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?

Mad Pride

The good parts of Manic Depression and why I actually like it

I’ve been thinking about Manic Depression and the benefits that come along with it, because yes, there are a hell of a lot of additional things that manic depression carries which are really amazing. I kicked off this blog with a list of people throughout history who have had manic depression or other serious mental illnesses, if you go to any crazy person run support centre you’ll usually get a list like this. In fact, they should really be handing it out in hospitals for the newly diagnosed. I tried to link to it but it was being stupid, it’s the post from March 14, 2004.

One thing that is amazing is the depth of emotions. If sane people’s emotions are black and white (to use a metaphor), bipolar people’s emotions are full on Technicolor. Everything is just exponentially more, my capacity for loving someone is dramatically larger than most, although since I have to pass as normal I usually hide that kind of stuff. I also know that people FREAK out when they realize you can love them to that degree, so sometimes I even hide it from my girlfriends because I know it is pretty intense and I don’t want them to run away. The bad thing is that yucky feelings like anger are also exponentially more, and it takes all my will power to avoid kicking stuff around when I’m frustrated.

Although if no one else is around to get intimidated by it I will hit random inanimate objects. But usually I work off angry energy by having a long walk.

The sad thing about having such a huge capacity for love is that it is hard to find romantic partners with the same intensity. Which is probably why things such as assortative mating happens with people with M.I.’s.

Assortative mating is kind of a dumb term. It’s applied to folks with M.I.’s because we have a tendency to date each other. However two sane people with similar life experiences forming a long term bond aren’t assortatively mating. They just have “a lot in common.”

Creativity also seems to go hand in hand with manic depression. A shitload of notable artists, musicians, filmmakers, actors, and writers have manic depression. In fact, so much of the arts is informed by manic depression that contemporary society has in a large part been shaped by people like me, and that’s not even taking into account that world leaders throughout history have also been disproportionately manic depressive. The reason so much has originated in the minds of “crazy” folk is that manic depression’s most troubling characteristic to the outside world is actually useful and important. That would be the classic manic episode.

During a manic episode it feels like, if your brain was a house, all the lights would be on, as would every electrical appliance. If your brain was a television set it would be playing 300 channels all at once, and you would be able to recognize and understand every single channel. To the outside observer communicating with us makes no sense AT ALL because we jump from concept to concept in split seconds. But on the inside it’s actually quite profound and amazing. It means two subjects which people would not think had ANY bearing on each other get linked in a very valid way, and in a way which a non-bipolar person would totally miss. Tragically some of the stuff we understand we get shamed for so much that we lose it or pretend it wasn’t real. For instance, I know a lot of people who have understood language related to colours, or seen how time actually functions. I myself saw how God and “individual” souls relate to each other, but in the end all the sane people ran around going “She thinks she’s God!” It was so frustrating. And I would try to explain the concept but it was so out there that they just pitied me and then made fun of it. My friend Emily and I talked about what it’s like to go manic and agreed it’s like being able to touch God, not just understand it.

Even the Second World War would have had a completely different outcome if it wasn’t for the fact that Winston Churchill was having an extended manic episode at the time.

Hypergraphia is also a very handy part of craziness which some other M.I.’s have as well. It’s the ability to just write and write and write and write. Which is useful for a writer. Most of the time it makes sense too.

And even depression has it’s benefits. For creative people, work made during mania can be edited and reconfigured during a depressive episode. You don’t need another pair of eyes because in a couple months when you crash you’ll be coming at it from a completely different point of view anyway.

So yes, I talk about the ways in which manic depression makes my life difficult, but it has also given me a lot more than it has taken. In fact, some people recognize it’s benefits so much that even if they are stabilized on meds by psychiatric standards, they’ll take slightly less so that some of the “illness” remains.

I should also say that the most major complications I’ve come across can be directly attributed to current psychotropics which we supposedly depend on. In fact my file dictates I should take Zyprexa for the rest of my life, when I’ve been off it for seven months and am doing better than I did for the four years I was on it. Not only that, but it was antidepressants which lead to my hospitalization, and furthermore I never had auditory hallucinations until I started taking psych meds.

Saskatoon

Deciding to Stay in Saskatoon

I’ve come to the decision to stay in Saskatoon. In seven days I will officially have been here a year. I really thought I would just flounce back to Vancouver, but for a lot of reasons I’ve decided not to. For one thing, Vancouver is fucking expensive. I hate having roommates because I’m hard to live with and I know it, so I kept ending up in teeny apartments, I mean 300 sq feet or less. And my books were starting to overwhelm my living space. So living in Saskatoon gives me WAY more space for the same amount of rent. Plus I am close to my cousins again, and I’ve wanted to get to know them better. And I have, but one of the things that made me sad was not getting to know Chris better before he died. He was a pretty cool guy, and god he was so young when he died. Just out of high school. It’s harder when people who are young die.

Also the film industry here is going crazy. Charlize Theron was just down in Regina last month shooting a film. Capote was shot next door in Manitoba, and the infamous Brokeback Mountain next door in Alberta. The costs of making a film here are way less than say, Toronto, or Vancouver for sure. A lot of Canadian comedies are coming out of here too. Plus the best Aboriginal actors come from Canada, and we have no star system. Some people say that’s terrible “Oh my god! No star system!” I think that’s silly. We have Sarah Polley. And if Canadians really want to get into the star system they just leave Canada altogether.

I remember Sarah Polley when she was still a child actor running around in an Anne of Green Gables spin off called Road to Avonlea. So very Canadian.

If the film industry here is booming, so is paranormal activity, like you would not believe. I have seen and experienced some weird shit here. My friend Preston’s roommate has a poltergeist. I have a poltergeist at work who bangs things. I’ve seen UFO’s with my friend Laurel, my cousin has seen a TON of UFO’s, and I found someone else online who’s been seeing tons of them lately. They’re invading and Saskatoon is going to be the intergalactic customs station. It would create jobs. Really though, I have no idea what they’re up to, it was kind of creepy, especially the first one that looked like some kind of dimensional portal opening up, but now it’s getting to be old hat. You know you’re jaded when a poltergeist can’t get a rise out of you. Although if it threw something at my head I’m sure I’d be pissed. Lucky for me I’ve mostly experienced this stuff with other people, so I know for sure it’s real. Sometimes I let weird shit happen just because I assume I must be hallucinating. No, it’s true, that water cooler jumped around. Oh. Fancy that. It’s a real great denial mechanism for creepy shit. Oh, I am seeing things, oh well, I’ll just ignore it, it’s probably my brain having a hiccup. Meanwhile another person with me would yell “Holy shit! Look at that!”

A doppleganger would scare the hell out of me though, or those animals with human faces, ugh, don’t want to see any of that kind of shit. I used to want to experience these things, but now I don’t anymore. It’s interesting though that paranormal events seem to be ramping up. I don’t know if it’s happening in other places. I’ve been having some weird visions too, but I won’t say them.

The other thing I like about living in Saskatoon is being able to learn my language. People keep talking about indigenous languages dying out, so there’s been a revival of the languages. A really cool thing is that a lot of white people are learning our languages too. I like that there are non-Aboriginals who see the use and importance of learning our languages. Who knows, maybe we’ll end up with half of the Cree speakers being Euro-Canadians.

So yeah, I’ll stay here. I’ll probably travel a lot though, or as much as possible. But this isn’t such a bad home base. It could be worse, it could be a two room apartment in the Downtown Eastside.