The Whole Point of Politics, Composing, 16/04/2018

I’ve moved. It’s been a huge pain in the ass, but I’ve finally moved apartments. Close to everything I own is still in boxes, but that’s fine. I’ll unfold it all eventually. But I need to get back to writing, because I’ve been all over the place. And I’ll still be all over the place for the next few days.

Things are still being installed in my new place, I have to buy new furniture because this is the first time in ten years that I’ve lived in a place without a closet. It’s all getting to be a bit chaotic. Not in a bad way, because I actually feel more relaxed now than I have in a long while.

Spinoza articulated in the rationalist philosophy of his time
the foundational principle of Kabbalah that all existence is
an expression of God, and ontologically is God itself.

I just really want to be able to hang up my damn clothes.
• • •
Benedict Spinoza’s work had a very profound influence on my own thinking. I rediscovered him through reading Gilles Deleuze, and he supplied a way of reading Spinoza that cut through a lot of the austere worshipfulness that you see in more conventional Spinozists.

I think the most important element of this uptake of Spinoza is reading the Ethics as an ethical and political text. You wouldn’t think this would be difficult, if the title of the book is anything to go by. But because the book starts with a long argument about the existence and nature of God and material reality, the presumption is that it’s primarily about God and reality.

But the Ethics is, frankly, a book about ethics. More than that, it’s a book about the ethics of many bodies interacting together. The Ethics is a book about relationships, how we can manage our relationships with everything in the world around us to live better, more joyfully, without suffering, terror, or pain.

That principle – laid out in books four and five of the Ethics – is the foundation of the most radical Spinozist politics. I’m following Michael Hardt’s book on Deleuze’s early philosophical searching.

Here’s the principle that emerges from the Ethics when you emphasize the end instead of the beginning. The purpose of politics is to arrange our society so that all our encounters with each other and our institutions – or at least as many encounters as possible – are for the mutual benefit of everyone involved.

Universal harmony becomes the foundational principle of political science and practice. That should be the goal of our political work as people, neighbours, and members of communities that stretch across the Earth.
• • •
I’m also looking forward to getting back to work on my novel again, a version of You Were My Friend that I think will have the most legs. It’s interesting how the story is changing.

Madison’s character is, in just the first few sections that I’ve written so far, much more bubbly and energetic than I originally conceived of her. I think that’s going to give her arc – becoming overcome by cynicism – more of a kick than we saw of her in the theatre.

As I add more detail to the story, I think some of the good ideas that emerged when I was planning a You Were My Friend film project will get even more space to explore.

I haven’t gotten to the scenes with Madison's co-worker Jenna Chen, who inadvertently inspires her more mercenary sides. And I think there’s a lot more comedy potential to come out of Madison’s relationship with her on-off boyfriend Wesley the hipster with the stupid moustache.

I want to expand this story, this world, and these people. I think in my new place, I’m going to have more time and energy to do it.

Third Format’s a Charm, Composing, 25/02/2018

I’ve had a super-stressful week, and I’ve dealt with it as best I can in a few ways. Most of those involve writing about Félix Guattari, getting some research work done where I can, and lots of coffee.

I’ve also taken another artistic decision. I’ve laid my project of Doctor Who essays to the side – I still want to write philosophical reviews of the new series on the blog as episodes come out later this year, but I don’t think my energies will work best on major statements about the show.

Reasonably accurate depiction of myself. Once I get into a groove
anyway.

On Saturday, I outlined how the novel version of You Were My Friend will go. And I made a symbolic gesture for myself – I wrote its first sentence.

She wasn't doing much of anything at all when the knocking came from the door.

I’ve been trying to do justice to this story since I first developed it – it’s been about four years since I first pitched the idea. I hoped that You Were My Friend could be the ground of work as a theatre writer.

But we had virtually no box office – we were swamped by audiences flocking to see Billy Bishop Goes to War at the higher-budget theatre down the road from our production in Hamilton. They had a higher promotional budget – and more experience marketing theatre. Hamilton was consumed by mournful patriotism after Nathan Cirillo’s murder – which happened less than two weeks before our debut.

The director and crew I worked with on the play You Were My Friend returned to the more sure bets of bigger-budget productions of established content. It suited them well – I approached Mel and Jeannette because I’d seen their brilliant production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal the year before, and she was already a friend.

Beyond the poor luck of our debut, I also think the story was still incomplete. Its presentation was powerful, but having to stick to one set and two actors may have been too much constraint. When I adapted You Were My Friend into a film script, I expanded its world.

You saw key background events that were only described in the theatre. You met other characters at the supporting or bit level who I could flesh out in more detail than I could when their only existence was as a name in someone else’s dialogue.

You can only do so much on a stage. I mean, you can do so much on
a stage, but not all stories are suited to it – at least not without some
serious changes in expression. Could you do a stage adaptation of,
for example, War and Peace on minimal budget and with only four
or five actors? Maybe. But a lot would have to change.

I hoped to ground the abstract quality of the play in the material reality of Toronto as a city. You Were My Friend began with a single set that became surreal nightclubs and Albertan mountains.

But I wanted to shoot in Trinity-Bellwoods, the streets of Kensington Market and Chinatown, surreptitiously in the back of city buses. It never worked out, though.

In nearly three years, I could never get the damn thing shot. Shooting a film takes equipment, crew, and actors. Acquiring all those takes money and time. I didn’t have the money, so I didn’t have the time as I was too busy trying to make sure I had enough money.

I first started working on the project with Sam, the lead actress from the first version in the theatre. We had a few conversations, but eventually we decided to part ways on the project. I think it was largely down to me – Looking back, I think I appeared dismissive and argumentative when we would critique each other’s work and ideas. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

Oddly, it's the lowest-investment and most isolating form of art that I think lets me create the most expansive world. You Were My Friend the novel can let me fill out the characters’ minds and memories as well as the world they move in. The labyrinths of the narrative can wind deeper into time, space, and thought.

All thanks to being able to string the whole world together with words alone. As for publishing, I’ll soon start reaching out to small publishers in Toronto, but may ultimately publish and promote independently.

This story began as an artistic inspiration from some of the struggles the GF went through earlier in her life, when she was underemployed and had little to no family support – just like my lead character Vicki.

I want You Were My Friend to be reasonably successful not just to honour her in this powerful figurative way, but also to share that struggle with other people who’ve experienced it in my society. It's a work of artistic and ethical solidarity. I want it to breathe and live beyond those nine forgotten performances in a Hamilton indie theatre.

Let the pages fly.

Returning to Pages in a Dank Tunnel, Composing, 14/02/2018

Taking a break from philosophy today, because I came home last night after a long day at work. I want to make a legitimately short post today, to talk about some of my artistic work.

Some good news on the artistic front. I have an audio-play coming out in The Twelfth Doctor Adventures, an independently produced series in Britain. Quite a fun fan production that explores a trans companion character.

The series producer JR sent me her script for the first episode, which portrayed their companion, Toni Perkins.* It made a good guide for the character when I was writing my episode, “The Walls Are Alive.” At her best, Toni has a strength with two foundations – her empathy and knowledge of her own fragility.

Books are my home.

* JR tells me the name Antonia Perkins was not an intentional reference. I will never be capable of believing this.

As you can probably tell from the title, I took a crack at another Lovecraftian horror story of the underground spaces that defy human comprehension. I even had some input on the sound design, so JR knows how I want the creepiness of the story to flow from the setting.

Most importantly for the sound, we talked about different ways to make the normal spaces of human existence become disturbing, weird, shocking. The territory that you think is safe actually startles and destabilizes you as a listener. It’ll be a subtle aspect of the story that messes with listeners.

“The Walls Are Alive” is set in a country estate on a human colony world in the far future. Underneath the mansion is a network of tunnels curving through spaces that are typically impossible for humans to traverse.

It was a good use of the Digger aliens I developed for Under the Trees, Eaten a few years ago. I wasn't done exploring the potential of those creatures for fiction, so I was happy to get another opportunity to set a story with them.

The opportunity to contribute to the project came along at a time when I was feeling stressed in my life. My old teaching job was getting tough – I was beginning to suffer from what I realized was improper training and a workplace culture that encouraged instructors to let each other fail as small errors snowballed into serious problems.

Some of my favourite spaces in the Doctor Who fan community
are the queer ones. Not necessarily the gay ones, which have
their own unavoidable problems at the moment. But the queer.

So I was glad to get an offer – even if it was for free – to contribute to a project built in making explicit the values of liberation and queerness that so many fans saw in Capaldi-era Doctor Who.

I think it’s time I focussed more on smaller projects like this for my writing. The last couple of years, I’ve been trying to produce a film version of my play from four years ago, You Were My Friend. But I’ve frankly had a lot of trouble raising the money for it and getting a crew together before I had the money to make it.

Now that I’m working full-time as Anderson College’s Director of Education, I have more money and don’t have to hustle all the time. But I’m also no longer in a position to devote three or four weeks of my life to eight hours of shooting a film on no notice.

But I do have time to devote every week to writing another short-ish novel. Which the latest version of You Were My Friend can be. It’s the kind of work where my talents can work best. And developing connections in the Toronto art and publishing world over the next year can make for a respectable indie author career.

So I’ll be getting back to pages. It’s where I belong.

Because You Have to Make the Calls – Get Things Done, Jamming, 30/01/2017

I’ve been trying to figure out the best path to get You Were My Friend made into a film for about a year now. So far, the biggest obstacle has been that I can’t do it alone.

If I were so financially independent and wealthy that I could just start a production company and hire a film out of my own pocket, I would have a long time ago. But I’m not. So I’ve had to look into avenues by which I could punch up from where I am now.

And I can’t lie to you about it – it’s been tough. Simply having a secure enough base from which to get all my bills paid and have a reasonable life as an individual is sometimes hard enough. My job has been stressful, and has consumed a lot of energy that I want to put toward my career.

When Lily Tomlin accepted her SAG lifetime achievement award on
Sunday, she said that you should never cry for missed opportunities,
because every failure is an opportunity someone wishes they missed.
The lesson: Don't fail.

Lately, a health crisis has interrupted that job.* So while I’m worrying a little about money, I actually feel like I’m in a better position than I was when I was working 20-30 hours each week at the store.

* Don’t worry; I’m not dead, or dying. But it’s still serious.

I have time.

Time to look for work that’s closer to what I actually wanted to do with my career. And I’ve had the past year to build a network of contacts in Toronto that are better suited to helping me find opportunities. Opportunities to work in writing and media, where I actually want to be.

Opportunities to find the people I need to make the film that I want, and a team who’ll be dedicated to promoting and marketing it. You Were My Friend is a story that speaks to a lot of the problems we face today – it’s a tough story of friendship, strength, betrayal, joy, and resilience.

The simple struggle to get by in a tough city is enough to wrench your heart out. And when I look at the script I wrote and the dry run I did for this film on the stage, I know it can stand up with the greatest of what's been done.

I wanted to make an unforgettable piece of theatre. And I did three years ago. Now, I want to make an unforgettable piece of cinema.

I have calls to make, things to do. I can finally get to it.

Entertaining the Possibility of an Actual Film, Composing, 12/01/2017

It actually will just be a short one tonight. Most of my creative activity today was revisiting the treatment pitch I wrote for a You Were My Friend film. I’m pursuing some leads right now that I hope will lead to some help with the production, so that I can raise enough money in the next year to get it produced.

I mean, I’ll probably end up being a producer myself. I’m already the writer. And I’ll probably be the director. I at first didn’t feel totally comfortable with that, but a talk with my friend Aisha – a professional documentary filmmaker – convinced me that it’s probably for the best.

I know the story best. I know the characters best behind it. I know what I want to say to the actors to make this my way.

And I learned a lot from working so closely with Mel, my director on the theatrical version, about how to guide actors.

One of my favourite stories about cameras comes from Werner Herzog,
telling the story of how he got his first camera. He was working in a
storage warehouse that included a lot of filmmaking equipment. He
saw a perfectly good camera that no one ever rented out, so he stole
it himself. He used that camera on just about every film he made for
nearly 20 years. Including some of his masterpieces.

I figure now that I’ll probably need only a crew of eight people. Myself, a co-producer with more experience in filmmaking logistics, a cinematographer, an editor, a sound recorder, a lighting and grip person, a set designer, and a production assistant to do continuity and take care of all the little crap.

18 actors. Eight bit parts of one or two scenes and a few lines, eight supporting roles who appear in three or four scenes, and the two leads Vicki and Madison. And I want to cast actresses who are actually the same ages as the characters – 19-20 and mid-20s. A few extras for restaurant scenes, and an indoor club scene.

The story has changed quite a lot, of course. Even just from the first draft of this script to the current one. In the original draft of the film, the sequences were very episodic. The episodes weren’t just about different phases in their relationship – in the film’s narrative, they also revolved around flashbacks.

Each sequence was its own story where we saw a part of the story unfold, intercut with scenes depicting the conditions bringing it about. For example, a comic conversation over Madison having bought an expensive coffee maker is interrupted by the full story of how and why she bought it in the first place. It reveals that she knows more than she says.

As I think about it, I realize that I was actually writing that part of the script more like it was a novel. There, you meditate with the amusement, can easily slip in a detail from the past, then let the rest of the scene play out with its more dramatic implications over the funny content.

But that only works because you take more time to read a sequence in a novel than you do to watch events unfold on a screen. In cinema, the tonal shift moves too quickly – it’s too abrupt.

So I made the sequence a straight chronological line. Madison discovers an event that makes her depressed,* and in an act of indifferent whimsy buys this machine. Now the whole conversation between she and Vicki about it is coloured with tragic implications. But you still laugh at the funny dialogue. It’s a twisty tension.

* I don’t spoil my own work. At least not that much.

I’m grateful to my former collaborator on this project Samantha for recommending this change. Going back to the scene as I update my treatment pitch, I better understand the structural reason why, how it’s rooted in the experience of watching cinema itself.

Every experience of writing, every thoughtful criticism from a friend, makes you a better artist. Now all I need is a budget commitment and a crew.

Never Forget That Freedom Is Fragile, Jamming, 24/08/2016

There was one incident at Lunaza that sticks in my mind. There were a lot of wonderful events. Basking in the joy of a new arts and music community’s rebellious and joyful spirit. Talking for an hour or so with my old friend EP at our campsite. 

It is a bit of a strange thing to pop up in the middle of a
field in The Goulds. The local locals didn't much like it.
Photo by the GF.

But there was one incident that expresses not only a perennial problem with being a progressive artist in Newfoundland. It’s also a very local expression of a broader issue that’s dominating contemporary politics in the West. 

Here's a story that’s unique to a very particular place. About an hour or so before their security staff arrived, the field where Lunaza Festival took place was visited by nine teenagers on ATVs and a pickup truck. They knocked over one of the decorative obelisks and almost did the same to their port-a-potties.

Razziki the organizer and I both understood what these creatures were. Skeets. Newfoundlanders know what I mean. Every society has these purposely ignorant, small-minded, perpetually immature, racist, homophobic, bullying dicks. 

But it seems – at least from my perspective – that Newfoundland has a peculiar version of these creatures. The Newfoundland Skeet shares with all its compatriots around the world the same resentment and hostility toward weird and artistic people. Where the Skeet differs, is that he doesn’t seem content to leave them alone.

It doesn’t even seem to matter when an artistic community can make money for the city and the province. No, “Techno music’s all weird and faggoty!” and “What’s all this gay shit propped up on wooden sticks?” These are people who laugh when they break something that belongs to someone else.

Those fuckers on their ATVs don't have nearly the
class that Ricky and Julian have in their little fingers
as they stir the ice in their drinks.

Their attitude is an aggressive hatred of the strange, unusual, and creative, precisely because it’s strange and unusual when their own lives are dulling repetitions. Out on the quad, ride around the dirt roads, eat, sleep, drink, fuck, repeat. Building anything noticeably unique is a demonstration of the futility of their thoughtless lifestyles. 

They hate it, and lash out.

This is a struggle that I think plays out throughout human society in a lot of different contexts. Thinking back on my personal experience over the last few years, I feel as though this attitude has contributed to some of the weirdnesses I’ve noticed in the Toronto startup scene.

I’ve come across a lot of job descriptions that, frankly, seem to chase trends – always just a little too late to really capitalize on them. And when I talk with business leaders, asking them about their ideas, I see bandwagon attitudes fairly often. “Everyone’s really starting to do X, so we’ve got our own spin on it.”

The city’s startup culture has plenty of enthusiasm, but on the whole, seems more intent on following what’s already peaked in Silicon Valley rather than developing fresh ideas and business approaches that grow more organically in Toronto’s and Canada’s cultural contexts.*

* I’m satirizing this attitude with a character in the current film version of You Were My Friend. Madison’s boss at a crashing sharing economy business gives us a lot of laughs with his enthusiasm. Thanks to a timely Patreon donation, that ridiculous man now has the name of my first Patron. I’m glad he has a good sense of humour.

A fear of the strange, of the unusual, of what’s never been seen before.

I’m speaking in very broad strokes when I say this – No, maybe I should say, instead, that I’m focussing on only one aspect to think in very vague, speculative terms, about a disturbing common feature to a lot of events that seem quite different.

Border patrol agents in Arizona, charged with keeping
the foreign out of the country. Did I make a suggestion
there? When does such a suggestion stop being a drunken
speculation and become a philosophical insight?

What does a band of ATV-riding halfwits have to do with the entrepreneurial (self-styled) elite of Canada? They react very differently – one bullies, the other blinds themselves. But there’s a common feature in their aversion to real difference, the genuinely unfamiliar and unusual. 

One group bluntly knocks the weird stuff over. One group just turns away from the weird stuff and pursues familiarity even when the familiar starts to fail.

Consider one application of this idea – aversion to the new and strange as a foundation of many diverse human habits. Over the next few days, I’m going to dig into Etienne Balibar’s thoughts on nationalism and state institutions. 

I’m already seeing aversion to the new and strange as the ground of a lot of the most violent nationalisms of our time. Balibar’s analyses trace how the institutions we live in can encourage those dangerous feelings. 

Call this one a prologue.

Creative Miscellany: Reading Writing Replying Networking, Jamming, 14/07/2016

Just a general update today, since today turned out to be pretty eventful – in both a good and a less good way. Some projects have had some wonderful boosts, new opportunities for smaller works have come up, and one big project got a setback that I think could ultimately be for the best.

• • •

My first “LEAPing Beyond” workshop for the New Democratic Party went quite well, as you could probably tell from the last two posts. This weekend, I’ll be writing an official update on the first workshop to go up on official channels of Toronto’s NDP. 

I like the aesthetic of holding these workshops in parks,
islands in concrete that pretend to be wilderness. It
provokes the kind of juxtaposed thoughts that I want
to encourage with my words as well.

I’ll also make contact with riding associations presidents in the heart of Toronto, to promote the next workshop in early to mid August. I think Christie Pits park will probably be the best location. 

It’s less mainstream than Trinity-Bellwoods, and so offers a little more peace and quiet. I also like that Christie Pits is always within reach of road traffic – I think the urban oasis nature of most smaller city parks reminds us of the delicate relationship that a city must maintain with its green spaces.

• • •

I finished my first read of Sandifer’s Neoreaction: A Basilisk, and secured a slot for a review of the book at the Reply Collective. I’ve already brought Sandifer to the hard drives of the Collective, as he was a significant interview for “Beyond the Academy.”

But this is the first time my American colleague’s work will have been brought for a review. Part of my mandate from the Collective’s Review’s editor – my old friend SD Card – is to keep the social epistemological parts of the book at the forefront.

That won't be hard. As I collect my thoughts and notes for the first pass at the review, quite a lot of what I’m thinking about revolves around ways of knowing. The book is, from the start, a critique of the traditional concept of rationalism from a variety of angles.

You wouldn’t think that was necessary anymore. But if you thought that, it was a sign that you’ve been reading too many progressive epistemology journals, and not enough neo-fascist pro-slavery blogs or anti-feminist Reddit or 4chan forums.

I'm also waiting for the supplementary material (thanks
to a ridiculously successful Kickstarter campaign),
especially Theses on Trump.

Now, I don't blame you for not reading these things. Part of what I find awe-inspiring about Phil and his work is his level of commitment. This man – with his deeply held political, moral, and ethical beliefs – sat down and read the neo-fascist pro-slavery rambling tangents of Mencius Moldbug. 

Tens of thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of words written by the most vile, self-absorbed, and unrestrained avatar of the genuinely neo-fascist pro-slavery software engineer Curtis Yarvin.

Phil has dived into something that most of us who thought that traditional conceptions of reason and rationality had been thrown on the dust-heap have ignored to our peril. This religion of pure reason exploding through right-wing online forums has become the dominant ideology of North America’s newest and most prominent reactionary social movement.

From Gamergate to the shock troops of the Trump campaign, the rank and file of American reaction in the 21st century have made a vision of purely objective rationality their sole epistemic yardstick. We have to grapple with this ideology, and that’s what I see Phil’s book as doing.

More details in a few weeks when the review actually goes up.

• • •

I’m working on another piece for the Reply Collective. This one is a reply to a recent piece by my favourite dialogue partner in the group, Steve Fuller. In this case, I want to write a response to his account of the Brexit phenomenon.

And Boris Johnson still won't go away.

Now, Steve has a few advantages over me on this. For one thing, he actually lives in Britain, and can see the media landscape daily through direct experience. I only see snippets and flashes from North America. So I don’t want to get into too many of the details.

Basically, I plan on responding to Steve’s perspective on the role of elites in political life, and whether the British constitution of parliamentary sovereignty has passed its sell-by date. It will come from the Negri-Foucault trajectory.

In short form, elite management of politics always risks disenfranchising or generally separating people from the institutions that hold incredible power over them. But contemporary communications technology and the political organizing it enables can bring that power to the people. Our era – thanks to our communications abilities – can open the most true and thorough democracy of all.

• • •

Finally, the partner I’d been working with on the development of You Were My Friend and I parted ways professionally yesterday. She’s still a fantastic actress, and I’ll probably still cast her in the same role she played in the theatre version. 

But I think our aesthetic instincts and priorities were a little too different for us to keep on the same page. Each of us had different ideas of what we thought were the most promising aspects of this story. I didn’t communicate my own such ideas clearly enough. And I still don’t quite understand what her own such ideas were.

So now I’m looking for a new director. And it has to be a woman. I need a female director so that the entire production can understand that You Were My Friend is a women’s story – with all that entails.

Sick of the Old Stories, Composing, 28/06/2016

You know what’s been taking up my creative energy lately? My actual creative writing. Work has been busy, and I try to devote as much spare time as I can to getting the You Were My Friend script ready to hit the indie fundraising circuit of Toronto. 

Today, I wanted to talk a little more about some of the motives I had for telling the story that I chose for this film project. From an ethical and political sense, I think it’s important to tell the stories of people who are genuinely struggling in the urban economy of the 2010s. 

An intense mixture of smog, stress, and enthusiasm.

A lot of the hype that comes from the leadership of my current home base city of Toronto is about the wonders of our dynamic business sector. It’s true that the startup / tech sector of Toronto is growing. But there are some severe problems with it. 

Toronto’s tech sector suffers from a similar problem as Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of investment capital chasing a lot of business development plans. And those plans themselves are chasing trends that are already dying out in Silicon Valley itself. 

A lot like the Toronto hipster culture that dominates the aesthetics and fashion of the Toronto startup scene, its business culture isn’t an organic development of Toronto’s own people and potential. It’s an emulation – maybe you could call it a simulacra – of a business culture that organically arose in northern California. 

There's a devotion to the image of libertarian Silicon Valley business culture – just read some of the job ads if you want to be disheartened – without really understanding or embracing the philosophy behind it. Contingent, insecure working lives are celebrated for their freedom without taking seriously their risk and danger.

You Were My Friend is the story of one person who suffers the fallout from that risk, but accepts that the ‘every one for herself’ attitude is ordinary. Even as it causes a horrible result. 

It’s not a story that’s told enough. At least not yet.

The Killing Joke was a story of angst-ridden men battling
each other while a woman is brutally tortured to make
out brooding male hero brood even more. Apparently,
Alan Moore can't stand this book now.

That’s really the motivation behind the kind of stories I’ve been writing in the last few years. When I started my first major writing project, A Small Man’s Town, I thought a novel with an uncritically self-absorbed male protagonist was still worth telling. And it isn’t that the story isn’t valuable, or can be told well. It’s that we already have enough.

I want to take those kinds of characters and just lay them in the background for the next couple of decades. Then we’ll see what stories can come from other characters. Maybe we’ll pick the self-absorbed male up again when our literary and creative conventions have had a good, strong muckabout. They’ll be quite different in such a new world.

It’s why I'm so glad to see so many vibrant stories in the mainstream comics scene, even though I rarely get a chance to read them. But I follow them and their artists, at least looking at their personalities and the ideas they promote while they promote their work.

When the graphic novel version of Ta’Nehisi Coates’ first volume of Black Panther comes out, that’s going on my list. Maybe a Comixology download of G. Willow Wilson’s best stories with Ms Marvel. Miles Morales seems to be the one Spider-Man I’ll never want to punch in the face. And I really want to get my hands on Chris Hastings’ Gwenpool, not just because I’ve loved his Dr McNinja for more than a decade.

I’d like my plucky little indie film about the friendship between a girl struggling to survive and a woman on the verge of losing hope to contribute something to that.

And I’ll sometimes dream of even more ridiculous stories. Especially when I look at comic book culture. If only because the last decade of films about these archetypal characters* have so closely followed the aesthetics and trends of the 1980s.

* And they are archetypes. One of my co-workers was arguing that my weird idea for a Batman story wouldn’t work because Batman has never been quite that way. I like the guy, but I don’t think he’s right. There is no one realistic Batman character to whom all the events of the comics lines happen. He’s been the same age for almost a century, except those stories where he isn’t. Comics archetypes are characters in the public storehouse we can play with – even though we can’t get permission to make money from our play without approval from corporate.

I think what I love most about Chris Hastings' work is his
innocent and enthusiastic embrace of the absolutely
demented, surreal, deranged, and unapologetically happy.

I’ll be blunt. Frank Miller is old hat. Even Alan Moore has come to hate the grimdark effects his own masterpieces from the 1980s have had on culture. That’s why I like the vibrance coming out of these new comics. 

It resurrects the joy of mid-century mainstream camp, but having learned the lessons about complex character development and ethically evocative storylines. I feel like it could only culminate in a gay Batman.

Remember how, in the paranoid days of the Comics Code Authority, ignorant, insular, rich white advocates for moral purity read so much homosexuality into the Batman-Robin relationship. They saw it as a way Batman was disgusting, morally evil, and corrupting.

So take the aesthetics of the flashy and bright Ms Marvel, Gwenpool, and Morales’ Spider-Man, and unite them with a relationship between Batman and Robin that is openly that of an older male taking on a younger trainee as a vigilante crimefighter and as a lover at the same time. And write a story that explores that relationship of deep, abiding love for exactly the joy that it is.

It'd sell, you know.

Laugh Until It Hurts, Composing, 14/06/2016

After some email chats with my creative partner on the You Were My Friend film project, I’m diving into the editing process. Samwise sent me back an enormous list of ideas for tweaks, cuts, and streamlines. I sent back an equally enormous list of ideas for some of the same tweaks, different cuts, and streamlining along parallel and similar directions.

Our communications on this are a kind of disjunctive synthesis. One of us will make a suggestion, the other will react, “That’s absolute madness! I’ll get right on it.” At the end of the day, we’ll have an even better script than the one we started with,* which will probably change radically again once we’ve filmed it and we’re in front of the editing suite.

* Which was already brilliant because I wrote it.

Pretentious note. The way we talk back and forth about structure and character kind of reminds me about how I’ve read Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari used to write together. Samwise, I promise you that’s a compliment.

I'm not going to get too much into the details of how we’re changing the script, because spoilers and privacy. But I do want to talk about how I approach the two main characters. There have been quite a few posts in the past where I talk about the two central characters of You Were My Friend, mostly from the time of its theatrical production.

That chat with Samwise helped me put my finger on a very important difference between the two characters, Vicki and Madison. We see a decent amount of Vicki’s family life in You Were My Friend. 

We see her abusive mother, her mostly-absent father, as well as her circle of friends whose abuse and betrayal kick the story into gear. That's the heart of Vicki's development from the start to the end of the narrative – emerging from an environment that never gave her a chance, determined to push against her circumstances and live the life she wants.

Madison comes from an entirely different background. We don’t see her family background at all. At most, all you’re going to get are a few throwaway comments about how boring her neighbourhood is. She grew up in an unremarkable upper-middle class home in the Greater Toronto Area. Maybe I’ll even change her hometown to Oakville so she can come from Upper Middle Road.

That is a real place. But no. No, that would be too ridiculous.

What the movie needs to show for the characters’ histories are the prime influences on their actions in the story itself. And what matters for Madison’s story is her growing disappointment in herself as her career falls to pieces around her.

But Madison’s story amounts to a comedy of errors. Not always necessarily her own errors. She’s a bit like George Costanza or Elaine Benes in a way. She’s a reasonable enough worker, but is constantly stuck in situations that leave her worse off for all her striving.

She goes to work for businesses that sell themselves as dynamic hothouses of innovation. But all their wild new business models turn out to be completely unsustainable because they’re based either on the most horrific sharing economy labour exploitation or their executives simply never thought through how to monetize their work.

In other words, she works for the type of company that populates virtually the entire Toronto startup scene. It's a source of serious hilarity – an entire business world of blowhards who barely even think ahead enough to figure out how their business will even make money. 

Not every startup in the city works like this, but quite a few of them contribute to the economy by spinning their wheels and spending their investors' money until the final collapse.

And working in this insane environment saps Madison's confidence in herself, in her ability to make a decent living, and her ability to think her networks and friendships have any value left at all. 

That's the chemical reaction at the heart of the story.** A young woman who’s building the confidence and personal strength to succeed against long odds builds a close bond with a young woman who’s having all her confidence and strength stripped away.

** Pretentious note two. I sometimes think of how I smash characters together in terms of chemical reactions. Elective affinities, as Goethe once called them. So bloody pretentious.

It's a comedy because their situations are so ridiculous that you laugh. But it's also deadly serious because the reality of their own life on a knife-edge of financial collapse is constantly present. Laughter with a terrible sense of foreboding.

It's Not Finished – It's Finished, Composing, 27/04/2016

Today was a day with a lot of writing. I finished the script for the promotional video to go on my Patreon page this morning, though I think tomorrow or Thursday morning will be a better time to film it. Most notably, I finished the script of You Were My Friend. 

I feel a combination of relief and excitement. Relief because I’d been falling behind on this project – at least I felt like I was, which in a way is even worse than actually being behind on a project that’s important to you. Excitement because I know that this is just the first phase in a very exciting production process. 

It's interesting to have finished the script for You Were My Friend after having written the script for You Were My Friend two years ago and produced it at the Pearl Company Theatre. It was actually my most successful creative project yet, simply because it actually got produced and we made a little bit of money.

One reason I wanted to do this film project is that I thought that a lot of circumstances conspired against us in the original theatrical run. For the sake of logistics, we were producing the play in Hamilton, when it took place in Toronto, and was very much a Toronto story. But I lived in Hamilton at the time, and my director Mel already know the owner of a theatre there. 

Also, I think there were a lot of ways in which the theatre script couldn’t tell the story as well as film ultimately could. I only fully realized this in the course of writing the script. The theatrical version only had my two lead actresses on the stage and a single set. The story was told only through their words. 

That resulted in some very intense emotional scenes and displays, and some moments that cut to the essence of the ideas I wanted the story to explore about the desperation that underemployment and poverty pressure creates.

But it also resulted in a lot of ambiguity over where the story ultimately ended, and ambiguity over the meaning of some of the film’s events. For a lot of their backstory, we could only tell it through the conflicting, and sometimes self-contradictory accounts that the leads told each other in their long, twisting scenes of conversation.

This is a realistic dramatic play. Most of the sequences consisted of the leads talking to each other. The two of them talking to each other established the drama of the story. It had to. All I had was two actresses, one set, and a director and crew who knew how to make the most of a cheap lighting grid.

While we may not be able to achieve the most ambitious shots I wrote in this script (not sure if we can fly a second unit crew to get establishing shots of the Rocky Mountains for the first 20 seconds of the story’s one scene in Alberta), this is going to be a story with more characters, more locations, and more of the story on the actual screen than the theatre version could ever manage.

I mean, there are still long sequences of Vicki and Madison just talking to each other. But they work differently than in the theatre. In the theatrical version, all I had to suggest the existence of a world outside their apartment was for them to talk about it. 

In the film, the dynamic is very different, simply because we can film stuff outside the apartment. So we’ll see the characters out in the world doing things, sometimes together, sometimes on their own. Then they’ll come back to the apartment and talk about it with each other. 

And the drama in their friendship comes not only from what they themselves do together and in their own lives. It’s also a matter of contrasting what we see happening to them with what they tell each other happened. Depending on how well which order works for a given event, the script shows the event, then the conversation about it, or intercuts them both.

Now, the drama comes not only from what happens to them, or only from what they say happens to them. It comes from how much of the truth the audience can see them hiding from each other.

Will Neil Patrick Harris Dance for Me? Composing, 01/04/2016

I’ve been working on the You Were My Friend film script again for the past week or so. It’s taken me about three months to get to this current almost-done point because I’ve had to work on it in fits and starts. 

This is the peril of having a ton of work and activism commitments that barely make me any money in the first place. 

And we're changing the poster too.

But I’ve started adapting the last sequence, what I call the stab to the heart sequence. This is basically the fallout of a single, desperate, stupid act of betrayal that leaves the main character in an even bigger poverty trap than she was already. It’s a very simple scene – a search through an apartment and a series of frantic phone calls for help.

But the sequence unfolds very differently from theatre to film. I mean, it has to. It’s a question of literal physical material. The original version of You Were My Friend consisted of two people acting out lines live on a messy set in front of an audience of people sitting a few feet away from them. 

This new version will be a series of images projected on a theatre wall or playing through a television or computer screen with a soundtrack. 

It sounds silly to write out the actual physical form of the different media, theatre and cinema. But it actually helps foreground the challenges of adapting a story from one medium to another.

Some of the most frustrating conversations I’ve had with people about writing have talked about adaptation. How it must be so easy to adapt, say, a book into a movie. All the story is already there, you might say. You just cut bits and turn it into a script.

It’s even easier with a play! you might say before I slap you in the mouth. It’s even already a script. 

Yes, the narrative stays the same. In some cases, I’ll admit it: I literally copied and pasted lines of dialogue from the theatre script to the cinema script. There’s an entire Groucho-Chico conversation between the two leads Vicki and Madison that unfolds in exactly the same way.

But the differences between the media change a lot about the presentation. Here's an example that shows how radical the changes really are, from a composition perspective. 

Adaptation is a lot harder than people think.

The Room.

No, not that one. I mean the apartment my Vicki and Madison share. On the stage, it’s literally the only set. There’s a sequence late in the play where they go clubbing together – I depict the change by a disorienting sudden change in lighting from a bright apartment to a dance floor and they just start dancing to trance music. The transition back to the apartment the next morning is done by bringing the stage lights up extra-bright to show how hung over they are. 

It’s all one smoothly flowing sequence. The cinema version is going to be more disjointed. In fact, it’s getting purposely, extremely disjointed.

For one thing, being a realist film, I have to have the actors in an actual club. But I’ve also been playing with the order of events a lot more in the film version. It’s not going to be disorienting – there are enough visual and narrative cues in the script to show how the different events connect to each other. 

All the sequences in the theatre version unfolded chronologically – the drama and suspense comes from how their conversations about their past unfold. Peeling back one layer of truth and history at a time until you reach the raw nerve underneath all the smiles and laughter.

I'm talking Samantha into lifting ideas from Martin
Scorsese movies. Either we do it and it still looks
awesome, or we think of something even better. But
you have to start from lifting someone else's really
awesome idea.

In the film version, each sequence is about discovering hidden facts that change a situation radically – sometimes both characters know. Sometimes only one of them. The drama comes from the different effects their different knowledge of each other has on their friendship and their situations. 

So the clubbing sequence in the film version – narratively speaking – plays out just as it does in the play. Vicki’s unfolding monologue about the frustration and hopelessness of her underemployment, punctuated with comic interruptions from Madison.

But in the film version, it’ll play out in an entirely different order. Some lines of the monologue in a club bathroom, some in the apartment as they take MDMA, some of Vicki talking to herself as she staggers peaking through the crowd, and a few shots of her dry heaving alone in an alley. 

Sometimes you rock the party, and sometimes the party rocks you.

The heart of the scene now shifts seriously from the theatrical version because one line doesn’t follow another in straightforward order. Whole different parts of her speech are now next to each other. It emphasizes different themes and ideas, shows you Vicki’s state of mind in a much more visceral way. 

And it breaks the last stability for the audience by shattering the stability of all this happening on the same set. It’s a whole different set of narrative ideas to think about. 

An adaptation is more than just cutting and pasting into a different script format. It’s retelling the story entirely differently, with totally different tools and affordances. Frankly, I’m a little impressed with myself.

My First Theatre Production Was Probably My Last, Composing, 21/03/2016

Just under a month ago, I read a review of a piece of theatre that I’d quite like to see. It’s in London, so I really hope they record it and make a version available online eventually. It’s called Cleansed by Sarah Kane, and directed by Katie Mitchell.

It is an apparently very disturbing piece of art – deeply symbolic and filled with visceral violence and torture. Actors masturbate on stage. There are graphic murders and horrifying violence throughout the story. Anal violations, mechanical tortures, brutal stabbings. Nudity is a constant, and this nudity is disturbing and unsettling – as far from erotic as you can get. 

A scene from Cleansed, some seriously weird shit.

Yet compared to what I’ve learned of the most remarkable theatre of the last century, Cleansed actually fits in quite well with its history of provocation and the tradition’s recent desires to push the boundaries of art forward. Despite this, there seems to be a limit to the artistic innovation theatre can achieve. 

You can see this in the descriptions of the audience at the Cleansed preview. Its political content is challenging, but its on-stage violence amounts to nothing more unusual than a live theatre Hostel. It’s violent, but no more bloody than a typical horror or action film of the 21st century.

But audience members were hissing and walking out in disgust. The audience was composed entirely of refined, upper-crust, and frankly ignorant theatre buffs. The folks who, as far as the VICE reporter could tell, still tittered nervously at the double entendres of a farce like The Importance of Being Earnest. 

It seems to be the same conundrum that I hit two years ago when I produced my first play, You Were My Friend. I still thought about the theatre as a place for challenging, powerful art. That’s why I wrote an uncompromising story about two women struggling against the financial erosion of under- and unemployment in modern Toronto.

My whole crew and I thought the story was wonderful, and that (it’s my blog, so I’ll blow my own horn) the script itself was pretty damn good. What audiences were got were appreciative, and many people approached me after performances to say how affected and touched they were. It hit people in the souls and the guts. 

When I first thought of the story of You Were My Friend, I wanted to make a visceral, powerful theatre experience that depicted the struggles of so many people in this rough economy, and showed how low we could fall – financially and ethically – if we didn’t support each other.

English theatre director Sarah Kane

And we succeeded. Me, the director, the designer, our technician, and our two actors, we all succeeded. But the audiences were all at Theatre Aquarius down the road watching the feel-good Canadian patriotism play Billy Bishop Goes to War. 

Of course, a serious factor in Billy Bishop’s success was the terrible and tragic timing of our theatrical run. Barley two weeks before we opened in Hamilton were the Parliament Hill shootings, whose only fatality (other than the shooter himself) was Nathan Cirillo, a Hamilton-born soldier who was only in his mid-20s. 

The entire city went into a period of collective mourning. A city in that mood wouldn’t be drawn to a story like You Were My Friend, but would sit in the collective cushion of happy patriotism. But thinking about the reaction to Cleansed helped me understand that there was more to it.

The art of playwrights like Antonin Artaud, Henrik Ibsen, Dario Fo, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Pinter could shock a popular audience because they had a popular audience. But theatre today is priced largely beyond the reach of ordinary people.

Most young people in my generation and with my cultural tastes – fairly intelligent hipsters raised on Quentin Tarantino, basically – love to watch these kinds of emotionally powerful and sometimes viscerally violent stories. We’re the generation who loves series on Netflix like Jessica Jones, television shows like Breaking Bad, and I hope movies like the film version of You Were My Friend. 

I’m finishing the script over the next couple of weeks, and then we’re searching for enough funding to get this thing produced. My lead actress Samantha from the theatre version is keeping her role and will direct as well.

Because people like Samantha and me (and our collaborators on the play version, Mel, Jeannette, and Hannah) are drawn to stories like this. They’re the kind of stories people love from artists like Greta Gerwig and Lena Dunham. But you put them on the theatre and they go nowhere. 

Theatre audiences largely aren’t young people anymore. The tickets are just inaccessible to them, especially in the most prestigious venues. So the biggest theatres in my current home city of Toronto – despite having a major large theatre district – play mainstream musicals and mainstream adaptations like Spamalot. Anything more experimental – even the classics – ends up on the margins.

So I’m probably not going to produce theatre again, unless it’s a trial run or some related part of a project that will be recorded and distributed more cheaply than live performance. There just aren’t the same possible returns. And I want to aim big.

The First Step of Justice Is Reaching Out, A History Boy, 21/12/2015

I thought I'd write a short follow-up of this weekend’s post about how abstract, theoretical thinking can blind you to real suffering. Because it isn't just complex theories of literature that make you think others’ suffering either doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

I’ve started working on a script for a film version of You Were My Friend, the play I wrote and helped produce in Hamilton last Fall. The story applies to this problem of indifference, in a lot of ways. It’ll take a few tangents through my memory to explain fully.

All the terror of our current century has followed from
the effects of this day. We should never take its
power for granted, or think of it as ordinary.

Don't worry – I won't spoil the story.

Let's start with yesterday's main topic. Lisa Ruddick ends her article about the moral coldness of modern literary theory with an appeal to heart, which is a little vague when you think about it. Aside from getting back into a more generally sympathetic frame of mind, how would you analyze or understand an artwork this way?

It reminds me of a conversation I had with my old friend D shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about irony in art. So much of the most popular art in the 1990s had a thick veneer of irony and misanthropy, which were sources of humour. 

We sat and wondered what would happen to art, whether irony would be dumped, inadequate to the trauma that had just been inflicted on our culture. We imagined a new era of art whose primary tone was a heart-rending sincerity.

Because 18-year-old students can be really pretentious sometimes. 

But I sometimes think we were onto something. At least in terms of tendency. Intelligent art isn’t always drenched in disdain or contempt. Being a dedicated Seinfeld fan was appropriate to my self-absorbed teens, and it's not like that show stopped being funny. 

Throughout my 20s, I've been more drawn to works of art that explore real struggles, and either find humour in them or depict them in all their gut-wrenching intensity. The most remarkable TV comedies of the early 2010s, Community and Parks and Recreation, mined cartoonishly absurd humour from narratives of love, friendship, and dedication. 

Community was probably the perfect example of how
to combine thickly referenced media literacy, hip
sensibility, healthy irony, and genuine ethical
sympathy with its characters.

These are examples that impacted me the most anyway. Being able to take part in the online communities that grew around these and other shows also contribute to a powerful sense of belonging. These were our communities.

Able to reach out and form fandom communities with people all over the world. Where more and more of the best cultural entertainment properties combined humour, satire, and love. These intensely social environments and sympathetic ideas have shaped how I engage with art. 

So I’m trying to bring that same attitude to You Were My Friend. The warmth of watching a friendship come together, but in a world constantly haunted by the worst economic and family traumas that Mike Leigh or Lars Von Trier could come up with.

I’ve told Samantha before that her big moment in the storyline is when I go “the full Von Trier" on her. One of the most powerful moments in cinema that I think I've ever experienced is the end of Dancer in the Dark. I saw it in a theatre, and it left me frozen in my seat for at least 10 minutes. 

The ambition of You Were My Friend is to combine that kind of emotional power with moments of ridiculous levity and warmth in one movie. It tries to depict how real friendship can develop and fall apart in the pressures of the real economy and urban life.

So if I can venture an answer to Ruddick’s question. What would a literary theory with heart be? It would move away from finding significations that conform to a theory that sees liberation in the total explosion of personality and history. That’s what it's not.

It would understand an artwork in terms of its affects and its mission. What an artwork makes an audience feel, and what they learn from it. In my own case, they feel the real pain of people cast adrift in an economy and a business world more obsessed with empty buzzwords and quick cash than real struggles. They feel the real joy of the friendships that are our life rafts in these harsh times. 

And they understand the world where all this happens. It’s ours.

Looking Up In Arts and Politics, Composing, 04/12/2015

Today, I want to leave philosophy and the more intense creative conceptual play aside. Today is just going to be a diary entry. Because things are finally starting to pick up in my career, and I want to share that with my readers.

Samantha would be on top.

I hope I don’t jinx it. 

Artistic news first. I’ve had a really good film development meeting to put together a passion project that I’ve been nursing for a year. When You Were My Friend the play was a box office bomb, I was pretty depressed.

It was a story that meant a lot to me, about social issues close to my heart – the stress and anxiety of life scraping by through underemployment, the hypocritical double standards that women face in our society. 

These issues have only become more important to me since I’ve moved to Toronto and experienced that economic wringer first-hand, with incredible intensity. And we only really got a reasonable house on our first and last nights of a nine-performance run.

I mean, I understand why. We were an independent production, a fresh script, and no big names. All the major principals were in different stages of the beginnings of their arts careers. It was a story whose particulars were very rooted in Toronto, but played in Hamilton. 

More than all that, the timing was just terrible. We were playing opposite a high-budget run of the patriotic classic Billy Bishop Goes to War at Theatre Aquarius, just down the street. Just two weeks before we both debuted, Nathan Cirillo died in the 2014 Parliament Hill shooting. 

His regiment was based on James Street North in Hamilton. His city-long funeral procession passed by my apartment building. The city convulsed in collective mourning. Love of Canada engulfed the city. My little story about two women sharing a shitty apartment never stood a chance.

So I finally met with Samantha, my lead actress, and we’re going to make a film version. Once I get something like a regular work schedule together, I’ll be able to sit down and knock out the treatments and the scripts that we need to get this financed. If everything comes together like Voltron, we’ll have this thing in the can by the end of next year.

Politics news next. I’m now Vice-President of the New Democrats’ Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding association. Technically, I’m two Vice-Presidents, for the federal and provincial party. This means I go to association meetings, come up with policy proposals, and network with local social movement activists around Toronto.

T-Knuckles, the volunteer coordinator for the Phil Trotter campaign this year, is the association President. He’s also my boss, as I’m taking on some duties with his business writing company at the start of next year. So we get to trade insults in two different professional contexts. 

Professional news. I’ve started some part-time consulting work on retainer, and part of my duties involves promoting a business called Hekaia. You’ll hear more from this on my social media in the next week or so. 

This is a business in Turkey, a factory that produces hand-made clothing and children’s toys. The factory is staffed entirely by Syrian refugee women, and it’s one of the few places in Turkey where otherwise marginalized refugees from the Third World War can earn a dignified living.

Learn more at the website at the link, and I’ll be talking a little more over the next while about the promotional event we’ve planned for next weekend.

And that’s all. Just a diary tonight. Sometime Sunday, my review of the Doctor Who season finale should be up.