I always sent my KFC comments to Save the Children at 56 Sparks Street care of Morticia Addams!

And now I’m in trouble!

On the National Day of Action, I’ll be eating KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN!
AND COLONEL SANDERS LOOKS JUST LIKE DAVID SUZUKI1

And yet Toonie Tuesday is the only democratic vote for the poor, who often have no choice but to shop at KFC, including many psychiatric survivors.

Can my friend Mikiki convince the government to help abuse survivors AND therefore psychiatric survivors by intervening in the hunt for the Dangerous Bird?

Last we heard:
Stef Llewellyn, my erstwhile camera person, was shopping devotedly at Toonie Tuesday every week, due to extreme aboriginal poverty in respect to psychiatric disability. This in turn set off my old code from my high school days, and Morticia Addams was sent to Save the Children at 56 Sparks Street in Ottawa which has since moved. In it’s place was the bookstore Smithbooks where she picked up a book on AIDS in Africa. She then sent Wednesday Addams to The Lion’s Den to meet Ken and Junior, an African Safari Lion who was born and raised in Winnipeg. At this point the Addams family decided to check in with the Lesbian Rangers, who had pointed out that Colonel Sanders looked an awful lot like David Suzuki, and that perhaps the reason so many bananas kept showing up was due to some lesbian witch in Saskatoon advocating eunuchs to stop the AIDS virus. In fact, the question became one of the possibility of Morticia Addams doing a spell on David Suzuki’s penis in question in order to prove that witchcraft could stop the AIDS virus. Morticia denied it by setting herself on fire and declaring herself the reincarnation of Great Aunt Calpernia, who never went to college.
Meanwhile Mikiki was drafted to stop my cousin Luke from ordering from KFC because the rumour was that David Suzuki was taking a tour of the rainforest to find his own rubber tree to make his very own dildo and to travel back in time via Stephen Hawking’s old wheelchair to before I ever sent my KFC comments to Save the Children C/O Morticia Addams to save his penis from the inspiration of one Miss Valerie Solanas.
In all the ensuing melee, Britta Boden was dispatched to Lesbian National Parks and Services to solve the mystery of the plantains, a type of tranny bannany which only appeared on the scene in April. Mysterious in their fruity goodness, the Lesbian Ranger Corps only wanted to know if these new bananas were lesbian friendly, to which Louis Cruz declared they were, and even Alice upon further inspection agreed.
But still, Luke was on the hunt for the Dangerous Bird, and the Dangerous Bird was on the hunt for Thirza Cuthand, because she didn’t like the ending of Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement. Can Mikiki do something fabulous for abuse survivors in time for the Sacred Chicken Dance?
Only time will tell!

John Cameron Mitchell is going to be in Vancouver at Out On Screen this year and I won’t be there! Such poopy pants!

My career is fine, I am going to finally get in touch with Outfest (L.A.) to curate something for them. My curator buggered off to Venice and Dokumenta (I probably spelled that TOTALLY WRONG!). And my email works again. Hurrah! Plus I found one model for Mintage, a vintage clothing store in Vancouver, and if my devious plan goes well then she’s going to Paris Fashion Week with them. Because, I love Robin Williamson who is NOT a folk singer but is an amazing best friend.

Okay, now I’ll try to do the cheap-o explaination of CBGB’s by detailing punk through . . . Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

CBGB’s is a classic old timey punk rock club, the Studio 54 of the punk set. And Nina Hagen is considered the grandmother of punk. Which is why every self respecting punk knows her name. And CBGB’s had a little queercore son called Squeezebox.

And Squeezebox is where Hedwig’s character was workshopped. Which makes sense in a roundabout fashion BACK to our grandmother of punk, Nina Hagen, who I really did almost meet.

And this is Nina Hagen doing genderfuck in the classic ode to junkies, Smack Jack.

I’m still inspired by this gender trash revolutionary video.

And so is the rest of the world, This is Nina Hagen at the Berlinale in 2006 And this is where my screenplay was last seen before I decided to amend it so that I could do a Canadian German co-production with Cosma Shiva, who can be seen here and who Maureen Bradley recommended in a roundabout way.

Because I need someone awesome for Cassandra AND an excuse for the main character to not only be learning German, but to also have Nina Hagen sing New York for the Sept 11 related psychosis scene.

So what’s my relation to punk? Well, I’ve done DIY for twelve years and seen a bazillion punk shows and was willing to go see Lydia Lunch on my own in Vancouver and bought the Nick Zedd book and basically, yeah man, I’m a punk, I’ve always been a punk, I probably always will be, and irregardless of what you wear, punk is a frame of mind.

I deliberately locked myself out of all my regular email addresses, so now only one works.
So if you are getting email from my old addresses, delete it, because it is spam. Google helped, someone was dumping spam into my account. Disreputable I say!

I hate trying to find people through Agents. Meh. Lucky me has various ins with the Industry though, so it’s going to be okay.

I think the hardest is trying to find someone to play Miranda, the neurotic, giddy, totally hot nerd who works for the Invertebrate Zoo. I actually wrote the part specifically with Parker Posey in mind, I think it’s every filmmakers wet dream to work with Parker Posey. She’s just totally amazing.

Sometimes I heckle myself for PR purposes. At my Emily Carr grad Screening I was known to yell out “This isn’t Josie and the Pussycats!”

“Bunnyhug” isn’t Josie and the Pussycats either, but at least it’s fucking hilarious in a sad kind of a way. I mean, I can’t really help telling jokes.

I told someone a really good joke several times and now she wants to kill me! No, I’m kidding, but I think she would like to see me in prison for describing how fucked up MONTREAL MADE ME1 The psych ward there I mean. Boy did that shit fuck me up.

I’m actually fine now.

My best friend Margaret Flood hates the word “actually.” She went off on me once about it.

“It’s an insult, like ‘Actually, that was a really good dinner’ or ‘Actually, you’re cute.’ It’s like they are surprised about it.”

And so, ACTUALLY Barb Powell is an amazing psychic, because she told me all this would happen. She didn’t much like who I was involved with in January.

Actually, she works with the cops, so she got a free ride!

And ACTUALLY, I’m going to be fine.

Because this was her big advertisement!!!!

http://www.sacred-connections.us/

I think possibly as a trans performance artist, well, going to the ward is kind of societies way of making sure that performance remains just that, a performance, and something that can be taken as an art work rather than what could possibly be a dangerous intervention into the damaged soul of the world. HK 119 is a performance artist based out of Finland who I have talked about in a previous blog. Malfunction is probably how I seemed during this whole last spring, but really, I think I was more like Buy Me crossed with America Is Waiting.

It might sound strange to know that I want to be enlightened . . . and be a capitalist artist. But if you’ve been making short videos for as long as I have and still are flat broke, then I think you might understand why I decided to use my own manic episode as the biggest publicity stunt ever. Today I was sitting with a nurse, psychiatrist, social worker, councellor, and my mother, and had to defend needing a new place to live. And the funny thing is that my mother raised this issue of my hoax. And there was no hoax really, I just want to be the most famous crazy motherfucker ever to live, and to do it peacefully. And really, I just want to make my damn film. And you know, I’m getting closer to it, day by day it’s coming together. But I did sink hardcore into a psychosis again, the interesting part was that this time all the threads made sense, because they went back into a longer term business plan. I mean, I don’t want to do that with every film I make, but since Bunnyhug does address psychosis, it almost did make sense to end up back at that place so I could talk about it.

And I think the interesting thing too, with all of this, is that I am also talking about changing genders. And that IS a big deal. Because gender change is hard to do and goes to scary territories and I’ve been thinking about it since high school. The irony of course is that in certain ways I quite like my female body. I mean, breasts are kind of cool in a camp sort of way. I’m not a masculine guys guy, I’m pretty femmy. I mean, on the girl end of things I’m quite butch, but as a boy I’m more of a glam dandy, and that is funny. In some ways I want to keep my boobs just because they’re so spectacular. And I wonder if any MTF’s, well I’m sure some do, want to keep their dicks because maybe they like them. Gender is a funny thing. Not all of us fit it.

I’m using Sarain on this blog now because it’s my boy name, and really the name I would have had was I born male, but I don’t mind being called Thirza either. It’s tricky. Add to this the fact that in some years from now I want to have kids with a woman, and I want it to be parthanogenesis because then my DNA would be involved too. The bipolar thing is tricky, but all of us have weird genetic abnormalities. And in some ways also bipolar is just normal for me.

The good thing, possibly, is I finally have a psychiatrist who actually understands and respects art. And that makes me feel hopeful. It’s a bit weird feeling on the defensive but mostly this time around I’ve actually (ACTUALLY) had decent caregivers while in the ward. And no restraints! And some of them have had higher expectations of their patients than just expecting us to sort of waste away somewhere. I have GRANDIOSITY, so they say, and that is true some of the time but the fact is I also have ridiculously intense skills. Like converting my mac computer to unicode just on a whim. Never mind that now I feel like, ooooh, I hate unicode, but still it was an interesting Mac IT experiment.

Anyway, I’m on Facebook now if you want to be my friend. Because I’m waiting for a message.

So as you can imagine, life’s been pretty bizarre, starting with the dreaded Lamictal Rash which got me to stop taking my meds. Nothing is more terrifying than the threat of permanent disfigurement, but it still made everyone mad when I went manic. But you know what? Fuck you. YOU”RE NOT THE ONE WHO HAS TO LIVE WITH SCAR TISSUE> THAT BEING SAID i don’t have any scars from it.

So yeah man, fuck you.

But where was I? Oh yeah, well I had one shrink who was convinced I was schizophrenic because I talked about having an international art career. I can’t help it if I’ve lead an interesting life. I’ve never lied about anything related to my career. Nina HAGEN REALLY DOES MAKE THE MOST SENSE RIGHT NOW> because I FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW TO TALK ABOUT MY FIRST EPISODE OF PSYCHOSIS>

look at these two images and tell me you don’t see a filmic link:

That is my first psychotic episode in a nutshell really, and I finally figured out how to depict it. And then I re-read my screenplay and it fits perfectly! OMG!!! Synchronicity!!!!!

And that’s how I knew I was finally making sense in the business way.

It’s been 12 years that I’ve been making videos for the international festival circut. I turned 29 this April. When I was sixteen I made “Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory” which got me phone calls from places like Manhattan and Berlin. And I was stuck in a rinky-dink high school in Saskatoon, the same one that tortured Joni Mitchell. I was called brave for talking about being openly queer in a “rural community.” That appellation for Saskatoon would probably piss off fellow students who thought drinking to barfyness was evidence of high cosmopolitan living. No, having a coke dealer in high school does not a super star make.

Anyone who watched my hedonistic 20’s, however, would think I must have been a partier in high school. It’s a myth. My best friends were people in their thirties, in school I hung out with gifted outcasts and was the nerdliest of nerdlings, on the honour role without fail every semester. Christopher Lefler was the first person to hand me a drink, and was shocked to find out I was still a virgin. He encouraged me to go after my main crush, but after a sad little threeway I ended up getting pierced so I could lose my virginity a second time to someone who wasn’t afraid to be alone with me, and I did. I ended up making “Bisexual Wannabe” about the experience. Pretty much all of my films are autobiographical, which is why they keep ended up in places like Hot Docs.

“Well you had better never make a video about me!” my ex Margaret Flood once told me. This after she gave me a copy of Melting Point stolen from the New York Public Library for my birthday one year.

Anyway, I was looking for a worldly girlfriend, one who actually wanted to go all the dramatic and romantic places I ended up traversing as a world famous video artist. I think if you want to travel, becoming a filmmaker is the way to do it. And if you want to be rich, uh, you might want to go into stock broking or something, because like I said, it’s been twelve years and I’ve only moved onto feature films now.

I think after 12 years in this biz I can honestly say the sexiest people in the world are filmmakers. You have to network, for one thing, and the cuter you are the easier it is to get your connections. You need to be able to tell good stories. And you have to be able to talk about things like sex, religion, death and politics in a way where people will stay in their seats to find out who you are, even if they end up hating you.

And not only that, but you end up having just bizarre adventures, like a scene in the Sugar Refinery with one Mr. Paul Lang for the benefit of Bruce La Bruce. Duct tape is hard to wash off by the way.

FILMMAKERS ARE SEXY ESSENTIALLY BECAUSE WE ARE SHAMELESS>

And so am I. I’ve been in and out of the psych ward here, a classic panopticon, since April. I have to say compared to Montreal it’s a five star hotel. Which is why I ca now honestly say that after 4 years of working on it, my feature screenplay, “Bunnyhug,” is finally in the hands of a professional who is looking at the budget for it.

And yes, it’s a comedy.

Haven’t you ever been Alan Smithee’d?

Alan Smithee is a name given to a participant in a film which they have no interest in making. I decided to crack the Alan Smithee code. I looped it through a unicode server which already exists in several different languages, all indigenous. It is based in a unicode mainframe. I can’t access my computer without compassion. I looped it through Gmail. I took Nels Nielson off of my gmail account because he invited me and then we had a spat, at work. Anyway, whatev man.

I based Luke’s Alan Smithee account on Monty Python and The Holy Grail. After it was cracked I saw it was signed by Richard M. Nixon. A joke? Probably. Maybe. Either way, it was really funny when I finally watched it. I made it talk in French and all other languages, and I made it disability accessible. I also videotaped what it looks like in chaos theory, which is fucked up! I mean, the images. It was all wavy and zooming around and stuff. Either way, I am working through Stanford’s Project Backrub, which is what Google is. I cancelled my domain registration. And I also tried to report my SIN card as stolen, because I don’t know how much of my ID James ended up writing down. Either way, I didn’t get a chance to really report it, as I had Jerusalem Syndrome. April Fools Jerusalem Syndrome!

Plus I had a massive seizure, and was put back on Lamictal which made me go into anaphylactic shock. I died! Literally. I have a new pdoc, and a councellor, and my GP. And my weiner dog, who is a seizure alert dog. And he’s really good at it! I am going to try and get into formal service dog training this summer, I know a trainer in town who is most excellent, especially with little dogs. And especially training psych service dogs. But mostly, I dunno, it probably is epilepsy. I am trying to see a neurologist. And then I may also have thyroid issues. And I also have to fix my computer.

Either way, I am doing a LOT better since my job ended. Sort of. I still need to calm down. I have nightmares I am being chased by an Oscar Meyer Weinermobile yelling “Achtung achtung!”

Alan Smithee could be anyone really. And just about everyone in the Industry has run into an Alan Smithee.

My Alan Smithee was the montreal psych system, a brutal system which dehumanizes people. After I got out, I got hit by lightning. It was like getting ECT. I would just loop through that one time period over and over and over. And I decided to get out of the loop.

But getting off psych drugs is hard. And especially if you have TLE. Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. It’s almost the same as being crazy, but different! I’m trying to learn how to live with it. And I don’t know, I am gifted so there is that to work with too.

And there were also bad memories I had of someone who pretty much assaulted me before and after I went to the psych ward. And he decided to keep calling and telling me he was going to kill my whole family. My dad made a report with the Quebec police about death threats, but not much came of it, although it is on file there. I tried to report my ID stolen to the police, but not much came of that either. And then of course, there were the screen memories. It was like being put into a cult. I hate cults! Psychiatry is a cult, the way it works when it uses force.

Currently I am healing and just trying to get back to normal. I am trying to take a break from the News and Religion, but it always comes up again. Anyway, I am going to go have a nap now. I’m staying with family, trying to feel okay about life. It is hard, that is for sure. I decided to rewrite my screenplay, now that I know what the Alan Smithee is. I’m going to be spending the summer on holidays, occasionally writing.