Rendering Pines, Rendering Pines

Well now my video is pretty much done EXCEPT for compressing it into an MPEG2 (which Compressor is doing now for the next twenty minutes) and burning to DVD (which will take at least another twenty minutes). But aside from that I’m pretty happy with it. I MIGHT put it on Youtube just so I can let people preview it, but a lot of the text might be totally illegible then. I went WAY overboard last night and got pretty heavy handed, so I had to take it down a tad this morning. I thought I had to get it to the Mendel at noon today, and then I just got an email saying Wednesday is fine. Aaaaah! Oh well, it’s done.

I like it, it’s the first time I’ve made something specifically for installations, so making sure it can loop and still make sense was fun. I’m also going to output a single channel screening copy for festivals. It would be nice to send it to Rendezvous with Madness, which is in Toronto. I’ve never been to it, but they’ve shown two of my tapes and send great swag. Maybe this time I can take a trip to Toronto and watch other films on madness.

And the audio isn’t too shabby, it’s minimalist but that makes sense. And I found a website called FreeSound Project which has downloadable wav and aiff clips of sounds it’s members have uploaded. It’s so useful, I don’t know how I didn’t know that site existed. I’m on my mom’s computer BTW, which pisses her off. I keep running back and forth between the upstairs computer and the downstairs computer.

I’ve spent at LEAST 24 hours on rendering and processing this 7 minute video. It’s not so bad, that’s pretty normal, but it’s a reason I like having my own suite. Paying for 24 hours of rendering time would so SUCK! Ugh! At ten bucks an hour that is PRETTY fucking pricey.

I have six more minutes before I can import into DVD Studio, set it up to loop endlessly, and burn it. BURN IT!!!

Editing is weird and fiddly, but I like it. I had to go on the hunt for an errant frame that kept showing up. My mom watched a rough cut with me and suddenly I yelled “Hey! That frame isn’t supposed to be there!” She didn’t see it though. How can 1/30th of a second be so obvious? But it is. I fixed it and even though she didn’t notice it the first time, she thought it was an improvement. There’s one thing I wish I had been able to fix, which is the slapping scene. But I think it’s fine as it is, I’m just being uber picky because now I’ve watched this damn thing about 50 times.

And General Error 34 started showing up when I wanted to play full screen in FCP. I know it means I have a corrupted file somewhere, but it’s not affecting the video itself, just the program, so I decided to ignore it until I can deal with it later.

I could probably tweak my video for the rest of the week and still not be satisfied. At a certain point I just have to back off.

Ugh, and now I have to re-compress because I didn’t like the way it turned out last time.

20 more minutes. Plus another 20 for burning, when I finally get there. So fiddly.

I’m bored of writing about how boring making videos can be. I’m going to go look at stuff while I wait.

I am still itchy. The doctor I saw yesterday said to go back to the dose of Lamictal I was at before the RASH happened. Hopefully that works. I don’t think it will get worse. I’m all covered in calamine lotion. And I’m hungry. Wah! Anyway, yes, no death today. I think I will be okay.

Zizek!

Slavoj Zizek is my favorite philosopher and cultural critic these days. A film was made about him recently called Zizek! which I have yet to see. A Canadian made it. He has a background in Lacanian theory, which is a way better branch of psychoanalysis than Freud. Freud can go suck a phallus.

Anyway, here’s Slavoj talking about the creativity of the void and the violence of love.

p.s. The health nurse says I should just go to a walk in clinic today with all my meds and see what’s up, so I am okay, for now.

Death as a Side Effect

Last night my lower back erupted into a rash, and it started spreading to other parts of my body. I was wondering, oh maybe it is stress? And then I remembered the dire warning everyone who’s prescribed Lamictal gets. Here is the kind of medical warning no one really likes reading.

ALTHOUGH BENIGN RASHES ALSO OCCUR WITH LAMICTAL, IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO PREDICT RELIABLY WHICH RASHES WILL PROVE TO BE SERIOUS OR LIFE THREATENING. ACCORDINGLY, LAMICTAL SHOULD ORDINARILY BE DISCONTINUED AT THE FIRST SIGN OF RASH, UNLESS THE RASH IS CLEARLY NOT DRUG RELATED. DISCONTINUATION OF TREATMENT MAY NOT PREVENT A RASH FROM BECOMING LIFE THREATENING OR PERMANENTLY DISABLING OR DISFIGURING.

Yes, so those last three things, death, disabling, and disfigurement, well, those all freak the shit out of me. I know those things could happen without pharmaceuticals being involved, but if I must be disfigured I would prefer it not be because of some ridiculous pill. I can’t believe I was a meth user at nineteen and yet nothing happened then, and then now I take doctor approved medication and oh yeah, I could just suddenly die! Well just great, and it’s terrible timing too because I have a deadline coming up. And my cute friend is in town again and I don’t want to look all disfigured.

I am seriously considering trying to live my life sans meds. I haven’t ever really done it, so I don’t know what to expect. I do know that marijuana seems to work more effectively than the legal drugs I’m on. I’ve been doing a maintanance dose of the equivalent of one joint a day for a couple of months or more, and its really helped. I dont get high unless I’m really like “Oh yeah, hanging with the cousins,” mostly I just get a low grade buzz and my symptoms go away. Come down from the highs, come up from the lows. Fewer absence and complex partial seizures. It’s a hell of a lot better than these ridiculous drugs, and it’s been proven safe and effective for my conditions over THOUSANDS of years, not just 20 to fifty years. Of course it’s illegal because some racist capitalists had to put it out of business to secure their own profits. GRRRRRR!!!!

I did realize my own mortality though. I’ve been feeling it more lately, ever since Chris died. In your head you can kind of understand the concept, but that’s different from really truly realizing your mortality. And then last night I realized this really could be it. And I was trying to figure out if I was happy with my life, or if I felt like it had meaning. And I honestly couldn’t answer. I knew how I wished it was different. I don’t know how much of that I could have ever had control over.

I’m so tired of feeling like I don’t have control over my life. And I’m tired of the constant pressure to go the pharmaceutical route to deal with bipolar disorder and epilepsy. The thing is I can see the good things meds have done for me. It’s not a black and white issue, there are tons of grey areas. I’m not one of those “Everyone should take drugs” and I’m not “Everyone should get off their drugs” either. Maybe some people can eat a strict healthy diet and exercise and meditate, but then there are also lots of people who’s lives, through no fault of their own, restrict them from being able to do those things. Someone living on disability is not ever going to be able to afford to eat healthy.

But maybe I can do the alternative. I can actually afford groceries now, and I have more time to do exercise. I have done meditation but maybe I could join the Saskatoon Zen temple folks or something. Talk about Dharma instead of what a lamotrigine rash looks like.

I do know I have to figure out how to live my life so that I would be happier about when I do croak. I don’t think I will though, at least not now. I think there’s still stuff I have to do here. I want to pull a Kubrick and die just after I start editing my last movie. Or at the premiere. Thank you. Bye! Put the reviews on my grave!!!

Eyes Wide Shut didn’t get very good reviews though.

Fucking Amal, Ma Vie En Rose

My computer is still processing. And the car needs to be plugged in for an hour before we can leave the house because I am going SQUIRRLY!

I think my favorite all time lesbian film is Fucking Amal, which also happens to be my all time favorite teenager film too. Maybe because I know the feeling of high school clique-crossed lovers. I was reading a message board where someone was looking for a good lesbian movie to watch and someone said Fucking Amal had vague lesbian undertones. I was so shocked. Did they watch Fucking Amal? The whole thing was about Elin figuring out she liked girls and coming out. How can you call that undertones? That’s as dumb as saying Ma Vie En Rose is vaguely about growing up transsexual. Strangely enough looking for the trailer I did find a bunch of clueless Film Critics saying that exact thing.

I find it bizarre when queer films are made by or for children/teenagers and then people get upset, like we’re recruiting or something. They never think that there are queer children and teenagers who need to see themselves represented somewhere, because heterosexual children have tons of movies and television shows that make them feel normal. Oh right, I forgot, queer kids aren’t allowed to feel normal about themselves.

Oh, Ma Vie En Rose makes me cry every time I watch it. It is such a sweet film. Even the TRAILER makes me cry.

It’s interesting to note that both of those films are foreign. I have no clue how the ratings system works overseas, or if it even exists. Either way, some really revolutionary queer film comes out of Europe. And the character development is spot on, a lot of mainstream work totally misses the mark on how children or teenagers actually behave.

I think I am going to have to find some uppers to stay up late enough to get serious work done on this project. Le sigh.

French and Saunders have computer trouble

BNC, Enchante!

Once my friend Candie became totally smitten with someone because they knew what a British Naval Connector was. I have to admit, people who know tech stuff make me cream my jeans. When my friend Rheanne and I saw Shortbus I got all excited when I saw a character using Final Cut Pro. “Aw! Final Cut Pro.” “You geek.” Which coming from her is a compliment.

I don’t understand people who don’t appreciate geeky video tech-y stuff. It must look pretty obvious that I’ve hung out with mainly video and filmmakers for the last decade. I was so depressed when at my last job I was accused of knowing nothing of sound editing, because they were using a very temperamental Logic Pro software which was incompatible with their input device and I had spent a decade using Protools in well designed suites, which in my opinion is a far superior program. Although maybe I am just a software loyalist. It makes a LOT more sense for video editing at least, because the interface is similar to programs like Avid and FCP. I hate Logic Pro, it can go to hell, it’s such a fuck ass program. And in my experience thus far M Audio sucks too.

Either way it’s kind of dumb to tell me I don’t know sound, when I can use Protools with one hand tied behind my back and standing on one foot. It wasn’t my fault they didn’t choose a more intuitive program, which would probably have been better for their membership anyway.

I remember one time I was sitting around with friends having a conversation and another tech minded person and I started talking about RF modulators. Which I didn’t think was very impressive, but everyone else was all “Oooh, RF modulators, how do you know that stuff?” He also asked a question about winding cords and I mentioned the crucial 3/4 turn. Oh yes, he said, the 3/4 turn.

The most major suck ass thing about my previous job (besides terrible interpersonal issues) was that I came in and NOTHING was set up and barely any video decks were functional. The Betacam deck had to be serviced. The distribution amplifier had been out of commission for ages. There was no 3/4″ deck. The S-VHS decks were crap, which was a big issue because for some ungodly reason the centre had been using S-VHS formats to master onto for YEARS! Anyone who masters onto a video tape that is a 1/4″ wide is being an idiot. Even 3/4″ is more stable, magnetic doohickeys just fall of tape and the less physical size of tape you have the more magnetic particles coming loose with destroy your tape quality.

And then we were all told that Mini-DV tapes were generation lossless and you could keep things on them forever. Ha ha ha. What we didn’t find out until years later was that Mini DV is “lossless” because it replaces a missing piece of information with whatever the next pixel beside it is. As you can imagine tapes on Mini-DV are starting to get really square pixel shit happening and distributors everywhere are imploring their artists to stop sending in Mini DV masters. I’m sure HD is going to end up having some horrid complication later in life too. The fact Betacam has always been and will always be the best format to master onto unless something MAJOR happens. But as a rule analogue is superior to digital.

The sound suite was in random pieces. The M-Audio input device they were using kept crashing and having to get software reinstalled, it would work for a while, and then it would crash AGAIN! It was like being in the 9th circle of hell. I never want to go into a tech artist run centre job again when nothing is set up and barely anything works. I can’t troubleshoot equipment that is totally broken.

I think the problem was things were being acquired because In Theory they were a good idea, although in practical usage they were too new to have proper support or a large base of knowledgeable people to consult. Just a bad idea. I remember when I was in elementary school we did rudimentary computer programming with sprites and I wrote a program which In Theory would have worked perfectly, but in real life application was pretty shoddy. I was talking with my friend Archer about getting an HD camera and he told me to stay away from it until they work out whatever kinks will come out. It’s true, if you’re putting thousands of dollars on equipment you’d better be damned sure it’s going to be reliable for the next six to seven years until they come out with a different format and everyone screams. And using a Beachtek because the camera has no XLR inputs is so dodgy, and few of the new HD cameras had XLR built in.

I digress. Once I found out a filmmaker friend didn’t know how a light meter works and I never looked at her the same way again. I’m awfully shallow about stuff like that. In film school everyone had their own light meter because the school’s meters would get smacked around by constant use and ended up being pretty unreliable. And when a minute of 16mm film costs $100 bucks from film stock to processing, you can see why everyone put out that much cash for their own meter. Once when I was totally broke my mom kept trying to convince me to sell my Sekonic so I could buy groceries (they’re about $200) and I was appalled. You can have my Sekonic when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

I am still waiting for my video conversion to finish and I got on a tangent. I think I have to do something else. I am going to go play We Love Katamari and try to pass the campfire level.

Mehhhhhhh!

I hate video file format converting. I hate meaningless error codes. And I ESPECIALLY hate rendering time, ugh! I hate it! Why do I work with such a fiddly temperamental art form!!???? Expect to read many more posts like this over the weekend.

Mehhhhh!

Giving, Thieving

There is a sort of karmic law I heard of once that says what you give you recieve five times, and what you take you lose five times. I’ve been looking for evidence of it in life ever since.

The recent blizzard was interesting to watch because most people were helping and giving and would even go two hours out of their way to help a stranded pedestrian or other person without transportation. People who were trapped in certain areas got taken in by places like Costco, Walmart, and the Co-Op. Some of them had to stay overnight. It was nice to hear about those things happening. And then I hear of some places like the Confederation Mall locking all their doors so that no one could get in for shelter. I wonder if they thought of the implications of doing something like that. Confed Mall is in a kind of weird area anyway, and I think after pulling that kind of crap they will probably lose a lot of business. While the above mentioned stores will probably get more business because they care about people.

Even people just on their own with 4×4’s were spending hours driving around pushing people out of snowbanks or giving people rides, strangers. People they might even have an arguement with at other times. And they weren’t getting anything tangible back, but still they had big happy glows on their faces and just, I don’t know. They were on a high from helping people. Because it does make you happy, unless you don’t do it much and have never noticed. And it’s not helping and then demanding something in return, it’s just completely altruistic.

And then I’ve noticed when it goes the other way, the wrong way. I’ve had many people in life who are habitual thieves. It’s the one trait in humans I can’t stand whatsoever. I can tolerate many other strange things, but thieving just pisses me off, especially because it rarely comes along with a code of conduct (which might sound strange but hear me out), I’ve noticed thieves as a general rule don’t exclude their thieving from friends or family. In fact, I notice they even feel less guilty when they steal things from people they know. I’ve lost at least five hundred dollars worth of things to thieves who were either friends or a Very Bad Cousin.

And I’ve noticed another pattern with thieves. You’ll go to their apartment one day (unless they’re between residences) and they’ll have tons of stuff, it will be all decked out. MOST of it will be stolen, maybe not the cheaper Value Village couches and things like that, but usually all their electronics comes from friends or family, from whom they are only “borrowing” (without asking and with no intention of returning) or who they’ve decided doesn’t need their stereo anymore. They have a very strong sense of entitlement.

And then one day they lose EVERYTHING. They’ll turn up at your door with a backpack of their remaining belongings and steal something again. And it’s not that they have to lose anything, it’s just some messed up shit they did that made it turn out that way. Like not pay rent while simultaneously trashing the apartment and getting locked out, or just getting evicted with a month’s notice and not bothering to pack. Weird shit. I know other people lose everything too and for no fault of their own, but I’ve noticed this is a regular ongoing cycle in theives lives.

The creepy part is they get resentful of your life, because you have stuff and they keep getting wiped out. And because they don’t recognize that karmic stuff is what keeps wiping them out, they assume it’s because you’re just really materialistic and have the best things and are so rich. So then this sense of being ripped off and feeling entitled to what is “rightfully” theirs comes out again. It’s a vicious cycle, and the reason why if I find out someone’s a thief I cut them out of my life immediately.

Except for Very Bad Cousin who I keep trying to ban from my house. But yeah, I don’t accept thieves in my life at all, not ever. And it’s a rule that will never change.

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.

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.