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LiveJournal for Sean Davidson.
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| Friday, February 3rd, 2006 |
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| Sunday, November 27th, 2005 |
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Earlier this month I was in Winnipeg to cover a convention of broadcasting executives. Not a very interesting trip. And yet, while I was there I was reading Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Thus: Indestructible Dodos in the fog of PowerPoint It was about the future. The Future! Shiny and threatening, digital and portable and cutting into our EBITDA if we're not really, reeeaaally careful, guys. The video iPod came out the week before, Google video was already a hit, and so some 600 of them -- radio and TV execs from Kelowna to Goose Bay, Windsor to Resolute, town to town, up and down the dial -- homed in on Winnipeg in BRRRRRRRRR-aaahhh!-geeeezitscold! early November -- to puzzle out what the Future would do to their bottom lines. Their bottoms. Can they save their asses? Three days in the 'Peg to rechart the future, rethink the business models. To make sure the history of radio (No one under 35 is listening anymore, guys.) won't repeat itself as the future of TV. And so out saunters Lippman from the MIT Media Lab, keynote speaker all tweed and East Coast brains, he looks exactly like Groucho Marx, caterpillar mustache and great big schnozz poking between heavy glasses. All right professor, say the 600, here we are, show us the way. Read the damn tealeaves. He smirks and shrugs and kicks the ball around... kids these days... networks are just aggregators... isn't broadcasting just a nice word for spam?... branding is dead... the future is podcasting. But. "Twenty years ago," he says, "I was talking at a conference just like this and I told everyone in the room -- people just like you -- I told them all to tear down their antennas." Knock 'em down like dominos "because the future was all about cable." Not the antennas! He's a madman, surely! And for cable?! "We're from MIT, we're never wrong," his moustache smirks, "but sometimes we are a bit premature." No easy answers folks, is what he really means, as he soft-shoes off the stage, your guess is as good as mine. Good night and drive safe! Ha-cha-cha-cha. Not very funny to this crowd, but what do they care? These guys, sure, dinosaurs in ill-fitting grey suits, every manjack of them. Thanks to podcasting, the PSP, PVRs and TiVO, OhmyNews, video cell phones, DivX, MPEG, WiFi, Blu-Ray DVDs, HDTV and the whole gruesome alphabet -- as doomed as dodos strutting out to meet the Spaniards. (No one is listening anymore.) But like Groucho says, the world has been ending since '80s, hell since VCRs, HBO, color and even TV before that, if you were in radio. And there's still a CBS, still a CBC. We've still got jobs, right boys? Ad revenue still intact? And so the 600 dodos -- hopeless yet indestructible -- applauded, almost politely, and rose from their chairs with a single, wheezy har-ummph. Two of them walk past me on the way out the door. "How's Glen?" asks the first dodo. "Good. He just got his new hip." Exact words. No joke. Jeeesus H. Christ. That night was Everyone Gets an Award Night, apparently, identical glass and brass trophies going to a parade of dodos -- Good job, whoever you are. Way to dodge those bullets -- while the rest downed plastic shot glasses of sour wine served by local teens, baby-faced Sagkeeng and Cree. The press, all three of us, stayed close to the shrimp ring. For broadcasters (Some from radio, no less! Radio!) the dodos have terrible presentation skills. "Mrrrph mwow mwow fremarkable accommpwiffmumps," says one, mashing the mic and sounding every bit like Charlie Brown's teacher. My boss and I push back six more shots of wine, a handful of cheese cubes, and collect our swag bags at the door, gutting them out in the hall -- crap, crap, crap, Oooo! Nice pen! We trash the rest and go out into the outer-space hoooooo-WOWZA! colder yet Manitoba night in search of a local and apparently very posh steak house. "They say Brad Pitt went there a lot when he was in town last month, shooting that Jesse James movie." The next morning, a red wine and red meat hangover, and the seminars are rudderless and rambling and "Ohhhhhmygawd pleeeaaase stop talking." Each of the indestructible dodos is armed with his own PowerPoint slides, each mumbling out his Master Plan, her Alchemical Business Model, his Grand Unification Org Chart -- As this next slide clearly shows. Click. Beta-testing in Kingston. Click. Not catching on with 18-35s. Click. User surveys. Click. Click. Ca-lick. Every slide is an Escher print of arrows, cylinders, ovals, clouds, triangles, line graphs and text boxes and drop shadows and clip art and bullet points. Each one a soporific Gordian knot, we get lost in the fog. The dodos all have their heads down, not asleep but staring at their palms. Sure, they came here to predict the Future of all things portable and digital but there, that one in the back, is too busy text messaging on his cel phone. And that one, she's reading her PalmPilot. Many more -- him, her, him, him -- are thumbing their Blackberries, poking and punching like furious Nintendo preteens out for a high score. There, in the back, one of the younger dodos even has a video iPod. It's true what they say, you only learn how to use the features on your Palm, or your cel or your Pod, when you're trapped in boring meeting. No one is listening anymore. My cel phone is old, and has only a few rudimentary games, but I make do with Blackjack. I beat my phone 17 hands out of 30. |
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| Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 |
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I am in Winnipeg. |
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| Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 |
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I think it was my friend Lenore who first noted that it's very hard to use the word "classy" without, in that same breath, revealing that one has no class. Go on, try it. Say "I need a new dress for the party. Something real classy." It came out sounding pretty bad, didn't it? The word somehow twists itself into a nasal accent that leans on the "ass" and comes out sounding as if it's being spelled with a "k." This is probably the fault of movie and TV writers, who enjoy putting "classy" into the mouths of mafia thugs, New Jersey beauticians and the like. I recently noticed it is equally hard to use the word "fascinating" without sounding sarcastic, probably for much the same reason. As in, "Oh really? You've read every Anne Rice novel ever written, even the porn. That's fascinating." It's as if "fascinating" needs -- but refuses to accept -- an exclamation point in order to sound sincere. Thus, fascinating. |
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| Monday, October 10th, 2005 |
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Dilys and I went out onto the street, high from the big moment. People were still congratulating us. Even blocks away from the Empire State Building other tourists who'd been up there with us were spotting us, sometimes from across the street, and shouting cheers and congratulations.  We were dizzy and giddy. We wanted to find a place -- someplace quiet and pleasant -- so we could sit and catch our breath, take in the moment. And yet because we weren't really paying attention we'd walked right into Times Square, which didn't seem promising. I mean, cleaned up or not, does anyplace there count as "pleasant"? Overwhelming, sure. Especially on a hot August night, just after the sun has gone down and the whole place is lit up like a mile-high kaleidoscope, swarming with people, cars and -- oh, something new -- these crazily dangerous things called partybikes. Picture a bicycle with four wheels, plus, forming a circle on its front and sides, another six seats each with its own set of pedals. These are partybikes, a kind of group-participation rickshaw. The driver pedals and steers while his passengers hang onto a ring in the middle of the contraption, also pedaling. This sends them merrily ping-ponging though the busiest intersection in the world. Expect to hear news of some deaths and a police crackdown shortly. ____________________ Because life got so busy last month a lot of things went unreported, not the least of which is the excellent engagement present that was waiting for me when D and I got back from New York -- an antique typewriter, circa 1912.  I've always wanted one of these and, oh man, it couldn't be more perfect. It looks exactly like it was swiped from the set of Citizen Kane. Thirty pounds of brown steel, insides like a Swiss watch -- the latest in Jazz Age technology. Not only does it still work, it still has its original ribbon. This particular typewriter apparently sat out the 20th century in an attic somewhere in the U.S., although D is being coy about where, exactly, she got it. We're thinking we might use its font for the wedding invitations. (Oh, speaking of weddings, we saw Corpse Bride last night. I liked it, sort of, Dilys did not. I've never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas (I know, I know...) but she assures me this was a weak, weak attempt by Tim Burton to do more of the same.) Among other things -- location, cake, officiator -- Dilys and I have to pick a wedding song, of course. Got to be careful with that one. No one wants to be one of those couples that failed to notice their song's deeper meaning, or even its lyrics. A few years ago I watched a bride and groom have their first dance to Peter Gabriel's "Blood of Eden." Nice song, if you only listen to the "woman and the man" part of the chorus, not so nice when you note its constant references to knots coming untied, grips slipping, distance growing "between you and me" or that it's from an album that is entirely about Gabriel's divorce. So there will be a long vetting process for the wedding song. Early contenders that didn't check out:
This week we're going location scouting. God, there must be all kinds of things that can go wrong with a wedding location. ____________________  It turns out there is at least one very nice place in Times Square. It's called Carmine's (of course) and it's on West 44th Street. It's very 1920s. Dark wood, old photos on the wall, bartenders in snappy vests. It's also directly across the street from a few Broadway theaters including the Schubert, home of Spamalot, and the Minskoff which, according to its big blue marquee, was hosting Fiddler on the Roof. We found a table by the window, ordered drinks and toasted our engagement. After a few minutes Dilys ducked out to the washroom. I looked around the bar. There was an old boxing poster on the wall for someone called the Toronto Typhoon. Outside a partybike went by, no passengers, headed for the thick of traffic. It's often hard to predict which memories will turn out to be life-long memories. Little things, meaningless and from decades back, will stay stuck in our heads for no reason while first kisses and graduations fade. But sometimes you can tell that this -- this moment right now -- is for life. Your brain is writing everything down in tattoo ink, the big picture and the weird details. That I had been engaged for about 20 minutes and that my gin and tonic was really strong. That I felt giddy but calm. Partybikes. The Toronto Typhoon. And that Harvey Fierstein -- the gravelly voiced, very gay character actor seen in Elmo Saves Christmas and Independence Day -- was also the star of the 2005 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. And that the big blue marquee with his name on it almost entirely filled the window of Carmine's, a quiet and pleasant spot to toast your new life, on West 44th Street. |
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| Thursday, October 6th, 2005 |
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"Tony Blair today said new explosive devices used against British troops in Iraq were suspected to have come from 'Iranian elements.'" -- Guardian Unlimited Elements such as taboulionium and hummus 235. |
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| Friday, September 23rd, 2005 |
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Things I've learned since we got our new cat: 1. While it is okay to feed cat food to a kitten, it is not okay to feed kitten food to a cat. 2. The reason? It rhymes with "blexplosive bliarrhea." |
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| Thursday, September 15th, 2005 |
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"It's like a Michael Moore movie. Without Michael Moore." -- Nicole Which is a succinct way of saying that Why We Fight is probably one of the better documentaries about what's been going on in the U.S. since 2001; mainly because it takes a longer view, back to the Eisenhower era and the deeper meaning of his famous warning against runaway militarism. Liked the part with the New York cop, too. |
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| Monday, September 12th, 2005 |
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And the winner, so far, for best press release received during the Toronto International Film Festival is: "Danny Aiello will be in Yorkville on Friday blowing up a 90-foot inflatable lobster." |
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| Friday, August 26th, 2005 |
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So on our first night in New York -- on top of the Empire State Building -- Dilys asked me to marry her and I said yes. This was three nights ago and I'm still giddy and having a hard time putting it all into words except that we're both very happy, excited and, well, giddy. Here's a picture that an Aussie tourist was nice enough to take just moments after the big moment.  That's a tiny typewriter in the jewel case, by the way, on which Dilys had managed to print the words "Will you marry me?" Right after I said yes, and right after we'd stopped kissing, laughing and sniffling with delight she then turned to everyone on the observation deck and in a big, loud stage voice announced, "Hey everybody -- I just asked him to marry me, and he said 'Yes'!" And everybody -- all these people from who knows where else in the world -- cheered really, really loud. |
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| Friday, August 19th, 2005 |
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"Is Philbin jealous? Is he threatened by Ripa's meteoric rise since the two began working together?" It's been six months since I fumed about mis-use of words, so bear with me a moment. Meteors do not rise. In fact, the only thing meteors do is the exact opposite of rising. This is like saying "arctic warmth" or "the pleasing taste of raw chicken soaked in motor oil." I see this in print all the time -- as in the above entertainment piece and these Google news searches -- and was grumbling about it to Lenore just the other night. I mean, it's not like the nature of meteors* is complicated or unfamiliar. We all understand that they spend most of their time falling, right? ---------------------------------------- * Interesting to me, at least: By definition, meteors fall but do not strike the ground. A meteor that makes it all the way down is a meteorite. |
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| Sunday, August 7th, 2005 |
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The movie City of God, which I finally got around to renting, is pretty damn cool. Like Goodfellas, only set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro Also, I fail to understand why Patrick O'Brian's novels are so popular. I've been slogging through Post Captain -- the second of his 20 books in what has come to be called the Master and Commander series, after the movie -- for some time now and, I don't know, I just don't get it. I expected more swashbuckling pulpy adventure and not so much impenetrable 18th-century parlor talk. |
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| Monday, August 1st, 2005 |
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Right after James "Scotty" Doohan died I got a call from CBC, asking if I'd do a quick hit for the 6 o'clock news about his pop-cultural importance. Of course I said yes -- when do I ever turn down a camera or a live mic? -- and we shot a few minutes that afternoon. Naturally, only one or two of my more excellent points (and thankfully, none of my rambling ones) made it to air. The most useable, and by no means most original, being that the Scotty character was probably the first cool nerd -- that before the rise of geek chic, the internet or any of those propellerheads on The Discovery Channel, there was Scotty, the soon-to-be patron saint of engineers. He was a scientist, but not an egghead. He liked to drink, knew how to fight and loved the ladies as much as Kirk, but could also argue warp theory with Spock. And so, he probably connected with 1960s audiences on a more "regular Joe" level. Sure, Scotty worked with incomprehensibly crazy science, but he worked with it like a guy working on his car. But consider this too. Doohan was the only Star Trek cast member who actually served in the military, and was shot six (six!) times by Germans while storming Juno beach on D-Day. No doubt, this found its way into Scotty. Not just because the character was inspired by navy engineers Doohan had known but because Scotty is, I think, the only person on the quasi-military U.S.S. Enterprise who resembles an actual soldier. Yes, Kirk can fight and strategize. But he's all flash and dazzle, a prima donna general not a bloody-minded dogface. Scotty, I think, without getting into chapter and verse, at least has a whiff of authenticity and soldierly gravitas. Two other points, both about catch phrases. "Ye canna break the laws of physics" is incredibly fun to say, but it also speaks to Scotty's often-overlooked authority in that his is often the last word on what is, or is not, possible. If Spock's or Kirk's clever idea-of-the-moment isn't going to fly, he says so. If it has to work, laws of physics be damned, Scotty is the only one with the ability to get around those laws. Lastly, "Beam me up, Scotty." The endnote to so many episodes, the headline to so many Star Trek obituaries, and a constant reminder that the Enterprise's dutiful chief engineer was often stuck on board, minding the store while, against all logic, her captain, second in command and only doctor went planet-side to pick fights with all-powerful balls of light. This reinforces the idea that Scotty is a secondary character with a less glamorous job, when in fact he probably has the most important job. Star Trek, after all, was a show about facing unknown dangers way waaay out in space and it was Scotty -- the patron saint, apparently the only man on board who knew how to work the life preserver -- who always brought them home. |
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| Sunday, July 31st, 2005 |
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There's a side-story to NASA's space shuttle trouble that has gone mostly unnoticed. It's been more than two years since the Columbia disaster, right? And in that time, no shuttle or other ship has docked with the International Space Station. So there's two years' worth of garbage on that thing that the Discovery crew have to haul out and back to Earth. That's got to be a rewarding job for an astronaut -- muling empty Tang packages and used-up Cyrllic crossword books. I wonder if the ISS crew give them a hard time about it? "Hey Chuck Yeager, you wanna not bang those cans on your little ship there? Some of us are trying to concentrate on science." |
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| Thursday, June 16th, 2005 |
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You all know me. You all know that I can usually spot a good movie and that, yes, I also happen to know a thing or two about Batman. ("A thing or two." Such as the market capital of Wayne Enterprises or that Calendar Man's real name is Julian Day.) That said, I would just like to say that Batman Begins is a fine, fine movie. All those good reviews you've read? Ditto. The few bad reviews? Bah! What do they know? (Liam Lacey at the Globe, I'm looking in your direction.) It reminds me of the first X-Men film in that, yes, the pacing and script feel a bit off because it's so clearly laying the groundwork for a series. Other than that, what's not to love? Okay, sure, Katie Holmes's character was also a total tack-on. But other than that? Also, some of you said you wanted a verdict on Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. So, here goes. It took me four months to read. How's that for a verdict? Not exactly a page turner, though it does have a share of his wit and sense of history, and his everything-old-is-cool-again take on science, but it sure as heck doesn't bottle the same lightning as Cryptonomicon. Also, the Massive Change exhibit at the AGO was really nifty (if too relentlessly optimistic), Garden State was good (once Dilys and I both got over the urge to punch Natalie Portman) but not great, and The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was way better than I expected. Who knew Inspector Clouseau was such a dick? |
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| Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 |
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Because of a certain corporate takeover announced yesterday, I spent pretty much all afternoon appearing on various news shows, trying to sound informed about the exhibition business and the financial particulars of Cineplex and Famous Players. This is why I keep an emergency dress shirt and jacket at the office, so I can look respectable (from the waist up) on short notice. Five interviews, in total. I would have done six except I got bumped from CBC Newsworld by the Michael Jackson verdict. |
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| Monday, June 6th, 2005 |
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One of our most important issues of the year just went to press -- important because hundreds of copies will be handed out at the Banff World Television Festival, which is big annual love-in for TV execs. I would just like to say: I am a 25th level editor, 18 on all my attributes, 2 on all my saving throws. What was once confusing and libelous, I have made simple and true. I am the invisible hand and the all-seeing eye -- fixer of mangled leads, paraphraser of rambling quotes. Yea, cutlines and paragraphs dance at my touch. Photos are cropped, deadlines are met. Interns and publicists fall before me. I am not kept on hold, I am put through. I am not of the word, I am become the word. Boo-fuckin'-yah. |
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| Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 |
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"If you are not with us, then you're my enemy." -- Anakin Skywalker Okay just one more. It's also cool/unsettling to note how, 20 years ago, the Galactic Empire was likened to America's enemies, whereas today some think it represents America itself. The new trilogy is about "how a democratic society turns into a dictatorship" Lucas said recently, which some Blue State-types are taking as a jab against the Red. Anakin, see above, also seems to be stealing his lines from Bush. A big change from the old days, when Reagan slapped the "evil empire" label on the USSR. |
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| Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 |
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Francis Ford Coppola is often compared to his most famous character, Vito Corleone, because both men do a lot of favors for their families. Witness the boosts that have gone to the careers of his composer brother Carmine, his director daughter Sophia and his actor nephew Nicolas Cage and it's not too hard to picture them, in the opening scenes of The Godfather, filling in for any of the hard-luck supplicants like Johnnie Fontaine, the undertaker with the brutalized daughter or that other guy, the one with the son about to be repatriated to Italy. Seems to me a similar argument can be made about George Lucas, though it's debatable which of his characters he best matches. Ever since The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones I've had this fanciful theory that he was a double for The Emperor and, as a more benevolent kind of master manipulator, that he was intentionally making terrible movies so that his somewhat weak Return of the Jedi would look better by comparison. And, thus, he would raise the stock of his original trilogy. Just a silly theory. But he's probably a better fit for Anakin Skywalker because, if we accept the harshest criticisms of Lucas, both men have had promising careers turned inside out by the corrupting influence of power and technology. I'm not the first to point out that Lucas's use of computer generated effects and other technical gimcrackery seems to be propping up his sagging powers as a director, just as Anakin comes to rely on the life-support doo-dads in the Darth Vader suit. It's not hard to connect Harrison Ford's quip that Lucas would probably prefer to work with just computers, no actors, to Obi-Wan's remark that Anakin/Vader is "more machine than man." (Which, on the man/machine spectrum would make him less human than Robocop, but more human than a brain in a jar.) What really drives the analogy home, though, is the "promising career" angle in that young Lucas (along with his chums Coppola and Steven Spielberg*) was originally hailed as a fresh and off-the-scale talent set to revitalize Hollywood, just as, yeah, you can see where this is going -- little Anakin, balance of the Force, "You were the Chosen One." So what we have is the original trilogy showing us Lucas at his best and Anakin/Vader at his most powerful, and the recent films about how both men get fucked up beyond all recognition. Unless, of course, Revenge of the Sith beats the odds and is as good as the early reviews** suggest. In which case both theories are shot to hell. Also, Ewan McGregor is a dead ringer for Chewbacca, and producer Rick McCallum is really IG-88 and three Jawas. -------------------- * You know you've made it when your name is recognized by the MS Word spellchecker. It also knows the word "Jedi" but not "Sith." ** Bear in mind that the earliest reviews for Attack were also very positive, the AP review leading with the words "He fixed it." |
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| Wednesday, May 4th, 2005 |
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Some people seem to think that newspapers and magazines only exist to serve as their own personal 411 service. Like the guy who called me today, who talked in circles for about five minutes before we finally got to the following point: ME: Oh, you want me to look up the phone number for the Bruce Willis movie that's shooting in town. HIM: Yes. ME: The one that's shooting right down the block from you, you say? The same one that's listed on the OMDC website? HIM: Yes. ME: And you're not a subscriber, you say? HIM: No, I'm not. ME: [click] |
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LiveJournal for Sean Davidson.
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