News

Bad Manors

I got a call from a close friend out in Vancouver. She’s one of the few people I can honestly talk about suicidal feelings with and vice versa, because I know she won’t run around yelling “Oh my god! I have to save your life! This is a burden, I’m resentful, what a manipulative thing to say!” Meanwhile I’m just like “Uh, can I just watch t.v. with you tonight until I can be on my own? I think Desperate Housewives is on.” Lucky for me Lynn and I really can just sit around watching Desperate Housewives and saying absent minded things about jumping off bridges or driving cars off of cliffs. And usually by the end of hanging out those bad feelings are drifting away to a more manageable level. She’s pretty fun. She’s also a big perv, but of the heterosexual variety. So I was shocked when the first thing she told me in our last conversation was uh, never mind. But I was amazed it was possible, and more amazed that it happened in the smoking room of a bar.

Anyway, she and I also used to live in the same building in a DTES neighborhood called Strathcona in a slum building called Bad Manors. For the most part Bad Manors is composed of artists in two room apartments and is a happy little building, for a slum. But recently a heroin dealer moved into one of the apartments, and apparently she is involved in a physically abusive lesbian relationship. Domestic abuse isn’t new to that building either, and we used to have to call the cops on a downstairs neighbor all time, especially when I heard him say he had a gun. (The walls are thin).

When I first left the building the next tenant in my apartment was a white loner who kept to himself and had a little white dog. Then one day Lynn saw him getting out of the shower and he had a huge swastika tattooed on his chest. She was trying to figure out if he was dangerous or not and she said he did have a little dog, like maybe that meant he wasn’t violent. “Yeah, but it was WHITE!” And Lynn is very very brown.

So the point is, now a steady stream of addicts are coming into the building to get heroin, and like most addicts who are getting ill from withdrawal, they’re shooting up in the nearest place, usually the shared bathrooms. Lynn told me there are blood spatters and rigs everywhere, and explosive diarrhea. Ew. The tenants are refusing to pay rent en masse and the landlord is on a spiritual retreat in India or something.

I’m surprised they’ve been coming to the apartment, since a lot of people are dealing heroin at Main and Hastings, and Insite, the safe injection site, is just down the street from there. I’m sure at some point someone is going to come across an ODed person in a bathroom at Bad Manors. Even walking around in that neighborhood sometimes you have to stop and carefully observe or give a shake to someone passed out on a park bench, because sometimes they really are dead. Not often, but enough that you can’t just walk on by without making sure.

Once we were watching TV and a dramatic news report came on about a skid row heroin neighborhood and did the classic media coverage of Hastings, specifically a slow drive by with a camera out the window. We both yelled “Hey! That’s our neighborhood!” The drive by shooting of the camera variety is all too common, I’ve had friends working the streets who have told me about watching a van with a lens pointed at them suddenly drive by.

The media coverage of Hastings is fucked. The residents are sick of being used by news and film crews without appropriate negotiations with the community. It’s true. It’s an area that is exploited by the middle to upper class so that the poor can be demonized as fucked up drug addicts with sores everywhere. And some of that is true, but a lot of larger social forces which created those problems in peoples lives aren’t looked at. Not only that, but the wealthy are buying property in the area and then having the audacity to say “How can we get rid of the people in this area?” Um, why did you move to the area? You can’t live in Vancouver without knowing the demographics of the DTES. There’s even an apartment building that has a sprinkler set up to a motion detector to keep the “vagrants” away, I know because one day on my way to work in Gastown I got soaking wet because I stepped too close to the precious rich people building. Some people got inventive though and used it for a shower.

The other issue is that the residents have to fight really hard to get their voices heard rather than have policies made with input from outside “professionals” who believe they know what the residents are going through without ever living there. If it wasn’t for a coalition made up of junkies, former junkies, and their allies lobbying, Insight would not exist.

It’s a big problem that Bad Manors has become a shooting gallery, but it’s also a problem that addicts don’t have access to reliable, safe, sources of heroin.

As you can tell I’m in favour of decriminalizing most drugs because of the harm reduction philosophy. The safe injection site is a good start, but we also have to figure out a way that the hard drug trade has it’s own specific site so people going to the bathroom in their own building don’t have to worry about needle stick injuries.

The majority of Canadians want to decriminalize marijuana, and we’ve been wanting to for YEARS, except the American war on drugs has trampled what Canada can do in it’s own country. DEA agents set fire to a DTES storefront for people trying to decriminalize marijuana and ended up burning down Spartacus Books, a non-profit book store selling rare books about theory, activism, race politics, and lots of other liberal intellectualism. Since Spartacus is non profit and since their entire stock was destroyed, they haven’t been able to open a new store in YEARS, and possibly never will.

If we had red light districts and specific places people could get drugs, these problems wouldn’t be so huge. And then Lynn could have a pee without worrying about a splat of blood on the wall from someone hitting an artery instead of a vein.

Here’s some good info on reforming drug laws in Canada from the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy.

News

Isabella Rossellini

If you’re new to this blog you should be aware that I make no pretense of being an upstanding person. I can get fairly debauched, just ask the two people I lost my virginity to. And I like telling people about my sexuality as it relates to mainstream media. And I like to do drugs.

So when I was on mushrooms this past holiday, for some reason I kept returning to Isabella Rossellini.

“No, wait, really you guys, it’s like, there’s Isabella Rossellini, and she sunk a BC ferry, I saw it in a free paper once.”

“What?”

“And like, Isabella Rossellini was how I figured out I was a homo because of Death Becomes Her.”

“Well yeah, all she was wearing was a necklace.”

“I know!!! How could I not be a lesbian with Isabella Rossellini running around like that!?”

I was thinking of this drug induced exchange with my cousin when I saw the clip below of Ann Jillian as the Red Queen, who I remember being totally attracted to. I would have been seven. So that predates Isabella Rossellini. But I remember even further back there was a female children’s entertainer I thought was cute. I would have been four. And when I was a little girl I had a soft spot for girls playing with my hair in line ups. I felt sad cutting off my hair later just because of that.

The irony of being a queer kid, a butch kid especially, was that most of my friends were boys or other tomboys, until the age when boys and girls have to stop being friends. There was even I guy I went to high school with who never talked to me but who I used to play with between the ages of five and eight. I felt sad seeing the boys I played with drift away because of the social rules imposed on children. I think I have a very different view of men because they were my friends when we were tiny. I wish we’d been able to keep being friends. Girls to me were an otherworldly species, I didn’t understand girls. To be more specific, I didn’t understand feminine girls. I didn’t see the point of having 16 types of berry flavored lip balm, and I definitely didn’t understand New Kids On The Block and that kind of desperate lust.

Although looking back on it, I really did understand that desperate lust towards Celebrity sex icons. Maybe I could have gushed too, but no one would understand why a twelve year old girl had Isabella Rossellini pictures everywhere. No, I didn’t get nervy enough to do that until Michelle Pfeiffer’s turn as Catwoman came along.

See, even if mass media is wiped of all queer references, we can still queer it just by our spectatorship. And it can still prompt people to realize they’re queer, after all it’s a chance to watch beautiful people up close for long periods of time.

And Isabella Rossellini did not sink that ferry, she was just in a photo beside it because she was at the film festival and the headline was for a story further down about a ferry sinking.

Art practice

Red Queen White Queen

I made a video in 1999 about Through the Looking Glass as a take on race, with Alice as a biracial girl, the Red Queen as a Cree woman, and the White Queen as, well, that’s obvious. But the whole time I was remembering an old made for t.v. version made with Carol Channing and assorted people I don’t know circa 1985. I never found a clip until YouTube came along, I was beginning to wonder if it was all in my head. There are a bunch of clips but this one is the most relevant since the video I made was basically just this scene. Only different. There was no singing. And race politics were involved.

By the way, Carol Channing is a pale person of colour.

My tape can be found through Video Pool Distribution.

Psychiatric Industry

How the Pharmaceutical Industry Works

The unfortunate truth is that Pharmaceutical companies value profit margins over their market’s health. This is the process from laboratory to your medicine cupboard.

First it has to be approved by running drug trials. The drug trials are usually sponsored by the drug companies. The drug trials will only monitor people for a short period of time, so that long term effects are not known. Any deaths or serious health complications resulting from drug testing will be swept under the carpet or otherwise not included in the reports. The drug gets approved.

Millions are spent in marketing campaigns towards physicians, including pharmaceutical conferences held in tropical locales with 5 star hotels and perdiems, all paid for by the company. Swag and hundreds of free samples of expensive medication is given to physicians. Sponsored drug trial results will be quoted.

Physician, under the impression this is really the latest cutting edge pill for (whatever health issue) will prescribe it to patients and give free samples, especially if they can’t really afford it. Side effects are rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Large groups of people get complications like an additional disease or there are sudden deaths, a class action lawsuit is made against the company. The company has made 1.5 billion dollars off said drug, but only has to pay 1.5 million to settle claims.

Filmmaking

Snowed In

I might be able to go to work at noon, but I will probably stay home and try to shovel us out. So far I shoveled out the back so that the dogs can go out and poop, because they were starting to poop in the porch. The front steps need to be shoveled out and the side door, but I’m not sure if we will be able to open the doors. My cute friend is in BC where there were also blizzards, so I hope she’s okay. I wrote a dramatic email to her saying we could have died. One fun thing I got to do is put the wiener dog in his fleece winter coat, because it is minus 31 degrees.

I have some work to do on my video, but I can’t be creative all the time so I’m going to take breaks to play Katamari and watch Birth with Nicole Kidman. I’m curious about it and I much prefer when she does serious work. She was great in The Others. Dogville was amazing, although intense, but the ending kicked serious ass and made up for the 3 previous hours. I hope Lars Von Trier is out of his abused victimized women thing. He fucked Bjork up while shooting Dancer In The Dark to the point where she says she will never act again, even though she was amazing. I’m glad he kept to Dogma, but I still think Thomas Vintenberg’s Celebration was the best Dogma film made. It was so intense.

If you haven’t seen The Celebration, it’s about a father’s birthday party and his grown son who takes the occasion to confront his father about sexually abusing him and his sister who recently committed suicide. In front of the entire family. And it’s really amazing to watch how they react, because it shows the dynamics of disclosure in families but compressed into 24 hours. I highly recommend it.

I think shooting with a small crew gets some really emotional stuff out of actors that is harder to find when there are twenty people standing around, especially since often they draw from their own life experience to act and can be REALLY vulnerable. I don’t think I ever want to work with a large crew. Kubrick used small crews. So do a lot of the dogma folks. I think there’s more trust between the director and the actors when there isn’t someone having to run around screaming at cast and crew. In fact, film sets are abusive, and I think the way they run counteracts any feelings of comraderie or safety or trust among everyone. If people acted the way they do on film sets in any other employment sector, they would be fired immediately.

I’m also lucky in that a friend I used to work with on shoots is now becoming a DOP, which is cool because she knows my style and if you don’t get along with your DOP then you can’t get the kind of shots you want.

Once another friend was location scouting in a haunted convent and we were looking at her digital photos when suddenly she screamed “There’s a face!” Sure enough, there was a clearly defined face looking right into the camera, yet somewhat, well, it wasn’t solid that’s for sure. It was just disembodied and floating. We were trying to figure out what caused it but we still don’t have a good reason for it being there. If it really is a ghost it’s probably the clearest image of a spirit which I have ever seen.

When my contract on this research job runs out I’m hoping to get an editing gig on Wapos Bay, a stop motion Aboriginal children’s show shot here in Saskatoon. My friend Diana makes the heads for it. The only job I would want in the Industry would be editing. It’s ridiculously fun, although I can see how it would drive some people spare. Especially when you spend five minutes assessing the exact frame which you want to cut at, and when you have to watch the entire thing over and over to be sure it works, and make copious notes about various shots. But I like that for the most part it only involves you and the director, and even though things get stressed when the deadline nears, it’s still better than desperate crew members trying to get a shot before the light is gone. My first job ever was as a production assistant, but fourteen to fifteen hour days wipes me out, can’t do it. Especially now that I have health issues that require good sleep patterns.

I should go do some work now. Or play. I am not sure.

Disability Rights

Mercy

Not all caregivers are nice people.

I can say that with impunity because four years ago I ended up with a multitude of self-appointed caregivers. Some people were actually pretty good sources of support. And some weren’t caregivers but just came to visit and didn’t treat me like a freak. Like my friend and next-cubicle coworker Randy who clued into what a lot of people missed and brought me some books to read. Come to think of it my supervisor also brought me some magazines, along with info on the rights of committed individuals in the Quebec Health Care system.

But possibly the worst self appointed caregivers were my roommates.

I did get out for a week and then had to go back. It was an awful week. I’d been trying to communicate that I wanted them to find another place to live, because they were acting fucked up, but they kept ignoring me because I was “crazy.” Once they even started talking about me in front of me amongst themselves. Not only that, but oftentimes they would look at me with total disgust. It was really awful and it hurt my feelings but I had no idea how to show that. And then there was some abusive stuff that happened which I only remember in the sketchiest fragmented way, I know I was physically assaulted just before I went to the hospital again. By now they were so fucked that I was really happy to see the paramedics and get away.

So I ended up back at the hospital. And when I called to check my message manager the code had been changed, because I couldn’t be trusted with an answering machine. They had a really patronizing message on the machine all about loving me, but they refused to return any of my calls and never came to visit for the next four weeks.

During those four weeks I tried over and over to evict them. I left a verbal eviction notice on my hijacked machine, but nothing happened, except that now I was hearing from other friends that one of the roommates expressed thoughts of kicking me out into the street. Bear in mind this was my apartment, all the utilities were under my name (including the phone), and I was the only one with a full time job.

It was getting to a really scary point where I knew I was going to be released soon, but I didn’t want to go back to those people and they weren’t respecting the fact that I had given them an eviction notice. The landlord was starting to get upset too, not with me but with them. The boyfriend had some loud party and the poutine chef downstairs had to run up and get them to keep it down. I think the landlord was considering eviction, not for crazy me, because my family had let him know I was in the hospital, but for the bad bad roommates who he was worried were trashing his apartment.

To explain how extreme that is, picture this: The apartment walls were riddled with bulletholes, someone punched two holes in the walls, paint was peeling everywhere, and this was from previous tenants. So he wasn’t fussy, but something was making him draw the line.

So I felt trapped in a corner, I had one key to my apartment which I had left at work and told my Dad to get it and change the locks. He did get it, but James, the bad roommate, knew about it and locked that door in another way so the key wouldn’t work. The landlord let him in, the locks were changed, and holy hell broke loose. I was going to let them come back for their stuff, but I was damned if they were going to evict me from my own apartment and keep all of my belongings.

What followed was even MORE drama. James Diamond threatened to kill me and my entire family. My father went to the cops and I nearly got a restraining order. When I got out he started a long campaign of stalking me, including harassing phone calls several times a day. When I confronted his girlfriend about it she tried to justify it by saying I had been pretty fucked up in my phone messages. I said “Well I was committed for being a danger to myself and others, what’s his excuse?” Not only that, but he stole several things from me, including some objects with sentimental value.

I should also point out that James had his own apartment.

But possibly the weirdest thing was her saying to my dad “But how can we care for her if we don’t even live with her.”

Sometimes the best care someone can give is admitting they are incapable of caring for another person and just backing away.

I have never said the words “poutine chef” before. It’s kind of funny.

Canadian Art, Race

Finally, a visitor from Vancouver

My friend Rebecca Belmore is coming into town for that opening next week, the Mendel has a bunch of different shows going on at once, and she’s showing. I love Rebecca, she’s so fun. I have her panties but that’s another story (she’s straight, to my knowledge, which is why it’s funny). She was the second Aboriginal to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale, my dad was the first. She and I used to hang out at The Grunt in Vancouver, which was probably the only gallery scene I was able to appreciate in any meaningful way. I think because they showed a lot of aboriginal art and yet didn’t classify themselves as an aboriginal art gallery. Plus they were unpretentious and you could stand out in the rain smoking joints with staff and other artists, and then stay after hours and get drunker and drunker. They were the most aboriginal friendly gallery in town, so it makes sense that that is where I ended up.

There were other decent galleries, but they seemed to be mainly concerned with catering to the white hipster crowd of wannabe art stars. In fact when Video In started heading toward the wannabe art star crowd I kind of got disengaged with it and felt marginalized again. The irony of that is Video In, which is the oldest artist run centre in Canada, had a really strong mandate for doing community based activist work around issues like sexuality, race, sex, class, gender, disabilities, more sex, etc. So as you can imagine the membership was pretty diverse. But now I keep hearing disturbing stories of aboriginal members being treated in racist and offensive ways. I haven’t experienced it myself, but that’s the word on the street.

I sometimes don’t know if racist shit is going down because people forget I’m aboriginal, or never knew it. So if they hate brown people, I’m sometimes just off the radar to not see it firsthand and know somethings up. Sometimes it’s so fucked up that I almost want to say “Don’t be racist to my friend, be racist to me! Spread your all encompassing racism around and stop singling out the obvious brown faces.” It sounds weird I know. I have brown skin envy.

Which brings me to another thing. I hate it when white people say racism is hating someone based on their skin colour. It goes WAY deeper than that, it’s about hating cultures and POC histories and projecting white guilt into a more manageable form of hatred that comes out in words like “I’m not responsible for what happened hundreds of years ago” even when they still benefit from it, or “Don’t tell me about colonial history because you’ll hurt my feelings and I’ll run to your superior and tell them you’re racist towards white people!” Ugh! Just dumb. And I’m not the same as a full blooded European because I have a very different personal history rooted in Cree culture. Looking white does not make me care less or know less about being Cree.

I’m glad Rebecca’s coming to remind me of the Grunt that I miss.

Saskatoon

I’m alive

It was too weird, as soon as I hit publish on that last post my mom was in my office to get me home because everything was shutting down. All the bridges were backed up except Victoria, which people hate using at the best of times. Victoria Bridge looks like this:

Except of course now we have cars. But you get the point. You might think that’s a terrible choice during a blizzard, especially since maybe there is a foot between you and the oncoming traffic, and that there is a steep hill on the other side. But no one was using it and it was actually really easy to go over.

It is still blustery and terrible. Basically the whole city is shut down, and if you know Saskatchewanians you know that’s serious.

Vancouverites are wimpy. I remember when I moved there and I was trying to get a job at A & W, the day of my interview an inch of snow had fallen. MAYBE three inches. The entire city was shut down, I don’t think even transit was running. I got a call to not come in for the interview, even though I just had to walk 10 blocks. I could look out my apartment window and watch a car drive up a hill and then slide back down, over and over, in a fit of modern day Sisyphean terror.

Extreme weather is pretty commonplace here. Even folks from Montreal quake in fear when they face -65 degrees C. We have the same climate as Siberia basically. In fact a fruit grower here sought advice from growers in Estonia, Finland, Moscow, and Siberia.

My mom told me a story about how Gramma used to make the family drive towards the mountains during blizzards so that she could marvel at the snow, ON THE HIGHWAY! She likes storms. So do I. Nothing gets me more excited than a vicious thunderstorm with power loss and broken trees.

Schrodinger tried to go outside to play in the snow, but it’s about three feet now so he was unsuccessful. Silly kitty.

Saskatoon

Oh swell

I wish my mom wasn’t so goddamned stubborn. The courthouse is closed, the banks are closed, a line of cars are hightailing it out of downtown at the impressive speed of ten km an hour. And I still have 50 minutes before my mom picks me up. By now the buses have stopped running so I can’t get home that way, and getting a taxi is completely out of the question. I wish my warnings would be heeded even if they are dire. I should not have come to work at all, it was a stupid idea and I should have just told my mom to bugger off and go to work if she wanted to.

Saskatoon

Blizzard!

My mom is weird.

This morning we had a huge debate over whether or not we should go to work. She’s a professor and I’m a researcher of residential schools (which involves burnout, but that’s another story). Anyway, after much squabbling and consulting the Weather Channel, she convinced me to go to work, even though we only had visibility for fifty feet.

Now of course, the roads are progressively getting shittier and the buses are coming up to not running anymore. People in my office are running around panicking and trying to assess if they should be leaving. Mom already agreed to picking me up at 3, but that’s still a ways away and things keep closing like schools and so forth. And spending the night in a law office isn’t my idea of a good time. I hear visibility has gone down to ten feet, and cars are skidding everywhere. In Edmonton tow trucks have even stopped working. Oh fuck, and now Circle Drive is shut down.

I just want to go home!

Where’s my mommy?