a most epic engagement

You will be interested to know that yesterday I defeated Anne Hathaway in a staring fight. Roundly.

I am once again getting far ahead of myself, so to give some time for my liver and kidneys to catch up (I love those guys) I will hop backwards in time to this past Tuesday at precisely noon p.m., when I parked my outrageously cool 1982 Yamaha XS 400 motorbicycle in front of the offices of Urban Casting on Homer Street in Vancouver. I was there to fulfill my lifelong dream of being a human prop, out of focus in the background of movies. This is one of those easy dreams, since they'll take on just about anyone as an extra. They took me.

It's really, really tempting to make this a super long post and explain to you curious people everything I now know about the lives and habits of the bottom feeders of the film industry, but my Internet card doesn't quite reach the source electronic thingy in my landlord's house. As a result, I'm typing this while sitting in my sweet-action cherry red '91 Volkswagen Golf muscle car, freezing my little fingers off.

So I'll cut all that out for now and stick to the important part about crushing Anne Hathaway, whom you will remember, of course, from her previous Hollywood forays as principal person in "The Princess Diaries" and "The Devil Wears Prada". Miss Hathaway is currently in Vancouver shooting a film entitled "Passengers" under the direction of one Rodrigo Garcia, whose father (you will be fascinated to know) is Nobel prize-winning novelist Frederico Garcia Lorca - who wrote a really befuddling book entitled "Cien Anos de Soledad", among others.

I, as one of the newest additions to the Urban Casting Grind, was given the opportunity yesterday to be camera fodder for this same movie. I will skip a lot of sign-in and costume details and plop you at the top of the steps on the second floor of the UBC law library, where I and four other people chosen out of the 150 extras on set had been escorted. I looked down the long, moldering rows of legislative nonsense and there she was, looking much smaller in the flesh than you'd expect, had you seen her previously in the theatre, where she was about twelve feet tall.

I peered at her a while and then was then plopped down at a table about ten feet away from her without direction of any kind, so I fell to reading "Slaughterhouse Five" and making an active effort to keep my eyes from boggling. It wasn't that hard, actually. It is a very good book. Still, I couldn't help taking chances and sneaking glances (when the cameras were not rolling) and wondering how this thin, pale (fairly short) little snippet could actually be a raving Hollywood beauty. Beautiful, yes. But not a goddess.

She was most decidedly human-looking. Despite all her inherent mortality, though, the allure of fame shrouded her in translucent magic, so that my eyes kept bouncing of their own accord away from Vonnegut's writing and over towards the Princess.

For about forty-five minutes I played this little game, pretending to be professional and trying not to be "one of those guys" whom movie stars are always having to avoid. I was pleased as pie at my incredible self control. So controlled was I, in fact, that when she walked off set behind me and brushed me with the hem of her garment, I neither screamed that I'd been healed, turned to look, nor acted upon the whelming urge to trip her. After another five minutes I was excused, sent back to "holding", and introduced to the reality of being an extra - an afternoon of waiting.

Around five o'clock I was plunked back into the action and after about two hours as a fuzzy little blip waaaaay back on the horizon, I found myself mouthing and miming a conversation with my new old friends, Bill and Ivon, about fourteen feet from her ladyship, directly opposite the camera. This was a longer scene and I was to be on camera, just below and between both the starlet and her conversation partner for most of it. I pulled out my best acting chops, ate them with a flourish and proceeded to act as though I weren't even a little bit out of focus (which I undoubtedly was).

Now, you may not know this, but movies aren't usually shot in just one take. They can shoot up to eight zillion takes from, like, four angles, depending, so an actor might say a line anything from one to twenty-four zillion times. In between each of these times, Annie (as the director kept calling her) would be circled by a group of women, who'd primp her, pet her, and spritz her with water (it was theoretically raining outside).

During one of these moments, it occured to me that being an extra was not my career of choice. I was not a recently graduated theatre student, hoping desperately to make it. I was just a dude doing something random for fun. I realized that I did not need to worry about protocol, or professionalism, or whatever, because if I got fired I wouldn't care and after that day I would most likely never see her again.

So I stared. Flagrantly. She had at that moment launched into singing "Dankashen" (which you'll remember from the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off) to herself. I stared until she stopped. And then the inevitable happened: eye contact. I didn't flinch. I just kept staring. I stared with all my might. I stared with both my eyes and a few of my more sensitive pores. She stared back.

Primp, primp, went the pudgy make-up lady with the red-flecked hair. Spritz, spritz, went the eager water spritzer girl with the water-spritzing bottle. Circled her they did, messing about, but she and I remained locked in classic heroic combat - finite man against goddess, Hercules (that's me) brazenly facing his Aphrodite. The spritz lady came between us, allowing little Annie a moment's rest in which (I like to think) she undoubtedly rested by glancing away. I stared on, undaunted, and when the spritz lady moved over to Miss Hathaway's right shoulder her eyes were locked, again, on mine.

She said something to some people behind her, making them laugh. I could tell she was mocking me, taunting me, flaunting her cool reserve in my face. Another fifteen seconds passed without a break. Sweat was pouring off me now and I wondered if I could survive. The tension was causing the air between us to vibrate, like heat waves on a summer day in the Mojave. And then she broke, turned, and walked away to her mark. It was over.

If you ever meet her, this Miss Hathaway, and remind her of that moment, I don't doubt she will feign ignorance. For the rest of yesterday, I know, she hid her disgrace behind a wall of affected disdain, pretending as she walked by that she did not even see me, was not aware of the definitive blow I'd dealt her - but she knew. Oh yes, she will long remember the day she met one Joshua Barkey, extra extraordinaire. She will think twice, I wager, before she considers returning to this rainy, dismal northern land, this hometown of her defeat.

---

Being an extra, they say, is about having the right look. You do what you're told, make no noise and maybe, if you're lucky, the casting director will like your look and choose you to be a featured extra, one of the lucky few who get recognizable moments in the sun. Yesterday, I had that look. I walked on that set, made my mark, and walked away.

pleurisy

You mark my words: the time will come when doctors will be little more than glorified computer technicians.

It's two a.m. and my pleurisy is keeping me awake. Pleurisy is a viral-based inflammation in the pleural cavity - the lining between the lungs and the inside of the ribcage. It hurts like a motherfool and there's nothing you can do about it but tape a pillow to your chest, take anti-inflammatories, and curse yourself for having to breathe to stay alive. I just wasted two and a half hourse down at the hospital so a doctor could tell me that. That, and oh yeah, "it's going to get worse before it gets better".

I call it a waste because I already knew this. I knew I had pleurisy.

How? Well, first I paid attention to my inner kinesthetic sense and identified the source of the pain as my pleura using some basic anatomical knowledge gleaned from that industrial first aid course I took last year. Then I googled it along with some key terms about my symptoms, and presto, magnifico - pleurisy! There was my diagnosis, symptoms, and treatment in five pages of text.

I printed it out and, because the pain was keeping me up and I had nothing better to do, I hopped in my car and went down to emergency at the hospital six minutes from my house. Socialized medicine in Canada means that hospital waiting rooms are a cheap source of entertainment when it feels like every time you take a breath you're getting punched, hard, in the ribs. It's free, once you pay your premiums, and you get to hang out with a bunch of people worse off than you. There really is something great about the humanity of a hospital waiting room. Like Lawrence, who doesn't recognize his name when the nurse calls it because "everbody calls me Larry". Or the octogenarian dozing contentedly while his wife pinches a bloody nose. Or the nifty magazines.

I thought about showing the triage nurse my five pages of pleurisy, but when I ignored her first misguided question and started to fill her in on the pertinent details she gave a little snort and a half-disguised eye roll - the kind of eye roll that says, "here we go again, another Dr. Amateur Knowitall". I stopped, dropped it, ignored her roll and answered her blunt-trauma questions.

Then I waited.

I know I said before that I hate waiting, but it's not so bad when I'm doing it for, you know, spit and giggles. Eventually a nice-looking nurse took down my important details - like who to call when my spleen ruptures - and I was told to sit down and wait some more. I waited. Eventually, I was ushered into a curtained cubicle, where I waited some more.

An officious nurse in her early fifties came in, poked and prodded me, asked some questions, hmmed about my symptoms, then left. I waited some more. She came back and gave me a hospital gown to put on. For a second, I thought maybe my little medical adventure was about to include some sweet-action public nudity, but she said I could keep my pants on. Then she closed the curtain and left (for policy's sake or my squeamishness, I don't know) and I put the thing on.

I put it on backwards - with the open part facing forward - because it looked better, because she didn't tell me which way to put in on, and because I figured her reaction when she came back in would be worth an inward chuckle. I waited some more. She came back in, started, apologized for not telling me which way to put it on, and left again for a long time while I switched it. Sure enough, I chuckled.

When she came back, she had a stethescope. I love stethescopes - they're little round cold magic portals into the mysteries of your guts. She stethescoped me, asked a few more questions, and left. I picked up a copy of The Economist and learned how the oppressed asians are dodging The Great Firewall of China through the use of proxy web browsers, how a dutch guy made solar power a viable option, and how cell phones might one day be implanted in your brain. Fascinating stuff. Worth the trip.

After all that, a doctor in green scrubs came in and repeated the litany I'd been through twice already. She prodded me all over, made me take a bunch of excruciatingly deep breaths, and left. I waited some more. She came back and sent me down the long hallway to the Xray room. There are probably few things as creepy as a dimly lit, empty hospital hallway after hours, but I managed to suppress the temptation to let out a bloodcurdling scream. The Xray bit was fun, too, except for the whole part about liquifying my organs with radiation.

I waited some more, then the Xray technician sent me back to my cubicle.

Where I waited a lot more. I read about Burgundy wines in National Geographic, how the U.S. can't keep on occupying Iraq in Newsweek, and about the plight of black people during the fifties in the literature anthalogy I'd brought along for good measure.

The doctor, at long last, came in. "You have a condition called pleurisy", she said, and then proceeded to repeat to me the information I had read at home two and a half hours before. I nodded and tried to look like an enthralled recipient of medical wisdom from on high. Then I thanked her and her fellow preistesses of the great Rx, said goodbye to my cursing, whining, puking, bleeding fellowsufferers, hopped into my car and drove home in the freshfound knowledge that I had pleurisy.

That's why I figure in the future it is all going to be done by computers, which are going to come with little medical-testing apparatii, like disposable pinprickers that scan your blood and tell you the exact day and time when you contracted the disease that will most likely kick your bucket.

So if I knew all about what I had ahead of time, why did I go to the hospital? Was it just to waste my tax dollars and snork, nose held high, at the inefficiency of socialized medicine? Maybe. Or maybe I was unwilling to proceed without being assured by a professional that I wasn't fatally hemorraging and apt to die from a tension pneumothorax.

Most likely, though, it just felt good to be reassured after two point five hours of my precious, pain-wracked time that I was, in fact, worthy of the title of Dr. Amateur Knowitall.

peoples is peoples

It is a rather different bucket of fish, of course, getting a motorcycle license in Peru. In Pucallpa, for instance, there is the additional requirement of a physical, to determine if you are blind, paraplegic, or a raging drunk. This can, of course, be waived for a small fee – or if the examiner happens to know your father and is therefore qualified to pronounce you a strapping, fit young fiddle.

Next, you have to take a written test. Again, there is a small fee. Being a north American and unable to understand complex written Spanish traffic jargon, you will be allowed to ask the examiner for a restatement of the question, at which point he will say something cryptic such as, “La respuesta para pregunta numero cinco es C.”, which you, being agile of mind, can take to mean that you should check the box next to the big letter “C”.

You pay another small fee, take a driving test (or not, if you know the examiner) and SNAP! you’ve got yourself a license.

This all sounds very corrupt and contemptible, I know. But try, for a moment, to think of it through human eyes. Corruption is systematized and poverty is always hounding at the door, so it becomes very, very difficult not to play the game. While your average Poor Louie must pay bribes to exist, the cops who give the tests aren’t much better off, and they have to be very careful not to set the fees too high, or no one will be able to afford to take them. The masses unable or unwilling to pay test fees can always be caught on the road and forced to pay “paperwork costs”, but the police force is stretched thin and there is only so far you can push an impoverished, desperate people before things start to get ugly. It was not so long ago that being an authority figure of any kind made you a target of violent Marxist terrorist retribution.

Plus, everybody is doing it, and there is really no end to how low people will sink under the guiding light of “everybody’s doing it”. Cheating at business, for instance, or going just an eensy-weensy bit over the speed limit. These are the small ways pretty much everybody fudges the line in North America, where the rule of law is pretty dang all-pervasive. We can sit here all hoity-toity at being born into this place, but the truth is that if you move the line of common, accepted behavior, it doesn’t take too much of a shove for us all to wander into the land of corruption, bribery, and collusion with the Nazis.

I’m not trying to justify it, mind, and I still think injustice is worse when there is more of it. Still…

I happen to have watched a few episodes of that 24 show, and the head dude in there, Mr. Sutherland, says something about some guys in his commando office or whatever who had been caught taking bribes – something to the effect that they weren’t bad people, they just compromised one little time, and every time you compromise it gets a bit easier to do it the next time, because compromise becomes part of your character.

I got my Canadian motorcycle license two days ago, and I did not have to bribe anybody, or be anyone’s second cousin. I just paid my fees, took my tests, and Bob became my uncle, as they say.

Still, there were compromises. For instance, I broke the law by riding to my motorcycle skills test without a supervisor. I justified it by saying that I had to get there to take the test to be able to ride without a supervisor, so it was a catch-22. Besides, the test people have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy because they know that most people won’t get a supervisor to come in with them – so it is almost like I had official sanction. Almost. But the fact remains that if I had made abiding by the law a top priority, I could have found a way.

Corruption and compromise are worked through the character of every person on this planet. Those who are more successful at maintaining their integrity often throw the benefit they may have done themselves out the window by wallowing in smug self-righteousness. Still, the first step towards change is acknowledging that change is necessary.

So I say thumbs up to the forces that demand accountability. Thumbs up to cops (God love ‘em), and thumbs up to fighting tooth and nail to preserve the lost cause of character. There is nobility in lost causes, and we be nobles here, each one.

the golden slot

I hate waiting.

In the broad hallway of the education building at Simon Fraser University I stop to look at a large oil painting hung on the southern wall. It depicts a black-cloaked figure, faceless for the shadows, standing against a wall next to some urinalesque, broken-down objects, artifacts of some foregone industrial conclusion. Through the glass doors way down to my right I can see the drabness of the heavy fog blanket smothering the campus, and I think of what I have been told – that this school has the highest suicide rate in North America.

This could be a myth, promulgated to give the “enemy” a darker air at inter-collegiate sporting events. Nonetheless, I find myself eyeing the faces of the students walking by, wondering if there might be more to their occasionally dour visages than an unpleasant hangover or an overbearing professor. Still, I am excited to be here, dropping off my application for admission into the Master’s of Art Education program. My friends who have studied here, Curtis and Yoey, have always spoken highly of the professors, and everything I have heard about the program and its director draws me in, suggesting that I will flourish in here – challenged and expanded in ways I happily cannot anticipate.

Down the hallway I proceed, left and into the education building, where the standard overworked secretary and her glowing assistant direct me to the “golden-plated mail slot”. Schloop it goes and then I am walking away, to wait.

I hate waiting.

Will they open the doors? Will I be allowed to walk the hallowed halls and bow before intellectual giants? Will I have the courage to challenge them, to abandon intellectual fear as I struggle to balance the humility of wise studiousness with the arrogance inherent in being academic? In that legal-sized manila envelope, schlooped through the brass-gold slot and lying in some tray, or spread out on some laminated desk is my best foot, stuck firmly forward. There are glowing references from people who believe in me, glowing references from me (attempting, as always, to believe in myself), and a sample, written at the behest of the program director, of my thoughts on the meaning of art and art education.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Writing Sample for Dr. Stuart Richmond, SFU

When I was four years old my dad pasted a large, fantastical Peter Pan poster on a piece of particle board and mounted it on the wall of the room my brother and I shared. I was fascinated with it, as all the vibrant colors and cavorting characters easily transported me to another world, a world where reason and rules were not nearly as important as imagination and fun.

Then a tragedy occurred – boyish enthusiasm and the corner of a metal Tonka truck conspired to tear a gash from the magical masterpiece, leaving behind a glaring strip of white. After a prolonged session of tussling and name calling, my brother and I dragged dad into the room to show him the eight-inch long, four-inch wide triangular tear on the bottom left of the poster. He calmly surveyed the damage, took down the poster board, and got a twenty-four color marker set out of the desk. Then, with his gigantic, dad-sized magnifying glass in his left hand, he proceeded to fill in the white space with color: finishing out the edges of flowers, coloring in the beach and imagining the details of the mostly-missing pirates’ chest, heaped with gold.

My dad is not an artist in the traditional sense. Looking back, I can remember obvious discrepancies between the polish of the original and the awkwardness of my dad’s reproduction: the coins were too yellow, the flowers too blurry and the sand too flat. But watching him work I fell under the thrall of the process of creation, reveling in the discovery of heretofore unimagined treasure.

I believe that the true magic of that moment arose from the discrepancy between the art being made and that which it was intending to duplicate. If my dad had merely pasted the original triangle (which had been too damaged by the incident and subsequent fight) back into place, the whole experience would have faded off into that chasmic black hole that is my memory. What made it stick was that dad was looking at something I perceived as real and using his imagination to create an illusion of continuity in such a way that if I unfocussed my eyes a bit, his creation would disappear into the greater reality.

I believe in a Greater Reality. I believe that Reality exists independently of my opinions and feelings about It. As an inevitable result, I often feel as though I am a fool for maintaining Its existence. Nonetheless, I hold that one of the most important functions of art in the life of a human being is to allow him or her to explore that Greater Reality through creative acts in a way that the purely rational mind, by its very nature, can never do.

Make no mistake. I am not an anti-rationalist. I believe that reason is, by and large, the dominant mode by which I will inevitably perceive the world. Attempts in artistic and philosophical endeavors to deny the pervasiveness of reason are doomed to self-defeat. This is evidenced by the fact that painters who ignore the rules of structure and balance create unappealing work. Nevertheless, it is the ratiocentricity of the modern mindset that today’s artist must attempt to counterbalance. At its worst modernity, in its obsession with the mind, neglected the heart (or soul, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it) – thereby killing itself. While it was right to propose that the heart cannot function without the mind, modernity neglected to remember that the mind without the heart is dead. The problem is that having arrived at that point of realization (standing there, holding a lifeless heart), a person is incapable of arguing his or her way back into a more balanced way of being. The mind cannot reason its way to the heart. This is where art steps in. It forces the mind to reconnect to the heart, opening what may very well be the only channels by which we as humans can touch upon Reality in any meaningful way.

What is this Reality of which I speak? To my mind, it is paradox. It is mystery and it is ignorance – not entirely, I don’t think – but enough to make things interesting. This Reality is not anti, but rather supra-reason. It both includes and exceeds reason. The rational mind hates this and goes into conniptions to try to reassert dominance. It boxes. It names. It creates symbols for things as a means to control them. It does this because the motive force behind reason is almost always a desire for power. Power (and its bedfellow, knowledge) can be used for good – but without a strong counterbalancing humility, it inevitably corrupts the person who holds it.

From this comes all manner of (dare I say it?) evil. The inclusion of art in a person’s education and life is a way of stepping back and saying, “No, wait! Explore, don’t explain! Allow yourself to get lost in the process of creation. Abandon, for a moment, the tyranny of a solely rational, linear mindset in favor of a way of being that allows you to move forward without first ensuring that the path is sound. Follow your guts.”

As soon as I write that, though, I find myself recoiling from the inevitable counter-punch. Remember, oh remember, the folly of uncontrolled passion. What horrid things are done (what awful, muddy and bloody canvases are painted!) when the heart of a question beats un-moderated by the mind.

This is why people must be educated simultaneously in the spirit and technique of the art they propose to learn. While love of the piano is killed when all one ever does is play scales under the monotonous tyranny of the metronome, without a solid foundation the pianist will never be able to forget the rolling complexities of Rachmaninoff’s notes and dive, soul-tinglingly, into what one of his pieces really means. If Picasso had never studied the mathematics of composition and the significance of color, he would never have left generations with the brutal, real exploration of war that is Guernica.

The call of a teacher of the arts is to equip students with the tools to continue this journey and then to teach in such a way that they can continue not merely in the knowledge of how to create in such a way that others can find common rational touch-points with which to connect, but also why they would want to do so. That, I believe, is what good art and good art education is all about – a struggle to bring together the mind and heart to explore what it all might mean. Good art reaches out a quivering finger in an unending, never-arriving attempt to touch upon Reality – not the imaginary reality our grasping minds fabricate to keep questions at bay – but the real, wondrous deal.

There are endless directions I could have taken this current, written exploration of the Reality I so faintly perceive. Art is so many things. Writing, however, as with all art forms, carries its own limitations, so within the confines of these four pages I have narrowed my vision in an attempt to shoot straight at the bare bodkin of the matter. Even though I think I have managed to aim true, tomorrow I will wake up to find the target moved. For today, however, it all comes back to a small child watching in awe as his dad falteringly attempts to bridge the rip between the Way Things Are and the way they are perceived to be. For me, today, this is why art really matters.

kick my teeth in

My cat fell in the toilet last night, but if you think I'm going to stoop to that level for a story, you are wrong.

Pretty funny, though, hey? I'm just lying there in bed, reading and "SPLOOSH!" out comes a soaking cat. No details, though, on how clean or otherwise that water may have been. I mean, beyond the standard putrescence.

Let's talk about something else.

Like Ravi Zacharias, whom I think is pretty cool. He says something to me the other day, literarily speaking, that G.K. Chesterton said to him. Now, normally you gotta question a guy who goes by his initials. I mean, what's he hiding? But this Chesterton guy is pretty much the most primo cat I have almost never read.

Chesterton said that there is a difference between pessimism and sorrow. That was all - or at least all that was quoted.

It got me thinking, though, because I tend to worry about all these things I rattle on about, that I'd like to see changed. Am I wallowing in pessimism? Am I addicted to its better educated cousin, cynicism, and the sense of superiority it so often holds hands with? Maybe. But I hope not.

I hope, rather, that I am authentically, usefully responding to the sorrow that is (and, I believe, should be) my response to this tragically broken world. This is my hope: that I never lose faith and abandon sorrow for blindness, but that I temper this sorrow with humility and an abiding sense of my own complicity. If arm-chair cynicism becomes the seat I occupy, then I'm more than a part of the problem, I'm a pud.

I'm asking you (and because we're freinds, I know I can do this), if this becomes the case, to track me down, knock me over, and kick my teeth in.