... and so it begins... again! 


First, let's talk about the holidays. 

Shortly after my last blog entry, my daughter came down with the flu. This was a vicious, violent flu that kept her throwing up for six straight days. She picked it up from her cousin and, in the end, it pretty well ripped through most of the family. (Apparently, it originated in the cousin's brother's day care. Day care is evil.) I managed to keep myself virus free until, would you believe, the 23rd! Yes, I spent all of Christmas in bed with the flu, sick as a dog. I got out of bed for a couple of hours on Christmas morning to watch my kids open presents but went straight back to bed afterwards. I really didn't feel back to normal until just about New Year's Eve when...

... New Year's Day, the same in-laws who dropped the flu in our laps (literally--that cousin actually threw up on my mother-in-law and Heather) showed up with wicked colds and coughed and sneezed all over the food. (Okay... in their defence, only three out of five of them were sick, and it was only the day care cousin that coughed and sneezed on the food.) The cold hit me the following day, and I was sick for another week. In fact, we all were. Every single person in the house came down with that little beauty. What a great start to the new year... although I have to say, in retrospect, I'm glad of it.

The thing is that I spent so much time alone (I'm one of those reclusive invalids), that I couldn't stop myself from just lying there in bed, reflecting on the last year. I usually think quite a bit about things, but it usually doesn't progress much past great cheeseburgers I've had or how I could destroy our Care Bears video collection without my kids noticing. It suddenly occurred to me just how far away from our original plan we'd drifted. The idea of buying a house in Spruce Grove and sitting on it for a year or two while it appreciated made perfect sense when we got here--you could buy a really nice house for $230,000 to $250,000.--but that was a year ago. There's a massive economic boom underway in Alberta so now, those same houses are listing at around $300,000. Not such a bargain. Without cheap housing, Spruce grove really has nothing to offer us. It's nice to be near family, but that's not why we moved up to Canada. I realised that over the last year, I'd really been slipping into a downward spiral because frankly, I'm out of my element here. I long for the ocean and air that doesn't turn you into jerky. I wouldn't mind seeing a mountain now and again or even just a small hill. I even miss "the business", something I never thought would happen. As much as I always despised Hollywood, I did manage to find good people who were creative, enthusiastic, and had an understanding of the artistic process and the trials and tribulations associated with artistic endeavours. Creativity and creative pursuits are a strange, abstract thing that really don't translate into any sort of Puritanical, prairie work ethic. "Hard" work is what's admired out here. I've always believed that if you're writing music, a book, or even a sentence or two in a greeting card, that if you have to work "hard", you just aren't in the groove. Creativity has to flow. I can't tell you how many times I've pulled all-nighters or worked even longer than that. (My personal record is 76 hours straight... not even a nap... I kid you not!) But that's not hard work, it's just long hours. The race is always against the clock because you're absorbed in what you're doing and don't feel the time slipping away so quickly. Still, it's not "hard". It's not like standing out on an oil rig in –45ºC guiding a spinning shaft with a piece of chain that could easily kill you if your concentration drifted for a second. It's not 14 hours hanging dry wall or a day spent on the farm harvesting wheat. They have a phrase up here: "Get 'er done." I wonder if, as he was deliberating over shots for the opening ape scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey", anyone went up to Kubrick and said, "C'mon Stan... just get 'er done." It really is a different world up here and the novelty of being a novelty is quickly wearing off. I don't like being the only guy within 250 kilometres who's in the entertainment business.

... and so it begins again!

I was online looking at houses in the Vancouver area (nothing under $450,000, unfortunately) when my search started drifting inland, and I ran across an area called the Fraser River Valley. It's only about an hour outside of Vancouver, and the housing prices are actually slightly lower than Spruce Grove! Can you feel my excitement? Finally, with the promise of work and a viable "Vancouver-adjacent" area to head for, we're back on track. I'm hoping to move by about September or October. I'll be closer to my career, able to easily head into town to "network", and I'll be near a river and only about an hour from lots and lots of water (i.e. the Strait of Georgia and the Pacific Ocean beyond). The area gets lots of rain (perfect for me) and is consequently lush and gorgeous (I've been told). Also, by the then, I'll be legal to work... I think.

I have completely lost my faith in the government agency called Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). Visitor permits are granted for a period of four to six months. In fact, towards the end of last summer, I had to make an improptu trip down to Montana to renew my expiring visitor permit. (I don't think I ever mentioned that in the blog 'cause, frankly, I was embarrassed that I'd left it 'til the very last minute.) Leaving and re-entering is apparently not the way you're supposed to do it, and although the border guard did begrudgingly grant me another permit, he advised me never to do that again. So this time, I decided to do it the proper way and applied for an extension before it expired. Well a few days ago, I received a call from CIC to tell me that I'd missed a few things in my application. The thing they were most concerned about was the payment: it costs $75 to extend a visitor permit and, not knowing that, I hadn't enclosed a cheque. The agent gave me a web address where I could go to make the payment and instructions on how to submit proof of payment to his office. It was sounding complicated already. The second thing I had missed was some sort of proof of financial support; I'm still not allowed to work so it makes sense that some means of supporting myself would now be in question. Not a problem. The last requirement is the funny part. I'm just going to quote the agent directly:

"We also need proof that you submitted your application because we never received it."

What?! Seriously, I was dumbfounded. All I could think to say was, "how did you know to call me if you never received my application in the first place?" He thought about it for a moment and then decided that maybe they'd lost it. My point was that there was no way I could prove I sent it because... well, I sent it meaning that I no longer had it. (Unfortunately, I hadn't sent it as registered mail.) Anyway, the whole episode kind of shook my confidence in Canadian bureaucracy. We'll see if I get my extension.

I guess governments are all the same. They're all inefficient, and they're all mired in red tape... all except for the Iraqi government, it seems.

I was fairly shocked that Saddam Hussein was executed so quickly after his trial. Everyone knew he was going to appeal, but I guess the appeal process, in Iraq, goes something like this:

"I want to appeal the verdict."
"On what grounds?"
"On the grounds that I didn't receive a fair trial" (or whatever).
"Hmmm... well I was the judge presiding over your trial, and I thought it was fair. Appeal denied."

... and a day or so later, he was dangling from the end of a rope. I have the feeling that, perhaps, they needed to hang him before the end of the year just to save the paperwork from rolling over into 2007. A nice, clean break, if you will. The whole thing felt very strange to me--a world without Saddam Hussein. I suppose that's because over the years since his capture from that hole in the ground, he had started looking crazier every day (as if living in a hole in the ground isn't crazy enough). He struck me more and more like a bag lady with a beard... but then, "You" (please see Time magazine's Person of the Year) had to hop into the picture and video the execution with a cell phone. This laid to rest, for me anyway, any doubt that Saddam Hussein wasn't the tyrant who had been so hated by the Iraq people. It also made me think that maybe Time magazine was onto something with their "Person of the Year". I didn't watch the execution video (although I did do a quick search to see how easy it would be to find--dead easy), but I did read a transcript of Hussein's last few words. Stroppy and defiant to the end. I did, however, watch Michael Richards' tirade online, and that had the opposite effect for me. Where Hussein had my sympathy until I saw his video, poor Michael Richards had my condemnation until I saw his nervous breakdown on stage. There's no excuse for the things he said, but really, I think it was just the last gasp of someone who knows their career is over. When the heckler in the audience said "it's not funny. That's why you're a reject. Never had no shows. Never had no movies. 'Seinfeld', that's it", the truth was just a little more than he could handle. Of course, the racial epithets came before that comment, but I'm sure he was already dying on stage. Poor, poor Michael Richards. Racist? Probably. Has-been? Without question. We saw the death of a dictator and the death of a career within a month of each other.

In other entertainment news:

I couldn't manage to pull together any crew to shoot something for "On the Lot". My producer friend, Aaron Rattner, suggested that I try to cut "Quitters" down to a five minute short from its current 15 minutes. Not a bad idea. I'm still trying to make the time to do that, and if it works, I'll post it somewhere and link to it here... and speaking of film links, I've finally posted a copy of the sword demo I shot on the "Air America" backlot. You can find it here. I also did a joke version called "Gringo Samurai" which you can find here. Both of the files are fairly large (13 and 19 Megs, respectively), so I'll thank you in advance for your patience.

... and in other entertainment news:

The L.A. Weekly recently ran an article about the resurgence of the "rockumentary" due to the rise of cheap formats like miniDV and prosumer HDV cameras... and do you know, "Ghost on the Highway" was specifically mentioned! Unfortunately, we were fairly high in the "must miss" column. The blurb said something like, "this film missed both the man and the music." Sour grapes, if you ask me. Several of the original band members, after seeing the film, commented that we had really encapsulated that period of time and what the band was all about. But you know, the band never went over very well in L.A., anyway. Perhaps The L.A. Weekly was upset that we had made that painfully clear... that the Gun Club's home city repeatedly turned its back on the band and Jeffrey Lee Pierce.

Despite such a poor review, I'm really coming into 2007 with drive and enthusiasm. Where 2006 was somewhat of a write-off, I'm determined to make 2007 a turning point... the year I get my career back on track, and the year I finally establish myself in Canada. We're house-sitting again which is nice, and while we're here, I want to make the most of the space and privacy. (We're only going to be here until mid-April.) I'm going to explore comedy and comedy writing more seriously (oh, yeah... that sounds pretty friggin' funny right there), and I hope to have some sort of video podcast online within about six weeks. Hell, I even decided to give up drinking for the year. Yes, I am ready to look 2007 square in the eye and say, "that's right, baby... you're my bitch, now."

And to conclude on a similarly upbeat note, my ranking in 8 ball went up to "5" at the beginning of the year. Look out, Steve Davis! 

Posted: Fri - January 12, 2007 at 09:45 PM          

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