Health

Early Christmas Present

I guess five days early isn’t so bad. My big present this christmas is a cross country ski package with fancy skis boots and poles. I haven’t tried them out yet, because I got all tired after work and slept and then we had to go buy presents. MORE PRESENTS. I bought 30.00 of candy. I actually bought it for a diabetic and now I have to think of someone else to give it to.

I haven’t cross country skied in years, at least thirteen years. I used to be really adept at it, terribly fast, able to go up and down hills. I once ended up on a black diamond trail when I was fourteen, I didn’t realize it was black diamond but it was suddenly really fucking hard with twists and turns and hills and steep slopes and I thought I was going to die halfway through. Then I finally stumbled back with my dazed dog to the cabin. He spent the rest of the night eating balls of packed snow out from between his paws.

The one embarrassing thing that sucks is when you take a spill and end up with a tangle of skis and poles and legs, all at terrible angles.

I found out it’s the best aerobic workout there is. I had no idea. It’s really fun, I could hardly think of it as exercise. So meditative. Even if you ski with someone it’s just not feasible to natter at each other. Anyway, I need some kind of winter sport because I hate just sitting around feeling lazy. And skating freaks me out because every time I go out on the rink I end up skating past a blood splot and get all woozy.

Art, Art practice, Filmmaking, Race

Beheading Holofernes

I didn’t get into Berlin. Bah! I’m applying to Outfest next, who actually likes me, but I’m not sure if they will take me. The deadline is at the end of January. Toronto’s deadline is in the middle of January. And I need a grant soon to work on something, but I don’t want a bunch of money to make a short. I know, maybe that is bad. But maybe I also just want to keep writing.

I do have an idea for a story that is REALLY dark, creepy, and terribly violent, with the climactic scene referencing Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemesia Gentileschi. There’s also a scene where a woman comes screaming out of the bushes with a knife in her head. People are going to think I’m seriously fucked. It’s a take on missing/murdered Aboriginal women, but with an I Spit On Your Grave approach to it. Hence the Gentileschi reference. No cutesy funny Thirza, I’m sorry, it will happen again someday. If this doesn’t creep you out, the film I want to do after this WILL end up giving you nightmares.

Anyway, for those who haven’t seen Judith Beheading Holofernes, here it is:

There are some who say this painting was created to deal with Artemesia’s rape by Tassi, who offered to marry her so that she would not have a damaged reputation or be considered damaged goods. When she charged him with rape she was tortured to make sure she was telling the truth. Tassi was a serial rapist and had also raped his sister. Oh, go google it, it’s an interesting story. Anyway, he was found guilty but got a slap on the wrist. Some things never change. Artemesia went on to have a running theme in her work of rape as seen from a female perspective. Of course this was all buggered up in a film made about her where Tassi is her passionate lover who mentors her in painting. That’s fucked up, ugh, I could go on and on about the sickness of a filmmaker who would glorify and romantize rape even admist copious evidence of Artemesia’s thoughts on Tassi. ANYWAY, as you can see, she painted Judith being totally unafraid and determined to behead Holofernes, which was a far cry from other Judith paintings where she turns her head away to avoid seeing the horrors of being an assassin. And this is a good example of why therapy as art is relevant.

This was probably my favorite painting in Art History. If it’s not Baroque, don’t fix it. Oh never mind, that’s a terrible joke.

I don’t know if it will get funded. Native women beheading a white man on screen might push too many people’s buttons, even though Native women are killed on screen all the time. It would be such an excellent image though. So yeah, I want to write that story while I wait for funding on my other film’s production to come through. I would apply to the Canada Council for production funds, but sadly 60 000 is not nearly enough. A screenwriting grant on the other hand would give me a year to write this next script. A year of writing, what a dream!

Art practice

Log of a Creative Process

Make coffee. Realize milk is spoiled. Drink coffee black. Sit down at computer. Drum fingers. Write two sentences then erase in a fit of pique. Hit edit undo in case sentences turn out to be useful later (they aren’t).

Read disturbing news items. End up playing iSketch for an hour.

Drum fingers. Write same letter over and over. Get frusterated and pound keyboard. Go make coffee. Remember as it’s percolating that there is still no milk.

Tell characters that they’re fucking around and pissing you off.

Write blog entry. This is easier. Hit publish. Go back to script. Drum fingers some more. Oh joy, you have to go pee. Read magazine and forget you’re sitting on the toilet.

Lunch. Eat some bananas and leftover casserole. Get grumpy at poverty and lack of a variety of comestibles.

Play with dog.

Spend half an hour reading online articles about writers block.

Write something terribly revealing, cry, then save to journal and vow never to read it again.

Chase away roommate coming up to you and yammering on about there being only one roll of toilet paper in the house and wanting you to pay more for the toilet paper because you pee too much. Yell “I’m in the middle of a creative process!” Be mocked.

Go for walk, start laughing at your own jokes and creeping out passerby. Characters start babbling. Go back to computer and write ten pages. Be shocked when you find one of your characters going awol and doing their own thing. Yell “Cut it out!” and get strange looks from roommates.

Think about horribly dramatic traumatic climax, jot down a few words about it, remind self to write scene tomorrow, even though you won’t because you feel guilty doing that to your characters.

Get tut tutted for having a trashy office area with food wrappers every where.

Spend rest of evening watching reality television and wondering why independent film isn’t respected as much as it should be.

Blogging, Saskatchewan

Thank you Saskatchewan Readers!

I do get some interesting repeat readers like the folks at UCR, someone in Germany, people drifting by from Iran, Saudia Arabia, Norway, Taiwan, etc. Someone in Barcelona likes me. Vancouver hardly ever/never visits me, which is sad because most of my friends are there, but makes sense because most of my friends don’t really care about me. Montreal comes by and I know who it is, which makes it fun because then I can write things she and I can talk about later. But the majority of my readers come from Saskatchewan. Mostly Saskatoon, followed by Prince Albert, Pasqua, Vanscoy, and Regina. So I feel like I must say Hello Saskatchewan and thank you for reading me, even though I go on terrible tirades about the province I call home. It’s nice to know folks from around here actually care about what I have to say.
As the joke goes: Saskatchewan, hard to pronounce, easy to draw.

Sex

Although “Funbags” and “Maidenhead” pisses me off . . .

Cunt is probably my favorite word for female anatomy. It’s such a contentious word, and yet to me it just sounds sexy. Unless you call me that while throwing a beer on me or something, in which case I’ll call you a cunt back and add a few more words. I have no qualms about cunt. I could say cunt all day.

Cunt cunt cunt.

Some people try to make cunt into a cutesy word that ends up sounding terrible, like “coochie” or “cooter” or “Cho Cha” or any other ridiculous derivative that usually ends up getting used in the letters page of Club. There’s nothing worse than trying to have a pornography assisted orgasm and reading a dumb word like Coochie.

I think what I like the most about Cunt is that it’s not trying to be cute or sweet or non threatening. A cunt knows what it wants, it’s aggressive and demanding and shameless. Everyone I’ve been seriously involved with has been able to use the word cunt in the sexy hot way it should always be used.

Art, Popular Culture, Theory

*Starstruck*

I always giggle a bit when someone says they never get starstruck no matter who’s around at a particular time. I firmly believe everyone has at least ONE person that makes them amazed and act funny around. I’ve even had people be starstruck around me, which makes me totally shy and embarrassed. The funniest was the morning I was having my usual coffee at the cafe across from my apartment, I liked going there because they had a plethora of magazines to read and enough counterspace to read the Georgia Straight while also eating a panini sandwich. I was minding my own business when a woman suddenly looked at me and said “You’re famous!” I said “No I’m not.” “Yes, you are! I’ve seen you somewhere, where was it?” She might have been referring to the one Georgia Straight article talking about me and several other Vancouver aboriginal filmmakers. Other times I’ve been introduced to people and they’re all “ooh, the famous Thirza Cuthand.” I’m only mildly famous and only with people who go to film festivals. Sometimes I try to pick someone up and then suddenly they hear my name (there aren’t many Thirza’s) and start talking queer film, sigh!
My friend Cease told me a great starstruck story about our friend Paul. It seems they were staying with Fairuza Balk while on their great American road trip. They were taking this whole crashing with a movie star thing in stride until Paul saw a photo on Fairuza’s fridge of her standing next to someone who looked familiar. “Who is that?” he asked Cease. “That’s Shelley Winters.” “Oh my God!”

I was going to put a picture of Shelley Winters here but I have a hard on for Fairuza so to hell with her.

I have been star struck myself on many occasions. The first time was when I skipped Art History Class to go with some friends to Kate Bornstein’s talk at the SFU bookstore. Kate was talking about the destruction of gender and people’s ability to recreate themselves as whatever they wanted and then used my hair and ambiguous gender as an example of what she was talking about. My hair was blue and yellow at the time in my favorite dye pattern that looks like a sunrise. Anyway, I immediatelyturned pink because even though I often had weird hair I preferred being a wallflower. Then she seemed to want to save me by saying it didn’t mean she wanted to sleep with me, which made me go even more pink.

Kate Bornstein: Inspirer of Pinkness

My next starstruck moment has a really boring ending. I saw Annie Sprinkle at the San Francisco queer festival, Frameline, while we were both speaking at a conference. She smiled at me and I was terrified and ran like the wind. I wish I hadn’t done that.

“Brave Sir Thirza ran away.” “I didn’t!” “Bravely ran away, away.”

Just after I got dumped out of the hospital I went to a retrospective of my work down at the University of California at Riverside. A guy was there who looked totally familiar, and he also seemed totally sweet and approachable. I struck up a conversation and discovered I was talking to James Duvall, who played Dark in Nowhere, which happens to be my favorite film. He also got his dick cut off by skinheads in The Doom Generation, was killed in May, and played the role of Frank the Rabbit in Donnie Darko. He was probably the most fun “star” I’ve hung out with, we had beers and joked about different things and talked about the profession of acting and then he offered to be in my movies. He’s a nice guy, I like him. I’d definitely work with him.

James Duvall/Dark being dominated in Nowhere

All of this culminated in my most star struck moment to date. It was my BFA grad and I had to sit through a long boring ceremony EXCEPT Sally Potter was there getting an honorary degree. Sally Potter directed the one film I watched OVER and OVER during high school, Orlando, with Tilda Swinton. In my media studies class I wrote a paper on “The Gaze” in Orlando, which was probably my best paper ever because after that I got lazy. Sally Potter did a great thank you for her degree where she proudly proclaimed that she never went to school and she didn’t think people should feel they had to get an advanced degree.
After the ceremony I was hanging out with my Mom and friends and Mom pushed me towards Sally Potter and told me to tell her how much I liked her film. So I did, I felt very shy, she was most gracious and congratulated me on my film degree.

Sally Potter’s Orlando

Shyness and being starstruck, it goes both ways. One night in Montreal me and two Finnish girls met the beloved Julie Doucet at a group show she was in. She is most well known for her comic Dirty Plotte, which we all loved. I think we just looked like the most unusual tiny fan club and it turns out Julie Doucet is terribly terribly shy.

Which leaves me with my last statement. Celebrities, no matter how they are famous or what they do, have a persona which is completely different from who they really are. I can be all radical and running around with no clothes and talking about sex, but in real life I’m too shy to ask for a kiss, have unwillingly ended up with a career of celibacy, and only run around naked with the blinds drawn unless I’m terribly drunk. So don’t assume anything about a famous person’s character until you meet them, and if they suck, well, you can always watch them on television or read their work.

Body Mods, Popular Culture, Tech

Another Industrial Update and Katamari

Well, I’ve mostly stopped sleeping on it, which I did a few times just because I forgot and was asleep when I flipped over. It doesn’t hurt anymore when it’s not being tormented, and the top of my ear has gone back to having a normal sensation instead of the weird thing it was doing before, alternating between being numb and being crabby and painful. I can wiggle it without hurting, and I can actually slide the barbell back and forth without wincing or drawing blood. I have bonked it a few times when I’m just running my hands through my hair or whatever, a cute girl keeps laughing at me every time we’re hanging out and I squeal after touching my ear, it makes it very hard to look suave.

The only issue I’m having with it now is a bump by the piercing on the edge of my ear. It’s not painful, it’s just a bump, and pretty common with cartilage piercings from what I understand. I want it to go away, just because I don’t want a weird bumpy ear and because I have no idea if those things contribute to ear collapse. I’ve heard I’m supposed to put crushed advil in water on the bump and it will miraculously fade away. So hopefully that will work. Aside from that I think it’s tremendous, and anyone who wants an industrial should get one.

I should also give you my review of We Love Katamari. I went to Futureshop this weekend and bought a Playstation 2, a newer version which is roughly the same size as a composition notebook with the blobby black and white pattern, and only slightly thicker. The playstation was on sale, but the fancy ass vibrating controllers were not, nor was the memory card. I’m not going to tell you how much it cost because I don’t want to be mocked for buying a system I only want to play two games on.

Oh yeah, back to We Love Katamari.

Well, I didn’t have high hopes for it, I guess I was too much in love with Katamari Damacy to expect more genius. But amazingly We Love Katamari exceeds the original in rolling fun. The plot is a little weaker, you don’t have to remake the entire solar system, just throw a few stars and planets in the air to make life nicer. But the graphics are even cooler, the Prince has some wacky cousins that run around, and the music is really good and changes more than in the original depending on what level you’re in. Also the ongoing story when levels are reached is a really cute one about the King of the Cosmos when he was a boy and his adversarial relationship with his father. Plus there’s a two player game, but I haven’t found my second player. I keep running upstairs yelling “Mum! Mum! Come play Katamari with me!” but she never comes.

So I guess I’ll say We Love Katamari is definitely worth it, I’m already starting to get addicted.

I love non-violent video games, I must find more.

Capitalism, Popular Culture, Sex Worker Rights

Pimp My ______

Pimping is the new rage. From what I gather it seems to be shorthand for “I’m going to make this thing ridiculously fancy.” Like cars, computers, and from a link I saw even my own email account. Of course, what pimping really means is running a stable of underprivilleged women doing sex work. I’ve yet to meet a high class well paid sex worker who’s felt that they had the freedom to choose sex work, working under a pimp. I have met a lot of minority women, street involved youth, and child sex workers having a pimp.

I don’t think people really understand what a pimp does. I’m not even going to pretend I know everything a pimp does, but I did get a brief description of working for a pimp from an old roommate. People think it’s just a woman going up to some guy, saying she’ll work for him, and then quitting whenever she feels like it. You can offer to work for a pimp, but if you want to quit you have to save up enough money to buy yourself out, and on the low end of buying yourself out it costs $3000.00. I know they take you shopping for sex worker clothes, and I was at a bus stop when a pimp dropped off his two sex workers who seemed to be doing their first night. I think there might be some protection involved, but not much. Abuse definitely happens between a pimp and a sex worker.

I’ve never seen these blinged out pimps either. A friend saw one with a gold mercedes, but generally they seem to just be average low lifes fuelling drug addictions. I’m sure there’s exceptions like everything.

I guess what I’m wondering is why we’re so set on glorifying the capitalist exploitation of women and comparing it to consumer excess and fancy hub caps. We don’t have shows called things like “Sex Worker My Ride” or links saying “Turn your email account into a sex worker!” I don’t normally say sex workers are exploited by the way, because I don’t really believe that, but working for a pimp is exploitative.

And besides all of that, “pimp” is just a dumb word. It’s bookended by p’s and has an i and an m in between, what a silly silly word.

Parenting, Queer

Queer Parenting

I guess I’m at the age where my biological clock starts ticking. So far I’ve gotten away with pretending not to hear it. Shows like Nanny 911 and being around squalling babies on public transport turn me off from the idea just enough to breathe a sigh of relief. But then it kind of comes back.

Truthfully, I already have been a parent. My sister is severely developmentally delayed (I don’t know why they use the delayed word, my sister’s never going to catch up okay?) and my mum was a single parent. So there were lots of times I had to look after my sister. Maybe that’s why I don’t want to raise a tiny kid, I know how much work is really involved.

But I still do like the idea of parenting.

And then there’s this firm belief I have that more queer teenagers need a safe home if they get kicked out or have to run away or whatever. I don’t want to start a whole shelter, but I’m thinking it would be nice to parent a queer teenager, or two, or three. I mean, god, I lived through that, I’m sure I’d make a great parent for someone in that situation. I’d even home school them if they were having a hard time at school with bullies or whatever.

So now I’m looking around at how to become a long term foster parent. It’s kind of an interesting process. They’re especially looking for people willing to parent teenagers, and Aboriginal families. I’d rather devote my parenting skills to someone who could otherwise fall through the cracks.

Anyway, it’s piqued my curiousity.

Parenting, Queer

Lesbians And Gay Men Fucking: The Queer Community Secret

Well, an open secret really. Other queers know but we don’t tell straight people because it’s too confusing for them. It drives bisexuals crazy because they think we’re closeted bi’s. I’m sure that’s true some of the time. But I also think it’s just a common past time between opposite sex homos. Being butch I’ve had a bunch of cute gay boys have crushes on me over the years and try to get it on. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we just flirt. If you want to have sex with gay men, become a lesbian. I’m serious. It’s never going to be so serious that someone falls in love with someone who can’t reciprocate, but it’s still going to be a lot of fun. Sometimes ongoing relationships develop that baffle everyone. Sometimes we do it just because we’re both into leather and there isn’t anyone handy at the moment, or a hot Daddy Boy thing springs up. Sometimes we do it because we feel like having a heterosexual experiment. And sometimes it happens just because our genders are somehow complimentary in a very queer way.

Plus homos are much more inventive about sex. It’s not all about sticking it in, there’s different stuff going on. Gay men are just infinitely sexier than straight men, look at how many straight women fall for their gay friends. And lesbians make pretty good opposite sex partners for gay men because we know how to work having a dick and aren’t going to try and “change him”. I have a friend I used to romp with a little bit, never all the way but he made several suggestive come on lines about being butt fucked by me and he let me watch him piss. Ironically whenever femmes would try to get down and dirty with him he would get shocked and run away. I think he just had a hard on for butch women.

It’s definitely an interesting and curious phenomenon. Currently I have two huge crushes on some gay friends of mine, both of whom flame out in this totally adorable way. I know one of them I’m going to be getting down with, which should be entertaining. If I had a kid I would want one of them to be the sperm donor and have a father role if he wanted it.

On a side note I hate it when lesbians are unscrupulous towards their sperm donors. I’ve seen dykes either date a boy and dump him as soon as she’s knocked up (Sperm hunters I call them). I’ve also seen dykes have kids and cut out the donor from engaging in parenting even when the man’s all excited about being a dad, especially if he’s gay. That’s just mean and cruel. I think the cutest queer families are when a lesbian and a gay couple jointly care for a child. It’s sometimes funny to see a little girl or boy toddling around with four, five, or even six parents. The whole thing about children of same sex couples being deprived of having both a male and a female role model is rubbish.