Seeing isn’t always Believing

Everyone is telling me to see the James Cameron film Avatar. Everyone. Go see it right now, they say..and make sure you see it in Imax 3D. I had dinner with friends last night and both of them leaned across the restaurant table and urged me to attend. I was at a birthday party last weekend and guests I’d never met made exactly the same pitch. Both my sons have told me to get with the program. It’s a lot of pressure.

I will get there eventually..although I must confess to being a pretty stubborn bastard sometimes. Often, the more people tell me to do something, the greater the resistance I feel toward doing it. Don’t exactly know what that means.

Though I have not yet seen the film, I have read a lot about Avatar. It takes you to another world, which is what a good movie should do. But….and here’s the whole point to this post….I watched Lawrence of Arabia again the other day and it took me to another world too. And it did it without a single frame of computer-generated imagery.

I don’t trust my eyes in movies any more. None of us should. If you watch a scene with any more than about eight people you can’t be really sure that all of those entities are true-blue, fleshy human life forms. So what, right? Who cares as long as the overall visual effect is pleasing..or stunning..or awe-inspiring. Well, folks, I don’t like to have my awe inspired by anything other than the real thing. I like my awe to be earned. Now, in a science fiction film you have to take a flight of fancy. If it’s another world..truly, another world you are trying to create…then use all the computer generated imaging you want. But if it’s this world..the one I’m walking around in every day…well, I still have a soft spot in my heart for genuine depiction. And that means using real people..hundreds of ‘em..hell, thousands of ‘em, if need be!

That`s why a film like Lawrence of Arabia is still such an eye–opener. Those are all real people, all real horses…every camel was a real smelly, noisy, cantankerous camel. When you combine the logistics of all that with the extraordinary scenery (again, all of it real..though Aqaba was recreated) and a musical score that cements itself in the back of your mind (for decades), you have a movie experience that really can`t be duplicated. Oh, they could try. They could try to remake Lawrence. I suppose a younger Jude Law could have substituted for Peter O`Toole. But all of the background would be fake. Those extraordinary sand dunes, the vistas, the incinerating sun..would be courtesy of  the good folks at Industrial Light and Magic. Who`s going to bother with a herd of real camels when you can animate the screen with Disneyesque dromedaries?

The truth is that I appreciate Lawrence of Arabia even more now because I know that David Lean spent close to a year and a half in the desert with sand in his coffee mug trying to make it. It won the Oscar as best picture just as Avatar may do. These are different times and these are different movies. I wasn`t really trying to compare apples to oranges here except to say that, well, they sure don`t make apples like that anymore.

The 100 Posts

One of the more interesting things about writing a blog like this is that you get a fairly detailed statistical breakdown of what people read. I am closing in on the 100th post since I started Manic Tapas last September. I think that’s a healthy number given the fact that I can often be the human equivalent of a three-toed sloth. A few of you may have read every single one of those 100 posts. God bless your little pea-pickin’ hearts! I wish I could give you a cookie or something. Even my wife isn’t that loyal.

Do you know which of those 100 topics has been read most frequently? Of course you don’t, but I do. Of all the scintillating titles I’ve put up here it’s Nylon, Pantyhose and Horses that has had the most views. Nylon, Pantyhose and Horses is my account of an 85 mile cattle-drive that took me from Ashcroft to Kamloops, British Columbia way back in 1992. It remains the single most painful and rewarding documentary experience in my close to 35 years of producing television.

Why is this my most popular read? Part of the hook, of course, is in the title. People who are looking for information on the subjects of nylon, pantyhose and horses all got here from different routes. They probably Googled each of those terms and it led them here. Some simply stayed and read what I wrote. Others must have been terribly disappointed. There really isn’t much info on horses. There’s even less on the development of nylon.  And if you got here by exploring the topic of pantyhose…well, let’s just say, you could have had any number of motives.

What is clear is that there is a tremendous interest in the wild west lifestyle. I know that because WordPress also tells me which other search engine terms have landed people on this blog. A very high number of those searches involved cowboys and cowgirls, boots , mules , John Wayne…you name it.

So, apparently, if you want to start writing and have people pay attention to what you write you can do a lot worse than focusing on the subject of saddles. Just remember to throw some pantyhose in there, once in a while,  for good measure.

                                 Got your attention….didn’t it?

We’re Number 1!!!

I rolled over in bed this morning, groped for the radio and was treated to the voice of the B.C. Premier once again rah-rahing about the Olympics. He gets a weekly Saturday rant on the province’s biggest radio station and this is about the 32nd straight address in which he’s been jostling his pom-poms about the Games. It’s a helluva way to wake up!

Also this week, one of those lovely, weighty lifestyle supplements slopped out of the morning paper and the headline, which we’ve all seen a thousand times, was trumpeting Vancouver as ‘ The World’s Most Livable City ‘.

This constant self-congratulatory mantra combined with years worth of Winter Olympic hype is leaving a lot of us feeling like Dr. Peter Venkman in the movie Ghostbusters. It’s icky. It’s sticky. I often feel like I’ve just been slimed.

Pride in one’s one’s home turf is good, please don’t misunderstand. But Vancouver is so quick to pat itself on the back every time some poll puts it at or near the top of any half-assed list that the lustre of the moment is lost. The title of ‘World Class City ‘ must, by now, be on the municipal crest. I hear it constantly. It is inescapable. Do world class cities have to run around always declaring themselves as world class cities? Where’s the class in that? The whole thing always strikes me as more than a little desperate.

We’re like that needy kid at the end of the diving board screaming at his parents, ‘Look at me, look at me!’

Remember the old tv tabloid show A Current Affair? Back in the mid-1990’s A Current Affair, for some inexplicable reason, included Vancouver in a series it was running on America’s Sinning-est Cities. They talked about the city’s drug culture, the crime rate and the liberal prostitution laws. And, boy, did Canadians respond! They flooded the show with complaints..to the point that A Current Affair was forced to come back to Vancouver and back pedal big time. Canadians don’t mind being singled out for the good stuff, but don’t lump us in with all that nasty, gritty urban angst from south of the border.

But getting back to the ‘Livable’ supplement.

The pictures chosen to accompany the article on our wonderfulness were telling. One of them shows a small flotilla of boats anchored in False Creek (lovely shot..I’m a sucker for anything with boats) This is the same spot that the city has been relentlessly trying to clear of so-called aquatic ’squatters’ for years. Must be an old photo.

There’s also the iconic view of the Lions Gate Bridge..looking towards the North Shore mountains. There are 14 cars on the bridge, I counted them. There are never only 14 cars on the Lions Gate Bridge! It must have taken two guys in orange vests and a thousand traffic cones at either end to achieve this effect.

   A third photo is staring up at a sky full of West End condominiums. It’s a gulag of over-priced, green-glassed similarity.

The library

With very few exceptions (the downtown Library being one) the residential architecture in Vancouver’s urban core is breathtakingly boring.

But it ain’t cheap. It’s the World’s Most Livable City if only you could afford to live here. And don’t give me that argument that it’s a lot more reasonable than Rome or London or New York. My kids don’t live in Rome or London or New York. They’re going to have to make a go of it here.

A final photo shows a snow covered inukshuk…a symbol of the Olympic Winter Games. The inukshuk , or , more correctly spelled inuksuk, has nothing whatsoever to do with Vancouver or even British Columbia. The inuksuk is an important representation for the Inuit people of the Arctic. There was a lot of debate over the conscription of it for the commercial purposes of the Games. Personally, I was pulling for the image of the white Kermode bear from the central coast of British Columbia.

I wish Vancouver would simply take a few deep breaths and settle into the comfort of its own skin. It is a terrific place, especially when the sun shines. Trust me, all the folks who are about visit will discover this for themselves. You don’t have to beat them over the head with it. Those of us who live here are going to need liniment if we keep up this shameless barrage of back slapping.

Speak no Evil

It’s always a little funny when people get all bent out of shape over the obvious. Take the President of the United States.

This week, during a public address, he apparently offended the mother lode of Las Vegas for the second time in the space of a year. He told the citizenry of New Hampshire that if they were trying to save a few bucks for college tuition it might not be the best time to blow the money in Las Vegas. Seems a little self-evident, no?

Las Vegans are beyond miffed. They are completely over the Rainbow of Verklempt. It’s enough to make Tony Spilotro jump up out of the cornfield. The mayor of that fair city in the sun says Barack Obama is no friend to Las Vegas and must have some kind of “vendetta” against the place. In some ways I can see his point. Why use Las Vegas as a metaphor for bacchanalian spending? Why not reference Reno? Why not summon the spectre of Atlantic City?

Vegas, of course, gets targeted by the speechwriters because it simply is the metaphor for unbridled greed. It always has been. When times are flush that age-old branding works like a hot-damn. People equate Las Vegas with good times and part of a good time is the lure of easy money. When times are bad, however..and Las Vegas has been pretty much crushed in this recession…you don’t, apparently, want the President using your municipal moniker in a lesson on common sense economics.

The problem is that you can’t have it both ways.

I like Las Vegas. I’m not down there every month but when I do go I cover myself with a thin veil of frugality. You’d never catch me blowing thousands at a craps table..even if I had the money. The fact that I don’t bet big means I will never win big. I’m okay with that. I like to treat myself to a meal in a signature restaurant and Angie likes to see Cher. That way we both come home happy. That way, at least, we both come home together.

But that’s not the case for many people who lose control amid the heady mix of cigarette smoke and fountain spray. They will blow the college fund…and the milk money too…if someone doesn’t give ‘em a well-meaning slap upside the face. I can’t think of a place that benefits more from the loss of basic human control than Las Vegas. There’s no investment counsellors handing out business cards in those casinos.

Las Vegas’ cliched credo is that what happens there stays there. Except debt. Debt will follow your sorry ass to the ends of the earth. The President has been forced to back-pedal a bit. He loves Las Vegas. Of course, he does!  In the end he was simply putting two and two together for the people who tend to leave their abacus at home.

Baseballs and bathrobes

There is a brand new dynamic underway in my home. Since the glorious day when we made the decision to personally re-populate the planet (oh, 26 years ago) my lovely wife has been a homemaker. This is what she puts down on things like the Mexican tourist card when we fly south….occupation: homemaker. I suppose a construction worker could write the same thing..although, as we all know, a house is not necessarily a home.

For the next month, The Homemaker, is working as a volunteer at the Winter Olympics. She gets up every morning, puts on the official Olympic volunteer uniform (very turquoise, very spiffy), festoons herself with official identification and leaves for the day. I make her coffee and toast in the morning and there is dinner waiting for her when she returns every night. I do this without complaint because I love her and she deserves this.

But you can see what has happened here. The television work I am doing right now has me anchored at home quite a bit. So I’m home and she’s out and about. Our roles have essentially been reversed. This does not really bother me on a purely domestic level because I have always enjoyed residential puttering. I have always cooked. I will clean..although yesterday while vacuuming under the bed I encountered a dust bunny the size of a fog bank.

When the kids call home to access the information that only their uber-organized, well-informed mother can provide, they now get the old man. And the old man, as a source of problem-solving, daily living  research, is proving to be pretty much useless. The old man cannot summon up laundry tips. The old man knows nothing about banking. If you have a question about the movie Lawrence of Arabia the old man is the go-to guy because, chances are, he just spent four hours watching it on the couch that very afternoon.

Years ago I played one of the lead roles in a Vancouver stage production of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue. For thirty performances or so I got to play the role of  a middle-aged New Yorker named Mel Edison who suddenly finds himself out of work while his wife goes out to get a job. Mel spends a lot of time walking around in his bathrobe, throwing a baseball into a glove, while his mind slowly unravels. (You may have seen the 1975 film version of this with Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft.) I enjoyed being back on the stage again but the production, though rewarding, was ultimately exhausting.

I basically had to act out a mental breakdown every night.

And now..for at least some parts of the day..I am that guy walking around in the bathrobe smacking a ball into a glove. I am Mel.

True, we don’t live in New York and I still have work…but the parallels are frequently frightening.

Angie comes home bright-eyed and breathless with complex tales of Olympic logistics and a city absolutely buzzing with celebratory anticipation. And then, just like the Anne Bancroft character in the play, she asks me about my day.  And I say something like, ” Did you know we’re all out of margarine? “