So this is me with the new camera, doing the bathroom mirror self portrait thing. I’m listening to my iPod. The mirror is dirty. I’m writing this from flickr and feeling annoyed, but this is me and the tiny camera. More pics soon.
New Things
Yesterday I finally got fed up with not having a digital still camera and went and bought the most low end digital camera I could get. I don’t want anything fancy, just want to take pictures of the dog and cat and things here and there, various body mods, etc. I lucked out, I ended up getting the Nikon Coolpix L4 for about $140 after taxes. It’s pretty sweet, and it has a Nikkor lens, which is awesome. Cameras are really only as good as their lens. It has some useful functions too, like face recognition for auto focus. You might be surprised to learn I’ve never actually owned a digital still camera before. So most of my pictures were photobooth shots of me. Since I got it I’ve been taking pictures of everything, Schrodinger, Mister, Mimi, Arthur, Mum, Mum and her art, Mum’s amarylis, my tattoos, my industrial, me, my shoe. Mister got pissed at me as soon as I used the flash on him and went under the couch in a huff for twenty minutes. He’s not so crabby about getting his photo taken now. Schrodinger is too quick to get a good photo of yet, except when he sits in the sun. Otherwise there are all these pictures of his tail leaving the frame, his ear coming into the frame, empty space where he used to be.
It’s nice having a camera, especially a small unobtrusive camera. It fits in my pocket, and it takes video MOS (that’s without sound for you non-film folks). Finally, next time I see something out of the ordinary I have a camera to take pics of it.
I’m doing the most tedious computer fixin’ today. I partitioned my hard drive AGES ago and then realized it was a bad idea (don’t partition the newer Mac hard drives, it’s just a bad idea for a lot of reasons). Then my dad gave me a 200gb internal hard drive which I promptly named Parker Posey, and finally I have something to back everything up on so I can de-partition my drive. So I’m copying EVERYTHING over to Parker, and it’s taking a long time because there are over 60 000 files on my drive. A lot of them are teeny system files which I probably don’t need to back up, but I am anyway just in case, because errant plists are tragic. So that’s what’s going on, and it is so boring, oh man, but I don’t even have enough room on my system folder to get my new camera’s software installed, so it has to happen, I can’t keep putting it off. So far just this year I’ve installed a gig of additional ram and upgraded the operating system, and it’s kind of nice. My computer won’t be obsolete for a while. Not until Leopard comes out in April anyway.
I went out to the AKA fundraiser last night, the art raffle. It’s kind of like an auction and kind of like a raffle, you buy tickets (five bucks each) and if they pull your name you have twenty seconds to pick the piece of art you want. It’s a really good idea, and I was rather giddy about it. My name got pulled twice and I ended up snagging the two pieces I wanted the most. The first is this oil on masonite painting by Bea Parsons of a sasquatch-like character, it’s really pretty! Oh man, it was my number one choice and I was so lucky that most people called before me overlooked it. The second one I got is a photograph of Clark Ferguson with his pet rat crawling out of his mouth. A lot of people thought it was kind of a weird picture, but I have an affinity for rats, so I liked it. Mom donated a beaded colour blindness test, which Clark ended up getting. I wanted that one, but mum and I agreed to trade my tech-y services for a commissioned colour blindness test with the number 14. I came out when I was fourteen, so it’s kind of my special number. I think I’m going to help her make a digital portfolio in exchange, but we haven’t pinned it down. I won art! I was so excited, oh my god. And we were surrounded by giddy undergraduate students.
Okay, now I have to go de-partition my hard drive, I’m so scared!!! I’ll be okay I guess. I hope. Everything is backed up fine.
Censorship
By now you MUST have heard about Dakota Fanning’s role where she is a rape victim. People are up in arms about it, NOT having seen the film (as is usually the case with censorship). They’re trying to say that it’s child pornography, that she’s been exploited, etc etc. Dakota Fanning herself has had some pretty stern words to say to people trying to portray her as a helpless victim, but then they pull out the “Well she’s a kid and doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Fuck you. Kids know what they’re talking about. Don’t try to speak for her and then discount what she herself wants to say.
Let me tell you something, as a filmmaker, as a director, you would be amazed what you can portray or suggest without traumatizing your cast members. Let’s look at something which traumatized audiences for years, and still does, but didn’t do any harm to the actors. The shower scene in Psycho by Hitchcock. The way the shower scene was shot was done in such a way that you never seen the knife go into Janet Leigh. NEVER. I don’t even think Janet Leigh and the knife are in the shot at the same time. He cuts between the knife plunging up and down, Janet Leigh screaming, and red liquid goes down the drain. That’s it. And it was still scary enough that women didn’t want to shower after seeing it. Filmmaking is slight of hand. It’s putting a shot of one thing next to a shot of another and making the audience’s brain fill in the rest. I think we’re getting lazy with cgi and all the fancy CSI shots of a bullet going into someone’s spleen, but even then no one’s getting hurt making a movie.
Most censorship seems to be promoted by people who haven’t seen the work in question. I myself was torn apart and outed by the Alberta government when I was sixteen because of a video I made which was assumed to be child porn and a recruiting video. It wasn’t. There wasn’t any talk about sex in it, except a reference to dental dams. Most politicians who debated the merit of the work hadn’t seen it at all, and probably didn’t even realize they were censoring a teenager making work about teenagers. My god, the actors were all made out of pipe cleaners!!!
I was reading in Film Comment recently that awards don’t confer prestige on the films, films confer prestige on the award, and as an example they said that the Best Picture Oscar was diminished by being given to Crash instead of Brokeback Mountain. It’s true. I think Crash was a limited film, it didn’t grab me the way Brokeback did, it used too many racial stereotypes to try and make a point about racial stereotypes, and for that reason it failed. I know a lot of people wondered why Brokeback didn’t win, and suspected the fact that it was about The Gays was the reason. In fact, it was. In a remarkable bout of censorship, some members of the Academy who were on the jury refused to watch their screening copies of Brokeback. As someone who has served on juries, that is just so unethical. If you can’t watch the films, don’t be on the jury, please. You’ll look like a buffoon. Which is what the Academy looks like. And let’s not even get started in on their problems in recognizing talented non-white actors. And fuck off Billy Crystal.
What troubles me, after basically growing up in the Canadian Art world, is that I am finding younger (30 and under) artists and curators are willing to censor artists. I remember one screening of Untouchable at IMAG, the curator actually thought that my film might be illegal because of a crotch shot. A crotch shot of a nineteen year old (me). And then he made some very freaked out comments about vulvas (he was a squeamy gay man). The fact is, my gay male collegues routinely make videos showing cocks ALL OVER THE PLACE including him, and I have no problem with it. I have seen more penises than the average woman actually. So I feel like it’s my right, as a queer filmmaker, to also show female genitalia. And yet for some reason I find that one shot, than one ten second shot, is so controversial. Dudes, GET OVER IT! It’s only a vulva. Just like your dick is only a dick. It’s not revolutionary in and of itself, it’s just a piece of someone’s body, no matter how big your penis may be. And if a kid does accidentally see a dick or a vulva, whatever. All of us had one moment in our childhood where we accidentally saw a relative naked or our older cousin’s hidden stash of pornography. I’d rather my kid accidentally stumble on soft core porn than rotten.com and a photo of someone eating a dead baby.
That being said I don’t want rotten censored either.
I find it interesting that mediums such as art are more apt to be censored than say, things which really could affect the corporeal body of a youth. I mean, look at the USA. Teenagers aren’t allowed to view Iraq documentaries about what’s really happening to the troops over there, care of the censorship board MPAA, HOWEVER they are subjected to military recruitment and having their school records given to the army. So, little Billy can’t watch a war documentary showing soldiers being killed, but in a year he can be sent off to Iraq where he’ll watch his friends be killed and probably develop serious issues like PTSD, probably get severely wounded, may end up with radiation poisoning, could get the superbug infesting all the VA hospitals, and could also just be killed. But god forbid he see a movie that might give him more information about the realities of war.
Back to censorship in the arts. I had some friends, HAD being the operative word, who were putting on a group show and suddenly decided to censor a performer because they didn’t want to trigger ritual abuse survivors. The performer herself was a ritual abuse survivor, and besides that, a hell of a lot can trigger a ritual abuse survivor. I know triggers suck, I have them too and I hate them, but that doesn’t mean I expect to live in a trigger free world. You can’t say you know what will trigger a ritual abuse survivor, it’s different for everyone. Someone might be triggered by cats, or men in faun costumes, or roses. You just don’t know. The worst part was, they didn’t even know exactly what her performance was going to be, she was pretty vague about it, but they latched onto one concept (her friend dressed as Satan) and because of it they struck her from the program.
It’s ironic that the older generations of artists are more cognizant of censorship issues than the younger artists. One wouldn’t expect conservativism to inhabit people so young. After all, youth are supposed to be rebels, pushing the envelope, making us deal with stuff we were ignoring. And now they seem to be retrogressing. Not everyone. But enough young people are censoring work that they curate (or don’t curate) or calling in the vice squad on senior artists that someone needs to tell them to knock it off. Whatever happened to fighting the Man? Now you want the Man to come along and work with you against another artist?
I think one thing which reminded me of this was when Out On Screen showed Bruce LaBruce’s Skin Flick. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a gay porn film made about neo nazis, with a gang rape scene in the end. I say porn film because he actually was funded by a porn producer, so it genuinely comes from that millieu, it’s not just art I’m calling porn because it’s about sex. Anyway, the people I knew who were pitching a fit about it were the youth! I was so surprised. And none of them saw it, yet they went off and spouted all these things about the merit of LaBruce’s film, the fact that they thought it was racist, etc etc. They were very angry at Out On Screen for showing it. And, I didn’t see it, I only walked in on the rape scene, but basically they wanted to completely censor this artist. I was shocked. If you want to have dialogue about it, that’s fine go ahead. But please see it before talking about it, and PLEASE don’t be stupid enough to call for censorship. And there’s still two queer artists I know who wander around Canada willy nilly saying bad things about Bruce LaBruce without every seeing any of his work or knowing the context of his career. It makes them look ignorant. Look ignorant, I guess they are ignorant.
So maybe we need to make sure art colleges are dealing with the censorship topic better, although a lot of the censoring artists I’ve met are largely self taught and haven’t had intensive dialogue in an art college. I don’t know how to stop censors. But political change isn’t achieved by censoring people, unless your name is Adolph, in which case it’s a great tool for dominating your countrymen.
Mental Illness is a Political Construct
Something which we have lost is the knowledge that mental illness and psychiatry is by and large a political question. I know a lot of people who SHOULD be allies with psych survivors sort of ridicule us and ask if we’re taking our meds or start talking about worrying I’m going to chase them around with a knife. And sure, it may seem easy to dismiss the human rights concerns of persons who have had a psychotic episode in their lifetime. But psychiatry REALLY truly is a tool of social control, and I’m going to try and demonstrate that by talking about a few things which either were once classified as mental illnesses, or are still classified as mental illnesses. All of the following “illnesses” are specific to minority people.
Life on Mars by David Bowie
David Bowie was openly gay at this time, 1973 is also the first year homosexuality was removed as a mental illness from the DSM. I know, Bowie is with Iman now, but at the time he was one of the first people in the public spotlight to be so overtly queer. There are still people in the gay and lesbian community who can tell you horror stories of lengthy hospitalization, heavy tranquilizers, and electric shock treatment designed to cure their homosexuality, not to mention “aversion therapy”. And we still have “straight camps” where overtly religious parents send their queer offspring to be “cured” of queerness, places where you are basically incarcerated. I was reading the rules of a straight camp once and they were so weird, no Abercrombie and Fitch and no Calvin Klein? So yeah, it’s really only very recently that homosexuality was considered a regular form of sexuality under the political framework of the DSM. And THAT only happened because the gay liberation movement was in full swing at this time period.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s I have a Dream Speech
Drapetomania was a form of mental illness specific to run away slaves, basically, the reasons slaves ran away was because they had a mental illness known as Drapetomania. The treatment for drapetomania was whipping and toe amputation. Like a lot of things, slavery became legalized under the correctional system by making felonies out of crimes typically performed by black people, such as hog stealing. Now felonies are drug based, and black men still perform unpaid labour in penitentiaries. Black men are also more likely to be diagnosed schizophrenic. By the way, at the time of this speech by Martin Luther King Jr, the Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment was going on, and would continue for the next nine years. Some people say Martin Luther King Jr also had a mental illness, I don’t know enough about that to comment.
Ben injects testosterone
“Gender Dysphoria” is still considered a mental illness under the DSM, and all gender transitions involve psychiatric assessments. Treatment is through hormones. Ironically, when I was talking with other friends who were transitioning, the general consensus was that to get approved for treatment you had to prove you had NO mental illnesses at all. I’m not sure I would get approved for testosterone treatment because of my previous hospitalization. Yep, I can be denied a gender change because of my illness, and yet gender change is an illness. Confusing as hell. I know a lot of transfolk are agititating to remove gender dysphoria from the DSM, but there are some who are aligned with the rest of us and question if that’s the best tactic. It is a divide and conquer question really.
Sadomasocism is also still considered a mental illness under the DSM. I didn’t find what they considered the appropriate treatment, although I’m sure in the past it involved genital mutilation. Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis has a case in it of a young girl who masturbated and was subjected to clitoral excision. By the way, tying your lover up, EVEN with silk scarves instead of bondage rope, is still a BDSM activity. So is biting. So are a lot of things people don’t realize. My god, fisting was still considered BDSM! By the way, people with this “mental illness” such as myself should really check out Mr. S if they are ever in San Francisco, it’s like the Superstore for leather folk and you can buy wonderous things.
So there you have it, some things about mental illness you didn’t know. I don’t really consider ANY of the above things to be mental illness, in fact I am most of the above things. But maybe it will explain to people who listen to psychiatrists too readily that it has a history of being a form of social control and oppression more than a real medical practice.
And now I will end this Youtube illustrated rant against the DSM with my favorite little cartoon character, Kogepan, a burnt bun. In this episode he talks about how he got burnt, and what that means to him. I think it says a lot about how I feel about my psychotic episode and it’s aftermath.
Kogepan Episode 5
Best Friend Luke
When I was growing up my best friend was my cousin Luke. He wanted to start a pickle factory, and find fraggle rock. He was a sweet guy. And then he started changing. And then when he was fourteen he got hospitalized for the first time, ended up homeless during most of his teenage years, went in and out of institutions, and now lives in a group home and gets a shot in the butt once every two weeks. He’s been on heavy neuroleptics for so long that he blinks a lot, he gets really tired when his shot wears off, and he’s never gone back to school. And as soon as he went into the hospital, I just knew, that’s where I was going too. It was creepy to get such a horrible premonition, at least fifteen years before it happened.
I’m actually a second generation psych survivor in a way, I have an aunt who survived rounds of ECT and several involuntary admissions. She’s pretty open about it, and I remember growing up around her sometimes her siblings would start talking about something they’d done in their childhoods and she wouldn’t remember it at all. There’s just wide swaths of memory that are gone. I can’t imagine how frustrating that would feel, to have huge chunks of childhood missing. She was, and is, a fun auntie. I remember one time she was slightly hypomanic and had just gotten a deep fat fryer, and for an entire weekend she just made donut after donut. It was truly a sight to behold. Luke and I ate so many donuts. Sugar and cinnamon donuts. I don’t think she used the fryer again, she just wanted it for donut weekend.
In fact, way in the distant past, my grandfather had a brother who had a manic episode during the Second World War, and was convinced Nazi’s were coming to Little Pine. It’s funny to think about Nazi’s attacking a reservation in the middle of nowhere Canada, but it probably did feel really scary for him, god that would be a suck ass delusion to have.
So it goes, generation after generation. Most of the people in my family with bipolar disorder are doing decently well though. It makes for ornery family gatherings, but whatever.
One time when Luke and I were kids we pissed each other off in this, well, yeah, we were crazy kids. We were canoing with my grandparents and the lake got some whitecaps so we had to hunker down on an island. And I was really bored so I started collecting lichen, because I collected stuff as a kid, like rocks and neat sticks and stuff. And Luke started chasing me around yelling “She’s itchin’ for lichen!” and then I got mad at him and then he threw my lichen in the lake and I cried. It was, that was typical of our relationship. One time I was trying to ignore him by reading an illustrated copy of Heidi and he started singing “She’s got the heidi heidi ho!” and then he pointed at the picture of Heidi’s grandfather and said “The old man is down the road!” God he said the weirdest things. His diagnosis is schizophrenia by the way. He was so fun. It’s different between us now. We ended up both going to Coast when we lived in the Lower Mainland. He went to the Port Coquitlam Coast and I went to the Vancouver Coast. Coast is a clubhouse for people with mental illnesses. You can use the internet, do laundry, watch a movie, drink coffee, and get fed. HUGE plates, of terrible food. I’m sorry, but it’s true, mass cheaply made food is usually not very good. Thanksgiving dinners there were nice though.
That’s where we started meeting our crazy friends I guess. I mean, the ones in the system. Most of my friends are slightly crazy to varying degrees. But that’s where I started meeting consumers who were more politicized, or who weren’t consumers at all.
Once when we were kids Luke gave me a haircut that made me look like I had a lobotomy, we still have the pictures.
If it hadn’t been for Luke I wouldn’t have been immersed in the machismo of boyhood. He and his brother were supposed to take me to see Santa Bear Saves Christmas and instead we ended up at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I also saw V (a show about reptilians who ripped off their human skins), Knight Rider, all the Star Trek and Star Wars movies, and the Aliens series. My mom didn’t find out until much later, she was so upset, she was trying to do feminist media savvy filtering and I got corrupted anyway.
I wonder oftentimes how come he ended up where he is and I ended up where I am. Sometimes I think it’s because he’s a dark skinned aboriginal man and I’m a light skinned aboriginal woman. Race plays a HUGE role in how you’re treated in the psych system. I don’t know that he is schizophrenic, but he’s a brown man so he has a statistically higher probability of getting the schiz label over the other ones. It’s not that men of color are really more commonly schizophrenic, it’s that psychiatrists just label them more often. I know he’s been on experimental drugs more than once in his life. I also know that the aboriginal community in Canada is routinely used in drug testing.
The other day he called and was really upset, he had some microwave popcorn and someone else has to microwave it for him and they weren’t doing it for him. They were just sitting around ignoring him and all he wanted was some popcorn. God that pisses me off. And it’s the little things really, little crap like that that can be so abusive. Fuckers.
He and I aren’t best friends anymore, but we still have a lot in common.
Mens
I’m in the unusual position of having some very smoking hot fantasies about . . . boys. But not straight boys, repeat, NOT straight boys. Only gay boys. And not as a girl doing straight girl things with them, but more as a transfag doing man on man smoking hot sex. And not romantic sex either, hot raunchy dirty anonymous bruising each other up sex.
Okay, maybe anonymous is going too far, because there are at least four gay men in my life currently who, if I get the chance, I would totally pounce on, even though I know their names. I’m not sure what to do about it. I probably WILL do something about it in the future, but I don’t know what. And I want to make sure it’s with a guy that’s going to have sex with me the way I want to, as a boy. I haven’t thought too much about what that will look like. Well, that’s not true, I’ve thought about it a lot. I have the diagrams, the plans, the whole thing is mapped out in terms of specific things I want to do, with variances based on the possibility that the dude won’t be biologically male.
Which brings me to this word that I’m really weird about applying to myself and I don’t know why. Bisexual. I don’t know if that’s me. I guess in technical terms it is, but I still feel REALLY lesbian identified. The thing is, I don’t feel like a girl when I scope out boys, I feel like a guy. I feel like a lesbian and a gay man in the same body. And I feel trans. I guess I’m defaulting to the grand umbrella of Queer, which makes the most sense. But besides negotiating labels, I just want to sometimes be a gay man and sometimes be a butch dyke, and mostly just be me having hot sex with people I think are hot, who tend to be femme and butch gay men, and femme bisexual women, and butch lesbians. Usually femme bisexuals. My favorite top when I was coming out as a pervert was a gay man, who was usually a bottom incidentally. I think the BDSM community gives more space for gender and sexuality variance than the vanilla queer and straight communities, at least the BDSM community I came out in, which was pansexual.
Lucky for me there are gay men who appreciate other gay boys in biologically female bodies. I remember when a trans friend of mine offered to hook me up with black market testosterone I was kind of tempted, but at the same time, I dunno. In some ways I feel like I can negotiate my masculinity better in the body I currently have. Of course there are still going to be gay men who go all squeamy about pussy, just like there are still lesbians who shudder when they accidentally see penises. But I don’t particularly want to play with them anyway.
So what the hell am I? I dunno. I don’t want to limit myself to one gender or orientation particularly. It’s kind of funny though, because the girl I currently like told me gay men keep chasing her, and now I’m wondering if part of my attraction has to do with my gay male sensibility towards over the top femmes in some kind of a camp way. Who knows!!!
Maybe really I just like fucking queers, irregardless of gender or sexual orientation. There really isn’t any type of queer person I haven’t had a crush on at one point or another. I’m sort of an equal opportunist. The only people who don’t interest me are straight men and women, which is good because I don’t think they want me either.
All I know is I’m thinking of taking the word “lesbian” out of my professional bios and replacing it with queer, or boi, or something. Except now straight people are poaching the word boi.
Do we have a corner on the boi word anyone? Like is that a queer trademark? I seem to see straight men using it without being aware of the queerness attached to it.
Am I just biphobic? That’s terrible. I guess I don’t want to call myself a bisexual woman because it implies I would actually consider dating a straight man.
I remember when I was a teenager David Harrison came to Saskatoon with the Fringe to do his one man play and he spotted me in a crowd and came up specifically to give me a flyer for it. God, was I that obviously trans? Sometimes I feel so wigged out when I realize how easily other queers can pick me out. I guess I’m obviously a whatever I am.
I don’t like this idea of having to leave girl on girl sex behind though to have hot boy on boy sex. I want it all dammit!
Okay, and now I really have interrogated my own gender/sexuality far too much for one day, with no answers. Although if there are any cute gay men reading this who want to take me on a date, leave a comment! I like twinks and bikers.
Call me
I’m in an alright mood right now, it’s nice. I think because I figured some stuff out lately, and figured out what I want to do next. I have three deadlines coming up in the next month, so things are kind of wild right now, or they will be, or they SHOULD be!! I need to write up a few pages of my next screenplay. I haven’t usually overlapped projects so much, but I have to say I kind of like the pace of it, it goes with my brain well. I still need to talk to one of my references for grad school and FIND two more references for grad school. I have some people in mind, but it’s such a different direction to go into. There’s a residency in Toronto I want to apply for this summer, just because I haven’t applied to residencies before. I’ve had them, I just never applied like people usually do. So I want to beef up my resume by going vanity googling for shows I was in and didn’t know about. I have to figure out what particular things I need to change in my script, because I know it’s really just a slight alteration in a few scenes and I have it, but I’m all panicking and thinking about having to do the whole thing over.
And I have to finish those tweaks on my short video so that I can get it to the distributors. AND I wanted to make a compilation DVD of my work, and I’m thinking I should do it now. Or start it. Something. I want to get a newer copy of DVD Studio but I don’t know if you can buy it on it’s own anymore.
Sometimes I think the only reason I have a career is because I was so socially awkward that I had to do something else besides while away my youth with other people. I dunno. I can socialize sometimes, but maybe retreating from the world gave me a chance to live in my own head and be creative. I’m starting to not feel so bad about my dramatic teens and twenties. I started a career, that was a good thing. I never really understood people who didn’t have a career by the time they were twenty. I mean, I don’t think of a career as something where you’re guaranteed a solid income, but some kind of work that you’re passionate about.
So yeah, feeling better. I got an address book so that I can actually have people’s numbers again. So embarassing, I spent months without anyone’s number. Literally, I lost everyone’s number in June, just after Christopher died. And so I’m getting everyone’s number again, or putting them all in the same spot, or whatever. I was embarrassed to note that the first four numbers I put in was a current crushola, two ex girlfriends, and my last crush. In that order. What the hell. I guess my priorities are clear. The tragic part is I wasn’t even going to do anything about it until I had a fight with a close friend and she griped at me for not having any support network and then I realized it was true just because I lost my phone numbers and hers was only one of three numbers I could remember. And I couldn’t really remember Lynn or Velveeta’s numbers very often, I just randomly dialed similar numbers until I reached their place. And asking if Velveeta is there is a really weird thing to hear a total stranger say on your phone. Apparently they’ve been commiserating on getting bizarre phone messages from me, usually when I’m high. And freakin Dana, Miss Biennale, is hard to get a hold of, and I need to ask her for a reference for grad school. Last time I sent her an email I got some “Oh, I’m busy here in Barcelona” thing. Lucky ducky. Who knows where she is now. When I told her I was moving to Saskatoon she said “Oh, I always wanted to retire to Southern Saskatchewan. Or the South of France, I’m not sure.” Yeah, because they’re so similar! She’s great. She ate some west coast food I couldn’t finish and felt bad about because it was a cultural faux pas. Fish eggs are not vegetables, that was false advertising.
I never ate Oolican in Vancouver and I never ate Poutine in Montreal. I couldn’t do it. And now that I’ve said that, of course, the next time I go to either of those places I will be assaulted with the above mentioned delicacies.
So all in all, I really think I’ve finally turned a corner in my healing from The Ward. I feel like I can get back to the way life was four years before. Well, in a better way though. I saw a video on youtube about psychiatric survivors and they said people healed a lot better without medication because then they could think and feel. It does make a difference. I already feel like I have been able to have some really intense feelings this anniversary that have helped me resolve certain things, and even to see parts of me I don’t really like. It’s good for me.
Hey, does anyone remember party lines? As in, a group of people would share the same number and based on different rings would answer or not? Not Lavalife or other silly stuff. I knew a friend who was on a party line when I was a kid.
A few of my favorite clips
I need to think happy thoughts for a moment, so this post is a bit of a break and a chance for me to talk about the subject closest to my heart, film. This isn’t really a “best of” set of clips, merely a chance for me to put together some of my favorite scenes from a few films so that I can talk about them.
1. Blue In The Face by Wayne Wang
This is the largely improvisational follow up to Wayne Wang’s film Smoke. I liked Smoke a lot too. I really liked Blue In The Face for it’s use of the same actors in an improvisational setting. There’s a certain energy and “realness” you can get with improv, and I think we don’t use it enough as narrative filmmakers. A lot of films are written using improv techniques, but that’s different than just telling the characters to do whatever while the cameras roll.
This selection of scenes cuts between Lou Reed talking about why he’s lived in New York for 30 years, and why he smokes, with Harvey Keitel and Jim Jarmusch talking about smoking. And you see snippets of POC throughout, kinda weird since there were a lot of POC in the film and it’s made by an Asian director. A side note: the reason so many actors in old movies smoked all the time was because the directors had to give them some kind of an action to perform, and smoking was just a lazy way of keeping them moving. Directors are more savvy these days, but if you look at the old smoking films you’ll notice it usually happens during scenes where people just sit around talking.
2. Faster Pussycat, Kill Kill! by Russ Meyer
I was lucky enough to see this on a 35mm print when I was in high school (not AT my high school though) and Tura Satana haunted my day dreams for months afterwards. This is the trippy intro. Those wiggly lines you see filling the screen are the optical track. If you look at a strip of film, like 16mm film, you’ll find the optical track on the side opposite the sprocket holes. It’s the CRAPPIEST form of audio possible, oh my god. It’s ironic because film is so gorgeous and so superior to video, yet it’s married to this scrawny squeaky form of audio. Basically it works the same way as the film, light goes through it and it gets read back into audio. But it squishes your sounds into pitifulness. I don’t know how Dolby works, but the audio you hear in theatres now is a far cry from original film sound.
Anyway, yes, dangerous go go dancers. And the lesbian gets teased for not being bisexual. It’s pretty entertaining.
3. Mullholland Drive by David Lynch
This is the scene in Club Silencio where they realize that they’re dead and have been dead for the entire first half of the movie. Okay, other people interpret it differently, but that’s what I get out of it. And I don’t feel bad about spoiling it because no one really knows what they’ve just seen when they watch it, except that the kissing scene between Naomi Watts and Laura Harring is fuckin’ hot! I’m tempted to start saying “Silencio” over and over the next time I sleep with someone just to wig them out. One thing I find fascinating about this flick is that it stars Nicole Kidman’s very famous, very closeted lover in a film about closeted hollywood lesbians. I sometimes wonder if Lynch specifically cast her because of it. Anyway, here is Rebekah Del Rio singing Crying. Oh man, Laura Harring is really hot. She kicks Tura Satana’s ass.
4. Velvet Goldmine by Todd Haynes
I like this scene with Christian Bale’s character identifying with the highly famous glam rock super star Brian Slade because I think it’s kind of a common experience in queer lives. There’s something comforting and relieving the first time you see a media figure or movie or whatever that connects to your own sexuality and identity. I dunno, I just get a soft little feeling at Christian Bale jumping up and down pointing to an androgenous bisexual rocker and yelling “That’s me!”
A side note, I remember when Todd Haynes was still in the early stages of his career with Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Poison, and Dottie Gets Spanked was touring the festivals. God, have I been around that long?
5. The Hours by Stephen Daldry
This is the end scene with Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf. I think it’s my favorite scene of a psych patient trying to regain control over her own treatment for bipolar disorder. In this case she was sent off to the quiet small town of Richmond for what was then known as rest treatment. It’s still kind of practiced today. I don’t know why people think if they make crazy people REALLY bored we’ll get better. Either way, I actually saw The Hours on a day pass from the psych ward, almost exactly four years ago. I also find people try to tell me that I’m not really saying what I’m saying, that it’s just the bipolar talking. Bipolar doesn’t talk, asshole. It just sits around and makes suggestions for suicide.
My mom thought it was a REALLY bad idea for me to see this film, incidentally, because it has suicide in it. Which is ridiculous, because NOT talking about suicide doesn’t make me think of it less. Also, I think I just needed to see something about another bipolar person, especially one who made a huge difference to the world, in this case to literature.
6. Orlando by Sally Potter
So it makes sense then to end with the film made from the book written by Virginia Woolf to her lover Vita Sackville West. Orlando, in case you haven’t read or seen it, is about a Lord who lives for four centuries, during which he spontaneously transforms into a woman. It was kind of a love offering to Vita, and it’s really funny. Sally Potter’s film is so lush, jeez, I used to watch this film all the time in high school. Actually watching this scene of Orlando falling in love with Sasha, I realized that you can see certain aspects of “melancholy” that remind me of my own bipolar disorder and probably Virginia Woolf’s as well. I dunno, that’s just something I noticed after watching the Hours clip. In film school I found out Sally Potter trained as a dancer, which also explains some of the film.
Probably some of these clips will go offline eventually, but I recommend any of the films mentioned in this post. None of them are related to each other really though, except that I like them.
Kimberly Nixon vs Vancouver Rape Relief
Before I go to bed . . . again, I wanted to post barbara findlay’s statement on the decision of the BC Supreme Court to decline her client Kimberly Nixon’s appeal against Rape Relief. Barbara findlay is a noted lawyer for the queer community in Vancouver and was the lawyer for Little Sisters Book Emporium. I think something maybe other people in the blogs have failed to note about the Nixon decision is that it has a wide impact on many other issues of discrimination. Anytime the Supreme Court makes a decision, then that case can be applied to other cases. In this instance the doors have been opened for all organizations to decide who is and who is not allowed to be a part of their group based on their identity, be that trans, female, queer, native, etc etc. Also, it’s just disgusting to see so-called progressive women’s groups attacking transgendered and transsexual people. This decision is nothing to cheer about and is putting all minorities in jeopardy.
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I have sad news to report.
After a twelve-year, four-hearing battle, Kimberly Nixon’s case for trans
rights has been stopped in its tracks. Kimberly Nixon is a post-operative
transsexual woman who was expelled from Rape Relief, a Vancouver women’s service and shelter, because she was not “born a woman”.
She won a Rape Relief challenge which argued that trans women had no rights under the ‘gender’ section of the human rights code. And she won the largest amount of money ever awarded by the BC Human Rights Tribunal at the time.
But she lost when Rape Relief took judicial review (a form of appeal) of the human rights tribunal decision. Nixon lost again when we appealed to the B.C. Court of Appeal.
Because the Court of Appeal decision was 3-0 against Kimberly, we had to request permission to take our case to the Supreme Court of Canada. That court, which heard only ten cases in its winter term from across the country, decides which few of the cases in which an appeal is requested it can hear.
And today they refused to hear Kimberly Nixon’s.
What is the result?
The legal result is that in B.C. at least, the Court of Appeal judgement stands. That in turn means that any group organized on the basis of disability, on the basis of religion, etc, and that provides services, can REFUSE to provide those services to anyone in the group that they don’t like. They are free to discriminate.
Queers are particularly vulnerable to such discrimination. Disability groups have historically excluded people with HIV for example. Many religious groups exclude queers. There was a case this week in which a Victoria archbishop fired a priest and an administrator in the parish. The reason? The administrator had admitted to a parishioner that he was gay; the parishioner spoke to the bishop. The bishop told the priest to get rid of the administrator; the priest refused. So the priest was also terminated.
Under the Nixon decision, that is perfectly legal.
But there is another result. Kimberly’s case, though technically a loss, is a victory for trans people because it is through her courageous pursuit of this case over many years, and the profile that this case has had, that the Canadian women’s movement and in particular Canadian women’s shelters have had to come to grips with the issue of service to trans women. Happily, almost all women-only services across the country have developed policies inclusive of trans women.
Trans people will continue to use the courts as one strategy to achieve legal and social equality in this country.
Where to from here?
This case, though ‘persuasive’ to courts in other provinces, applies only In British Columbia. So anyone with a similar issue in another province can (and should) file a complaint. And people anywhere in Canada can file human rights complaints if they are discriminated against by anyone except a women-only service.
Costs
The Supreme Court of Canada ordered costs against Kimberly for the application for leave to appeal. It is our expectation that Rape Relief will content itself with its victory rather than to be so unkind as to go after Kimberly for money she does not have. Nixon, who is currently employed doing award-winning historical restorations in Vancouver, was on social assistance for nine years.
I am sure Kimberly would appreciate hearing from people. It is a lonely place that she is in right now. You can send mail to me at the address below; or email me at this address, and I will pass everything along to her.
Questions
If you have any questions please let me know.
barbara findlay
Counsel for Kimberly Nixon
The Law Office of barbara findlay QC
635-1033 Davie St.
Vancouver BC V6E 1M7
604 251-4356
F 604 251-4373
A ha!
I am deficient in iron. So says the blood tests. So now I have to take ferrous sulphate twice a day and hopefully my immune system will be back to normal. Which is good because these colds and flus are really wearing me down, I think I can handle being crazy better than being physically sick. But I’m not going to debate the personal impact of physical versus mental health. I want to be healthy in every way possible.
I watched Little Miss Sunshine this afternoon, it was really sweet. Oh man, I want to say something about the narrative structure but obviously I’m still ill and mostly awake only because I am terribly hungry.
Fat free hot dogs are disgusting, I had to give mine to the dogs. I don’t know why we insist on buying fat free everythings. Sometimes fat is just nice okay.