Sometimes I feel very close to awakened mindfulness, and sometimes I feel very far away.

This morning, over waffles and wonderful coffee — from Lunenburg: The Laughing Whale; slightly fish-scented, the coffee, not the waffles — I was having some difficult feelings and I complained:

I don’t get what’s so great about being in the moment. I’ve been in the moment plenty of times: when I had a headache, a hangover. Have you ever had a breakup or a depression so bad that minutes passed like hours? It doesn’t feel good — it’s not like I was experiencing the moment, it’s more like I was trapped in it.

Jill:

Mindfulness isn’t about feeling good. Expecting it to be something in particular is another trap keeping us in saṃsāra. If you feel pain, sit with it and let it wash over you.

Last night I was watching the “live” coverage of this year’s World Series of Poker (and finished top 0.5% in a small tourney of my own). “Live”, in quotes, because not only is the coverage delayed a half-hour for gameplay reasons, but also because I’ve timeshifted the heck out of it. Anyway.

At one point one of the announcers made a comment that reminded me of the wheel of dharma. A player had just busted and Lon McEachern said:

And the great wheel of poker turns. Hello, welcome to the game, goodbye, thanks for playing.

This, in turn, reminded me of Amy Winehouse with echoes of Heath Ledger. I’ve been vaguely happy for her since I heard of her death, for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on — “fullness” — but anyway, suddenly I was quite sad at the turning of that wheel. It’s exacerbated by the media, but it seems like the death-moment is so fragile and temporary and permanent. One minute here, one gone forever, and the wheel rolls on.

But time is an illusion, another of those saṃsāric traps. I’m beginning to get a better handle on that, the existence of only one, knife-edge moment.

If you never paid attention to Winehouse grab her albums now. I did, they’re fantastic, she was worth the media attention, and her karmic contributions to The Great Mandala are percolating.

☸ Anyway, peace. Love you all. ☸

I love tarot, but the I Ching is pretty badass too. Walter Murch spoke with Michael Ondaatje in the Conversations book about possibly using it to construct a pictographic cinematical notation similar to musical notation.

My use just now was much more crass:

Me: “Why do I have so many haters?”

I Ching: “Conflict is a necessary part of life. Tension upon the strings of a violin can make majestic music. Most conflicts you face in life are the result of your Path converging with another’s. Your Path is not his, and one Path is not necessarily more right than the other. Can you work together to remove the blockage?”

Me: “kthx”

The film I’m on is financed without government support. The mainstream industry is notoriously difficult to break into, even for people with multiple indie features under their belts like my production team. I did it once before, in games, but it wasn’t pretty — took a couple of years of rejection.

One of the problems with the Canadian film industry is that it’s very freelance-based and everyone is on the grind, looking for a piece of a constant-sized pie. One of the stated goals of my sci-fi project is to break the “addiction” to government funding the Anglo-Canadian industry has and set up an investor-based capitalist system like that supposedly flourishing out of Montreal for Quebecois cinema.

The insular “film-is-full” nature of the no-pay-internship Anglo cinema is a result of staggering production costs arising from trying to compete with, while producing, American films. There’s a lot of money sloshing around, but most of it gets tied up, perhaps rightly, in “safe” productions that the funding bureaucrats can justify to stakeholders.

Which means hiring newbies — or doing anything experimental — is the dead-last thing on production company’s minds. Government film funding doesn’t really create jobs, it maintains them — increases in government funding create jobs. This is obviously unsustainable (because, while arts jobs supposedly have a positive tax ROI, they’re not profitable enough to also pay for, say, universal health care).

The bright side is that cameras (like the GoPro) are now ridiculously cheap — to the extent that the buy-versus-rent question almost becomes moot. People in the industry see this as a “Bad Thing” because it means “anyone can make films” — it’s slowly becoming what you know, not who. This strikes terror and hatred, fear and loathing, into the hearts of the mediocre. And rightly so: LeBron doesn’t make $15 million per year because he’s decent at basketball.

This year I shot a super hero film and an action movie with guns and explosions for a COMBINED cost of under $1,000. It’s actually getting easier and cheaper to make blockbuster-style pictures than to make indie-talkies like Clerks. Anyone who’s seen Thor knows what I’m talking about — why pay for a writer and actors when you have cheap HD and After Effects? I bet one could build a 3D rig out of GoPros for under $1,000 in parts and labour (aside: this is one reason I’m going to take a welding and metal sculpture class in TO).

The trick with these films, of course, is stylization — working with the limitations of the technology. Yes, it’s shittier-looking and no, that’s not a problem if you roll with it as part of your “look” (cf Paranormal Activity).

In essence, we’re in a similar position to post-war France: local and American productions are mostly formulaic, single-voiced, and stagnant; while low-cost, shittier-looking productions are becoming possible with technological improvements. In the 1960s in Quebec, and later in France, this gave rise to verité and the New Wave.

I want something similar to happen here, now — and thanks to YouTube and NetFlix this revolution won’t have to be televised.

PS — In b4 “white whine“: boo hoo, it’s hard to have a film career

Yes, I dress to the left, why?

July 1st is Cannabis Day. Stock up early.

This suicide note is making the rounds of my younger contemporary intellectuals. It clocks in at around 1904 pages and is a lengthly deconstruction of liberal democracy from a sociobiological perspective.

The “note” starts with the key “technology” of monotheism, and argues forwards from Judeo-Christian hegemony to Nazism, then backtracks to the Norman Conquest in 1066 CE to argue that Norman-Saxon race relations are the foundation of liberal democracy and all that shunted us off the German path to fascist genocide. The last chapter, pre-bibliography, is called “The Punchline: Background Research for an Experimental Elimination of Self-Preservation and other Biasing Biological Factors”. The rough argument seems to be that one’s own free will can only be exercised through suicide.

Mitchell Heisman, the author, shot himself last September.

I’m running into some big psychic problems with the Anglo-Saxon social order. It’s good to get mixed views. Some links call the note “unintelligible”, but that’s what they said about The Physical Cosmologies of The Shining too, and I found that meaningful — I’ve learned in art school that sometimes audiences are too stupid to trust

“Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.” — Marshall McLuhan

I visited Toronto today with Jill and Naan-Bread and we discussed the (Vancouver) riots. My working theory about the cause of the riots, developed lackadaisically during that conversation, goes something like this:

1. Violence is a reaction to depersonalization, or to a lack of identity, according to McLuhan*.
2. “Hockey is Canada’s game.”
3. “Vancouver is Canada’s team.”

Essentially — and I admit I could develop this more but I just got back from TO and it’s bedtime — the embarrassing nature of the loss (3-0), combined with the identity-stripping national letdown (points 2 and 3, above), the depersonalizing nature of crowds, the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, and maybe a kind of historo-psychic expectation harmonically adding to ripples from 1994, all helped caused the riot.

* McLuhan is the go-to guy for media, especially violence in media, and for violence caused by media doubly-so. I can’t say the sports media caused the riot though, because that would make this reasoning circular.

The actors we’ve been working with all year have graduated and are off into the world to do their thing, which includes huge amounts of self promotion. I just noticed that one of them is using one of my photographs, taken with my own equipment and on my own initiative, on her personal site, without my permission. So I stole it back:

It’s also been poorly cropped, or else the original is incorrectly composed (haven’t checked) — but at first I was actually pissed off! Somewhere along the process of learning to be an imagemaker I bought into the idea that I should get compensated for imagemaking. This forced me to confront my own hypocrisy: I steal intellectual property pretty much every day. I actually have my computer set to steal it automatically, whenever it’s turned on. I’m actually stealing some right now.

No one likes to confront their own hypocrisy! Talk about awkward.

I started to consider watermarking my photos, which in private life I think is effing weak. Perhaps best to calm down and realize that, in a sense, she’s pimping my work by pimping her own. I might ask for an image credit though… And try to sell her some web design consulting (and more shots from the set) while I’m at it. There’s always a win-win sales opportunity.

But yeah: I used to have less-than-no sympathy for the other side of piracy. But now… It’s personal.

I find the joy and frivolity in the culture surrounding Osama’s death to be disgusting. This is not a response to Jared’s post (except in the literal sense).

Marshall McLuhan wrote that media are inherently violent (the telephone amputates your voice) and that a search for individual identity often manifests itself in a bit of the good old ultra-violence: “[people] have to kill to know if they’re real or if the other guy’s real.”

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

So now I can finally answer the question of why I — and presumably lots of other white (ie, nonmarginalized suburban) fans — like hip hop. It’s not just an interface with “the other”, though it is that. It’s a dark mirror through which we can find our own identity — or maybe our internal perceived lack of identity calls out to, craves, the violence in the music as a kind of self-definition: I don’t stomp faces, but boy do I have faces I’d like to stomp.

My fantasy life is needlessly over-violent, and I do feel marginalized by my utter, bland lack of marginalization. Maybe conservative social politics helps create the countercultural forces it rages against. You can clearly see that, for example, in the Reganomics-Gangsta-Rap-Dan-Quayle cycle of hip hop in the 80s and 90s.

Plus, nothing jazzes you for a business meeting like murder music. Note that 50′s Many Men is entirely set during the course of a boardroom meeting.