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.)

When the couple’s lawyer, Martha McCarthy, brought this to the attention of the media(1),  a new story was formed, that of Stephen Harper’s government trying to sneak in ways of preventing same-sex marriage. This took the web by storm. Almost as quickly, the facts came out, that this ruling wasn’t sourced from the current Government, but from the department of Justice. Harper had no idea the case had occurred until it came into the news, often being shared by those who are the staunchest critics of the current government. (I’d count myself in this group.)

This narrative, when it’s laid out, looks like a story about bureaucratic mismanagement, and an accidental spread of misinformation or blame by those inclined to believe it. In fact, in a networked culture, it is disturbingly easy for the wrong story, told well, to travel much faster than the truth. (2)

Behind all of this, though, is another story: we are so suspicious of our national leader, that we are willing to attribute stories like this to him immediately. A significant portion of our country distrusts our leader. That’s the story underneath the mistaken assumptions and clarifications of legal points.

It’s not like his past hasn’t given us reason to be suspicious; his attempt to loosen the chains on private sponsorship of campaign funding is hard to see as anything but an attempt to gain a monetary advantage over parties like the NDP, the Green Party, and even the Liberals, who are generally less likely to cozy up to big business and their interests. He helped form a coalition against the Liberal party to bring it down, and then called a similar coalition against him a “gathering of losers” (3).

This lack of trust is being felt by the Harper government. (4) A day after the story broke, and spread across the nation, the institution replied and addressed the concern. For a government as bureaucratic as Canada’s, that’s an impressive reaction time, and shows they’re worried.

I’m no fan of the current government, and though this story ended up not adding to the evidence of repression, corruption and brazen lack of regard for the common good, we were willing to believe that it would. And that climate is bad for this Prime Minister. Which is a silver lining for those of us who only see overcast skies since the last election.

SOURCES:
(1) http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/01/12/pol-harper-same-sex-marriage.html

(2) When Osama Bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces, social media began spreading a quote attributed to Martin Luther King about not celebrating death in any form… M.L.K had never said it, but it seemed like he had. A good (and seemingly likely) story travels faster than truth.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/martin-luther-king-jr-misquoted-after-osama-bin-laden-killed/2011/05/03/AFNKPjfF_blog.html

http://mashable.com/2011/05/03/altered-mlk-quote/

(3) http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/westview/deception-thy-name-is-harper-118898409.html

(4) The first time a leading party has named itself after the leader…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Stephen_Harper#.22Canada.27s_New_Government.22_and_.22Harper_Government.22

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.

(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…

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.

Fast-forward to today, where I’m drafting this post in a coffee shop that pours out free wi-fi as an attractor for business. (I’m on my second americano and have enjoyed a breakfast here, so it’s working on me.) Sitting next to me is a gentleman who has both an iPhone and an iPad, and is referencing both of them constantly. I follow numerous blogs and twitter feeds daily, and consume most of my entertainment through the computer. Our computers are no longer fancy calculators, they are the ubiquitous method of entertainment, communication, and daily business.

In that bygone youth, a programmer seemed like a gifted mathematician (which is still true) but not much more. Now, developers of things like Facebook and Twitter seem like rock star composers, digital Beethovens with symphonies that we all use daily. Many of us consider programming like an inscrutable enchantment that can’t be decoded or explained; we let the magic happen but absolve ourselves of looking under the hood.

I have a few friends who are programmers, and I’ve been getting back into coding a little bit myself, and it reminds me of that mystique I used to ascribe to programmers and inventors when I was small. Building something from the ground floor, testing and developing it, and watching it work as you designed, has a sense of victory. (Even at my current level, where the programs are very small and minor.) The science and technique of coding are a fascinating escape from the intuition of my arts career.

One of my favourite moments in the first Iron Man movie is the design sequence, where he’s building his new suit, having successes and failures as part of the process. This speaks to the drama and thrill of creation, though it’s clearly more exciting to build a futuristic suit of armour than to code a little app that prints HELLO WORLD beneath the command line.

So as I work on my little programs, hoping to develop that knowledge into bigger projects, I also have a sense of pride in joining a cabal of developers who make something from nothing. As a writer, the idea of making something happen through language appeals deeply. It is as though the compiler is the audience; if I’m clear in my communication, everything’s fine, but if I fail, I will quickly be told that I’ve got an error in my process. It’s a platonic ideal of communication; either it works or it doesn’t.

Like re-watching The Godfather, Part 2.

This movie is three hours and forty minutes long.  And you can tell. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I had lived the months of time that the movie portrays. Not that I was bored, but that I felt fully involved in both the exciting and the quiet moments of Michael Corleone. It’s a great movie, not least of which is it’s bravery to give quiet scenes and long takes. But it got me to thinking that we don’t see many stories told this way, anymore. Even the Lord of the Rings trilogy, movies that stretch past four hours in their extended editions, still don’t present the audience with many shots that are longer than a few seconds.

I’d been putting off seeing the movie for months, mainly because I never felt I had that many hours in a row to string together into one thing. At least, after socializing, getting work done, and maintaining those other areas of my life. Being shocked out of my regular day-to-day gave me the opportunity. That got me thinking.

When I’m surfing the web, I will sometimes reconsider reading an article if it seems long. I’ll pause before watching a YouTube video if it gets over four minutes. (Some of this is a legitimate crap filter, helping keep out the stuff that’s not worth paying attention to online.)  But when I’m not out with friends or with Jen, or working, what exactly am I worried about losing time on? Usually, organizing my desk, checking Facebook and e-mail, following Twitter, odd jobs, daily ephemera. Basically, nothing that could be defined as actual work with a clear accomplishment.

It’s like I’m leaving myself free for some unknown excellent event that will appear and fill my afternoon or evening with a delight, that I would miss if I were caught watching another YouTube video. But that’s not the case, is it? I think I’m just afraid to unplug from all my streams of information, even for four minutes to watch Monsterpeice Theatre’s ‘Waiting for Elmo.’

I wouldn’t trade away all this modern communication, but it’s certainly worth noting that our time has become both more costly (we’re choosy where we spend it) and devalued (we’ll pour it away waiting for something that we expect will be truly valuable). We’ve been conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to want and be hungry for the steady info-drips.

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.

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/> .

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.

The polish is apparent in this kind of a movie; you can see that every creature and item has been sketched and discussed and re-sketched and discussed so that it attempts to simulate a whole world. The writing generally steers clear from heavy exposition; it lets you see all the big ideas in action. The reason or McGuffin of the story involves an aptly named ore,  unobtainium, but we aren’t told much about it or what it can do. It’s enough for this kind of story for us to know that it’s valuable, and the indigenous people are sitting on top of it.

(As a side note, unobtainium is a meta-textual concept often used to describe non-existent metals in science-fiction, particularly when it carries important. The name feels like a placeholder, something Cameron meant to go back and change, and then forgot. It stands as the only major problem I had with the film; other than a hokey name, what makes this metal so valuable? Based on the lack of depth with the rest of the movie; I can’t expect that Cameron is trying to be especially clever or metatextual..)

Those indiginous people are definitely in touch with the natural world; huge effort has gone into showcasing just how much they care for everything living. Which creates a nice simple dichotomy of technology versus nature. Guess which side we’re supposed to go for?

As we watch that conflict play out, we feast our eyes on cool technology and strange alien creatures, some beautiful, others monstrous. We get lost in the detail of the mind-swap device, and how it is wrapped around our human hero to allow him access to his alien body; in how the robot armour-suits duplicate the motions of their human pilot, and in how the alien bow is strung and how it holds the arrow.

There’s not a story moment of this movie that surprised me, though not in a way I minded. Most of the later victories and tragedies are set up beforehand, in the tradition of skilled storytellers. The relationship between the Jake Sully and his Naa’vi (the name of the indiginous people) contact is exactly what we expect. To be honest, it’s what we came for.

Some have compared this movie to Pocahontas, or Dances With Wolves, seeing the similarity as proof of a lack of imagination. Though I agree there wasn’t innovation given to the narrative, it was fully inside the design. The reason for the film is not to give you a story you’ve never heard, it to give you one you’ve never seen, and that’s an important differece.

I perfer my stories a bit more complicated, but I can also appreciate the goal of the storytellers, which as I’ve said, isn’t focusing on impressing us with wordplay. So as a ride, as an exploration into a world that shows phenomenal effort on the part of it’s creators, this movie succeeded.

(After having originally written the review, I saw some speculation in the newspaper about a summer re-release, with more footage. In keeping with how I enjoyed the movie, this lost footage would have to be of more robots and more aliens to keep me interested. If it’s a clumsily written heart-to-heart between Jake and the hard-bitten researcher Sigourney Weaver plays, 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.

(I will take full responsibility for the irony of that last sentence; this is a personal blog with a readership of mostly friends and colleagues. Maybe one or two explorers who might have seen it among WordPresses ‘new posts’ aggregate feed.)

A while ago, I had this idea for an anachronistic morning; we’d get croissants, coffee, and a copy of the New York Times, (in print!) and catch up with the world in bohemian splendor. We would avoid our computers, where we end up reading our separate blogs. We would share in the experience of collecting information from the world around us, with our fingers on paper instead of a mousewheel. It was going to be great.

It turns out there was a delivery problem getting the NYT into the magazine shop, and we opted for bagels instead of croissants. There was still coffee. One out of three. We went home and surfed the internet.

That’s how we learn about our world, now. Sometimes be reading news sources and hearing it on the radio, but now also in the negative space of media, the real life and digital discussions between the stories. There have been major news events that I heard about first when my friends all started talking about it together on Facebook.

I didn’t start typing this with the idea of talking about newsgathering, or the viability of major newspapers, but now that I’ve started… what if our news sources started thinking about a deeper permeation in the new social networks? Enjoy a particular column or section? It becomes a Facebook friend. Some of this is already happening, but the problem that I still see involves these organizations seeing themselves as institutions to be respected. Those of us native to the ‘net are fickle. You earn or lose our trust every time we click on your link.

Maybe those institutions are just the shell that New News will come out of; trained journalists who are flexible enough to make a new kind of living out of an information ecology.

Anyway; caught up on my blogs. Yay.

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.

As exciting as Downey’s portrayal of Sherlock was, Law’s turn as Watson held the story together. As the story starts, he is beginning to build a more normal life, which we can understand. But his desire to follow the case matches our own. Watson is normally seen as a loyal friend and companion of Holmes, but always with a detached quality, mostly there for Holmes to explain a deduction out loud. This might have made him look like a mediocre man who happened to befriend a genius. Jude Law showed a capable character who was as involved in these events as Holmes, which was refreshing.

The story is not a direct adaptation of any of the original Holmes stories, which means that fans such as myself don’t have the benefit of knowing the ending. It is, however, filled with homages and references to those other stories, which are great texture for the movie, and continuous little rewards to those in the know.

I did have one problem with the story, though. Holmes enjoyably deduces his way through much of the movie, but there’s no central question that follows through the events. Often the climax of a Holmes tale will be a deduction that unlocks the whole series of events, and there’s no single moment like that. The closest we get is an antagonist (played by Mark Strong) who does seem to challenge Holmes’ dedication to logic and reason. Strong’s performance is compelling enough that it does bring the story into a complete package. Due to this, missing the ‘central mystery’ becomes  glitch in an enjoyable adventure, instead of a fatal flaw.

Guy Ritchie’s filmmaking style is in strong evidence here, with London having a stylized gritty quality, without being surreal and overdone as Tim Burton’s Sweeny Todd. The quick cuts that we’ve seen in his other work is on display here, inventively walking us through Holmes’ observations a few minutes after he’d made them. Those moments take on the quality of mini-mysteries, with their solutions being enjoyable payoffs.

Ritchie also has fun with Holmes’ physicality, and his abilities a fighter. This is another possibly unexpected take on the character, who many see as a quiet and reserved figure. These are also some of the moments I enjoyed most in the film. That same quick-cut style is applied as we watch Holmes think through his attacks in a methodical, beautifully brutal, process, and then watch the follow-through of those plans. This is shown near the beginning of the movie, and it immediately sets up Holmes as a character. Brilliant, supremely rational, and somewhat distant from other people, as he imagines debilitating his fellow man.

The quality of film-making the whole way through is kinetic and enjoyable. I often found myself tapping my foot to the rhthym of the beat and just laughing with the thrill of these adventures. The other aspect of the character many people forget is that he was an adventurer. He’s working with the police but not one of them, and that means that we are following the exploits of a vigilante, with all the excitement that goes with that title.

That distance, and his own attempts to bridge it with Watson, add more nuanced emotional quality that even some of the original stories lack. It’s worth seeing it all put together on the screen. I was originally put off by the ‘Holmes for the holidays’ advertsing tag line. I’m glad I wasn’t. This isn’t a slavish devotion to the source material, but an extension and adaptation. And a hell of  a ride.