A-WEDDING WE SHALL GO

This is the second version of this post. The first one was a two parter. The first part was a political rant aimed at David Miller, the mayor of my city, and his apparent lack of knowledge around something as trivial as the national gun laws in this country and his insistence that closing legal gun ranges would stop the gun violence here ... But I find political rants boring and mine was no exception.

So I am going to the second part of the original post. This weekend Collette, Miss Hayley and myself are heading up north for a wedding. When we say "up north" we mean the Parry Sound area where Collette's family lives. The wedding is for her nephew Tim and his fiancee Kate. Besides being the aunt and uncle Collette and I will be serving as the A/V tag team; I'm taking the pro video cam and she is bringing her new boyfriend, often referred to as the Nikon D-80. So, there will be a fabulous wedding DVD and some exquisite wedding still pictures ... and we will get to celebrate the marriage of these two and get to hang out with Collette's family.

The wedding is on Sunday but we are sneaking up tomorrow (Friday). Collette is finished teaching for the year and since she is now not teaching summer school (don't ask, it entails a different kind of political rant) we decided to go up early. The wedding is in Parry Sound itself, the town where Collette's dad lives, the place we normally stay. But tomorrow we are heading straight up past Parry Sound to Pointe au Baril and Springhaven Lodge, the business owned and operated by Collette's family. We plan on staying overnight then going to Parry Sound on Saturday.

It has been a while since we've been to lodge, pretty much since Collette's parents moved "into town" (Parry Sound). We love the lodge. Miss Hayley loves the lodge. Springhaven is located on Nares Inlet which, in turn, opens up onto the Georgian Bay, a body of water attached to Lake Huron but in itself, almost as big as Lake Ontario. We are talking around 15,000 square kilometers here. Deep deep, water, wind shaped pine trees, ancient moss coated rocks .... this is a party in Vic and Collette's world.

The lodge features a gentle sand beach leading into some of the cleanest water you will find anywhere; I don't suspect that Miss Hayley will be dry for any long period of time. And I strongly suspect that the next blog I post will have some gorgeous photos compliments of Collette and her new auto focusing boyfriend. And sure, probably some video as well.

So it's a win win kind of weekend; a wedding for people for whom we have a great deal of affection, a gathering of the family, and a day or two at one of our favorite places on the planet. There will be still pics, there will be video and ..oh yeah .. there's gonna be beer. And everything goes better with beer.

GEORGE CARLIN

Sometimes you are alone in the dark. Even in a big, crazy noisy family like the one I grew up in, you have moments when you are alone. When I was young, I did not mind those moments. I did not seek them, but I could deal with them when they came. Being alone was a time of silence, a time to breathe, a time to break out of the energy of my family and just sit there, not the third son, not the fourth child, just Vic, wondering who he was.

In those moments, in the days our television was still black and white, I would often find something in those images that spoke to me, something that I could connect with; something that was outside of my family and therefore afforded a kind of credibility, no matter how transient that may have been.

That is how I found George Carlin. Sure, like most pop culture, I was introduced to him by my older siblings. Probably I first saw him on Ed Sullivan, later on the Tonight Show. But once introduced, every chance I got, every time he appeared on the screen, I would sit with him; alone, just George and I and that incredible dialogue he could have with his audience.

There were a lot of comedians that I admired then and shows like Sullivan and Carson showcased them regularly. There was Jack Benny and Bob Hope and Red Buttons and Richard Pryor and Rich Little ... but none of them spoke to me like Carlin did. First, Carlin was a hippy. I was a kid who started to grow his hair somewhere around six; and aside from musicians, there were not a lot of counter culture influences on TV and even the bands were difficult to see. No Much Music or MTV then; you had American Bandstand that presented the most sanitized bands in the most sanitized delivery possible.

The comics were equally sanitized. Alan King, Benny, even Pryor, wore suits and ties. I never related to suits and ties. I grew up without a father and my brothers were hippies. So suits meant nothing to me, nor did slicked back hair and gold watches. Then there was Carlin; with his hair and his scruffy beard and his blue jeans. He was loose, casual, he used the vernacular of the street, he was the Hippy Dippy Weatherman, for fuck's sake.

I don't recall Carlin doing drug humour on Ed Sullivan but you always knew it was there, it was implied. It's not a pro drugs thing; this was the sixties/seventies and pot, in particular, was just part of the lexicon. And George knew it well. So he spoke to me, in a way few others did.

When I was a kid I did not understand the significance of the Seven Words. I knew what they were, but I just accepted the fact that you could not speak them on TV. My mother swore like a trucker, I have never been offended by strong language, it was just the state of things: You don't swear on TV. I never questioned why that was. But George did. He questioned it until the day he died. The second last time Collette and I saw him perform live, Carlin still worked the Seven Words, but it had changed. Instead of seven words, George produced a thick sheaf of paper, each page covered with "dirty" words. People sent them to him, over the years and he kept building the list. There were hundreds and, as he always did, George read them. This was the eighties in a paid concert event and no one was going to bust him; Yuks Yuks was down the street and you could hear those words every night. So George read, word after dirty word, all organized into categories for body function, for sexual euphemism, for religion .. he read the dirty words like they were poetry. And as he read them, for a good fifteen minutes, with no authority to rail and gnash and throw metal around his wrists we were able to turn to each other and say "Well, that's just plain silly" And so it was.

I won't say that it was solely George who got me into stand up comedy but certainly his mix of pre written "skits" like the Hippy Dippy weatherman and his casual observations always appealed to me. Carlin could write. He could be goofy and silly or he could be angry and insightful. I certainly never approached the latter in my brief amateur stand up career, but it was always there in the back of my mind. He showed me that good writing can make good comedy and no topic is taboo.

Carlin was more than writing. He really was a consummate performer. During one of his shows people would shout out bits like they were song requests (out of the crowd would come "loin cloth!" referring to the Indian drill Sergeant bit) and George would meet them as best he could. His onstage sense of timing, of space, his ability to fill up a huge stage by himself (and he was a little guy) was something I remember as much as the writing.

Collette and I love George. We have more of his comedy on disc than any other. I will miss him. I will miss the opportunity to see him again. But when I alone, or with the one I love, and we are in the dark, we can turn on the screen and there he will be, and he will talk to us.

And we will laugh.

THE NAUTICAL FESTIVAL & COLLETTE SCORES BIG TIME

Another weekend in Toronto, and another outdoor event. A free outdoor event. Free .. say it with me. Mmmmm ... free. Totally had a Homer Jay Simpson moment there.

This weekend the event was the Toronto Nautical Festival. A rather grandiose title for what was a few tall ships anchored around the inner harbuor and some Maritime music, but I can't complain. The Blue Nose came. The only time I've gotten close to seeing this schooner was in its home port of Lunenburg Nova Scotia and it was fall, offseason and I may have seen it but there was tequila involved and I really don't remember. Not remembering is pretty much the point of tequilla.

So Collette and I decided to take advantage of the event and we went down Saturday. I took my little Samsung palmcorder (there is a video below) but Collette had left her little Nikon Coolpix at school. Bummer. More on that later.

The day began cool and cloudy with a little bit of rain. For a semi-Maratime event I found the weather .. authentic. Not a bad thing because it kept the crowds at bay. The only problem with outdoor free festivals in Toronto is that everyone else likes them as well .. and I mean everyone. I've stopped going to certain annual events because the crowds have developed into some Moloch-like all consuming beast .. and I have a bit of claustiphobia .. and really, I just don't like people. Well, not so many people .. all at once.

So we wandered around Harbourfront in the clouds and the rain and got to board three of the larger ships. There was free music but we decided not to hang out that long. Which means we've missed an opportunity to see the Bara McNeals for free a couple of weeks in a row. Damn.

Still, we enjoyed ourselves, I love wandering around these old ships; I'd seen the Niagra before but not the Pride of Baltimore and had never been on the deck of the Blue Nose. So it was good.

Here is a little video compilation of the day, music by Nova Scotia's Natalie McMaster.






The Nautical Festival from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

Now to the second part of the story. After we were done with the tall ships, the sun came out (sun ... big firey hot thing in the sky .. rare in these parts .. heard about it .. seems pretty nice... want more) and we decided to wander up Younge Street and do a little browsing. We ended up in Henry's Outlet store. Henry's is an Ontario photo/video store and over the years Collette and I have invested so much money in it that we should be on the board of directors.

Collette is the still photograhper in our little family unit. And she is good. You can see some of her work in this post. These photos were taken with her venerable Richoh 35 mm camera that used something called film .. young people Google awaits your inquiries.

Collette made the move to digital many years back with the purchase of the Nikon Coolpix. She loves the digital realm, the ease of it and the ability to bring it into Photoshop and play around but this cam is a consumer point and shoot and she has always felt its limitations.

So here we are at Henry's and when I turn around Collette has locked in the gaze of her one true love: The Nikon D-80. This a full sized digital SLR, 10 megapixels, interchangleble lenses, the whole nine yards. I saw that look in Collette's eyes and wondered why she needed me, here was her love .. oh yeh, the Nikon can't cook.

Collette has agreed to teach summer school this July, eating up a good chunk of her summer and it has been a long hard school year for her. Why not make that into something pleasant? So there is the D-80, a 4 Gig flash drive and a 18 to 200 mm zoom lens. Ah, the look on that woman's face .. I would have been jealous had I not been so happy.

So Collette scores and in the future, so will this blog, because you won't just have to suffer through my little videos, you will have something truly beautiful to look at.

AUDIE MURPHY HOLSTERS HIS GUNS FOR ME

I am writing this post alone but I can imagine Collette leaning over my shoulder and reading the title and saying "Yes dear, Audie Murphy, dear" and going off in order not to waste any more of her life on Mr Murphy. I can't blame her. She has heard more about Audie Murphy than any person should be forced to tolerate. And my poor brother Ed. I was staying with him once and just launched into one my Audie monologues and I saw his eyes begin to go all glassy but I just couldn't help myself. When Eartha came into the room Ed turned to her and with this voice filled with desperation said "Hon, I've been learning about Audie Murphy .. and there is so much to learn."

I don't know why I love Audie Murphy. Reasonably, I should not. This post is not going to be a biography of Audie Murphy. If you are curious about him there is a lot of info on the net ... Google works here . Suffice it to say Audie was known for two things: The most decorated American soldier in WW II and as an actor in B grade movies, most of them westerns. I grew up with Audie Murphy. The aura of the war was still hanging heavy over the world when I was a kid and I grew up watching westerns, mostly on TV, and there always seemed to be an Audie Murphy western on TV

But my interest in him is more than nostalgic. He wasn't even a terribly important person for me, he was no icon. Movie wise he fit right in with guys like Rory Calhoun and George Montgomery who toiled in the B western trenches and at the time I really did not distinguish between them. But as time has gone on, its Murphy that has become the little splinter in my brain.

He works for me today on a couple of levels. I like the movies, or at least enough of them to keep me hanging in. He generally made the kind of low budget, Drive-in oriented westerns that used to be called "oaters". Pretty formulaic stuff, shot on back lots, with weak dialogue and an emphasis on badly staged fight scenes. Often he was miscast. The lone, stalwart hero, the tough guy, but physically he did not work for that at all. Murphy was a little guy, and soft spoken, and when he had fight scenes with big burly character actors it was hard to accept that he could actually be the victor. But he brought something to his character, the ah-shucks Jimmy Stewart/Henry Fonda American country boy feel and that was genuine. He was also a song writer, working in the country genre and many of his songs were recorded. Murphy was raised in west Texas, dropped out of school at eight to support his family and often lived off the land with his rifle.

Murphy could work against his character. I think I like him best when he has a bit of an edge to him. In Night Passage, with Jimmy Stewart, Murphy plays the "bad" brother, the outlaw with a heart of gold and in scenes of conflict with Stewart (who played the older brother) you can see this little spark come out. Like most actors, he benefited from working with someone who had talent. In Bullet For A Badman, Murphy plays one of a pair of outlaws, but he is the one that has gone "good". Darren McGavin plays his ex partner and the scenes between them get pretty lively. In No Name On The Bullet he plays a darker character, a gun for hire who holds a town at fear by his very presence. He was cast, once again, as a brother (this time with Burt Lancaster) in The Unforgiven where Murphy plays a character with an almost psychotic hatred against the Apache. This is one of his later movies and he's good in it, showing us a character who works from an emotional core even as he does despicable thing. Like Alan Ladd, you can see Murphy had a potential that was never fully realized and usually came when he was given characters with some darkness at their core. Legend says that director Don Siegel was considering casting Murphy as the villain in the original Dirty Harry movie ... damn, that would have been something. Murphy, then his mid forties, facing down against the young Eastwood, the actor who destroyed the old fashioned studio westerns with his work in Italy. Unfortunately, Murphy died in a plane crash before filming began.

So, he was a serviceable actor who made some entertaining western movies. Well, so was Alan Ladd, as I mentioned and although I still enjoy watching a few of his better movies, I don't often sit through his oaters as I will Murphy's. What's the difference? Well, as is usually the case in most narratives, I think its the back story. Remember, Murphy was not just a western actor, he had some other credentials to his name.



There is a lot written about Audie Murphy the "war hero". Winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor. He had nearly 30 other decorations. He was the most decorated American soldier in World War II (To Hell and Back is his movie autobiography, where Murphy plays himself but really, its pretty lame) He also received decorations from France and Belgium. He received the bulk of his medals before he was 21 years old.



I am ambivalent about war and warriors. At my present stage in life I really can't see many viable reasons to go to war and I have seen very few positive results come out of such conflicts. But when you read about war, when you hear combat stories, and try to put yourself in the boots of the men and women who fight them, it is difficult to dismiss their achievements; just surviving in a combat theatre is an almost miraculous act.



And we have young Murphy. An almost illiterate kid from Texas. An orphan. Basically no education to speak of. Stories say that when he first went overseas, his accent and his terrible diction were so bad people had no idea what he was saying. He was a skinny little kid who looked like a boy next to many of the men he fought with. But consider the event that led him to that Medal of Honour: He had been granted a battlefield rank of Lieutenant. He was leading a company in France when they were attacked by six German tanks and what is described as "waves of infantry". He orders his men back and begins to radio in artillery fire, holding the Germans at bay. One of his tank destroyers takes a direct hit and bursts into flame, and its crew gets out. The crippled destroyer leaves a flank open and the Germans begin to advance there. With his men under cover, he gets up onto the tank and takes hold of the .50 caliber machine gun and begins to unload with the thing. The story goes that alone, with that one machine gun, Murphy held off the enemy for an hour. They wounded him in the leg but he kept shooting, its described as one of the most accurate assaults with a .50 cal. It is a big, heavy weapon designed to spray across the killing zone but Murphy could, when needed, use it for pin point shooting. He took out an entire squad of Germans and held off three fronts of attack. He is personally credited as killing or wounding at least 50 enemy soldiers, single handely, in one fight. He held off the enemy long enough to regroup his men and take them down.



I'm not celebrating fighting or killing here. But when I read that story I don't know if I can understand it. This little, mild mannered guy, standing up on top of this busted tank, just calmly holding off several waves of enemy soldiers. At one point the Germans got within ten feet of him ... ten feet .. point blank for their Karabiner carbines. And they couldn't kill him. He just kept firing into them, directing his fire, picking them apart. It is a situation that moves beyond simple survival.



Another story I heard of Murphy's war experience was when he and some of his buddies were "leased" out to another company in France. The Americans had cleared out a section of farmland and were beginning to advance into the zone when Murphy comes up to the commanding officer (we'll say it was a captain but I'm not sure of the rank) and says something like "Excuse me sir, but shouldn't we clear them German fellas out of that field before we go down there?" The captain looks out across this open farm field and says "Soldier, are you nuts? What Germans?" Murphy just looks up at him and say "Well, them five or six right down there" The captain looks out. No enemy. Murphy just shrugs, unlimbers hi M-1 and begins to walk down the hill ....



Several yards into the field Murphy disappears. He just drops out of site. Pop, pop, pop. The M-1 goes off. Murphy pops again, hunched low, running fast, just his legs moving, the Garand held across his chest and he disappears again. Pop. Pop. Up comes Murphy. He slings the rifle and walks up to the captain. "That should do it sir" The field was riddled with gullies, not visible through the grass but it reminded Murphy of the arroyos of his home and the prey that would often shelter there ....



So I enjoy Murphy the actor and admire Murphy the soldier. Fair enough. You could say the same thing about Lee Marvin or Robert Mitchum, solid tough guy actors who saw real combat in WW II. These guys are two of my favorite actors and I certainly put them up on a higher acting "shelf" than Murphy, but I don't hold them to the same sentiment.

There is more backstory. The story that happens after the war, and during the movie making, the one that was never discussed in public during Murphy's lifetime. See, he wasn't just a hero he was the hero. He was a military recruiting office's wet dream; a simple country boy from a poor background who goes to fight for his country, performs some of the craziest acts of bravery ever committed, and lives the Hollywood dream. It was a dream that everyone wanted to perpetuate. The army, Hollywood, most of America's (and Canada's) citizens. Of course, the story was more fable than reality.

Murphy suffered from post traumatic syndrome for the rest of his life. I suppose back then they would have called it shell shock. He went through a couple of marriages. He gambled most of his life away. He had problems with violence, he beat a guy almost to death for kicking a dog .. though I can't really blame him for that. At the height of his success, with the big house and the fast cars he would often go to his buddy's sweaty boxing gym in Hollywood and sleep in the back, on a little cot. His first wife tells about how he slept with a pistol under his his pillow. And he often cried out the names of his dead comrades in his sleep. I marvelled at the young, country kid who could perform these crazy acts of bravery.

But how can we expect that kid to go through that, to see that carnage and watch his friends die, and not be affected by it. Well, that is how we wanted it, and we want it to this day. Several recent articles in the Toronto Star are examining what has happened to some of our Canadian soldiers who have returned from Afghanistan; the stress and emotional damage they are facing and how nobody really seems to give a fuck about it.

I suppose that is the thing that has elevated Murphy above the other cowboy actors I loved as a kid. This man was in fights I can never even conceive of and he managed to survive them. The fight he had afterwards, when everything was over, was probably his toughest because he was left to fight it on his own. Murphy did not self destruct. He was killed in a plane crash. He was beginning to get some more opportunities in Hollywood; Don Seigel liked him, as did director John Houston. But he strikes me as a lonely man. He had a family, children, but I have this image of him going into his friend's gym at night, a place he could have bought with his pocket change, curling up in the back on that little cot ...

Would he rather have been back on the plains of west Texas, moving alone across the land, searching for sustenance? Would he rather be back up on top of that tank destroyer, the big machine gun in his hands, calm in that moment, centered, not taking pleasure in the killing but understanding the necessity of it, simple and focused in that hour, simply doing what needed to be done ...

We all have our demons. I know people who fight monsters and darkness that would have me peeing my pants and they fight it everyday; sometimes they falter but most times they fight on. They hurt, they get scared, but they fight on. When they feel alone it is the worst and what we need to do, the best way to help them, is to just let them know that we are here, that we are with them.

So, I'm here Audie. After all these years, when so many people have forgotten, I'm here. The darkness and monsters are gone, for you, now. Its time to holster the guns.

INSPIRATION PART TWO

Do you wait for it? Or do you go out and make it happen? If you can do that, if you can make it happen, if you can call it up like a sorcerer summoning a djnn, is it actually inspiration at all?

Sometimes I feel the need to be inspired. I bump along through life, lucky enough to like what I do, lucky enough to do something with creative elements, but I feel myself wanting something more; something impractical and obtuse and ephemeral that serves no "purpose" whatsoever except perhaps to make you feel good. Something like art, I suppose. At those times I want to be inspired, I want to be moved, I want the spark that will get the juices flowing, the mental gears turning and the body moving ... don't be alarmed by the smell. I never said the gears moved smoothly.

There are times when I have no need to search for inspiration. It just falls down into my lap, or plops down onto my head, which gives it something in common with bird poop and perhaps explains whey I sometimes produce "art" that is similar to bird poop too. When I was a kid, I was inspired to write fiction by the sources around me; movies, comic books, short stories, song lyrics. And, indeed, what I produced was often fairly faithful emulations of those original sources. You call it derivative, I called it .. inspiration. The stories themselves were clearly pastiches of the originals but the question still comes: What inspired me to emulate that art in the first place? I never asked that question because I was too busy developing writer's cramp (yes, Virginia, there was an age before keyboards when you actually had to use a pen to write and when you did it as much as I .. it hurt.)

Inspiration comes sneaking or barrelling at us from different sources. Collette was inspired to take on her upcoming two day walk to end breast cancer (personally, I think a nice stroll and a drive around the block is sufficient but that's just me) by some of our family members who have gone through that rabbit hole and come out the other side. That, in turn, fills me with inspiration but I an uncertain how to channel it: Should I write a story? A poem? Make a video? Well, I am certainly shooting the event for posterity but am I going to make a simple "documentary" style video or something more subjective, something emotional ... something "inspirational"

Should you go out searching for inspiration or should it always just come to you, a creative response to some external source: A movie, a song, the experience of another? This speculation comes out of a vision of inspiration as something ethereal, deeply hidden inside of us; yes, perhaps something even spiritual. We are talking epiphany here, the bolt out of the blue, like Vic is bumping up Highway 400 in the Saturn and ka-boom: I'm suddenly seeing a family in an old Rambler station wagon moving up this highway except the road is deserted, the countryside is devastated, the father is hunched over the steering wheel, face sweaty, eyes flicking across the horizon and mom is in the back, her sick daughter at her side, an old M-40 in her hands ... And the vision is quickly dismissed because who needs another world-wiped-out scenario? But still, the image came unbidden, boom, out of the blue.

That's the way it usually works for me; the inspiration flooding in unbidden, regardless of the original source. So now I find myself searching for inspiration, somehow trying to manufacture it. I have this idea of grabbing my Samsung palmcorder, the one that fits in my pocket, grabbing one tape, one battery, taking the Metropass, jumping on Toronto transit and just seeing what the day and my city holds for me, basically going on a hunt for inspiration (be vewy vewy quiet, we're hunting muses .. hahahahaha). Is this somehow less legitimate than the bolt from the blue? Is there more creative cache if the inspiration finds you, or is it the same if you find it?

I'm not really questioning the creative process, I guess I'm examining what gets you there in the first place: First the inspiration, then the creation. Does it matter what leads you to the creation? Or is it the creation itself that is important? Works of art should stand on their own, I should be able to view a painting, read a book, hear a song and just take it as it is, as that singular work of art. But let's face it, some art is made more compelling by the story behind it, the inspiration that leads to it.

I am an Audie Murphy fan. Go ahead, Google him, I'm in no hurry. He was never a great actor, he made very few really good movies, but he churned out the kind of simple, straight ahead Western films I devoured as a kid and I can still watch those movies, and watch him, just for the simple pleasure of it: Audie did not make big, eloquent western sagas like John Ford or George Stevens, he made little, drive-in targeted cowboy movies. Audie was also the most decorated American solder in World War 2. This guy performed feats of individual combat that has rarely been matched. A poor, pretty much illiterate kid who grew up hunting for sustenance on the plains of West Texas. In one of his movies, (it may be Bullet for a Badman but you could pick several) Audie is in the showdown with the bad guy and does what every cowboy actor did at the time; he "fanned" his single action Colt, brushing the flat of his hand across the trigger in succession, allowing him to blast off shots quickly. Its a bullshit move. Even if the pistol did not misfire from such abuse you would not hit a damn thing. Yet, of course, in his movie, Audie mows down his enemies, all standard stuff. Yet: When Audie, a combat vet and expert with firearms, was first shown this "gag" by a stunt coordinator, he told the guy "It just won't work that way" The stuntman rolled his eyes at this naive kid (Audie was still in his twenties when he started making movies even after two or three years fighting in Europe) and told him it didn't matter, the bullets were blank and the bad guys would be levelled by squibs. Audie wasn't happy. Set his jaw and disappeared. The next day Audio shows up on set. The prop guy goes to find the pistol and its missing, Audie says "Its OK, I took the thing home" and takes the stunt and prop men to the back lot, loads the Colt up with live rounds and precedes to fan the Colt just like in the movie ... except he hits everything he aims at. He had spent the night modifying the weapon and practising until he actually could fan a single action pistol with efficiency. When you watch that scene it works in a very generic, predictable sense. But know the story behind it, knowing that Audie brought some spark of inspiration to the scene, it blows my mind: Damn, that skinny little dude could just mow you down.

So inspiration matters. It infuses the art, it is what the art is all about. But is the inspiration any more or less relevant depending on its source? I really don't know the answer to that. I just know I'm happy when that creative grease is slick on the wheels and perhaps I should not question it all.

If inspiration is a mystery, then Gaina at The Mouth on Wheels has summed up the entire process far more eloquently than I. Happy hunting to all.

THIS IS MY TIMELINE & I'M GOING TO RIDE IT ..

A timeline is a video editing term but this is not a post about video editing. Its a post about birthdays. Or both. Let me explain.

I am currently surrounded by people celebrating their birthdays (I guess spring/early summer is a particularly randy time). My brother Ed celebrated his birthday in May. My sister Susanna (the only of my four sisters who is older than I) has her birthday this weekend, as does my brother in law Dale. Collette's grand nephew Lucas turned a whopping one year old a few days ago. Damn, he's still under warranty.

They are an interesting thing, birthdays. (Also interesting that I wrote about my dog's birthday before anyone else's but that's my issue) We all have them, we are all getting older, yet we all co-exist together, at the same time, even as we move forward, at different rates .. or do we.

This is where the timeline comes in.

The timeline is where you assemble your project in video editing software. You import all your footage, you trim down to the clips you want and you drop them into the timeline, to assemble them into the movie you want. The timeline is also the place where you place your titles, effects, music, etc. All the elements that make up your movie go into the timeline. On the computer, it gives you a visual representation of the various elements that make up your movie.

The way the timeline works is that you drop your clips into it in the order they will appear. So, the establishing shot of the house first, the house interior, then a shot of the party in progress, then the close up of the fetish gear .. no wait, this isn't that kind of movie. This is the Birthday Movie.

I have all my clips assembled. Lucas, Ed, Dale, Susanna .. all the birthdays that are swirling around me. Being an editor, being a writer, my compulsion is to assemble them all together, lay them down in the timeline and make that movie of out of them. But how do I go about this? What is the proper sequence?

If the movie is actually about birthdays, do we go along the calendar, picking the birthdays as they occur: Ed, Lucas, Dale, Susanna ... one after the other going down the line. Logical, but looking at the timeline, something weird occurs; the youngest (Lucas) follows the oldest (ED). That doesn't seem right. In our linear world, that is certainly out of sequence, because we would normally factor such things in ascending order. Youngest to oldest. It seems to want to supersede even the sequential calendar dates, especially in the visual world of the timeline .. the baby comes first, our brains tell us, and the grey haired old guy last (sorry Ed, you are still a sexy and powerful man)

In the timeline, each little clip has a different size and that is determined by its length. So a five second shot, on the screen, has a visual icon much shorter than a one minute shot.

So baby Lucas' clip would look like the second one in the timeline above. Ed's would be ... bigger (I'm not picking on him, I'm taking him to a show, get over it). So my Birthday Movie timeline would be nicely staggered out, the icons growing larger as we move down the sequence. One clip after another. Edited that way, the movie would start with Lucas, jump to Dale, cut to Susanna .. but that's not right either. Lucas was not born first, he was born last, so shouldn't he be down at the end of the timeline? This is the advantage of non linear editing, you can move the clips all around.

So now we have Lucas at the end of the sequence and Ed at the beginning. And the length of the clips diminish as we move along it. That seems logical, but its still not right. Sure, you can start with Ed, but his clip ends then Susanna's begins, and that isn't how it happens. Ed, thankfully, has not ended. I'm pretty sure I've seen him and our sister together. There may be pictures. So what we need is a timeline that represents something closer to reality; where all the clips exist at the same time. We call this a multiclip timeline, where several clips can be on the screen at the same time.

So now all the clips, all my family, are onscreen at the same time. Damn, you'd have to call this production The Rideau Heights of Babel (inside joke and Google may be of no help, sorry) So now we are set, here is everybody existing at the same time ... but still not working. See why there are so many re-edits in my biz?

Because while they all certainly co-exist, but it seems to negate the whole point of the birthday. They weren't all together at the same time, that would make them the same age, and it would save on candles or something. They were born on different dates, in different years, just like the calendar that we started with. So that is the linear part, the beginning of their lives, but as the clips (lives) are added, each one lengthens, grows longer (grows older) they kind of caught up to each other. In a traditional timelime the clips would push each other along as they extended but in the multiclip environment we can start each clip at a time, and let them catch up to each other.

Birth dates are a fact of life. You were born. Boom. There you are. That's the date. Birthdays are something else, I think. We are not just acknowledging the date of your birth we are celebrating the event of your birth. Or as often stated, celebrating your life. So by date of birth we have the calendar, the linear timeline with each clip layed out in a row. But by birthday, even if the clips are staggered, we need the multiclip sequence, where the clips grow on, get longer, join up, side by side, one on top of the other, co existing. I like the way the birthdays are working these past several weeks, kind of all grouped together, all these people of different ages but all the celebrations happening so close together. Separated by years, united by a number of weeks.

That is the kind of timeline I need to make the Birthday Movie. Linear, multi faceted, organized, mixed up ... all the clips moving on and filled with noise and color and sound and motion, yet all linked together, making one movie from all these diverse elements.

So, this isn't a post about editing. It isn't really a post about birthdays. It's a post about something big and noisy and straightforward and complex, something with a past and a present, zooming ahead into the future, each part alone but each part needed to maintain the whole.

That's right. This is a post about family.

LUMINATO: WITH VIDEO

There are a lot of disadvantages to living in Toronto; the smog, the traffic, the disturbing dichotomy between wealth and poverty, the smugness of its citizenry, the abject awfulness of its hockey team ...


But there are advantages as well. Among those are the many festivals that crop up in the summer like the weeds in my neighbour's lawn. This past weekend was the beginning of Luminato, a week long arts festival now in its second year. Its a pretty eclectic festival, with music, theatre, visual arts and more in various venues all of the city. Some cost you, some are free. Many of the venues are outdoors. The fact that this weekend happened to feature our first real hot weather of the year, and Collette and I have been been working like dogs lately (not our dog, mind you, I should be so lucky to have the life of Miss Hayley) we smeared on the sunscreen, slipped on our sandals and got the hell out there.



The festival kicked off Friday night at Yonge Dundas square; this is Toronto's attempt to emulate Times Square in New York City. Not the old, funky, grungy, character filled Times Square but the new, corporate greed at its scariest Time Square. Why you would want to emulate that, I'm not sure but this is Toronto: How many Torontonians does it take to change a light bulb? Two, one to change the lightbulb and one to make sure that's how they do it in New York.



Friday night was to be a jazz/swing night. It featured the Count Basie Orchestra with guest vocalist, Montreal's Nikki Yanofsky. We had first seen Nikki this past winter as part of the Women's Blues Review. She has a terrific voice, a very natural jazz style and a totally engaging personality. At the Review, Nikki declared herself a "blues woman in training". Nikki celebrated her birthday this year by headlining Carnegie Hall. Nikki is fourteen.




The video below starts off with a couple of short clips of Nikki with the Count Basie band. Yup, its shaky as hell; I could blame this on not being able to find my new camcorder's electronic stabilization feature but it probably had something to do with the fact the concert venue is next door to the Hard Rock Cafe's patio ... it was hot .. I was thirsty .. there was ice cold beer. That's all I'm saying.



The next day we moved between two venues. Nathan Phillips Square, City Hall, was featuring a funk festival. The James Brown Band, now being fronted by a former member of the Temptations was to play there. We went down there in the afternoon to find that the band wasn't appearing until much later that night. We knew we would not be hanging out for long at that venue; see, there was no beer ...


But we did arrive in time for a "funk" dance competition. The dancing was more hip hop and beat than funk but it was enjoyable nonetheless. A few highlights in the video. Besides the skill of the dancers I admired the youthful endurance; dude, it was almost 40 C out there ...


After the dancers we decided to wander back to Yonge Dundas Square. There was a Scottish festival happening there. And we knew where the beer and margaritas were at.


The featured performer at this venue was the incomparable Ashley MacIsaac, the bad boy of Cape Breton fiddle players. Its been a few years since we've seen Ashley but he's always a treat. He came on to the stage in jeans and someone yelled "Where's your kilt!" His response was "I left it on Church Street" OK, its a Toronto joke. But like I always say, Google is your friend.



Ashley is pretty well known for his "celtic fusion" music and I've seen him perform with rock bands, a soul band and a couple of DJs with beat boxes and synths. Saturday night it was basically him with a pianist so he went back to the celtic roots and it was a great experience.


Right where Collette and I were standing (after we once again staggered off the patio at the Hard Rock) was a large, extended Nova Scotia family. As Ashley played they broke out into some traditional Celtic square dancing. Look at the joy on their faces. They were a good distance away from home, in the middle of this big, smoggy, smuggy city but as the the fiddle music skirled through the night like electricity they found their roots, they found each other and they just danced.


Now that's what I call art.


Luminato from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

REBEL WITHOUT A LAWNMOWER

I am not a rebel. I've never thought of myself that way, but that sobriquet has often been thrust upon me, sometimes from some surprising sources.

I have almost always had long hair. At this stage of my life, I get the "quaint old hippie" tag and it doesn't bother me, there is some truth in that. I started growing my hair out pretty young. I had long hair in Grade 6. This was the late sixties but in the schools I attended in a small eastern Ontario city, I was usually the only guy at that grade level with long hair. I've always been a doodler, I like cartoons and I did a lot of that in school; one day in Grade 6 a teacher nabbed one of my doodles and confiscated it. It was a hippie cartoon, a guy that was just a hat, a big nose (Ringo Starr like in its enormity), a Zapatta mustache and long hair. Years later, in high school, when were preparing our university applications, the guidance counsellor gave us our school files and told us to go thru them and discard anything we found detrimental. Collette, my school teacher wife (there's irony for ya) informs me how wrong this was but the guy did it. And there it was. My hippie cartoon, attached to my file after all those years. A teacher or principle had written a comment on the file "Over identification with counter culture characters"

I found that funny. Counter culture. That term had .. and still has .. little relevance to me. Counter to what? When I was young I didn't see my long hair and bell bottom jeans as rebellious, I was just emulating what was around me. My oldest brother Edward was a hippie, he lived at home when I was young, he gave me Beatles records and took me to see biker movies and that is what I knew. I don't know if my mother liked long hair and beads and sandals but her house was filled with them and she never openly objected. So that is what I knew. That was my culture.

I grew up in a very free flowing kind of environment. We weren't religious. We sure as hell were not the middle class. I had no father. In our house I didn't think much about these factors but when I was out in the world, it was often shoved up against my face. It always surprised me. But what really surprised me, what often took me aback and put a frown on my face, was the concept that there was some overriding culture that you could be counter to. I always knew that people were different from me. Other kids had dads, other families had money, other mothers did not swear, other brothers did not pay attention to you and give you guidance. I knew that. Why couldn't those people get that?

On some level I knew that I was, that my family was, different but I didn't spend a lot of time brooding on it. Yet others apparently did. When I was a kid some people hated my long hair; they hated it. There would be a snarl on their face and invective on their lips. I never got that. You hate me because of my hair? Not because of who I am, or what I do, but because of how I look? It took me a long time to realize that people are afraid of what is different, they have an existence that they often did not themselves choose, and they do not want to think about any alternative. Fear of change, I guess. Like, I only ever ate red apples, that yellow one over there scares me. Weird.

So, people applied this "rebel" tag to me and although I never really agreed with it, there it was. I knew that in the eyes of some people, I was a rebel. Generally, these people were older, from another generation. I knew that many of these people must have gone thru some period in their lives where they had experimented with change, that they had tried new things but at this point, they only liked what they liked. Fair enough. What catches me by surprise, is when people younger than myself, find me oh so rebellious.

In my early twenties, in the late seventies, early eighties, I did some hitchhiking. Went across the country twice, once with a girl I was seeing at the time and once by myself. On one of these solo excursions I was camping at a commercial site in New Brunswick. The place had a laundry room and I was catching up on the essentials. I met this couple from New England, I think Maine maybe. They were about as crew cutted and and freshly washed as Ken and Barbie. I was a little grubby, I was living on the road, but this was one of the points in my life where was my hair was short. These two looked at me like I was the wild man of Borneo. They were telling me about some campsite in Maine and how all the young people loved it and that it was "groovy" (trust me, that particular expression was pretty dead at this point in time) and chuckling at all this youthful craziness. The kicker .. were were probably the my age. These two came across like the Cleavers in the early 1980's and they were certainly no more than a couple years older than me. That sticks with me to this day: What the hell happened to them.

This phenomena has kept repeating itself. It became quite self evident when I went back to college. I first returned to college in Kingston in my mid twenties. I was pretty much the oldest person in my class. We had some punks, a semi goth girl, some biker rocker guys ... but once again, I was a rebel. In one of our media classes we had a lecture from some people in radio. I was raised on radio, and I always knew that it was a business, I loved it for the music. I saw the commercial aspect as a necessary evil, that the real purpose of radio was the music. Ok, so I was naive, fucking sue me. The good folks giving the lecture saw the music as some kind of unpleasant necessity, like a pimple on a perfect commercial complexion that cannot be removed cuz it would only result in puss and blood. Fine, this was their business, I get it, and I was in a marketing program. What really got me was that my younger classmates, many of whom lived and died by their music, ate this up like hash laced Pablum. Well, of course, it was all about the money, and although I spend every night listening to the same record, we all know that the only purpose of music was to make someone rich ... I could not remain silent (yeh, like that surprises those who know me) and I got into a little discussion with our hosts. At the end of the lecture, one of the women turned to me as I went out the door and she smiled and said "Keep on fighting, rebel" Turns out we were the same age.

This happened again when I came to Toronto to do television studies at Seneca college. Yet another media lecture. This is around 1986/7 now. Female professor. Discussing TV commercials. And her stating how much the media portrayal of women has changed over the years and that the old image of the "house wife" was dead and gone forever. I choked on my coffee. I pointed out the endless array of current TV ads featuring the young woman, all alone in her home, surrounded by her laundry and her dirty dishes and smiling like a happy, freshly Tasered Stepford wife. The lady professor disagreed. And so did my classmates. In that lecture hall I was the oldest student by at least three years. And every single one of them thought that the portrayal of women in the commercial media was lightyears advanced from the previous decade. Of course, I gently tried to dissuaded them from their point of view, all 56 of em. At once.

So I became the class rebel. Again. I really hadn't meant to. I was just pointing out the obvious: What we see, we should think about. And what we see we should not always accept. One of the quotes that defines my life is from Juan Ramon Jiminez: When they give you ruled paper, write the other way. Ray Bradbury used it to open Fahrenheit 451. That always seemed just so simple to me; there is more than one way to write the same sentence on the page, you have your way to do it and it works for you, so don't be shocked when someone else does it differently.

So, let's get to the point of inspiration for this post. What inspired my thoughts of rebellion and rebels? It was my lawnmower. Yup, my lawnmower. My old lawnmower finally bit the dust. And my lawn is getting high and I live in a lovely, middle class neighbourhood in central Toronto. I have a leather clad biker dude living next to me and his yard is filled with weeds and I do not want to present that image to my neighbours or even myself.

So I went out and bought a new lawnmower. Cuz my grass is too long. I still have my ponytail, but I can't let my gas grow. Fuck. I am such a rebel.