was terminal. Whatever I had for lunch was fighting on the western front, and no small part of my cranium was threatening to explode violently. I came home in a total delerium, ready to vomit myself unconscious. But the comic.
The comic had to Go Up.
Sweet crap, that was all I needed, was to be on my floor, shitting and puking, while Axe pounded his monitor and cursed my name. Fortunately a long, zombie nap brought me back from the brink; enough time for me to hastily inform Axe that the reaper was hiding in my bathroom, and I would be out of communication for who knows how long.
But Axe is a solid QB, and didn’t need me to run the ball in. The inking got done, the comic went up. The only missing piece were the words that adorn the bottom half of the friggin’ site. I awoke this morning, prepared to gut through my worsening illness and make something up.
And that’s when my windows partition vomited into my mouth, and boot camp told me to fuck myself. Good Times.
I would make my comments about the weather a post script, but I’ve already lined up a delightful quote for that, so let me just say: Fuck Rain. Thank you, and goodnight…
p.s.
“Never trust any technology more complicated than the knife and fork!” - Jubal Harshaw