You're going to help me, bitch!

I've been trying to commit this year's 4th Anniversary of the Psych Ward to personal reflection and growth and I've noticed that some major issues have been presenting themselves which I was totally not expecting. One thing I wanted to really work on is the repeated rape attempts I endured in the hospital, but in a larger scope I am recognizing that it wasn't this one element which negatively impacted me for so long. It was the whole concept of the hospital itself and of contemporary psychiatric treatment. Of COURSE I wouldn't be protected from a rapist in the hospital, for one thing I was "crazy" so nothing I said mattered, even when I went to the nurses station for medical attention because of 1st degree burns. Of COURSE these things would happen because being raped would not be worse than being allowed to be "crazy" and unmedicated. Of COURSE I wouldn't have input into my own treatment, because I am "crazy" and therefore intellectually diminished.

It's not just about how I could have been raped (for the second time), or that I've been on brain damaging drugs, or that people still watch horror movies with crazy antagonists, or that whenever my mother talks about someone she doesn't like she says they're bipolar. It all really comes down to this essential idea of human rights. And not just human rights, but the fact that even among human rights activists there is still this idea of forming a hierarchy of whose human rights are worth MORE than other's human rights. I had a huge blow out fight with my mom earlier today about Dr. Dickwad and having my right to proper health care violated. She was trying to assert that racism was a more damaging form of discrimination than crazyphobia. I blew up. KA-BOOM!! There is no human rights violation that is more or less important than another. Sexism does not outweigh transphobia. Racism does not outweigh crazyphobia. Homophobia is not more important than racism. They are all equally important. Anytime someone's human rights are infringed there is a problem, and everyone's liberation is tied in with that. The concept of a human rights hierarchy is just a fall back to the original hierarchy which created all the hateful isms in the first place. We can't say "Okay, let's deal with this one thing and then after we win equality on that basis we'll deal with your little oppression over here."

As someone with multiple identities which are oppressed, I don't value or fight for one more than the others. However, I currently am very invested in disability rights because legally I am on shaky ground in terms of rights. While I am included in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I can still be subjected to CTO's, and I still could have been sent to the ward yesterday because a doctor seeing me for five minutes assumed I was actively batty. Legally, I don't have a lot of protection. Even emancipating myself from the psychiatric industry is going to be a long hard struggle and I could always be thrown back in the bin if my mom thinks I'm too emotional or back talking. Legally I am a 28 year old adult woman. But in Dr. Dickwad's eyes I am a "young girl."

Psychiatric labels aren't only used for people with genuine neurological problems. They are also used to crush dissent. Step out of line, be defiant, demand equality, stray from a medical definition of normalcy, be poor, and you too could be in the ward. If you get angry about your treatment, it's because you're crazy. If you cry because you're being abused, you're crazy. If you demand to see a lawyer, you're crazy. If you try to keep from showing emotions, you have "flat affect" and you're crazy. If you ask for a second opinion or alternative treatments or try to be a pro-active health consumer, you're crazy. There is no way out of the ward except to acquiese to doctor's orders and judgements, to be docile and compliant and take the meds and agree that you have a serious illness which now puts you in a second class citizenship. If my mom was irritated with me, she could easily call the cops and have them haul me to the bin at any given moment. I know this.

So, I am tired of being at the mercy of the medical establishment. I am tired of the ball and chain medical file which follows me around. I want out, for good. I don't want to see one more psychiatrist. I don't want to try one more new miracle wonderkind drug. I don't want some creepy chemicals with no long term studies mucking around with my brain. How many psych industry inmates commit suicide just to get AWAY from it? I'm tempted to myself.

Although to be honest I would probably run away and change my identity before I did that.

The thing is, I have a brain that works really well. I don't talk in front of people super well, but I am a pretty good thinker and I have that kind of burning passion that's useful in creating change. I can't snuff it because I know I can be awfully useful.

So, this is the year where I am going to apply for every single thing I possibly can. Already the Canadian Film Centre has my application for the FFP. Outfest has a deadline coming up. Canada Council and Sask Arts Grant deadlines are coming up in a couple of months. And the beginning of March is the deadline for the Critical Disability Studies MA at York. There's a program in New Zealand for a month long writer's retreat. I don't know what's going to happen to me. But I think if I just keep going, keep applying, keep making films, something will come out of it. My ideal life would be to write critical theory, be active in the Psychiatric Survivors Movement, and make short and feature films. That's all I really want. I don't even care about the girlfriend thing or having a family or being fabulously rich or winning a major award. I just want to have a home, food, clothing, my support animals, undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees, and the resources to live full time doing the above three things. And by the time I die, hopefully at a very old age, I just want the world to be better because I was here.

Next week I am seeing a psychic and hopefully she can give me some advice or guidance on where I've been and where I'm going. I really don't know if I'll stay in Saskatoon now. Toronto has a horrid psych industry, but it's also the epicentre of the Mad Movement in Canada, and it has a really diverse population otherwise, along with a film and video community. Sure, maybe the apocalypse will happen and I'll be stuck in T.O. and the CN tower will fall, but maybe that's just where I'm supposed to be. Who knows? Maybe I won't end up in Toronto. Maybe I'll go for the MA program and then move back here. I really don't know.

Really, I just want to have the freedom to be ornery, happy, sad, super in love, crabby, angry, and all those other emotions which people outside of the psych industry take for granted. I have a right to have emotions.

Who Ate The Pube Cake?

Tomorrow the show opens. I have to dress clean and beautiful and stand around making small talk. The media are going to preview the show at 11am, I don't know if I will drop by for it or not. I do alright talking to the media. I'm excited to see my friend Rebecca though, and my friend Archer is coming in at the end of the month too. Another person from the Grunt millieu. He's hilarious. Once when Lynn and I were walking around in the hood we found him intently tinkering with his NDN car installing the most whack sound system I've ever seen. It was very Powwow Highway. I don't remember if it was the Toasted Marshmallow, maybe he had gotten a new car by then. One halloween someone set the car in front of his on fire and so the whole front of his white car had a scorched distressed look to it. Hence the Toasted Marshmallow moniker.

One time my friend and I were getting a ride in Marie Baker's fifth-hand station wagon and while she was trying to show off her new wheels she sped down 7th Ave and a hubcap flew off in a grand jeté.

PUBE STORIES!

Marie Baker reminded me of these. The first is her story. Shawna Dempsey used to do this performance where she masturbated with a chocolate cake and one time Marie Baker happened upon the stage just afterwards, NOT having seen the performance. She saw all this crumbled cake on the ground so she ate some of it because it looked perfectly fine (if you knew Marie Baker you would understand why she'd do this). When I told her where it came from she said "You mean I ate of her bush!?"

This is not the only pube-cake eating story involving performance art though.

During Art's Birthday at the Western Front, Margaret Dragu did a web based performance that involved me holding a slice of cake while she cut off her pubic hair and sprinkled it on the cake then kissed me.

Well what do you do with a pube sprinkled cake? I put it on a plinth and then later at a function in the same space, cake was being served. My friend Lynn and I watched that Dragu Pube Cake and sure enough, by the end of the night there was a plate with scrapings of crumbs. Who ate the Pube Cake? It's the eternal question. I told Margaret about it later, I think she got a kick out of it.

SPEAKING of cake, my friends Cindy and Megan told us all about Annie Sprinkle's wedding over in Calgary this past Sunday. They were in charge of making a three tiered cake, which had four breasts on the top. Megan promises to put it on Flickr soon. Apparently it was mucho fun, and they got to help the blushing brides get their outfits on. So jealous.

I think if you get married you either have to be COMPLETELY over the top, or you have to do a quiet lets-run-to-the-courthouse kind of a thing. Or maybe that is just me. I like extremes.

All I know is, if I do have a wedding cake I'm going to make pubes out of icing and put them all over it. Or maybe delicate marzipan pubes, or sugar glass pubes.

OMG! OMG! OMG!

I keep trolling around for the next degree program that interests me. I'm terribly keen on getting a PhD in The History of Consciousness at UCSC, but I hesitate spending that many years in the States right now. I don't want to do an MFA because I more interested in expanding my academic knowledge beyond artistic practice.

And then this shit happened at ER and while scoping out disability law I came across a masters program at York University in Critical Disability Studies. Holy shit, oh my god, that would be so awesome! I am practically jizzing my pants reading the program brochure.

Anyway, I have a doctors appointment, with my REGULAR doctor, in half an hour so I should dash. And I have to drop by my old alternative medicine doctor's office and make an appointment so he can give me snake venom or something to get rid of this rash.

Death of a Psych Hospital

Some inspirational Youtube-ing.

Inside Edgewood (after being abandoned for 16 years). Kind of a goofy clip but at least it shows you the interior of a psych institute complete with barred windows.



Edgewood State Hospital's demise.

MOTHERFUCK!

Okay, officially City hospital in Saskatoon is completely discriminatory towards persons with mental illnesses. I waited for hours in ER to see someone after fighting with an admitting nurse about why I was there because of a rash. Then I finally get in to see the doctor, Dr. Clifford T. Chase, who as soon as he found out I had bipolar disorder started talking down to me like I was an idiot. He seemed more interested in pontificating on bipolar disorder and telling me what it was than inquiring about my rash and the additional symptoms I would be presenting with. When I told him I was there specifically because Lamictal comes with a black box warning about fatal rashes he just dismissed me as someone "reading things on the internet." Uh, no, that's in the side effect profile that comes with the goddamn medication and fatal skin rashes with Lamictal are very well documented. He made some very general assumptions, like assuming I was manic for four years. He interrogated me on my psych history which was not the issue whatsoever, and then instead of giving me specific injections I may need to keep this from going into Steven-Johnson's Syndrome and making sure I had blood levels checked for a week, he gave me a referral to a psychiatrist.

WHAT. THE. FUCK!?

And the sad thing is I KNEW this was going to happen, I so knew it. As soon as I said bipolar I wasn't a person anymore, I was just some silly crazy person who was upset over a little rash. He didn't say anything like "No, that doesn't look like Steven-Johnson's Syndrome, you'll be fine." He gave me a fucking psych referral and some fucking benadryl. And he never even let me talk really, he just carried on feeling all smug and superior because he has a bipolar son so he knows all about nutters. Fucking ass. Anyway, on the epileptic message board I posted on where they told me to go to ER, someone said to make a complaint with administration. So I will.

What the fuck is wrong with front line health workers? And what the hell is wrong with doctors? I wonder if I should file a human rights complaint. At the very least I will say publicly here and now that Dr. Chase should not be practicing medicine if he can't put aside his prejudices and actually listen to his patient's concerns.

By the way, Steven-Johnson's syndrome starts out as a rash which then blisters and causes large pieces of skin to literally fall off of your body. It's fatal because then infections develop, and people with it often have to spend a month in the hospital in the most sterile place they have while also getting skin grafts. It is VERY serious and I'm sick of goddamn front line health workers not even knowing what a black box warning means. So tomorrow I will see my regular doctor, hopefully, and I will tell her what happened to me at City. And I will chew out City admin, and hopefully they won't also be discriminatory.

I'm also making an appointment with an old doctor I used to see long ago who practices alternative medicine. He's REALLY good, and hopefully he can give me something to get rid of this rash and also help me find an alternative to drugs.

I almost thought he was going to send me to the bin, he had that sickening smile that means "you need a psych evaluation." Motherfucker. I hope he loses his license.

On my way to ER

Back soon.

I Don't Like The Drugs But The Drugs Like Me

I've been taking psychiatric medicine for my entire adult life, and after eight years I can honestly say, it has not improved my condition. I have been on about twelve different medications in different combinations, none of which completely worked. Maybe it stopped me from committing suicide, but maybe there were other ways of avoiding suicide too. Sometimes it even made me suicidal. It definitely made me manic. Either way, the beneficial effects have been negated by long term brain damage. I have tremors now that I doubt will ever go away. I've been in perilous near fatal drug related situations for a few months now. I hear things when I didn't hear things before. My intelligence and creativity have been dampened. I'm just tired of it. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to feel like doctors have more control over my life than I do. I don't want to feel like if a major catastrophe happened and I was unable to get medication, I would lose it. I just don't want this life anymore. Something has to change.

I know someone who had a major manic episode and since then has become a devout buddhist and has lived a completely normal life for decades just doing meditation (and I'm sure eating healthy and other things). People have managed both epilepsy and bipolar disorder only using marijuana, which I know for a fact DOES work for me and has no side effects aside from the munchies. And here in Canada I could apply for a license to use and grow medicinal marijuana (which has been approved for epilepsy and with a persuasive doctor's note, bipolar too). And then there are various other therapies, the whole exercise thing, etc etc.

I'm going to wait until I see this neurologist. I want to know that I have temporal lobe epilepsy for sure and then I want to find out if that is what has been called "bipolar," or what. If it is ONLY temporal lobe epilepsy it will be easier to get a license to possess and grow marijuana. If not, it will just be a more involved process. It's not as simple as TLE and Bipolar either, I also have PTSD, OCD, and Social Anxiety Disorder, all of which respond to medical marijuana.

If I smoke up everyday my seizures go down about 90%. And my moods become a non-issue. In fact, thinking back on it, if I had marijuana when I was suicidal it would go away. I don't remember a single Long Bleak Night when I had marijuana around. And plus when my moods get really fucked, it usually involves messed up sleep patterns, and marijuana makes me sleepy if I smoke before bedtime.

I have never cried while on marijuana and I have never run around going "Woot!" on marijuana either. Sometimes I get paranoid, but ONLY when I'm worried someone might smell it and call the cops, which is also silly because Canadian police usually don't care about pot (with exceptions, I know a relative who will go unnamed was tossed in the hoosegow once for having pot).

But I don't want to rely on ONLY marijuana, obviously. I want to do everything else I possibly can because I do know seizures and suicide aren't fun. I know there are a few Buddhist groups in town who meet Tuesdays and Thursdays to meditate and then have discussions. I could do that. I think meditation would help me focus my mind a lot better. Yoga would probably help too. There's a doctor who specializes in Chinese Medicine who got rid of my depression for most of my teen years. I was still dramatic like any teenager, but I wasn't trying to hang myself like when I was a kid. I know he still practices. I have a shitty diet and I could do better on that front. There are tons of things I can do basically besides medication. And with no long term damage either. Yes, people say marijuana causes brain damage, but I know people who have used it on a regular basis for decades with no ill effects. And the drugs I'm on now have caused more severe brain damage in a much shorter time.

I wouldn't have been able to do this in Vancouver, when I had no money to buy groceries, or in Montreal, when, uh, life just sucked and I didn't know where any resources were. But I do have some stability here and I feel like I have the support to do it.

It's just getting away from the psych industry that freaks me out. They take so much from you that eventually you really do believe you can't live without them. It's like being in an abusive relationship and not feeling that you deserve better.

I know there's a chance I could have a major psychosis again, and I would use Zyprexa and Ativan as needed to bring me down should that happen, but I never want to be on long term drugs again. I have to talk with my doc about this and see if she'll be supportive. She's pretty open minded, so I hope so. And in theory I can get off these drugs if I'm in remission.

So yes, I have to do some research, talk to doctors, friends who are off drugs and doing fine, find a good therapist. It's not going to happen right away, but by May I hope to be off all of my medication.

God, I had a dream I was reading Frankenstein and suddenly came across a passage where Mary Shelley wrote something along the lines of "I don't know if people know the turmoil I am in as I write this. I am in a disturbed state of being," and basically went on describing going crazy and then went back to her story in the next paragraph. Mary Shelley did have mood disorders btw.

Psychiatric Industry

It is lunch. Hurrah!

Back in the regular world of living with insanity, I noticed some things recently.

I had called the HealthLine when The Rash showed up. The nurse I talked to was very thorough, although I still felt that she didn't know much about lamotrigine. Still, she made sure I wasn't having some really serious complications, which was good. And when I said I had bipolar disorder she didn't treat me like I was a child, which was nice. She told me to go to a walk in clinic to get it assessed, so I did.

The doctor I saw at the walk in clinic had VERY little knowledge about what issues I was having. He didn't know what lamotrigine was. He had to run off and look in a book for what I was talking about. And then in the end he just told me to go make an appointment with my regular doctor and lower my dose. I don't think he realized that the rash could be a sign of a serious complication. It was so frustrating.

I'm lucky in that my regular doctor does know a lot about what I'm dealing with, and what she doesn't know she isn't afraid to go and independently study. She really doesn't muck around with me. And she takes my File that now follows me for the rest of my life with a grain of salt. Even though it says there are certain drugs I should be on FOREVER, she doesn't follow it. And it has helped a lot, she helped me get off one drug which had dramatically reduced my quality of life for three and a half years. I can finally feel emotions again, and think, and be creative. Before my hospitalization I averaged one short video a year. After hospitalization I only made ONE in four years. So as you can imagine, I was glad to ditch olanzapine forever. Fuck you Zyprexa!!!

But I also noticed some other things. When it did look like I might have to go to emergency I realized I didn't want to. And the reason was that if I went to emergency and I did have to be admitted and they did find out I was taking the medication for Bipolar disorder, I was worried I would be put into the psych ward again. And it's a very real possibility. And it made me realize why many other people with mental illnesses have poor health care. It's not that we don't notice something is wrong with us, or that we don't know we urgently need health care, it's that we've been seriously wounded by the psychiatric industry and the possibility of getting sent to the psych ward again for a non-psych related health problem is so terrifying. One of the reasons abuse is permitted in psych wards is because if we're punished then we might not have the audacity to go crazy again and therefore end up at the hospital. But what really happens is that ex-inmates go to such lengths to avoid the hospital that other health problems aren't addressed later on.

I am using the words Psychiatric Industry rather than mental health system or psychiatric system because those words imply that healing is actually possible within them. The fact is, psychiatry is founded on principals of capitalism. My 6 week psych ward stay cost $20 000. That's more than I paid for five years of tuition at film school. Old timey wards like Bedlam housed inmates who were paid for by family or husbands who didn't want to deal with their relatives or wives who were eccentric or acting out. Often times people imprisoned in these places didn't originally have mental health problems, but they did after they lived there a while. And it was a very profitable industry. You could charge a lot of money and provide substandard housing, there were no mattresses, only piles of straw. The food served was the cheapest stuff they could find. And people running the wards made a killing. Later on mental patients made great experiment subjects as well, and I'm sure someone was getting money for recommending various inmates for studies (this still goes on). Currently psych drugs account for a multibillion dollar industry, and the fact that the drugs go on to create more health problems like diabetes, tardive dyskenesia, high blood pressure, Parkinsons, etc, makes it MORE profitable because then additional drugs will be required, made by the same companies. And since psych drugs cause brain damage and often create MORE mental health problems, people can justify keeping us on them because we keep getting crazier and crazier.

If we do get off our drugs, we get worse, not because that's who we really ARE, but because the drugs have been designed to worsen our condition if we withdraw from them. Quitting a drug your brain has become dependent on can seriously flip you out, and it would flip out anyone irregardless of whether or not they were mentally ill.

In Mad In America the author notes that people who have a mental health crisis in third world countries fare better than those of us in "Developed" nations. The simple reason being there are no drugs, no wards, and no psychiatrists. A person having a schizophrenic break will often remain in their community and be cared for by the local shaman. In fact, in an experiment in the sixties down in the states had a supervised home for people in the midst of psychotic episodes. There were no drugs used, just supervision. People had episodes lasting on average three months and then got out of it ON THEIR OWN. The people running the home noticed pretty much everyone went on to have a normal life afterwards. They said people did do things like run outside with no clothes on, but for the most part there wasn't major trouble. And they also noticed that people were having life changing spiritual epiphanies, and letting them go through that process made them feel stronger and more capable once it was over.

The psychiatric industry is not about healing people, no matter what the people working within it may think. It has always been based on the principles of behaviour modification, on making sure the insane just don't bother the normals. We may think we've advanced because people aren't institutionalized like the olden times (although a lot still are), but the drugs are working in very similar ways. A patient may not have a manic episode again on Olanzapine, but neither will they feel deep emotions like love, compassion, anger, or sadness. Neither will they be able to think, or to effectively live a regular life of working, or to create, or to challenge the psychiatric industry. The people around them will be happy with the way they have changed, but the person who is really living that life will not be happy, and even worse, they won't even know they aren't happy.

Possibly the thing which frustrates me the most is that while I have done extensive research on the history of psychiatry, psychotropic drugs, neuroleptics and their origin in Fascism, the causes of bipolar disorder, etc etc etc, I still have to deal with people whose education is, to put it gently, limited. And yet they still assume they know better than me how I should be living or being treated because they are sane while I am crazy. It's getting to the point where I want to make up bibliographies and hand them out to people and say "Look, before you start telling me this shit, you have to educate yourself by reading these twenty books, forty of these articles, and at least ten of these medical studies. Oh, and I also want you to spend a week in a ward."

And to them I also say, it doesn't take much to step over that line. Anyone could find themselves on the other side of a locked door, whether they have a mental illness or not. And once you do end up on the other side, you will be dogged by the psychiatric industry for the rest of your life.

Madness In Four Actions

Remember how earlier in this blog I mentioned that it's the extended anniversary of my hospitalization from a psych drug induced mania? Well, now some weird fucking thing keeps happening with my computer. The language settings keep slipping to Canadian French, which means when it slips over I get shit like this when I type in quotations: Èè What the hell? It reminds me of every small petty annoyance I had living in Montreal. The French language is hijacking me! When I first got One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on DVD my friend turned it to the French language selection and I blew a gasket. "How could you be oblivious to such an obvious trigger!! Change it back right now!" I mean, the film itself was one big trigger, but making it an unintelligible language to me AGAIN, that would just slip me over the edge.

I'm having less triggers about hearing French. I quite like the language actually, I just think Quebec has some really shitty human rights abuses that go on unquestioned. I heard some FUCKED UP shit that they did to the warriors at OKA after the blockade went down and they got a hold of them, like torture under the Geneva conventions type shit. So many of those guys have snuffed it since.

Anyway, the video, which now has a name, is sitting in a DVD player at the Mendel, which is shut down this week for installation in all galleries. The video is called Madness In Four Actions, because it uses four repetitive actions performed by Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in the Miracle Worker. Taken out of context they are pretty interesting because they are so adversarial and yet so meaningless. And I also liked using it because Patty Duke did go on to have a diagnosis of manic depression. She even states "Although I don't think that my bipolar disorder fully manifested itself until I was about 17, I had struggles with anxiety and depression throughout my childhood. I have to wonder, as I look at old films of mine when I was a child, where I got that shimmering, supernatural energy. It seems to me that it came from three things: mania, fear of the Rosses and talent."

One thing I noticed about it is that it references repetitive loops I fall into when I get really upset about something. If I get so upset I lose higher communication skills I will, quite literally, repeat a short five word or less phrase over and over and over, sometimes 15 times. I guess I feel like if I say it enough people will understand I really mean it, because sometimes if I just say it the one time they don't really clue in that it's bothering me. So making Patty Duke slap Anne Bancroft around over and over was pretty fun.

I also liked that it was using tropes of performance art moreso than other videos I have done. And it was more of a collage than other videos too, everything was sampled, even the text. There are still a couple tiny things I want to tweak, but I'm taking a break for a couple weeks and doing it later for the copies I'll send to distributors. I think I'm also going to burn a bunch of DVD's to go with the Betacam master I'll send in case people do use it for installation.

I saw my friend Megan's work at the gallery too, it's really good. She did Velveeta (my ex from art school) really well. And it's from a photo of when Velveeta and I dated and she looks really happy, which is cute.

Anyway, I'm glad I got to make this video while I was having The Anniversary. I think it helped me resolve a lot of my feelings around being in the hospital. This is the first time I've actually tried to evoke what it feels like to be involuntarily committed and also the politics around it. I quoted R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, Benjamin Rush, and two survivors. And I read Mad In America during rendering times, for the second time. If you want to read a really good book on the psychiatric industry and it's gross human rights violations throughout history, I recommend it. And it even describes an all too short humane alternative that worked and was abandoned around the turn of the century.

Once I am done being so exhausted I will compress it and post it on Youtube. In fact, I think I might use Youtube for videos more, maybe it will improve distribution.

Schrodinger is wandering around on the desk being cute. He's such a sleek little weirdo.

I saw Paradise Now. REALLY GOOD, holy crap. I'll have to write more about it later. Next I'm watching Mandalay, the second in Lars Von Trier's American trilogy. I hope he doesn't do something awful to the protagonist again, but I'm not holding my breath.

Rendering Pines, Rendering Pines

Well now my video is pretty much done EXCEPT for compressing it into an MPEG2 (which Compressor is doing now for the next twenty minutes) and burning to DVD (which will take at least another twenty minutes). But aside from that I'm pretty happy with it. I MIGHT put it on Youtube just so I can let people preview it, but a lot of the text might be totally illegible then. I went WAY overboard last night and got pretty heavy handed, so I had to take it down a tad this morning. I thought I had to get it to the Mendel at noon today, and then I just got an email saying Wednesday is fine. Aaaaah! Oh well, it's done.

I like it, it's the first time I've made something specifically for installations, so making sure it can loop and still make sense was fun. I'm also going to output a single channel screening copy for festivals. It would be nice to send it to Rendezvous with Madness, which is in Toronto. I've never been to it, but they've shown two of my tapes and send great swag. Maybe this time I can take a trip to Toronto and watch other films on madness.

And the audio isn't too shabby, it's minimalist but that makes sense. And I found a website called FreeSound Project which has downloadable wav and aiff clips of sounds it's members have uploaded. It's so useful, I don't know how I didn't know that site existed. I'm on my mom's computer BTW, which pisses her off. I keep running back and forth between the upstairs computer and the downstairs computer.

I've spent at LEAST 24 hours on rendering and processing this 7 minute video. It's not so bad, that's pretty normal, but it's a reason I like having my own suite. Paying for 24 hours of rendering time would so SUCK! Ugh! At ten bucks an hour that is PRETTY fucking pricey.

I have six more minutes before I can import into DVD Studio, set it up to loop endlessly, and burn it. BURN IT!!!

Editing is weird and fiddly, but I like it. I had to go on the hunt for an errant frame that kept showing up. My mom watched a rough cut with me and suddenly I yelled "Hey! That frame isn't supposed to be there!" She didn't see it though. How can 1/30th of a second be so obvious? But it is. I fixed it and even though she didn't notice it the first time, she thought it was an improvement. There's one thing I wish I had been able to fix, which is the slapping scene. But I think it's fine as it is, I'm just being uber picky because now I've watched this damn thing about 50 times.

And General Error 34 started showing up when I wanted to play full screen in FCP. I know it means I have a corrupted file somewhere, but it's not affecting the video itself, just the program, so I decided to ignore it until I can deal with it later.

I could probably tweak my video for the rest of the week and still not be satisfied. At a certain point I just have to back off.

Ugh, and now I have to re-compress because I didn't like the way it turned out last time.

20 more minutes. Plus another 20 for burning, when I finally get there. So fiddly.

I'm bored of writing about how boring making videos can be. I'm going to go look at stuff while I wait.

I am still itchy. The doctor I saw yesterday said to go back to the dose of Lamictal I was at before the RASH happened. Hopefully that works. I don't think it will get worse. I'm all covered in calamine lotion. And I'm hungry. Wah! Anyway, yes, no death today. I think I will be okay.

Zizek!

Slavoj Zizek is my favorite philosopher and cultural critic these days. A film was made about him recently called Zizek! which I have yet to see. A Canadian made it. He has a background in Lacanian theory, which is a way better branch of psychoanalysis than Freud. Freud can go suck a phallus.

Anyway, here's Slavoj talking about the creativity of the void and the violence of love.



p.s. The health nurse says I should just go to a walk in clinic today with all my meds and see what's up, so I am okay, for now.

Death as a Side Effect

Last night my lower back erupted into a rash, and it started spreading to other parts of my body. I was wondering, oh maybe it is stress? And then I remembered the dire warning everyone who's prescribed Lamictal gets. Here is the kind of medical warning no one really likes reading.

ALTHOUGH BENIGN RASHES ALSO OCCUR WITH LAMICTAL, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO PREDICT RELIABLY WHICH RASHES WILL PROVE TO BE SERIOUS OR LIFE THREATENING. ACCORDINGLY, LAMICTAL SHOULD ORDINARILY BE DISCONTINUED AT THE FIRST SIGN OF RASH, UNLESS THE RASH IS CLEARLY NOT DRUG RELATED. DISCONTINUATION OF TREATMENT MAY NOT PREVENT A RASH FROM BECOMING LIFE THREATENING OR PERMANENTLY DISABLING OR DISFIGURING.

Yes, so those last three things, death, disabling, and disfigurement, well, those all freak the shit out of me. I know those things could happen without pharmaceuticals being involved, but if I must be disfigured I would prefer it not be because of some ridiculous pill. I can't believe I was a meth user at nineteen and yet nothing happened then, and then now I take doctor approved medication and oh yeah, I could just suddenly die! Well just great, and it's terrible timing too because I have a deadline coming up. And my cute friend is in town again and I don't want to look all disfigured.

I am seriously considering trying to live my life sans meds. I haven't ever really done it, so I don't know what to expect. I do know that marijuana seems to work more effectively than the legal drugs I'm on. I've been doing a maintanance dose of the equivalent of one joint a day for a couple of months or more, and its really helped. I dont get high unless I'm really like "Oh yeah, hanging with the cousins," mostly I just get a low grade buzz and my symptoms go away. Come down from the highs, come up from the lows. Fewer absence and complex partial seizures. It's a hell of a lot better than these ridiculous drugs, and it's been proven safe and effective for my conditions over THOUSANDS of years, not just 20 to fifty years. Of course it's illegal because some racist capitalists had to put it out of business to secure their own profits. GRRRRRR!!!!

I did realize my own mortality though. I've been feeling it more lately, ever since Chris died. In your head you can kind of understand the concept, but that's different from really truly realizing your mortality. And then last night I realized this really could be it. And I was trying to figure out if I was happy with my life, or if I felt like it had meaning. And I honestly couldn't answer. I knew how I wished it was different. I don't know how much of that I could have ever had control over.

I'm so tired of feeling like I don't have control over my life. And I'm tired of the constant pressure to go the pharmaceutical route to deal with bipolar disorder and epilepsy. The thing is I can see the good things meds have done for me. It's not a black and white issue, there are tons of grey areas. I'm not one of those "Everyone should take drugs" and I'm not "Everyone should get off their drugs" either. Maybe some people can eat a strict healthy diet and exercise and meditate, but then there are also lots of people who's lives, through no fault of their own, restrict them from being able to do those things. Someone living on disability is not ever going to be able to afford to eat healthy.

But maybe I can do the alternative. I can actually afford groceries now, and I have more time to do exercise. I have done meditation but maybe I could join the Saskatoon Zen temple folks or something. Talk about Dharma instead of what a lamotrigine rash looks like.

I do know I have to figure out how to live my life so that I would be happier about when I do croak. I don't think I will though, at least not now. I think there's still stuff I have to do here. I want to pull a Kubrick and die just after I start editing my last movie. Or at the premiere. Thank you. Bye! Put the reviews on my grave!!!

Eyes Wide Shut didn't get very good reviews though.

Fucking Amal, Ma Vie En Rose

My computer is still processing. And the car needs to be plugged in for an hour before we can leave the house because I am going SQUIRRLY!



I think my favorite all time lesbian film is Fucking Amal, which also happens to be my all time favorite teenager film too. Maybe because I know the feeling of high school clique-crossed lovers. I was reading a message board where someone was looking for a good lesbian movie to watch and someone said Fucking Amal had vague lesbian undertones. I was so shocked. Did they watch Fucking Amal? The whole thing was about Elin figuring out she liked girls and coming out. How can you call that undertones? That's as dumb as saying Ma Vie En Rose is vaguely about growing up transsexual. Strangely enough looking for the trailer I did find a bunch of clueless Film Critics saying that exact thing.

I find it bizarre when queer films are made by or for children/teenagers and then people get upset, like we're recruiting or something. They never think that there are queer children and teenagers who need to see themselves represented somewhere, because heterosexual children have tons of movies and television shows that make them feel normal. Oh right, I forgot, queer kids aren't allowed to feel normal about themselves.

Oh, Ma Vie En Rose makes me cry every time I watch it. It is such a sweet film. Even the TRAILER makes me cry.

It's interesting to note that both of those films are foreign. I have no clue how the ratings system works overseas, or if it even exists. Either way, some really revolutionary queer film comes out of Europe. And the character development is spot on, a lot of mainstream work totally misses the mark on how children or teenagers actually behave.

I think I am going to have to find some uppers to stay up late enough to get serious work done on this project. Le sigh.

French and Saunders have computer trouble

BNC, Enchante!

Once my friend Candie became totally smitten with someone because they knew what a British Naval Connector was. I have to admit, people who know tech stuff make me cream my jeans. When my friend Rheanne and I saw Shortbus I got all excited when I saw a character using Final Cut Pro. "Aw! Final Cut Pro." "You geek." Which coming from her is a compliment.

I don't understand people who don't appreciate geeky video tech-y stuff. It must look pretty obvious that I've hung out with mainly video and filmmakers for the last decade. I was so depressed when at my last job I was accused of knowing nothing of sound editing, because they were using a very temperamental Logic Pro software which was incompatible with their input device and I had spent a decade using Protools in well designed suites, which in my opinion is a far superior program. Although maybe I am just a software loyalist. It makes a LOT more sense for video editing at least, because the interface is similar to programs like Avid and FCP. I hate Logic Pro, it can go to hell, it's such a fuck ass program. And in my experience thus far M Audio sucks too.

Either way it's kind of dumb to tell me I don't know sound, when I can use Protools with one hand tied behind my back and standing on one foot. It wasn't my fault they didn't choose a more intuitive program, which would probably have been better for their membership anyway.

I remember one time I was sitting around with friends having a conversation and another tech minded person and I started talking about RF modulators. Which I didn't think was very impressive, but everyone else was all "Oooh, RF modulators, how do you know that stuff?" He also asked a question about winding cords and I mentioned the crucial 3/4 turn. Oh yes, he said, the 3/4 turn.

The most major suck ass thing about my previous job (besides terrible interpersonal issues) was that I came in and NOTHING was set up and barely any video decks were functional. The Betacam deck had to be serviced. The distribution amplifier had been out of commission for ages. There was no 3/4" deck. The S-VHS decks were crap, which was a big issue because for some ungodly reason the centre had been using S-VHS formats to master onto for YEARS! Anyone who masters onto a video tape that is a 1/4" wide is being an idiot. Even 3/4" is more stable, magnetic doohickeys just fall of tape and the less physical size of tape you have the more magnetic particles coming loose with destroy your tape quality.

And then we were all told that Mini-DV tapes were generation lossless and you could keep things on them forever. Ha ha ha. What we didn't find out until years later was that Mini DV is "lossless" because it replaces a missing piece of information with whatever the next pixel beside it is. As you can imagine tapes on Mini-DV are starting to get really square pixel shit happening and distributors everywhere are imploring their artists to stop sending in Mini DV masters. I'm sure HD is going to end up having some horrid complication later in life too. The fact Betacam has always been and will always be the best format to master onto unless something MAJOR happens. But as a rule analogue is superior to digital.

The sound suite was in random pieces. The M-Audio input device they were using kept crashing and having to get software reinstalled, it would work for a while, and then it would crash AGAIN! It was like being in the 9th circle of hell. I never want to go into a tech artist run centre job again when nothing is set up and barely anything works. I can't troubleshoot equipment that is totally broken.

I think the problem was things were being acquired because In Theory they were a good idea, although in practical usage they were too new to have proper support or a large base of knowledgeable people to consult. Just a bad idea. I remember when I was in elementary school we did rudimentary computer programming with sprites and I wrote a program which In Theory would have worked perfectly, but in real life application was pretty shoddy. I was talking with my friend Archer about getting an HD camera and he told me to stay away from it until they work out whatever kinks will come out. It's true, if you're putting thousands of dollars on equipment you'd better be damned sure it's going to be reliable for the next six to seven years until they come out with a different format and everyone screams. And using a Beachtek because the camera has no XLR inputs is so dodgy, and few of the new HD cameras had XLR built in.

I digress. Once I found out a filmmaker friend didn't know how a light meter works and I never looked at her the same way again. I'm awfully shallow about stuff like that. In film school everyone had their own light meter because the school's meters would get smacked around by constant use and ended up being pretty unreliable. And when a minute of 16mm film costs $100 bucks from film stock to processing, you can see why everyone put out that much cash for their own meter. Once when I was totally broke my mom kept trying to convince me to sell my Sekonic so I could buy groceries (they're about $200) and I was appalled. You can have my Sekonic when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

I am still waiting for my video conversion to finish and I got on a tangent. I think I have to do something else. I am going to go play We Love Katamari and try to pass the campfire level.

Mehhhhhhh!

I hate video file format converting. I hate meaningless error codes. And I ESPECIALLY hate rendering time, ugh! I hate it! Why do I work with such a fiddly temperamental art form!!???? Expect to read many more posts like this over the weekend.

Mehhhhh!

Giving, Thieving

There is a sort of karmic law I heard of once that says what you give you recieve five times, and what you take you lose five times. I've been looking for evidence of it in life ever since.

The recent blizzard was interesting to watch because most people were helping and giving and would even go two hours out of their way to help a stranded pedestrian or other person without transportation. People who were trapped in certain areas got taken in by places like Costco, Walmart, and the Co-Op. Some of them had to stay overnight. It was nice to hear about those things happening. And then I hear of some places like the Confederation Mall locking all their doors so that no one could get in for shelter. I wonder if they thought of the implications of doing something like that. Confed Mall is in a kind of weird area anyway, and I think after pulling that kind of crap they will probably lose a lot of business. While the above mentioned stores will probably get more business because they care about people.

Even people just on their own with 4x4's were spending hours driving around pushing people out of snowbanks or giving people rides, strangers. People they might even have an arguement with at other times. And they weren't getting anything tangible back, but still they had big happy glows on their faces and just, I don't know. They were on a high from helping people. Because it does make you happy, unless you don't do it much and have never noticed. And it's not helping and then demanding something in return, it's just completely altruistic.

And then I've noticed when it goes the other way, the wrong way. I've had many people in life who are habitual thieves. It's the one trait in humans I can't stand whatsoever. I can tolerate many other strange things, but thieving just pisses me off, especially because it rarely comes along with a code of conduct (which might sound strange but hear me out), I've noticed thieves as a general rule don't exclude their thieving from friends or family. In fact, I notice they even feel less guilty when they steal things from people they know. I've lost at least five hundred dollars worth of things to thieves who were either friends or a Very Bad Cousin.

And I've noticed another pattern with thieves. You'll go to their apartment one day (unless they're between residences) and they'll have tons of stuff, it will be all decked out. MOST of it will be stolen, maybe not the cheaper Value Village couches and things like that, but usually all their electronics comes from friends or family, from whom they are only "borrowing" (without asking and with no intention of returning) or who they've decided doesn't need their stereo anymore. They have a very strong sense of entitlement.

And then one day they lose EVERYTHING. They'll turn up at your door with a backpack of their remaining belongings and steal something again. And it's not that they have to lose anything, it's just some messed up shit they did that made it turn out that way. Like not pay rent while simultaneously trashing the apartment and getting locked out, or just getting evicted with a month's notice and not bothering to pack. Weird shit. I know other people lose everything too and for no fault of their own, but I've noticed this is a regular ongoing cycle in theives lives.

The creepy part is they get resentful of your life, because you have stuff and they keep getting wiped out. And because they don't recognize that karmic stuff is what keeps wiping them out, they assume it's because you're just really materialistic and have the best things and are so rich. So then this sense of being ripped off and feeling entitled to what is "rightfully" theirs comes out again. It's a vicious cycle, and the reason why if I find out someone's a thief I cut them out of my life immediately.

Except for Very Bad Cousin who I keep trying to ban from my house. But yeah, I don't accept thieves in my life at all, not ever. And it's a rule that will never change.

Bad Manors

I got a call from a close friend out in Vancouver. She's one of the few people I can honestly talk about suicidal feelings with and vice versa, because I know she won't run around yelling "Oh my god! I have to save your life! This is a burden, I'm resentful, what a manipulative thing to say!" Meanwhile I'm just like "Uh, can I just watch t.v. with you tonight until I can be on my own? I think Desperate Housewives is on." Lucky for me Lynn and I really can just sit around watching Desperate Housewives and saying absent minded things about jumping off bridges or driving cars off of cliffs. And usually by the end of hanging out those bad feelings are drifting away to a more manageable level. She's pretty fun. She's also a big perv, but of the heterosexual variety. So I was shocked when the first thing she told me in our last conversation was uh, never mind. But I was amazed it was possible, and more amazed that it happened in the smoking room of a bar.

Anyway, she and I also used to live in the same building in a DTES neighborhood called Strathcona in a slum building called Bad Manors. For the most part Bad Manors is composed of artists in two room apartments and is a happy little building, for a slum. But recently a heroin dealer moved into one of the apartments, and apparently she is involved in a physically abusive lesbian relationship. Domestic abuse isn't new to that building either, and we used to have to call the cops on a downstairs neighbor all time, especially when I heard him say he had a gun. (The walls are thin).

When I first left the building the next tenant in my apartment was a white loner who kept to himself and had a little white dog. Then one day Lynn saw him getting out of the shower and he had a huge swastika tattooed on his chest. She was trying to figure out if he was dangerous or not and she said he did have a little dog, like maybe that meant he wasn't violent. "Yeah, but it was WHITE!" And Lynn is very very brown.

So the point is, now a steady stream of addicts are coming into the building to get heroin, and like most addicts who are getting ill from withdrawal, they're shooting up in the nearest place, usually the shared bathrooms. Lynn told me there are blood spatters and rigs everywhere, and explosive diarrhea. Ew. The tenants are refusing to pay rent en masse and the landlord is on a spiritual retreat in India or something.

I'm surprised they've been coming to the apartment, since a lot of people are dealing heroin at Main and Hastings, and Insite, the safe injection site, is just down the street from there. I'm sure at some point someone is going to come across an ODed person in a bathroom at Bad Manors. Even walking around in that neighborhood sometimes you have to stop and carefully observe or give a shake to someone passed out on a park bench, because sometimes they really are dead. Not often, but enough that you can't just walk on by without making sure.

Once we were watching TV and a dramatic news report came on about a skid row heroin neighborhood and did the classic media coverage of Hastings, specifically a slow drive by with a camera out the window. We both yelled "Hey! That's our neighborhood!" The drive by shooting of the camera variety is all too common, I've had friends working the streets who have told me about watching a van with a lens pointed at them suddenly drive by.

The media coverage of Hastings is fucked. The residents are sick of being used by news and film crews without appropriate negotiations with the community. It's true. It's an area that is exploited by the middle to upper class so that the poor can be demonized as fucked up drug addicts with sores everywhere. And some of that is true, but a lot of larger social forces which created those problems in peoples lives aren't looked at. Not only that, but the wealthy are buying property in the area and then having the audacity to say "How can we get rid of the people in this area?" Um, why did you move to the area? You can't live in Vancouver without knowing the demographics of the DTES. There's even an apartment building that has a sprinkler set up to a motion detector to keep the "vagrants" away, I know because one day on my way to work in Gastown I got soaking wet because I stepped too close to the precious rich people building. Some people got inventive though and used it for a shower.

The other issue is that the residents have to fight really hard to get their voices heard rather than have policies made with input from outside "professionals" who believe they know what the residents are going through without ever living there. If it wasn't for a coalition made up of junkies, former junkies, and their allies lobbying, Insight would not exist.

It's a big problem that Bad Manors has become a shooting gallery, but it's also a problem that addicts don't have access to reliable, safe, sources of heroin.

As you can tell I'm in favour of decriminalizing most drugs because of the harm reduction philosophy. The safe injection site is a good start, but we also have to figure out a way that the hard drug trade has it's own specific site so people going to the bathroom in their own building don't have to worry about needle stick injuries.

The majority of Canadians want to decriminalize marijuana, and we've been wanting to for YEARS, except the American war on drugs has trampled what Canada can do in it's own country. DEA agents set fire to a DTES storefront for people trying to decriminalize marijuana and ended up burning down Spartacus Books, a non-profit book store selling rare books about theory, activism, race politics, and lots of other liberal intellectualism. Since Spartacus is non profit and since their entire stock was destroyed, they haven't been able to open a new store in YEARS, and possibly never will.

If we had red light districts and specific places people could get drugs, these problems wouldn't be so huge. And then Lynn could have a pee without worrying about a splat of blood on the wall from someone hitting an artery instead of a vein.

Here's some good info on reforming drug laws in Canada from the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy.

Isabella Rossellini

If you're new to this blog you should be aware that I make no pretense of being an upstanding person. I can get fairly debauched, just ask the two people I lost my virginity to. And I like telling people about my sexuality as it relates to mainstream media. And I like to do drugs.

So when I was on mushrooms this past holiday, for some reason I kept returning to Isabella Rossellini.

"No, wait, really you guys, it's like, there's Isabella Rossellini, and she sunk a BC ferry, I saw it in a free paper once."

"What?"

"And like, Isabella Rossellini was how I figured out I was a homo because of Death Becomes Her."

"Well yeah, all she was wearing was a necklace."

"I know!!! How could I not be a lesbian with Isabella Rossellini running around like that!?"

I was thinking of this drug induced exchange with my cousin when I saw the clip below of Ann Jillian as the Red Queen, who I remember being totally attracted to. I would have been seven. So that predates Isabella Rossellini. But I remember even further back there was a female children's entertainer I thought was cute. I would have been four. And when I was a little girl I had a soft spot for girls playing with my hair in line ups. I felt sad cutting off my hair later just because of that.

The irony of being a queer kid, a butch kid especially, was that most of my friends were boys or other tomboys, until the age when boys and girls have to stop being friends. There was even I guy I went to high school with who never talked to me but who I used to play with between the ages of five and eight. I felt sad seeing the boys I played with drift away because of the social rules imposed on children. I think I have a very different view of men because they were my friends when we were tiny. I wish we'd been able to keep being friends. Girls to me were an otherworldly species, I didn't understand girls. To be more specific, I didn't understand feminine girls. I didn't see the point of having 16 types of berry flavored lip balm, and I definitely didn't understand New Kids On The Block and that kind of desperate lust.

Although looking back on it, I really did understand that desperate lust towards Celebrity sex icons. Maybe I could have gushed too, but no one would understand why a twelve year old girl had Isabella Rossellini pictures everywhere. No, I didn't get nervy enough to do that until Michelle Pfeiffer's turn as Catwoman came along.

See, even if mass media is wiped of all queer references, we can still queer it just by our spectatorship. And it can still prompt people to realize they're queer, after all it's a chance to watch beautiful people up close for long periods of time.

And Isabella Rossellini did not sink that ferry, she was just in a photo beside it because she was at the film festival and the headline was for a story further down about a ferry sinking.

Red Queen White Queen

I made a video in 1999 about Through the Looking Glass as a take on race, with Alice as a biracial girl, the Red Queen as a Cree woman, and the White Queen as, well, that's obvious. But the whole time I was remembering an old made for t.v. version made with Carol Channing and assorted people I don't know circa 1985. I never found a clip until YouTube came along, I was beginning to wonder if it was all in my head. There are a bunch of clips but this one is the most relevant since the video I made was basically just this scene. Only different. There was no singing. And race politics were involved.

By the way, Carol Channing is a pale person of colour.



My tape can be found through Video Pool Distribution.

How the Pharmaceutical Industry Works

The unfortunate truth is that Pharmaceutical companies value profit margins over their market's health. This is the process from laboratory to your medicine cupboard.

First it has to be approved by running drug trials. The drug trials are usually sponsored by the drug companies. The drug trials will only monitor people for a short period of time, so that long term effects are not known. Any deaths or serious health complications resulting from drug testing will be swept under the carpet or otherwise not included in the reports. The drug gets approved.

Millions are spent in marketing campaigns towards physicians, including pharmaceutical conferences held in tropical locales with 5 star hotels and perdiems, all paid for by the company. Swag and hundreds of free samples of expensive medication is given to physicians. Sponsored drug trial results will be quoted.

Physician, under the impression this is really the latest cutting edge pill for (whatever health issue) will prescribe it to patients and give free samples, especially if they can't really afford it. Side effects are rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Large groups of people get complications like an additional disease or there are sudden deaths, a class action lawsuit is made against the company. The company has made 1.5 billion dollars off said drug, but only has to pay 1.5 million to settle claims.

Snowed In

I might be able to go to work at noon, but I will probably stay home and try to shovel us out. So far I shoveled out the back so that the dogs can go out and poop, because they were starting to poop in the porch. The front steps need to be shoveled out and the side door, but I'm not sure if we will be able to open the doors. My cute friend is in BC where there were also blizzards, so I hope she's okay. I wrote a dramatic email to her saying we could have died. One fun thing I got to do is put the wiener dog in his fleece winter coat, because it is minus 31 degrees.

I have some work to do on my video, but I can't be creative all the time so I'm going to take breaks to play Katamari and watch Birth with Nicole Kidman. I'm curious about it and I much prefer when she does serious work. She was great in The Others. Dogville was amazing, although intense, but the ending kicked serious ass and made up for the 3 previous hours. I hope Lars Von Trier is out of his abused victimized women thing. He fucked Bjork up while shooting Dancer In The Dark to the point where she says she will never act again, even though she was amazing. I'm glad he kept to Dogma, but I still think Thomas Vintenberg's Celebration was the best Dogma film made. It was so intense.

If you haven't seen The Celebration, it's about a father's birthday party and his grown son who takes the occasion to confront his father about sexually abusing him and his sister who recently committed suicide. In front of the entire family. And it's really amazing to watch how they react, because it shows the dynamics of disclosure in families but compressed into 24 hours. I highly recommend it.

I think shooting with a small crew gets some really emotional stuff out of actors that is harder to find when there are twenty people standing around, especially since often they draw from their own life experience to act and can be REALLY vulnerable. I don't think I ever want to work with a large crew. Kubrick used small crews. So do a lot of the dogma folks. I think there's more trust between the director and the actors when there isn't someone having to run around screaming at cast and crew. In fact, film sets are abusive, and I think the way they run counteracts any feelings of comraderie or safety or trust among everyone. If people acted the way they do on film sets in any other employment sector, they would be fired immediately.

I'm also lucky in that a friend I used to work with on shoots is now becoming a DOP, which is cool because she knows my style and if you don't get along with your DOP then you can't get the kind of shots you want.

Once another friend was location scouting in a haunted convent and we were looking at her digital photos when suddenly she screamed "There's a face!" Sure enough, there was a clearly defined face looking right into the camera, yet somewhat, well, it wasn't solid that's for sure. It was just disembodied and floating. We were trying to figure out what caused it but we still don't have a good reason for it being there. If it really is a ghost it's probably the clearest image of a spirit which I have ever seen.

When my contract on this research job runs out I'm hoping to get an editing gig on Wapos Bay, a stop motion Aboriginal children's show shot here in Saskatoon. My friend Diana makes the heads for it. The only job I would want in the Industry would be editing. It's ridiculously fun, although I can see how it would drive some people spare. Especially when you spend five minutes assessing the exact frame which you want to cut at, and when you have to watch the entire thing over and over to be sure it works, and make copious notes about various shots. But I like that for the most part it only involves you and the director, and even though things get stressed when the deadline nears, it's still better than desperate crew members trying to get a shot before the light is gone. My first job ever was as a production assistant, but fourteen to fifteen hour days wipes me out, can't do it. Especially now that I have health issues that require good sleep patterns.

I should go do some work now. Or play. I am not sure.

Mercy

Not all caregivers are nice people.

I can say that with impunity because four years ago I ended up with a multitude of self-appointed caregivers. Some people were actually pretty good sources of support. And some weren't caregivers but just came to visit and didn't treat me like a freak. Like my friend and next-cubicle coworker Randy who clued into what a lot of people missed and brought me some books to read. Come to think of it my supervisor also brought me some magazines, along with info on the rights of committed individuals in the Quebec Health Care system.

But possibly the worst self appointed caregivers were my roommates.

I did get out for a week and then had to go back. It was an awful week. I'd been trying to communicate that I wanted them to find another place to live, because they were acting fucked up, but they kept ignoring me because I was "crazy." Once they even started talking about me in front of me amongst themselves. Not only that, but oftentimes they would look at me with total disgust. It was really awful and it hurt my feelings but I had no idea how to show that. And then there was some abusive stuff that happened which I only remember in the sketchiest fragmented way, I know I was physically assaulted just before I went to the hospital again. By now they were so fucked that I was really happy to see the paramedics and get away.

So I ended up back at the hospital. And when I called to check my message manager the code had been changed, because I couldn't be trusted with an answering machine. They had a really patronizing message on the machine all about loving me, but they refused to return any of my calls and never came to visit for the next four weeks.

During those four weeks I tried over and over to evict them. I left a verbal eviction notice on my hijacked machine, but nothing happened, except that now I was hearing from other friends that one of the roommates expressed thoughts of kicking me out into the street. Bear in mind this was my apartment, all the utilities were under my name (including the phone), and I was the only one with a full time job.

It was getting to a really scary point where I knew I was going to be released soon, but I didn't want to go back to those people and they weren't respecting the fact that I had given them an eviction notice. The landlord was starting to get upset too, not with me but with them. The boyfriend had some loud party and the poutine chef downstairs had to run up and get them to keep it down. I think the landlord was considering eviction, not for crazy me, because my family had let him know I was in the hospital, but for the bad bad roommates who he was worried were trashing his apartment.

To explain how extreme that is, picture this: The apartment walls were riddled with bulletholes, someone punched two holes in the walls, paint was peeling everywhere, and this was from previous tenants. So he wasn't fussy, but something was making him draw the line.

So I felt trapped in a corner, I had one key to my apartment which I had left at work and told my Dad to get it and change the locks. He did get it, but James, the bad roommate, knew about it and locked that door in another way so the key wouldn't work. The landlord let him in, the locks were changed, and holy hell broke loose. I was going to let them come back for their stuff, but I was damned if they were going to evict me from my own apartment and keep all of my belongings.

What followed was even MORE drama. James Diamond threatened to kill me and my entire family. My father went to the cops and I nearly got a restraining order. When I got out he started a long campaign of stalking me, including harassing phone calls several times a day. When I confronted his girlfriend about it she tried to justify it by saying I had been pretty fucked up in my phone messages. I said "Well I was committed for being a danger to myself and others, what's his excuse?" Not only that, but he stole several things from me, including some objects with sentimental value.

I should also point out that James had his own apartment.

But possibly the weirdest thing was her saying to my dad "But how can we care for her if we don't even live with her."

Sometimes the best care someone can give is admitting they are incapable of caring for another person and just backing away.

I have never said the words "poutine chef" before. It's kind of funny.

Finally, a visitor from Vancouver

My friend Rebecca Belmore is coming into town for that opening next week, the Mendel has a bunch of different shows going on at once, and she's showing. I love Rebecca, she's so fun. I have her panties but that's another story (she's straight, to my knowledge, which is why it's funny). She was the second Aboriginal to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, my dad was the first. She and I used to hang out at The Grunt in Vancouver, which was probably the only gallery scene I was able to appreciate in any meaningful way. I think because they showed a lot of aboriginal art and yet didn't classify themselves as an aboriginal art gallery. Plus they were unpretentious and you could stand out in the rain smoking joints with staff and other artists, and then stay after hours and get drunker and drunker. They were the most aboriginal friendly gallery in town, so it makes sense that that is where I ended up.

There were other decent galleries, but they seemed to be mainly concerned with catering to the white hipster crowd of wannabe art stars. In fact when Video In started heading toward the wannabe art star crowd I kind of got disengaged with it and felt marginalized again. The irony of that is Video In, which is the oldest artist run centre in Canada, had a really strong mandate for doing community based activist work around issues like sexuality, race, sex, class, gender, disabilities, more sex, etc. So as you can imagine the membership was pretty diverse. But now I keep hearing disturbing stories of aboriginal members being treated in racist and offensive ways. I haven't experienced it myself, but that's the word on the street.

I sometimes don't know if racist shit is going down because people forget I'm aboriginal, or never knew it. So if they hate brown people, I'm sometimes just off the radar to not see it firsthand and know somethings up. Sometimes it's so fucked up that I almost want to say "Don't be racist to my friend, be racist to me! Spread your all encompassing racism around and stop singling out the obvious brown faces." It sounds weird I know. I have brown skin envy.

Which brings me to another thing. I hate it when white people say racism is hating someone based on their skin colour. It goes WAY deeper than that, it's about hating cultures and POC histories and projecting white guilt into a more manageable form of hatred that comes out in words like "I'm not responsible for what happened hundreds of years ago" even when they still benefit from it, or "Don't tell me about colonial history because you'll hurt my feelings and I'll run to your superior and tell them you're racist towards white people!" Ugh! Just dumb. And I'm not the same as a full blooded European because I have a very different personal history rooted in Cree culture. Looking white does not make me care less or know less about being Cree.

I'm glad Rebecca's coming to remind me of the Grunt that I miss.

I'm alive

It was too weird, as soon as I hit publish on that last post my mom was in my office to get me home because everything was shutting down. All the bridges were backed up except Victoria, which people hate using at the best of times. Victoria Bridge looks like this:



Except of course now we have cars. But you get the point. You might think that's a terrible choice during a blizzard, especially since maybe there is a foot between you and the oncoming traffic, and that there is a steep hill on the other side. But no one was using it and it was actually really easy to go over.

It is still blustery and terrible. Basically the whole city is shut down, and if you know Saskatchewanians you know that's serious.

Vancouverites are wimpy. I remember when I moved there and I was trying to get a job at A & W, the day of my interview an inch of snow had fallen. MAYBE three inches. The entire city was shut down, I don't think even transit was running. I got a call to not come in for the interview, even though I just had to walk 10 blocks. I could look out my apartment window and watch a car drive up a hill and then slide back down, over and over, in a fit of modern day Sisyphean terror.

Extreme weather is pretty commonplace here. Even folks from Montreal quake in fear when they face -65 degrees C. We have the same climate as Siberia basically. In fact a fruit grower here sought advice from growers in Estonia, Finland, Moscow, and Siberia.

My mom told me a story about how Gramma used to make the family drive towards the mountains during blizzards so that she could marvel at the snow, ON THE HIGHWAY! She likes storms. So do I. Nothing gets me more excited than a vicious thunderstorm with power loss and broken trees.

Schrodinger tried to go outside to play in the snow, but it's about three feet now so he was unsuccessful. Silly kitty.

Oh swell

I wish my mom wasn't so goddamned stubborn. The courthouse is closed, the banks are closed, a line of cars are hightailing it out of downtown at the impressive speed of ten km an hour. And I still have 50 minutes before my mom picks me up. By now the buses have stopped running so I can't get home that way, and getting a taxi is completely out of the question. I wish my warnings would be heeded even if they are dire. I should not have come to work at all, it was a stupid idea and I should have just told my mom to bugger off and go to work if she wanted to.

Blizzard!

My mom is weird.

This morning we had a huge debate over whether or not we should go to work. She's a professor and I'm a researcher of residential schools (which involves burnout, but that's another story). Anyway, after much squabbling and consulting the Weather Channel, she convinced me to go to work, even though we only had visibility for fifty feet.

Now of course, the roads are progressively getting shittier and the buses are coming up to not running anymore. People in my office are running around panicking and trying to assess if they should be leaving. Mom already agreed to picking me up at 3, but that's still a ways away and things keep closing like schools and so forth. And spending the night in a law office isn't my idea of a good time. I hear visibility has gone down to ten feet, and cars are skidding everywhere. In Edmonton tow trucks have even stopped working. Oh fuck, and now Circle Drive is shut down.

I just want to go home!

Where's my mommy?

The good parts of Manic Depression and why I actually like it

I've been thinking about Manic Depression and the benefits that come along with it, because yes, there are a hell of a lot of additional things that manic depression carries which are really amazing. I kicked off this blog with a list of people throughout history who have had manic depression or other serious mental illnesses, if you go to any crazy person run support centre you'll usually get a list like this. In fact, they should really be handing it out in hospitals for the newly diagnosed. I tried to link to it but it was being stupid, it's the post from March 14, 2004.

One thing that is amazing is the depth of emotions. If sane people's emotions are black and white (to use a metaphor), bipolar people's emotions are full on Technicolor. Everything is just exponentially more, my capacity for loving someone is dramatically larger than most, although since I have to pass as normal I usually hide that kind of stuff. I also know that people FREAK out when they realize you can love them to that degree, so sometimes I even hide it from my girlfriends because I know it is pretty intense and I don't want them to run away. The bad thing is that yucky feelings like anger are also exponentially more, and it takes all my will power to avoid kicking stuff around when I'm frustrated.

Although if no one else is around to get intimidated by it I will hit random inanimate objects. But usually I work off angry energy by having a long walk.

The sad thing about having such a huge capacity for love is that it is hard to find romantic partners with the same intensity. Which is probably why things such as assortative mating happens with people with M.I.'s.

Assortative mating is kind of a dumb term. It's applied to folks with M.I.'s because we have a tendency to date each other. However two sane people with similar life experiences forming a long term bond aren't assortatively mating. They just have "a lot in common."

Creativity also seems to go hand in hand with manic depression. A shitload of notable artists, musicians, filmmakers, actors, and writers have manic depression. In fact, so much of the arts is informed by manic depression that contemporary society has in a large part been shaped by people like me, and that's not even taking into account that world leaders throughout history have also been disproportionately manic depressive. The reason so much has originated in the minds of "crazy" folk is that manic depression's most troubling characteristic to the outside world is actually useful and important. That would be the classic manic episode.

During a manic episode it feels like, if your brain was a house, all the lights would be on, as would every electrical appliance. If your brain was a television set it would be playing 300 channels all at once, and you would be able to recognize and understand every single channel. To the outside observer communicating with us makes no sense AT ALL because we jump from concept to concept in split seconds. But on the inside it's actually quite profound and amazing. It means two subjects which people would not think had ANY bearing on each other get linked in a very valid way, and in a way which a non-bipolar person would totally miss. Tragically some of the stuff we understand we get shamed for so much that we lose it or pretend it wasn't real. For instance, I know a lot of people who have understood language related to colours, or seen how time actually functions. I myself saw how God and "individual" souls relate to each other, but in the end all the sane people ran around going "She thinks she's God!" It was so frustrating. And I would try to explain the concept but it was so out there that they just pitied me and then made fun of it. My friend Emily and I talked about what it's like to go manic and agreed it's like being able to touch God, not just understand it.

Even the Second World War would have had a completely different outcome if it wasn't for the fact that Winston Churchill was having an extended manic episode at the time.

Hypergraphia is also a very handy part of craziness which some other M.I.'s have as well. It's the ability to just write and write and write and write. Which is useful for a writer. Most of the time it makes sense too.

And even depression has it's benefits. For creative people, work made during mania can be edited and reconfigured during a depressive episode. You don't need another pair of eyes because in a couple months when you crash you'll be coming at it from a completely different point of view anyway.

So yes, I talk about the ways in which manic depression makes my life difficult, but it has also given me a lot more than it has taken. In fact, some people recognize it's benefits so much that even if they are stabilized on meds by psychiatric standards, they'll take slightly less so that some of the "illness" remains.

I should also say that the most major complications I've come across can be directly attributed to current psychotropics which we supposedly depend on. In fact my file dictates I should take Zyprexa for the rest of my life, when I've been off it for seven months and am doing better than I did for the four years I was on it. Not only that, but it was antidepressants which lead to my hospitalization, and furthermore I never had auditory hallucinations until I started taking psych meds.

Deciding to Stay in Saskatoon

I've come to the decision to stay in Saskatoon. In seven days I will officially have been here a year. I really thought I would just flounce back to Vancouver, but for a lot of reasons I've decided not to. For one thing, Vancouver is fucking expensive. I hate having roommates because I'm hard to live with and I know it, so I kept ending up in teeny apartments, I mean 300 sq feet or less. And my books were starting to overwhelm my living space. So living in Saskatoon gives me WAY more space for the same amount of rent. Plus I am close to my cousins again, and I've wanted to get to know them better. And I have, but one of the things that made me sad was not getting to know Chris better before he died. He was a pretty cool guy, and god he was so young when he died. Just out of high school. It's harder when people who are young die.

Also the film industry here is going crazy. Charlize Theron was just down in Regina last month shooting a film. Capote was shot next door in Manitoba, and the infamous Brokeback Mountain next door in Alberta. The costs of making a film here are way less than say, Toronto, or Vancouver for sure. A lot of Canadian comedies are coming out of here too. Plus the best Aboriginal actors come from Canada, and we have no star system. Some people say that's terrible "Oh my god! No star system!" I think that's silly. We have Sarah Polley. And if Canadians really want to get into the star system they just leave Canada altogether.

I remember Sarah Polley when she was still a child actor running around in an Anne of Green Gables spin off called Road to Avonlea. So very Canadian.

If the film industry here is booming, so is paranormal activity, like you would not believe. I have seen and experienced some weird shit here. My friend Preston's roommate has a poltergeist. I have a poltergeist at work who bangs things. I've seen UFO's with my friend Laurel, my cousin has seen a TON of UFO's, and I found someone else online who's been seeing tons of them lately. They're invading and Saskatoon is going to be the intergalactic customs station. It would create jobs. Really though, I have no idea what they're up to, it was kind of creepy, especially the first one that looked like some kind of dimensional portal opening up, but now it's getting to be old hat. You know you're jaded when a poltergeist can't get a rise out of you. Although if it threw something at my head I'm sure I'd be pissed. Lucky for me I've mostly experienced this stuff with other people, so I know for sure it's real. Sometimes I let weird shit happen just because I assume I must be hallucinating. No, it's true, that water cooler jumped around. Oh. Fancy that. It's a real great denial mechanism for creepy shit. Oh, I am seeing things, oh well, I'll just ignore it, it's probably my brain having a hiccup. Meanwhile another person with me would yell "Holy shit! Look at that!"

A doppleganger would scare the hell out of me though, or those animals with human faces, ugh, don't want to see any of that kind of shit. I used to want to experience these things, but now I don't anymore. It's interesting though that paranormal events seem to be ramping up. I don't know if it's happening in other places. I've been having some weird visions too, but I won't say them.

The other thing I like about living in Saskatoon is being able to learn my language. People keep talking about indigenous languages dying out, so there's been a revival of the languages. A really cool thing is that a lot of white people are learning our languages too. I like that there are non-Aboriginals who see the use and importance of learning our languages. Who knows, maybe we'll end up with half of the Cree speakers being Euro-Canadians.

So yeah, I'll stay here. I'll probably travel a lot though, or as much as possible. But this isn't such a bad home base. It could be worse, it could be a two room apartment in the Downtown Eastside.

My Paparazzi Boycott

I'm starting a paparazzi boycott. I've hated them since they killed Princess Di (I'm a bit of a Monarchist) and now they're harrassing Prince William's girlfriend Kate Middleton. Already the Prince has pressured papers to stop running paparazzi photos and a few have actually agreed. I think any paparrazi harassment is unacceptable though, for anyone, from royalty to movie stars. I know we ignore it because they're rich, but I still think it's sick. So, yes, my paparazzi boycott. It's going to be hard to follow, but basically I'm not going to watch t.v. programming which uses paparazzi clips, and I'm not buying any magazines or newspapers that feature paparazzi photos. It would be nice if other people did it, but whatever, I just want to have some integrity. It does nothing to decry the attitude of paparazzi and at the same time serve as the market for their photos. I can live without seeing a duchess getting her toes sucked, it really won't impact my life. And besides, famous people look better when they're on the red carpet, not when they're distracted and eating a gyro and giving the finger and accidentally showing pink bits.

The Canadian Film & Television Industry and why it sucks to be me sometimes

Little Mosque on The Prairie is starting tonight and I'm totally stoked. I saw Zarqa Nawaz's short BBQ Muslims years ago and laughed my ass off, so I'm looking forward to a good non-white comedy series. If you haven't seen BBQ Muslims you're missing out, it's an awesome short. You can find it at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC). And she lives just two and a half hours away from me in sunny Regina. I hear CBC picked it up, which is good because they've had a terrible streak of picking up dumb programs, discounting smart programs, and cancelling programming just when it's hitting it's stride in audience numbers. CBC was originally approached with Corner Gas and turned it down, because who would want to watch a comedy about a small Saskatchewan town? Ha ha. Not only that, but a friend of mine told me about trying to get a producer she worked for to pick it up, but he didn't think it would fly. Not only THAT, but some Saskatchewan Film Commissioner advised people to stay away from it because it was doomed to failure. Whoever did give it backing and produced it must be happy as a pig in poop.

Which basically sums up the problem with the film industry. People make really conservative choices and except for some notable producers and having someone intelligent back you up, some really great stuff gets shoved aside for some dreck like Men With Brooms. Canada has some amazing directors and screenwriters, which is why it's sad to see a lot of them walk around with amazing screenplays and no one willing to stick their neck out to fund it. Even Atanarjuat, which won the Camera D'Or at Cannes, was denied funding from Telefilm for a long time because it wasn't in either of the official languages. Who would want to watch a movie all in an Inuit language? They don't take chances. A friend told me Telefilm wouldn't fund his feature until he got Michael Enwright to say he was a genius.

I was trying to figure out why the film and television industry was so white washed, so written from the point of view of privelege, until I screened at an Industry festival. I mean uber Industry, like some guy running through the bar loudly yelling "I'm waiting for a call from Spielberg" kind of Industry. My friend was there and we were just flabbergasted, so many straight white people with so much money and so little to say. I felt soooo out of place, raggedy poor halfbreed butch, it was weird. But I did understand why t.v. and film is so often about upper class able bodied straight white people.

The other sad thing about Canadian film is that as a culture we just don't support it properly. We have crap venues and our theatres have no obligation to meet any kind of Cancon regulations. We're marginalized in our own country! If theatres had to show at least fifteen to twenty percent Canadian films, our culture and film industry would be a lot stronger. But since theatres are privately owned, you can't impose governmental rules on them. And it's not that hard to meet Cancon regulations. Even when I worked at the co-op radio station there were so many Canadian artists that playing the allotted percentage was not at all difficult. Something definently has to change there.

I'm mailing off my application to the Canadian Film Centre for the Feature Film Project today. It's an interesting program but I'm not sure if I'll get in. Who knows? Basically they put you through three months of development, including piecing together an appropriate budget and doing readings and rewrites of the script. Then if you've satisfied them and they think it's a good project and ready to go, they financially support the production and post with $250 000 to $500 000. In terms of feature film, it's not a lot of money, but it also gives you some interesting restrictions that make it easier to learn how to direct a full length feature. No Busby Berkely numbers here. But directing more intimate scenes teaches you more than having a bunch of CGI dinosaurs storm through a boreal forest. If I don't get in I'll be on the hunt for a producer and funding, sooo, we'll see. It will get made somehow. The cool thing about the application is that it allows for people to self identify as both male and female.

Oh yes, and I did find my support material for it, although I had to substitute Anhedonia for Through the Looking Glass. Which actually makes sense considering Anhedonia is more of a drama, albeit experimental, and I'm applying to do a drama. Maybe two samples that are comedies would confuse the jury. What I did realize, again, is that I have a crap system for tapes of my work. Everything is on Beta or ye old timey 3/4," which means I have to go to a professional dubbing place and get new dubs for everything possible, even work I'm not so into anymore. And I have to get my shit together and make my DVD compilation of my work, because I want to start selling the complete collection to universities so I can make much more money. And it would be a steal of a deal, because I would only charge 800 - 1000 bucks for it (institutional sales are usually 250 - 300 bucks for one short). I don't know if anyone has that much allotted for acquistions to pay for only one artist, but who knows? At least I would have some DVD's to take with me to artist talks or retrospectives. And goddammit, I am super in need of having a large supply of support material, especially since I want to try and get to the point of being a full time filmmaker. Meeting a deadline and then realizing you don't have tapes sucks.

Get thee hence to the Straight Path

There's some new anti-homo Christian propaganda out with the charming title "It's Not Gay." It shows former gays talking about the men living the the twilight world, and the unsavory side of homosexual life that gets sanitized from the press. I should be angry, but I find it pathetic, and I feel sorry for the x-gays losing the chance to have fulfilling sex by easing on down the Straight and Narrow. But I admit, I had to crack up at this review:

"This is the a very good video. I ordered this and my son had a girl friend the next day. I couldn't believe it. I love the part in the movie of the former gays. I wonder if they are still on the straight path?"

I wish I had a girlfriend tomorrow. Boyfriends are too easy to get, they're not a challenge at all. It's like the difference of getting into grad school compared to getting into community college. It's late, my metaphors are falling apart.

I'm applying to the Toronto thing tomorrow, I was really good about it. The last time I was applying and missed the deadline I was hole punching in a frantic and running around shrieking. This time I just had to print stuff out and fill out the form again. However, I did hit a snag when I went to package it all up. My support material walked away. Two unassuming VHS tapes just decided to bugger off. I've been tripping over them since October, but now that I'm ready to actually use them, they're awol. Support material isn't supposed to do that to me. Support material is supposed to listen to my needs!

Anyway, I still need to get this in Xpress post tomorrow at lunch, but it's late and I'm giving up the hunt until the morning when they will be in their places with sunshiny faces.

My tattoos are at the itchy part, aaaaahhhh! I keep scratching them without meaning to. Most of the scabby has already fallen off, it's just those last bits that are just hanging on, I can see a couple places that might need touch ups, but they look pretty good. I can't see my neck one very well though.