Category: me

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Remembering Michael

It’s the 32nd anniversary of my uncle’s murder. Details here: http://www.amw.com/fugitives/brief.cfm?id=44215.

Sad, numb.

I was in a mood when I wrote this – hard not to be, I suppose. However, I don’t want it to come across as maudlin, so I thought I’d add some context.

I chose this year to make a statement about it, on social media especially (Facebook, Twitter). Why? Because, outside of the initial blog posts I published around the time of the America’s Most Wanted episode, it’s been a source of untapped grief. In making it public, I was unabashedly putting it out there – to friends and acquaintances, and strangers alike – instead of it being this twisted little secret which swims around my head.

The fact is, my uncle’s death has nothing to do with me. I never had the chance to meet him. I am involved in the sense you would be involved if you were researching a stranger from another age, another country, who just happened to be related. And yet his story is woven into mine, distant though our two lives were. I am older than he was when he was shot. I wasn’t even 9 years old back then, and I didn’t learn about it until I was 17. The tragedy was delayed for me: time-released.

In any case, this is my sorrow, shared briefly with you. It is, I should add (in all fairness), a necessary exploitation of a crime, in the faint hope someone will happen across an old Guild D40 guitar, or know what happened to a burglar with a Leica fetish. Faint hope, for sure, but it’s part of the process of grief.

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Update

First off, things are going very well on the Keyhole blog. If you haven’t checked it out, please do. Yes, this is me, shilling for myself (and the film).

It is a departure from Guy’s previous works, which tended to rely on the aesthetic of film itself as a language; Guy has been very upfront about his love of tropes from the early days of cinema. The difference is that in Keyhole these elements are reordered in priority, toward the background as mise-en-scène and not a character in and of itself. Keyhole is subliminally deeper and more purely emotional than his earlier films; a drawback is that I’m not sure how much people will be able to absorb in one viewing. If there is one challenge that I am experiencing, it is balancing the educational, editorial, and entertainment-oriented components of the diary/blog.

Aside from this, teaching, student-ing, writing are going well. I am working on a submission letter to a literary agent for my novel. The weather is getting warmer. I can’t complain

Well, I will complain: we have a federal election coming up May 2nd. I don’t mind the election per se, but we have exceeded three weeks of campaigning already and not one word of either Afghanistan or Libya – two wars which require a position, regardless of whether you are the sitting government or one of the contenders. Oh, and health care. It’s the weird-assed priorities which bug me – who are they trying to appeal to? Swing voters and pundits, it seems.

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Guy Maddin’s Keyhole

Good news #1: I’m supervising the post production on the new film by Guy Maddin, Keyhole.

Good news #2: I’ve been asked to do a blog/diary of its progress. Sweet!

Here’s the link to my Keyhole post production blog. Don’t be surprised if it takes my attention away from here for the next while. I will endeavour to keep Imaginary Magnitude updated.

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Movies & A Book: Some of The Best Things I’ve Witnessed in 2010

Here’s the best of what I’ve seen this year. I haven’t seen everything. You may disagree with what I have seen. This is life.

FILM:

Inception

Go ahead. Try. Try disagreeing that this is one of the most technically (and perhaps conceptually) elaborate mainstream Hollywood productions released in years which also happens to work as a “movie” that a wide variety of audiences would enjoy watching.

There has been a backlash against Inception. I don’t know how or why this is – perhaps it was over-sold as a deep “puzzle-solver” film, which it is not. And yes, the NYT’s A.O. Scott has a point in his comment that the film’s literal depiction of dreams are lacking psychological heft (outside of Marion Cotillard’s performance as DiCaprio’s wife). In any case, something has caused a revolt against this film and I say this revolt is missing the point.

Inception is, generally speaking, the most watchable, the most fascinating film of 2010. You are allowed to hate it.

A Prophet

I am a huge fan of Jacques Audiard, a French director who has always rewarded the viewer with films (Read My Lips, The Beat My Heart Skipped) that balance passion with style. With A Prophet, Audiard expands his canvas, creating a gritty, novelistic masterpiece on-par with The Godfather (yes). The story concerns a young incarcerated Muslim who slowly rebuilds himself from within the treachery of prison life, rising from under the thumb of a vicious mob leader to become his own person and create his own empire. Epic, patient, and in places extremely violent. People will be referring to this film for years to come even if it has not really made a mark in North America. Again, a masterpiece.


The Eclipse

I realize this Irish film was released in 2009, but it didn’t get here until now. A compelling ghost story which eschews the two-dimensionality of ghost story films. It was around the twenty-minute mark that I realized it was a film which was going to confound my expectations (expectations based upon years and hundreds of similar plot lines): it wasn’t going to squander what it was and fall prey to hackneyed cliché. A gorgeous, touching, ultimately humanistic film with a stand-out performance by Ciarán Hinds as a grieving father of two children who must swallow his pride to escort a loud-mouthed Aidan Quinn through the motions of a book tour of the small coastal city of Cobh, in County Cork. A sublime achievement by director Conor McPherson.

Notable: Winter’s Bone – see it. It’s on DVD now. Like A Simple Plan, it’s a self-contained “rural thriller” (ugh) with a chilling undertone of barren hopelessness. Unlike A Simple Plan, it’s uncomplicated which is what gives it more of an honest strength. Exit Through The Gift Shop is the perhaps best film made about art and the art world that I have seen – like Inception, it’s not trying to be deep, just smart. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World blew me away because I expected it to be weak (perhaps because all the publicity photos inexplicably used a static image of Michael Cera standing against a fucking wall…imagine if you will, trying to sell Star Wars with a picture of Mark Hamill sitting cross-legged in the desert – sounds awesome, eh?). Not only was it not weak, it was the strangest case of “I don’t know why I love this movie but I really do”. Painstakingly, sublimely Toronto-centric (which, unlike the inexplicable promo photos of Michael Cera, shouldn’t be factored into explaining why it didn’t fare well at the box office) and wildly imaginative – those two things have never met before…oh but wait, I forgot the perfect companion piece: Kick Ass – also shot in TO, and also exceedingly expectation-defying (although the climax is kinda drawn-out). As far as performances go, Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) stand out, along with Winter’s Bone‘s Jennifer Lawrence, and Hailee Steinfeld for True Grit (who, at 14-years, shows huge promise as an actor).

BOOK:

I would have said “BOOKS”, but due to work and school I haven’t read anything published this year (that I can remember), with the exception of John Vaillant’s The Tiger. Lucky for me, since it is without doubt one of the best non-fiction titles I’ve read in years.

The Tiger is a meaty real-life tale of vengeance by the titular beast, in the winter hinterland of the Russian Far East (which the author calls, paradoxically, “the boreal forest”). Vaillant describes an environment historically, politically, and biologically unique, inhabited by hardened outcasts. The shadow of a predator male tiger, known never before to attack without cause, creates a wave of dread throughout the land, with only a small band of volunteers to figure out the mystery. Vaillant provides wave after wave of fascinating detail – examples of how man and beast have evolved throughout time, how human and animal behaviour have worked in similar paths – that by the end of the book you feel as if you should have a credit in Ethology. This is truly a page-turner and I cannot recommend it enough.

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Taking a Breath

For the first time in a few Decembers, I approach the end of the year without a knot in my stomache, without a brain scrambled by the to-and-fro of this and that. This is not to say that I’m not busy, that I do not (as I type this) sit with a few plates spinning above my head. This is also not to say that I do not face an onslaught of tasks once the merriment of New Year’s Eve has ebbed.

I feel compelled these days to start putting things in perspective. Perhaps this is what happens when you turn 40 – perhaps I am being cliché. Seeking context and sketching narratives seem like writerly enough goals to aim for, but even as a writer there are a lot of things – tangents, curves, frays, tears – to reconcile within that task.

A strong influence stems from my current study of psychotherapy, which requires that I be in therapy also. You find yourself relating a story from your past – from your childhood, from your 20s – and you find yourself saying something you realize you haven’t really mentioned to anyone before. Not necessarily secrets, but impressions of events. Sometimes events themselves. It allows you to discover how unintentionally secretive we can all be.

I have been struck by as often as I have been able to dodge the things thrown at me in life. Sometimes you don’t have a choice: I think that’s one of the first things you learn, but the hardest to reconcile. That is, if you don’t want to subscribe to fatalism (which isn’t to say that everything should boil down to some atheist/libertarian screed). Ultimately, life has but one author, and if you do not have a hand on the pen there is a problem.

It is thus, in the spirit of pen holding, that I try to take some time over the next while to add to the picture of my understanding of my self, with the aim of broadening that understanding (as opposed to solipsism) so that the rest of the (human) world may not be as strange and foreboding as it can seem.

Perhaps, some day, we will see that we are all artists.

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I Don’t Want To Know

As a writer, even though I am not part of any sort of literati, I am still plugged into the lit scene. You need to be if you want to understand the general to-and-fro of any industry you are interested in becoming a part of (same goes for TV, music, theatre, etc..). That said, I must make an admission. I am making this admission because I think there are a lot of people like me out there who feel the same but are reticent to admit it.

Here goes: I don’t take any particular interest in the life of the artist outside of his or her art.

When I read a book, I don’t care if an author comes from the East Coast and studied journalism, had a drug problem and now lives in a shed with a mastiff. It’s not that I don’t care about this author personally, it’s that these facts shouldn’t have anything to do with the book that I am about to read. I should be able to pick up the book, knowing nothing about said author, and be able to read it, enjoy it, be fully affected by it, without substantially missing something due to a lack of familiarity with the author’s biography.

And yet, when you are culturally plugged-in (and by this I mean, you check out industry blogs, trade mags, etc.) there is so much white noise about the artists themselves that it seems divergent from what it is they are supposed to be doing: their work. We can talk about Picasso’s passions, but 100 years from now there will probably only be discussion of his work – your work is the only thing left after you and everyone who knew you has died. And if people are still talking more about you than your work after this point, then I would think the quality of your work was overstated.

Would knowing that Stephen King battled drug addiction offer an insight into some of his writing? Yes. But, my point is that if that insight is necessary in order to fully appreciate a piece of work then there is a problem. The work doesn’t work if you need a biographical cheat sheet to inject context into the material.

I think Bryan Ferry is an fantastic vocalist – and I don’t want to know anything more than that. Nor the details outside a director’s films, nor what inspired the playwright to write her play. I’ve got my own shit going on, thanks very much.

Ephemera is for journalists, fanzines, and those working on their Ph.D. The general public should not feel inadequate if they pick a DVD or book off a shelf, sit down in a theatre, or load a song without being prepared with supplemental information not contained within the medium which contains the work. The work inevitably has to stand up for itself. I write this for two reasons: first, with the likes of the AV Club and traditional print/TV media clamouring to add as much web-based context as possible to every article, there’s a growing sense that – for the everyman – if you aren’t savvy to the smallest details of each artist’s passings and goings, you are nothing but a tourist. Secondly, embracing social media to a claustrophobic degree, we can now read endless commentating on authors reading their work for a live audience!…something no one really asked for outside the publishing companies themselves and perhaps the authors’ parents. Let’s face it: most authors can’t read aloud to save their lives – it’s not their specialty.

There are reasons for digging deeper, but that’s up to the individual. It was interesting to learn more about HP Lovecraft when I reviewed Michel Houellebecq’s quasi-biography of him and his work. What’s funny, however – using that same example – is that when I proceeded to read the two works by Lovecraft contained in that same book, I don’t recall thinking to myself “Ahh – this is where his uncomfortable relationship with women takes shape!”. That’s because the stories were two of his masterpieces, and when you witness a masterpiece, peripheral biographical information is going to gunk-up your enjoyment.

The medium may be the message, but the work contains the words. Outside of this we are left with cultural “bonus features”. Nice to have, but not necessary.

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Swirl

I am trying (desperately) to avoid a “boy, it’s been a wacky ride these last few months!” post. It certainly isn’t for lack of things to talk about, news to update you with, opinions to confess/shout.

Thing is, I don’t know who you are. Sure, I know there are some of you who are semi-regular visitors. There are others who happen upon this place by accident (via Blogger or StumbleUpon). There are also those who come here via Google searches, either via my name or – most likely – a book review (which admittedly I haven’t done in, oh, a year or so *). And no, this isn’t going to be a “Matt wittily evading accusations of being a lazy bastard by turning the camera on the reader” post.

I’ve been posting artsy stuff, writerly stuff, industry opinion stuff. I don’t mind the randomness, so long as there’s no fluff. I do mind the lack of output. I wish, for one, that I could post more photographs (which is to say, I wish I had a better selection of photos to post **).

It comes down to the fact that I’ve been working like a dog since May (note: this happens every year that I’m working on a SAW film). When I come out of these periods, I feel like Rip van Winkle: a little dazed, slow on the up-take. Whereas last year this time I started teaching, this time this year I am a student (part-time) †. I have a small (but good) feature and a small (but good and potentially controversial) TV show on my plate from now till February. If funds allow, I also hope to have an editor working with me on my novel, with an eye to approaching a publisher or self-publishing if that doesn’t seem feasible ††. I’m collaborating on a musical.

My plate is full.

– – – 

* which isn’t to say that I’m not reading or that I don’t want to do any more book reviews. I’m reading a lot of non-fiction, thank you. Much of it either out of professional or academic interest. However, if only to improve my Google ranking, here’s a quick book review of Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño: What the fuck was that? (ISBN-13: 978-0811217170)

** another casualty of working so much is my photography. I still have the same roll of film in my camera that I’d loaded in June. I think I’ve only taken 4 exposures since then. Of course, my cellphone camera gets all the fun these days, unfortunately.

† I will be continuing teaching, but for only two terms this year as opposed to three (which was exhausting and… exhausting)

†† It needs a new name, for one thing. And I know this is going to drive me up the wall more than any changes to the actual content of the book.

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