Silver Lining in the Harper Overcast

There’s a story behind the story.

There’s a buzz in the air with same-sex marriage, on a justice department’s ruling on an attempt for two women, married in Canada, to get divorced. The law stated that for a divorce to occur, the couple needed to have lived in Canada for a year. The couple declined that option, and contested the ruling. At this point, the lawyer suggested an alternative; their wedding was never valid because their home nations (the U.K. and the U.S. respectively) don’t recognize same-sex marriage, and they never lived long enough in Canada to be citizens.

(I wonder if this alternative was suggested as a well-meaning attempt to give them what they wanted; out of the marriage.)

FIGHT COMICS! An introduction

FIGHT COMICS: Opening Jab

The title comes from Warren Ellis. He mentioned Fight Comics as a concept years ago on his now-closed Bad Signal mailing list.

As he described it, Fight Comics is a concept where the the fight itself is the point of the story. A fight told in an interesting way. Making the battle compelling and not as filler between dialouge.

Which hit me right in the brainstem. I’ve been a lover of well-done action for as long as I can remember, and this concept all of the sudden gave me permission as a storyteller to focus on what I was already passionate about, and on what many consider the sauce on the story, not the meat of the narrative itself.

So I’ve come up with five stories, a different artist collaborating with me on each(plus a cover artist!). They’ve been a blast to write. I’ve tried to keep each story distinct from each other, including a bare-knuckle boxing fight, a swashbuckling duel, a high-tech story of rebellion, a conflict amoung techno-gods from the distant future, and a kung-fu tale.

I hope to have the anthology ready by October, but check back here for details! I plan to get a few preview images up in the next few days.

1984 Americano

Starbucks is Big Brother. Orwell saw it coming.

(Clearly, I’ve never been a fan of the Starbucks experience.)

Much has been made of Starbucks’ success in terms of marketing, but a random thought of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four while making coffee made me realize that the parallels fit eerily well.

Those times I find myself in a Starbucks line (my need for caffeine sometimes supersedes my fear of Big Brother… ah, fresh roasted hypocrisy) the confusion always begins here:

“I’ll have a large americano.”

“Venti americano?”

“Is that the biggest?”

Much like O’Brien proves to Winston that the state can indeed make two-plus-two equal five, Starbucks has convinced many consumers that the proper way to order coffee is with their lingo, which is creepily brilliant. You use the language, and then you go to the only place where that language is understood. I’d actually be interested in learning how many other coffee-shops accept the terminology when they hear it, or if they demand a translation.

I’ve learned that ‘tall’ (one of their smallest sizes) is named based on actually having been bigger than their original size, near the beginning of Starbucks. The pendulum has swung in the other direction, leaving it nearly the smallest option, yet it retains the name, which the literalist in me has a very hard time with.

I’ve had numerous friends who have worked or do work for Starbucks, and it seems to treat their employees very well, with free coffee, and great training. Not unlike WestJet, they foster a deep sense of interaction with their employees, not to mention with their customers.

Researching this article has shown me that as a company, they’re not so bad, though not without blemishes. The real sin that I see is here that of monoculture. The same food, music, and clothes everywhere you go. The safety that you can get cloned coffee no matter where you are should be replaced by the curiosity of trying something new, and pleasantly being surprised. I’ve become a big fan of Kawa coffee because of the great tasting roasts they choose, but also because I treasure the individual quality of every visit.

The threat of monoculture is a world where we don’t see the world, because every facet of it is stuck on repeat with same street-corner two blocks ago. Or two cities ago. Or two ‘talls’ ago.

Starbucks as an organization can hardly be blamed for their marketing acumen, and they are not so blatantly oppressive as Big Brother. Their ability to manipulate language and actually alter behavior based on that does bear a resemblance though. Besides, when you’re bringing in $10.71 billion  with a coffeehouse experience, why go to the bother of actually being oppressive. It’s a lot more work…

The dominance of the Starbucks brand has less to do with quality than salesmanship and viral branding. The coffee itself is often over-roasted and bitter, though I suppose it’s true that it’s consistently over-roasted. Coffee drinkers are in the Starbucks habit (or follow their peers), and so entrepreneurs get on board rather than taking a risk with an individual creation. We’re all drinking Blend 101, and two plus two equals Venti…

Romancing the App

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve always been fond of programming.

When I was a kid, we learned to program on a Commodore 64 in BASIC… When I moved into junior high, we learned Microsoft’s BASIC language, and I remember being amazed at the possibilities of coding. Living on a steady diet of sci-fi novels, I imagined computers and programs as the ultimate answer to any sort of labour we would find too boring or time-consuming. Math and it’s subsidiaries are the first and best example of how we would let computers help us… but the burgeoning fields of video games made me dream of coding levels and monsters as a career.

This, of course, was before we’d heard of the Internet.

Rewarded Patience

I was sick all last week. I tried to go in to work, but the bug kept me home for a couple of days. And with a completely unplanned day off, I find myself turning to those things I kept putting off because of a lack of time.

Like re-watching The Godfather, Part 2.

A Study in Horrible-ness (a Dr. Horrible ‘documentary’)

Find out what the henchman-on-the-street thinks of Dr. Horrible…

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrXpWw8Tz5Q

This was my first foray into film-making, and I found I really enjoyed the process. That was assisted by no less than Dan Dumouchel from Perfect Pictures Inc, who made every step of it easy and fun. The quality of the product has a lot to do with the skill, craft and art he has at his fingertips.

Something fascinating was in watching this with an audience. Stuff that I only hoped was mildly entertaining got big laughs. Fortunately, so did the stuff that I actually thought was funny. Like a lot of art forms, you have to realize that by the time an audience watches it, it’s going to be a different beast than you thought it was on the page, while you were shooting, or even while editing.

It was invigorating. Addicting. Maybe I’ll have to do some more.

Hope you enjoy it.

Come see Natalie Meisner’s BEFORE THE TIDE

This show, as well as working on the Calgary production of Dr. Horrible, has been keeping me away from this blog for awhile… so it seems as fine a place as any to try to tell people all about it!

Theatre BSMT presents the world premiere of award-winning
playwright Natalie Meisner’s Before the Tide with
Artistic Director Designate at the helm.

CALGARY, AB – Theatre BSMT presents Before the Tide – a haunting new play by award-winning Canadian playwright, Natalie Meisner. Artistic Director Designate of Theatre BSMT, Jason Mehmel, produces the play which stars outgoing Artistic Director, Amy Dettling.

Before the Tide tells the story of Claire, a kayak instructor who makes a macabre discovery while on the water. Rich is the police sergeant she encounters as she tries to chart out the right course of action.  Confronted by due process and a string of coincidences, they learn that the riptide can pull you in directions you never intended. Playwright Natalie Meisner has been recognized with awards such as the Canadian National Playwriting Award and the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award.  Her brilliant and ground-breaking plays have been produced nationwide.

This production features some of the talents of Calgary’s emerging theatre professionals: Director and Set Designer Shane Anderson is partnering with acclaimed comic-book artist Fiona Staples <http://www.fionastaples.com/> , and Sound Designer Greg Smith. The production is produced by Theatre BSMT’s Artistic Director Designate, Jason Mehmel and stars outgoing Artistic Director Amy Dettling and Calgary actor, Brian Doss.
Theatre BSMT is stretching the definition of emerging artists. With Fiona Staples and Greg Smith, we have two accomplished professionals in their particular fields, but had never brought those skills into the theatre space before. Actor Brian Doss returns to the craft after time spent away.

Jason Mehmel comes to Theatre BSMT as an eager and capable theatre professional having received his BFA in 2006 at the University of Calgary. He is currently the Treasurer for the Fight Directors Canada and was featured as Vertigo Mystery Theatre’s Emerging Director in 2008. He is thrilled to take his place as the new Artistic Director of Theatre BSMT for the 2010/2011 Season, and plans to make exciting and innovative changes to the company’s direction and mandate, while continuing to offer rewarding opportunities to emerging artists.

Outgoing Artistic Director Amy Dettling will be leaving Theatre BSMT to pursue her education and career goals in the field of Science! The company wishes her all the best in her exciting endeavors.

Before the Tide runs June 2nd – 12th, 2010 at the EPCOR Centre’s Motel. Tickets are available by calling 403-288-2384 or by emailing tickets@theatrebsmt.com. More information may be found at www.theatrebsmt.com <http://www.theatrebsmt.com/> .

Review of Avatar

This isn’t my most current review. This movie has been out long enough everyone’s probably already formed an opinion. Which means, read on! See if you disagree, and then debate it with me in the comments! From the enormous hype machine to the months of sold-out performances, I came out of that movie having seen exactly what I expected. Which is good, mostly.

Stunning, well-designed visuals? Check. A critical view our need as a race to strip everything around us for resources? Check. Action scenes that will no doubt inspire hordes of video games? Check.

Strange as it may sound, with all the fervour around this movie, giving us this sort of relatively simple story is the safest bet, with the best chance for success. Everything that could be counted as a surprise was in the visuals, in the design.

I have now read the entire Internet

Well, maybe not.

But I did get caught up with all the blogs I subscribe to today. I probably hadn’t looked at them since Christmas, so they’d piled up a bit. Five hundred-some posts later, I emerge, informed and energized.

It occurs to me that this is either an emerging, or already dominant, way of getting the sense of the world around you. At least three different blogs might post the same link, and through that sense of shared voice, you see which internet voices can command attention, and which ones still have that sense of the personal blog that no-one’s really reading.

Review of Sherlock Holmes

I’ve read a few reviews and criticism of the new Sherlock Holmes movie, to get going on this review. It’s polarized, basically between people who wanted to see him in a deerstalker (the funny cap), and those who were glad they didn’t.

I’d count myself in the second group… I’ve got a fair amount of familiarity with the original Holmes stories, and I was glad to see something other than the typical Sherlock cliché. What we see as the ‘traditional’ Holmes, with the cap, jacket and pipe, was an image created more out of the movies and illustrations that followed the stories, than the stories themselves. The funny cap is less important than showing the almost unbalanced compulsion that drives this character.

Which this movie did, as did Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as performers, is both have fun with the possibilities of these characters, as well as show the tensions. Sherlock as a OCD genius who needs a case to work on for his own sanity. Watson is Sherlock’s closest friend, but is also someone addicted to the excitement of Sherlock’s cases.