NAKED DAVID SUZUKI

NAKED DAVID SUZUKI!

Just sayin'!

Scriptwriter, Know-It-All in Training

If there is reason I'm often grateful for choosing this difficult career path it is that it gives me a legitimate reason - not that "general interest" isn't one, but you know - to research pretty much everything in the known universe. One of two web series I'm working on for my new collaborator, the same fellow with him I am recording a second monologue tonight, is somewhat high concept and rooted in a twenty years ahead projection of the modern global scene. A "The World in 2008" issue of The Economist which my pal Rob gave me has been an invaluable leaping off point and another present, from Tom, looks to be quite useful as well. From that I'll leave it to you to guess at the nature of this series - for which I'm trying to get...

1) A treatment
2) A thirteen episode, episode guide
3) A scripted first episode
and
4) A character guide

...finished up. It's going well so far and given the novelty of the distribution medium (webisodes - a rare example of new jargon that I actually like) and how it shapes the message, I've been thinking a bit more about the business of storytelling and how it affects the story being told. For example, I've been making a list of neat background elements which I feel could help to snare those valuable OCD cases that turn a show from just "popular" into "cult". These nibbits are useful for the writer since they expand the world of the story and thus give you more room to tell more stories after - but let's face it, "stories" become "DVD's" and other salable products, which lead to money which I'm told a lot of people are fond of. This is an angle I haven't thought about much before now, I must admit.

I MUST

Meanwhile my favorite writer-director, and basically a huge inspiration behind my original decision to pursue this career, P.T. Anderson has finally come out with a new movie since the criminally underrated Punch-Drunk Love. There Will Be Blood looks very interesting and I will almost certainly review it in some depth after I see it. Until then, cheggout the trailer...

Each year, Scarygoround's creator takes a break by putting up the top 20 albums of the year as reviewed by his main character Shelley. Even if you aren't familiar with the music, the whimsical and inventive descriptions of the music make a great read. Today's reviews includes one of Radiohead's latest which carried a very different method of description than my own and made me grin. Maybe you will to?

Maybe!

A No Good, Uppity Collage Boy

Mostly she cheated on him for how every time he entered her, he insisted on referring to it as a "Slam Dunc".

When I got my first apartment all of my own, I knew I wanted something on the walls that nobody else had and which was all my own. Not having much faith in my drawing or painting skills, I decided to make use of a large store of magazine clippings I'd been hoarding for several years to no specific purpose. Using a standard Grade Six Presentation On Ancient Rome sized piece of bristol board, I did up a big collage and hung it up in a cheap frame that my parents had had laying around. To my surprise, a lot of people other than myself found it very enjoyable to look at.
A year later, upon moving into the bachelor box by the Ottawa canal which would hold me until I left for England, I decided to do up another. The first was just pure stream of consciousness while the latter was loosely gender-themed, with lads dominating one half and ladies the other. Of the same size as the first, I laminated it and then used the collage as a fun cover for my tiny table.

Knowing I'll be heading down to Toronto next month and, ideally, getting my own place by February...I decided it might be time to do some more - having given the two previous collages to my pal Joe when I left for England. This time around I am taking stiff pieces of standard printer paper sized card and doing up a series of smaller collages which I will then get laminated and use for place mats in whatever my new home turns out to be.

The lion's share of my clippings are coming from a tall stack of 1970's teen girl romance comics which contain, by and large, solid gold. The shiniest of the nuggets I have thus far mined would have to be the following "Alphabet of Differences Between Boys and Girls". Yeah, some of it is the predictable patronizing female programming...but honestly, I think that the guys take a much harsher lesson from this cursed alphabet!
Unfortunately the teen-aged girl who owned these several yonks ago must have had a go with her own pair of scissors, so we miss a couple of letters and two descriptions. Still, there's plenty to work with!I suppose you could say that I have my work cut out for me? "You could, but you probably shouldn't."Boys possess some of the same qualities, but to a much lesser degree""When a girl has a quarrel, all she has to do is shed a few tears, and everything becomes all right"I...I have to say that the "S...is for Sex" text confused the hell out of me until I realized it was referring to "Sex" as in "Gender" and not "MAKIN' BACON".For all the old fashioned crap in the other letters, at least X is being hell of progressive by putting forward the idea that women want to see porno films...?

Now I'm off to go make Christmas martinis - I hope you've all had as peaceful and satisfying a day as I have!

First World Problem #2487c

I've come home to find that all of my bookmarks have mysteriously disappeared! Got-damn, there where like 150 of the buggers!

Just thought I'd make this post to say that this space is likely to be quiet until Boxing Day or maybe the day after, for obvious reasons. I definitely want to take some pictures around Carp in that time, so perhaps I will finally deliver on my "Carp has some stuff too!" post(s). Merry Christmas and all that!

Addendum: Though this article is written with America in mind, I think it applies (to varying degrees) even in countries without abstinence education. An interesting read on the sexualized/puritanical conflict of interests in teaching young people how to see themselves and the bodies of the opposite sex.

Brackenbeatzzz the Rapping Secular, Anglo-Saxon Male

So as I alluded to yesterday but maybe didn't explain properly - my head is just fuggin' buzzing with ideas for a new project, as well as the monologues and an older idea that has found new life in my head as a potential series of webisodes (and this isn't including a hoard of other, more tangential notions for this and that). Essentially it can feel like someone just dumped a bunch of pop rocks into my brain pan...in a good way, mind!

This kind of glorious thing pretty much always leads to plenty of long, highly detailed dreams that I can remember very easily the next day.

Last night I had the second in what seems to be maybe a series of dreams wherein a friend of mine whose name begins with "R" and is a writer shows up...and hijinks ensue.

This second dream involved me wandering through a webcomic convention that was cobbled together from pieces of the one I went to earlier this year and my high school gym. Quite soon, I found myself at Ryan North's table...which was more like a large desk. He was all excited about something so I came over and asked "What's up?". "Oh man, Oliver, I totally have a new thing that I'm working on and I'm so stoked about it!" he said. I asked if it was a new book or a new web project and he told me it was the former. "Here, you can see this preview copy" he said, then pulled one out from under the desk and plopped it right there in front of me.

The title was "Why Does Anybody Tell Jokes to Italians?" in this really ugly, yellow font. As I pored over the cover, which was the title overlaid on a fuzzy photo of Michelangelo's David, Ryan whispered "Just between you and me, I was only able to get twenty pages out of that idea so the other hundred pages are just filler". I turned to page twenty one and was greeted by another full-page, color photograph. The photograph was of "Grove St." which I knew in the dream to be the most recognizable street in all of Compton. Overlaid upon this picture was a grid of smaller photographs, evenly spaced, of dogs done up like the various members of NWA - though I swear one of them was Heartbeatzzz The Rapping Dog. "So, what do you think?" Ryan asked and thank goodness I woke up at that point because I may have had to tell dream-Ryan that his book was sub-par at best!

The previous night is not as clearly remembered, but I gather I was standing in a field not far from a school I was attending. I had an essay I needed to get done and it was due soon, but I'd only written a single page. Rob Near walked up out of the surrounding mists and offered to help out. I handed him the essay and as he put it behind his back with one hand, he pulled it back out again with the other. "All done!" Rob told me, before starting to walk away. Looking at the cover of the paper I saw that he had written on the cover sheet, in pencil, "This is basically a perfect 'C' grade paper and does not deserve any less". "Well" I thought "a 'C' is better than the fail I was going to get" and turned the cover page. I very quickly saw that Rob hadn't written the rest of the essay for me at all! He'd just inserted his full name, in 72 point font, in-between every other word and thus inflated my one page into five.

But as I looked up to chase after him, he was just stepping into the mist and the next moment he was gone. I had a brief flashback to when he carved his name eighty-two times into my ruler in grade five, then woke up.

Ah well!

Today I'm reviewing a short script by Mark Z, the fellow who was my other half in making the trailer the summer before last. It's nice to have someone to not only put that kind of trust in me as a person, but in my abilities. After that, more brainstorming for the project that came out of yesterdays crazed conversation...

When you get drunk and party inside it you're allowed to call it the "Diefencrunker"

So!

I just got back from the second go in front of the camera and my first monologue that I can feel decent about. I'm sorrrrrely tempted to post the actual text, but I'm going to raise my testicles into the "steely courage" position (they're like aircraft landing gear, ladies) and wait until a rudimentary edit is put together that I can then upload for feedback.

The other nice thing is that my collaborator and I got chatting afterwards about our mutual desire to film something in the Diefenbunker before we die of old age and it led into a spontaneous brainstorming session of the absolute best kind - one that produces tons of interconnected ideas as well as an intense enthusiasm to get working on them. So with that, I must now fall into my fat green notebook and not crawl out for a few hours.

Oh darling, I think I'm about to peak (oil)

Minus the oil part, that used to be how some folk in olden days used to announce to their partners that ejaculation was along the way. True story!

While researching details for a monologue connected to peak oil, I stumbled across one of the stupidest things I've read in a long, long time. I'd link to the blog I'm copying this from, but do not want to start some sort of pathetic blog war. So feast your eyes, if you dare, on THIS...

-------

9. THE FEMALE PERSPECTIVE ON PEAK OIL

Some peak oilers think street lights are a waste, and should be eliminated. I couldn't help but think how this would come into conflict with, for example, on-campus feminists who want to *increase* the number of street lights as a countermeasure against rape and sexual assault.

Peak oil has a strong male bias. They want to get back to basics and eliminate wasteful electrical appliances. Guys: you may not need that appliance, but how does your wife/girlfriend/mother, who actually uses it, feel about getting rid of it?"

It reminds me of the program "Frontier House" which I saw on public TV. In that program, a number of modern families were selected to go back and live on the land in Frontier style for a summer. No make-up, no conveniences, no energy other than that available to the pioneers (wood and kerosene, I believe). You can read about the program here:
Source

Anyway, the eye-opener about that series was how hard the women's work was in those days. They were washing dishes/clothes, fetching water, cooking, sewing, milking, cleaning-up non-stop from dawn to dusk everyday. It was totally exhausting and monotonous and they complained about it. The men, on the other hand, were outside chopping wood all day and building, and generally enjoyed it and had a favorable view of the whole experience.

That's part of the male bias of peak oil. Men think it's fun to rough it and go back to nature, and shoot guns in a Mad Max scenario. It's like playing cowboys and indians. Women, on the other hand, don't like it, because they can see themselves in the backdrop of this male fantasy, getting raped or rubbing their fingers to the bone on a washboard.

So my point is this: It may very well be that an energy surplus is a precondition of emancipating women from household slavery. So when we lose that surplus, how are you men going to explain the need for drudgery to your women? They may *demand* that you fix the problem by finding more energy, not by rationalizing how important it is for them to be a drudge again.
----------------------
Addendum: It's nice to know that the idea of using a nuclear fucking bomb to get at the oil in the Albertan sands was seriously considered more than once.

So er uh hey what about them things that don't make sense when you give them a cursory analysis?

Wow...

So yesterday involved a lot of barking my shins up against familiar and unfamiliar obstacles in both the writing and the performing side of things. This is good, really, since it's always better to get as much of that out of your system as possible - in general, but especially during the planning stage.

It also drilled home the fact that I hadn't seriously written comedy in well over a year - in fact, all my big writing efforts while in England fell into horror, dystopian and post-apocalyptic genres! These are not genres that are generally known for Big Komedy Laffs (with some notable exceptions). It also reminded me how much easier it is to write something that is character or plot driven rather then pure, uncut humor. When I mentioned this monologue thing to some folk over the weekend I was told by some that I'd basically just have to rant off about whatever, to just "be myself" for a few minutes and hey presto an episode.

But I'll tell ya, the time to space-filled-on-the-page ratio is easily the most unforgiving for writing a comedic monologue...or so I was finding yesterday. I'd wager this is at least partially because a story will always suggest several next steps while a joke does not come with this guarantee. Oh sure, it might lead into more general blather on the topic being dealt with but maybe not a joke. However, a lot of the grunting involved in the process was probably mostly due to my having to work out the kinks in my komedy muskles.

Not to mention that I was trying to write a broad, non-topical bit when my strengths lay in anecdotal, topical humor. Luckily my collaborator and I hit on that last night and as soon as I was able to unclench and let myself know that the latter style would be suitable...the ideas starting coming a lot easier. That being said, we're keeping the episode length to between two and three minutes, at least at the start. That may make it sound like ADD theater to some, but pay attention to the length of something like what Rick Mercer does or ZeFrank. An awful lot can be said in that time.

We're filming again on Thursday with the intention of getting at least one workable episode put together. As we're not concerned with a big launch, per se, y'all may very well get a preview of what is to come sometime not long after (depending on how much the holidays get in the way).

The style is still being refined, but let me show you someone whose set design I considered imitating and whose interview style I just plain admire - Charlie Rose. More and more I find myself digging through his archives on YouTube, his calm and friendly manner is a rare treat amongst all the screaming on TV these days.

In this clip he talks with Edward Norton about the High Line, a section of railway in New York that displays what would happen if nature was allowed to start taking back the domains of man. They show some clips but you can also check out a gallery here.

The Isolation of Yesterday's Storm Got Put To Good Use

So yesterday I finished polishing the latest draft of "Radio Days" and, after receiving the initial (thankfully positive) response from my collaborator, I continue to feel like it's a strong improvement - even if it's now seven pages longer. Originally the goal was to keep it to no longer than fifteen minutes as my collaborator (Myspace Man) had informed me that this was a standard length for UK festivals. Now it sits at twenty-three pages and with the rough [one page = one minute] formula being kept in mind...well I'm sure there are other "weight classes" for festival submissions. Plus one to three pages could end up being pruned if only through my thinning out the scene descriptions.

Due to all my earliest writing forays being short and long stories, a tad too much prose can wind up in the aforementioned descriptions which in turn can artificially bulk up the assumed running time (i.e. it only takes a moment to show a complex background that may have taken "fifteen seconds" to describe. How much the viewer will pick up in that moment is another story). That being said, I wonder at what point you draw the line regarding highly stylized films where the world is as much of a character as the people in it?

Now I'm going to spend the day attending to something folk have been telling me I should write since long before I even decided that film was the avenue I wanted to go down - comedic monologues. I still have my sexy Belkin iPod widget that lets me record my jabberings in the time-honored style, so I'm going to have a go at that while keeping a list of topics and sub-topics I doodled out last night under my nose. This will probably feel particularly apt after having watched Adaptation last night for the first time since it was in theaters.



Let us all take a solemn moment to remember those who have fallen in the battle between technology and horse.

Some people find peace of mind through meditation...

...I find it in my six year old, tri-testicled, phallic cactus. Small red flowers have started to spring up around the tip, so I can only reason that it has been messing about with those filthy girl cacti that hang around street corners during the late hours.

If I ever find myself impotent, I'm going to grind this thing up and snort it.

Gore in Bali, Winter in Canada

Guys, this is seriously mandatory knowledge. Please go here and watch this short speech by Gore upon the topic of the ice caps and the price of burying your head in the sand. This stuff isn't just the next generations problem!

You can read more about it here (and here) and perhaps take a dark kind of joy in seeing Gore take his own country to task while gently reminding delegates from the rest of the world that there isn't much time left in office for that guy and that they should plan under the assumption that the next president will be more on board with dealing with climate change. Canada didn't go unscathed either, nor should it when you look at Harper's awful approach.
Meanwhile, I appreciate that a lot of Canadians are looking at how our winter has been thus far and the way it's shaping up for the rest of the season...then figuring this means things are getting better or that the weather even constitutes a kind of rebuttal to the issue. But just because you see this out the window, it doesn't mean that climate change is over or that "it's just cyclical". As always, if the big news stories leave you feeling overwhelmed and impotent - you can find all sorts of sites with ways for the individual to do their part and even save money along the way (even make money). If you want you know why you should bother, this article is a decent stepping stone towards the answer.

Addendum: Check out this video with Gore outlining 15 ways for the individual to help out and also display the great sense of humor I suspect he had surgically implanted about three years ago.

The Aggregate Rewards of Notebooking

Just a moment I thought I'd share.

In preparation for meeting with folk to discuss future film collaboration in Canada, as well as to help myself decide which script to develop next, I've been spending time at the local library organizing my ideas into index card length summaries - title, genre, length, amount of work already done, novel points of interest...plus the hardest part, a one or two sentence synopsis.

While plunging through my last notebook I reached a blank page and figured I was done. Flipping the page out of habit, I came across several more pages filled with notes. "Bleurgh" I sighed at the thought of having more stuff to summarize. Then it occurred to me that there are certainly worse problems for a writer then having too many neat ideas. Sheesh!

But yeah, hurrah for notebooks. With eighteen months of notes to go through, I certainly won't feel at a loss for concepts to pitch!

Shameless Pilfering

Good old Stephen Fry is at it again, this time with a game show where the points don't matter but you do win said points for not only giving correct answers but also being interesting. It's a great premise and the first episode is a great watch, partially because his old comedy partner Huge Laurie (who most folk enjoy in House these days) is one of the players. You could do a lot worse than to give this a watch.

(I shamelessly pilfered this from that scientifically proven reprobate...Marc)

The realm of dystopian fiction takes another step into reality

Man, the terrible treatment of a friendly street artist is bad enough - but finding out that Britain is continuing to amass the world's largest collection of DNA through law enforcement makes me feel all the better about leaving London.

Great in life, great in Futurama

Gore on China and the US, while at the fourth IPCC climate change assessment.

"Both countries should stop using the others' behaviour as an excuse for stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment."

Oh the fallacy of all skyscrapers being phallacies

I'm a goddamn 195 pound blogging machine today!

This, this is a thing to take pride in.

A friend and former coworker from my Network Rail job in London has recently moved on to a position in the rather interesting London Shard Project. It aims to not only be another distinctive part of the London skyline, a la the Gherkin, but to create "a vertical city". I find this highly amusing as such a concept has shown up frequently in the bleak, long-running, British sci-fi comic Judge Dredd. We can only hope that the future residents of this impressive piece of architecture do not succumb to Block Mania. Seriously though, it is a fascinating project - I recommend at least checking out the slick animated building guide and the image gallery.

A Picture Tells a Thousand Canterbury Tales

I was cleaning out my camera yesterday and it turns out that I still have a few pictures from England to share. Not long before I left I decided to head out to see my family in Broadstairs one last time and during that visit my Aunt and I went to the Canterbury markets.Me talking a picture of an old library, fancy that.
I considered checking out Canterbury's famous cathedral (This is the gateway).
But, as George Carlin has informed us with great wit, GOD NEEDS MONEY. At fifteen quid for entry I decided that I'd stand by my desire not to give money to corrupt institutions with belief systems that I strongly disagree with - though I did sneak the following picture by utilizing my camera's zoom function.
I then set off back into the market and pursued the not so new pagan worship practice of shopping. True story.

His other medallion is maybe an illustration of Calvin peeing on Intelligent Design?

Holy crap do I like today's stencil by Posterchild - particularly what it has hanging around it's neck! If anybody is wondering what they want to get me for Christmas then something like that would be a very safe investment in my glee fund.

Yagga Bagga

Yagga Bagga Hey

Yagga Bagga whey

Chomp Chomp Chomp Stairwell wood Michael Ondaatje is what you want to be and maybe I'm high from being tired and maybe I'm on the internet maybe.

American Elf opened up it's archives and maybe you'd like that. Let's not commit to any certainty okay and maybe this kind of an entry makes me a fourteen year old but the world needs those crazy kids goddamn it otherwise how would we all

eat

them for dinner.

Addendum: This is the thing

the thing that we are going to do.

Solar panels will be bought and affixed to a building that is older than pepsi-cola and the British Empire combined. The house will be lived in by good mannered folk who sometimes make ill informed decisions while raising their four bright, identical children. Boys so blond and blue eyed that even Hitler wouldn't complain but somehow the parents are black and we're not talking adoption or stem cells or nothing. It's just the way it is.

These people will give us money for living in the house and we will use this to pay off the solar panels first. This is being an adult. Then the money will pour in. I shall use it to move to Toronto without having to get an office job in Ottawa for a few weeks. You will use it to pay for lessons you have always wanted. In the end, I'll be somewhere different and you'll be someone different.

Then everybody claps and we win.

Readysetgo

London Wrap-up

Now, as I've mentioned, this site has been pretty much a love letter to London (and England in general) since day one. Lately I have corrected this, as I'd like anyone interested in visiting or moving there to get a more well rounded picture.

But just for the sake of a kind of proper closure or to balance the summation or to appease the curiously Churchillian markings in the frost on my window...a quick parade of positive points.

Boredom is bore-derline fictional
See what I did there?

Seriously, even if you are low on cash you basically have to be terminally stupid and/or lazy not to be able to find something to do in London. I couldn't even do a brief summary of all there is to do by way of music venues, museums, restaurants, pubs, nightclubs, galleries, theaters, cinemas, shops, libraries, parks, markets, novelty locations...let me put it another way. If you are a Person with Interests and A Little Initiative, then you shall find somewhere in London that Caters To You. Time Out magazine is basically the bible of things to do in the city, but obviously there are other sources of information on the matter - many, many sources. Given that this sort of thing was the real meat and potatoes for this site, I'll stop here. Throw a dart at the archives and you're bound to hit an entry filled with my rabbling on about one fun place to go to or another.

Transit
Like anywhere on Earth, longtime locals will groan about the public transit system whenever they get the chance. I'd be lying if I said I never had my own frustrations with the famous London tube system or that I hadn't experienced the joy of having myself compacted into the side of a train car during rush hour. That being said, getting around London was easier and quicker than anything I have experienced anywhere else I've ever been. The slowest late periods and Sundays still managed to blow the finest Ottawa bus service out of the water - and in this I refer not only to the tube but the overland rail and London's own bus services. Like a lot of things in the city, it's expensive...but a clever individual can really get a lot for their money.

I will say this, if you have the extra time and patience then the bus system can actually be much better for your wallet (generally running at half the price) and your peace of mind than the tube. When I worked in Barbican for a stretch in August, it only added ten minutes to my route to take the bus and I often got half the double decker to myself (plus the childish good fun of a double decker bus ride). The bus is also advantageous in that you better learn the space between neighborhoods and see London as a whole, instead of disconnected dots of radius surrounding tube stations. Overland rail, which is much more prominent south of the Thames than tube lines, also carries this advantage.

By and by, whether you go for a day or a year, do not waste precious currency on any map guides to London unless they are the London A-Z. This is widely accepted as the finest guide to finding your way about the city and it is sold in damn near every book, stationary and even corner store in the city. There are a variety of sizes and formats, but a standard paperback sized version will do you plenty fine. A cousin of mine who has lived in the city all his life, working in various locations, still gets some use out of his copy thanks to the density of London neighborhoods.

I said it before and I'll say it again, Google Maps does not have your back in this city. Only a month ago it got me lost down some dark alleys about half a kilometer off-target from where I was trying to get to, despite punching in the correct address. To be fair, I shouldn't have placed so much trust in the green arrows location, but to be vanity fair the damn thing should be accurate - particularly when you consider that Google Maps is powered by the imprisoned souls of Christopher Columbus, James Cook and Marco Polo.

Anyways - at the end of the day, Londoners have an understandable love affair with the tube system which walks hand in hand with the daily grumbling. This has led to some rather amusing and detailed websites which you may enjoy checking out. Serious fans of the film Amelie could get a bonus kick out of this one.

Employment
If you are just looking for a steady paycheck, as opposed to gunning for a specific career path, than this is in fact a good city to be in. Recruitment agencies grow like weeds and though they can be a waste of time, I can honestly say I got all but one of my jobs over there through the durn things. Skilled workers (i.e. anybody who can put around in Microsoft Office Suite) who want to do a kind of working vacation in London shouldn't have a big problem once they get past the initial obstacles posed by immigration.

Football
Plenty of stadiums and enthusiastic pubs in which to catch a game. I myself lived not too far from Arsenal stadium. Even without being a rabid sports fan, I found myself getting a little sucked in. If you want to work your way in with the locals, you could do a lot worse than to follow football and learn enough to join conversations on the subject - just be careful who you swear allegiance and to keep an eye on what team any given group of pub dwellers may be supporting. The infamous football fan violence-o-rama phenomena isn't as bad as it's made out to be, but folk can still get more worked up about it than politics and religion combined.

and finally...

The one line hit parade
- Old and varied architecture, lots of it!
- The relatively new smoking ban.
- Hell of bike lanes/paths.
- Waitrose supermarkets.
- Wide availability and variety of alcoholic beverages.
- A cacophony of ever changing and specific-yet-vague slang. My personal favorites would have to include lairy, chav and shrapnel (definition C). Though not slang per se, the term gormless will always have a special place in my lexicon.

And finally, finally (for real) finally...

London is a place where you can count on more before less, louder before quieter, faster before slower and so forth. There are many, many aspects of the city that I would define as being neither better nor worse but simply more intense than anywhere else. This is something which drew me from the comparatively quiet hamlet of Ottawa, but I can honestly say that after thirteen months there I am happy to be in Carp again - which I shall put up a couple of updates about, if only to show that it has it's charm and places of interest. From there we shall see!

Mid to late Janurary is looking to be a more realistic time for my moving to Toronto. I reckon that I should maybe try learning from past experience? Specifically, I think that if I had found the patience to save a little more money and weigh the pros and cons of who to stay with while I sorted out the job/apartment equation in London...well, it might have taken me a lot less time to get settled in and I wouldn't have felt like my situation was as precarious as it did on some days. So I reckon I may grab a short term job doing whatever, so that I can pad my bank account a bit more before heading down.

Anyways!

I doubt this will be the last time I write about England just as I do the notion that I shall never return there. A friend I made is moving to Berlin in the new year and, depending on What Happens, I may fly over to visit her - and Berlin and maybe Paris as well.

I promise, this is not the end of this here bloog.

BLOOG.

Crap Bags

Holy crap bags I had a great weekend catching up with people...and there are still more folk to see!
Though I wouldn't call this a first world problem, it certainly is better than a kick in the face.

So yes, back to the task at hand of examining the less appealing side of Londinum - to be followed by something positive.

Crime
London is a big city and it has a somewhat notorious crime problem, despite an overall decline in crime rates in recent years. Like the high cost of living, this is something which most of the human race is well aware of - regarding big cities in general, if not London specifically. Islington ranked fairly well in the overall London borough crime charts.

As in Germany, strict knife and gun laws have led to a trend towards "weaponized" dogs amongst gang members and thuggish types in general. Pitbulls (and mixed breeds with a healthy bit of pitbull in them) are very trendy amongst Chavs and their ilk for precisely the associations that make most other folk shy away from them. In Islington, Finsbury and Hackney I saw more of these dogs than any other by far and I must admit that it was a little annoying how my view of them had been changed to one of apprehension by the almost inescapable headlines put out by the various news outlets (which generally bore a great resemblance to the style and bluster of millennial American journalism).

Though it's been many years since the infamous Kray Twins ran around Bethnal Green, organized crime is still a force in the city - with the Russian Vory most recently capturing the public imagination in Cronenburg's latest.

But la dee dah

I generally felt perfectly safe as I went about London, be it the shiny tourist paradise along Embankment or getting lost in the Kray's old neighborhood while trying to find an illegal bar. This is despite a failed terrorist attack that happened in a part of Picadilly Circus I'd been in only a couple of days prior. Say what you will about the big brother effect, all those CCTV cameras left me feeling safer than if they weren't there. As a friend of mine put it, "Try living in Israel for a year, then move back to London and see how scary it feels".

That being said, I can see my patience for them wearing thin if the new talking camera initiative gets some serious momentum behind it. I can't say as I see a lot of wisdom in the ongoing ASBO program either - generally the British law seems focused almost entirely on the treating the symptoms of crime while paying little heed to addressing the causes and this is displayed rather well by ASBOs. Better to try and brand a child with a mark of cain than to find out why he or she is acting up in the first place? I guess, seeing as how they are so effective at deterring further offenses.

Pollution
Cars are the primary culprit of London's pollution troubles, sparking Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion charge and low emission zone initiatives. I've talked a bit about this before, in the broad strokes, but I haven't really said anything about my personal experience. I can tell you that the entire time I was in London, when I blew my nose the results were always dark grey going on black. This had only ever happened to me before if I had spent an evening indoors with several heavy smokers, so it was certainly disconcerting when I noticed the same thing after spending an entire day out of doors and romping through St. James park.

I also remember feeling a slight tug on my lungs when I was in certain areas during my first three weeks. That went away as I got used to it but, as is generally the case with these things, getting used to it was a tad more disconcerting.

General Filth
Walk around London's core and you'll probably wonder why London has such a reputation for being a dirty city. Outside the inner core, it's not unusual in a lot of neighborhoods (including my own) to see garbage bags burst open with their guts decorating the sidewalk, on top of the usual littering. The practice of fly tipping is also well exercised in some parts. Coming from Ottawa, you can appreciate how this drove me crazy and took the longest of anything to get used to. I know that part of the reason is the way that local councils charge for rubbish collection, but that can't possibly be the whole story.

When it comes to recycling, I can say that the public attitude generally doesn't match the enthusiasm and PR on the subject which is put out by the government. I could toss out some theories on this, but I don't feel qualified to say anything of great substance. Suffice to say, I found this difficult to reconcile after the first thirty times it came up.

So okay, enough already. Next post I'll see what I can do to sum up the great things about London/England.

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Addendum: For those of you who are a fan of Saul Willaims and/or free music of a high quality, may I suggest you head on over to his website to download The Rise and Inevitable Liberation of Niggy Tardust! Interestingly, Trent Reznor has produced the album as well as helping with writing and backing vocals.

Shedding Pounds

Right then, let's look at one of the things about London which ain't so fabulous and which I glossed over while I was there.

Cost of Living
Now, you don't move to the world's second most expensive city (Moscow took the lead, fancy that!) and expect it not to be...you know...costly and if you did, well then you shouldn't have been allowed outside your polyurethane bubble-diaper.

This is something which a few naysayers and honest-meaning worriers brought up during my last few weeks before departure. My response was usually along the lines of "Well, the seven million people living there seem to manage somehow. I'll just have to figure out how they do it". Now, of course, it's not worth getting into how every class and strata of those seven million survive seeing as how I myself don't fit into every demographic - I'm not every man or even every woman.

So the question is, how does some twat who is on the other end of a degree but not working at a highly professional level get by (while pursuing the arts in one form or another)? Well the answers seemed to boil down to...

1) Be a Trustafarian
2) Live with those who begot you
3) Live well outside of the parts of London which generally entice young, idealistic folk to move there (essentially zones one and two).
4) Live with a reasonably large number of house mates (as I did).
5) Squat (for reasons unknown to man or beast, VICE UK repeatedly pushes this option).

The thing I learned over time was that contract work, like what I did at Network Rail and in Barbican, generally pays a decent amount more than entry level work in anything which could lead to a career. The average starting pay in non-temp work is fifteen thousand pounds annual and honestly, (within option four) you have to live incredibly frugally without ever getting sick...unless you are comfortable with contributing to the epic personal debt phenomena England is experiencing. It's not as bad as the housing crisis etc going on in the U.S. but it certainly struck me as a genuine problem, unlike the battalion of pedophiles which news outlets liked to convince the public were inhabiting every corner of England which a parent isn't actively observing.

Giving this, I'm not surprised that property investments are unto a national sport - despite estate agents generally being viewed in the same camp as used car salesmen, lawyers and street corner DVD salesmen. As with just about everything in London, the difference between being a renter and an owner is magnified to extremes that would be comedic if they weren't painfully real.

All this made it very, very difficult to save money and it seemed my options were to work dead end temp jobs that allowed me to save a bit while living in a humble ensuite or I had to look into living in such a manner that I wouldn't be taking advantage of London at all, while working an entry level job. Add on that the vast majority of entry level film work was non-paying and, well...

I appreciate that Toronto isn't a cheap town, but given that Toronto isn't Moscow then by default it has to be more affordable to live in. In fact, so long as I manage to avoid heading to Russia's capital - SOMEHOW - then I shall be living in a more affordable city.

As I've said, I'm not crossing London off my list of places to live forever - but if I return, it will be after I've made myself either a fat wedge or employable at a much higher level.

Addendum: The rest of the Emma Clarke farcical tube announcements. She was fired after London Transport found out about these, which is kind of fair, but I'm not too worried for her as this was but one of several freelance jobs and not her sole bread n' butter. I just wonder what the tube will sound like as they make the transition from her voice to someone else...or if they'll just go on the hunt for an Emma Clarke impersonator!

I'm Brack...I mean 'back'

So!

I have returned from England early. I have returned from England with plans to stay for much longer than the holidays. Indefinitely, you could say.

I'd like to stress that I did not come home feeling that The Mission Had Failed. I'm not rich, but I'm not skidding home on an empty bank account. Nor am I throwing up an insulting hand signal to London as it shrinks behind me - I still love London and I don't see that changing any time soon. I've generally left my bridges intact and depending on What May Come, I could see myself returning there. For reasons I may elaborate upon, it just isn't where I want to be for the immediate future.

In essence, the mission - the original mission - was a success. I went to England to look around and decide if I wanted to live there. True, I made up my mind in less than the two year period I set myself. But that period's length was set completely arbitrarily and so I don't feel married to it. While looking over the details of planning a three week visit for the holidays, I starting thinking "What if I just stayed?" and the more I weighed the possibilities, the more the scales fell in favor of that course of action.

I must confess that I have been in the country since late on the 18th, but have kept quiet about it since I continued to be terribly ill and wanted a private week with my parents so that all the kings horses and all the kings men could do a bit of contract work on me. I'm finally feeling better on the whole, but my body is exhausted from fighting off the most tenacious disease I've wrestled with in about four years. What energy I have has mostly gone to fishing through the numerous boxes which I filled up and stored with my parents before leaving for London. If nothing else, I'm grateful for the year in London proving I can do just fine without a lot of the crap in said boxes - why did I save half a dozen He-Man action figures? - and thus giving me whatever I needed to be able to part with a lot of the junk.

I'm crashing with my parents until years end, then heading out of Ottawa to another city - Toronto being the top candidate - and seeing what kind of messes I can make there (or so the plan goes). I'm also taking advantage of this short break from the "real world" to reassess what I'm doing and what I really want, in the hopes that this will lead to a more cohesive decision based on stronger merits than before.

I don't regret going to England, mind. As you can see just by digging through this site I've been updating over the past year, I've been able to see and learn a great deal that I wouldn't have otherwise. It also forced me to be more independent than I've ever been before - though I moved out of home two weeks after graduating high school, I've always been in the same city as my parents and that can lead to the inevitable call for help when perhaps I could have just dealt with something myself. I couldn't give a fiddlers fuck* how corny it may or may not sound - my time in London was a great period of personal development, though I wouldn't say I found myself if only for the semantical reason that I've always been highly aware of my location, but also because that implies a kind of final stage of development. I think that hitting some kind of plateau like that is not the reaching of a pinnacle, but slamming into a brick wall. The day you stop changing as a person should, ideally, also be the day you die.

But I digress!

As with my decision to go to England in the first place, I can choose to sum it up in a sentence, but a proper explanation of why I left could easily get into my drawing up a pie chart of reasons. This isn't due to there being a litany of despair driving me to come back, just that I can barely decide to leave the house without at least three reasons for doing so and thus you can imagine how this plays out with something as big as moving three thousand miles.

I'm going to keep this thing going for now - I may be back from England, but I'm not abandoning the pursuit of success in film. Plus I'll be enjoying exploring wherever I end up next and I'd be interested to find other content threads to weave in here.

No angst filled poems though, sorry!

*Fiddlers aren't terribly good in bed, I guess? You can thank my dad for that expression finding it's way into my lexicon.

Emma Clarke - the voice of London tube announcments - does some fun stuff on the side

boomp3.com

Regent's Park Before Dark: Part 2

So on we go, up through the main body of the park's west side - I won't bother with pictures of that as I'm sure you're all familiar with what flat, grassy football fields look like - and then up to Regents Park Canal, which runs along the norther curve of the circular shaped park. Along this canal lay the London Zoo and I would have given it a whirl except entrance was fifteen quid and I would have only had an hour before closing. I quickly realized that that apes and giraffe's would all be from the same places as the apes etc. that I'd seen in Canadian zoos, so it wasn't a big loss. That being said, here's a snap of the portion of the zoo which lay along the canal.And then looking down the other way...Crossing this canal took me to a separate section of the park called Primrose Hill. It's from the highest point of this hill that you can achieve a magnificent view of all sorts of neighborhoods I've been talking about on this site for the past year - Soho, Embankment, Oxford Circus, Westminster, Tottenham Court Road, King's Cross...and if you cast your eyes far enough you can even see such as Shoreditch, Barbican and Canary Wharf to the east (left) or Westminster, Kensington and Hammersmith to the West (right).I took a couple of short MPEG's, the first working from east to west and then the second working the other way, but with more of a zoom. I'd suggest viewing them with the sound off as the wind was high that day, causing a great deal of uncomfortable noise to be picked up by the camera's tiny mike.


The BT telecommunications tower features prominently and perhaps these videos will reinforce what I've said about it being an immensely useful landscape for finding your bearings in North London.Eventually I came down from Primrose Hill and went back along Regent's Park Canal, heading into the North Eastern quadrant of the main park. Spotting a wild boar, I tried to grab a picture through the fence. The durn focus kept on the fence instead of the boar, but I think it's fun to see anyways.Just by the Zoo is, understandably, the headquarters for the ZSL.And now you are joining me as I swung around and starting heading southward along the eastern half of the park.Eventually I came across this little monument which, at a distance, I presumed to be some churchy church church church thing for which I had little interest.Boy, was I wrong!I fully appreciate that, in the final tally, the British going and conquering a quarter of the Earth's land area was not A Particularly Nice Thing and that it entailed some pretty heinous injustices. But it is refreshing to see someone saying "Thanks for the good stuff that came with that!", it's nice to see something which goes against the grain of almost cartoonishly villainous portrayals of imperialists if only for a greater variety of discourse. I remember often enjoying seeing this side of the Indian reaction to the English occupation in the literature I studied in my related University courses - and it wasn't always from the wealthy Brahmin class, either. As I say, though, I'm not endorsing imperialism here so much as I am a plurality of thought!.The ol' BT tower again, as seen from the South-East quadrant of the park.
This is one of the Money Buildings which lay along the eastern side of the park's perimeter. Alas, I cannot recall what it was! I do recall there were a few private residences along this stretch where, as with those homes by the heart of the Thames, the residents are not suffering from a terribly desperate need for your PayPal donations.

I thought I knew superheroes

I knew nothing.

Regent's Park Before Dark: Part 1

To my great joy, I came across this while heading up from Baker street tube station towards Regent's park. To my slight disappointment, it turned out to be a real tourist trap. The teenagers in period costumes were kind of adorable in how they were still trying to posture and look cool while being dressed like Victorian shop keeps. I think every single one of them had been made to get the job by their parents - or maybe I'm enough of an old coot that all teenagers constantly look that way to me.

I also think they made the store two big by half, by accident maybe? The Sherlock Holmes books (in numerous versions and editions) along with some Sherlock specific merchandise only took up so much space - the rest was filled with the kind of stuff that only served to remind you that a nation's flag can be printed on just about anything you like. Ah well! I'd say something about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle spinning in his grave, but I reckon he's too decomposed for that now. Dude's corpse ain't the spinner it used to be.All around the outer ring of the park are buildings of this nature. Money-palace's which are owned either by prestigious business colleges, companies or the royals. I figured one picture of them is enough since the architecture has surprisingly little variation. That being said, there were a couple of nice homes on the east side - I reckon they probably go for a couple of bucks and a coy wink.Eventually the birds all fluttered around this old woman in a big storm. The buffeting from their wings came with such force that I had to cover my face. When I was able to steal a peek from between my mighty forearms, all the was left of her was a bloodstained hat and a coupon for a free lapdance at Tesco.The south western corner of Regent's Park seems to have benefited the most from the kind of superior landscaping I've seen in St. James and other pockets of the city. The rough center of the park is circular and features a small cafe, as well as the outdoor theater I visited a few months ago to see Macbeth in.As you head on up into the upper west side of the park you run into more standard fare as well as plenty of football fields....and eventually the zoo, which can be spotted from afar thanks to some new mountain habitats they've constructed.We'll journey up and past those plastic peaks in the next installment. Until then, try rubbing that thing between your legs - I gather people enjoy that?

Dennis Kucinich's Opening During Global Warming Debate

I've been a fairly consistent Barack Obama man thus far...

But this fellow is starting to tickle my areas a whole lot more, particularly since this short speech.

Thames at Noight - Part 4: The last bits

Man oh man, I got you a first world problem right here.For the last couple of days I have been too sick to blog.Shocking, I know. It makes the potty run out of the body.But these germs which my immune system isn't so familiar with, seem to finally be getting beat back.More complex ideas than "Where are the tissues?" and "I want to live, yet even more I want to die" are starting to form in the imaginationscape.
So yeah, sorry for the quietude and promises which haven't been followed up as quickly as either you or I would like. This is what happens when you get tied to a chair and cock slapped by germs, I guess!

I - I guess!

Thames at Noight - Part 3: Saatchi invasion and Ben (Big)