an extremist, for once, fights back

In February of 2003 I was hitching a ride down the east coast of Vancouver Island to the Nanaimo Ferry Terminal with one of my treeplanting employers and we were talking about my thoughts on poverty and personal responsibility.

"That's all well and good, " he said, "and I applaud your idealism - but just wait. One day you'll wake up with kids. They'll need things - things like new hockey skates - and you'll start to do what you need to do to make that happen. Idealism is great - for the young - but the real world is a bit different."

Today I sit in that same employer's house, surrounded by the accoutrements of the work of this man - cocooned by his generosity in sharing what he has, beyond obligation, with me and my oil-site-reclamation crew on unexpected days off brought about by two feet of snow where we were set to work. As an employer, he doesn't need to do this. But he is feeding and sheltering us anyway, saving us a lot of money.

At the library yesterday I picked up a Snowboard Canada magazine (from 2003, coincidentally) and in it found an interview of musician Pedro the Lion, which quotes a line from his album, Control: "Have you ever seen an idealist with grey hairs on his head?" Things, as they say, fall apart. Even, perhaps, the idealism of youth.

Right now in my wife Anya's womb grows our first child, a lime-sized, soul-stirring human who will apparently wrench off my arms and beat me with them. Metaphorically speaking. I sit here a province away in a summer that is not going quite as planned, in which I will be lucky to earn half of what I did last year. I think of my "successful" friends - of the comfort and security of their warm, spacious homes - and I feel my ideals slip just a bit more. I revel in the generosity (the wealth) that allows me the comfort to sit and write, thus, with food in my belly and more leisure time than I can poke a stick at. I think of being a father, a provider, and the "extreme idealism of my youth" seems to slough off like an outgrown, dead skin, an irrelevance that is then caught by some memorial breeze to waft away to the far recesses of my mind.

A part of me - a large part (I hope) - wants to scream "SCREWITALL!", to take up lance and shield and dash gallantly after the dragons of depravity; but a compendium of forces brickwalls this desire, insisting that I'd be a madfool laughingstock, tilting at windmills. Dragons are there, these forces croon, but they're not as insidious nor defeatable as you may think. What are these Voices, I wonder? I want to call it laziness, or vice, or selfish pride, but an awareness rises within me of my grand complicity with the dark powers my idealistic youth yearns to destroy.

I drive the roads, eat the food and bask in the freedoms my corrupt culture allows. I lounge (wallow?) in the mediocrity of my own sapped will, content(?) to plod along in implied consent to the vile globaleconomic practices that make this luxury, this life, a possibility - all the while feebly ranting and attempting to maintain in dozens of itsy-bitsy ways that I am not like Them. That I, at least, am still capable of distinguishing between "I need" and "I want". That I yet make small economic choices that show that my identity is tied not to the socioeconomic vagaries of a pop culture gone mad with masturbatory spending, but rather to the "higher and greater" truths tying together the Ultimate Reality in which I have - if not a lot of understanding or knowledge - at least a noticeable amount of Faith.

But I am no different. There is no weakness, no unhealthy common behavior or attitude, no sin of humanity of which I am not, at least occasionally, guilty. I am a whore, an illegitimate son, a liar and a thief, a murderer who condones the suffering of the poor, weak and downtrodden that he might live in just a bit more hedonistic opulence. I am a narcissist, rolling around blindly in a self-obsessive compulsiveness. I, too, have willfully blinded myself to the distinctions that in Reality exist between desire and basic necessity. I, too, am a willing victim of my own temporality, believing more in the fractal influences of emotion and experience than in Truth, of which I hypocritically (and often loudly) claim to be a proponent.

I am cruel, manipulative and weak. I dislike myself for my social awkwardness, diminutive frame and lazily underdeveloped talents, and so I recourse in my shame to the pride that puffs up, dwelling instead to others on my moderately handsome face, my moderately interesting life, and my moderately developed abilities. I shout from the rooftops, "I am ME! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" I expostulate loudly on, drowning out the voices, a piffling fart on the wind - full of sound and fury but signifying only the stench of a life in decay.

Make you no mistake, though, reading this. I am not a drowning, self-loathing rat. For every nugget of self-ire I posses in some measure, I reckon, an understanding of my own inherent worthwhileness - that my complicity in the dankness of my kind is a birthright bestowed with an equal part in its hope, it's potential for good.

Here, I think, is where I can hang my blindfold, the Truth that can allow me, at least momentarily, the clarity to see dragons for what they really are. At that moment in which I am hanging by a thread over an infinite swirling mass of my own good and evil potentiality I can grasp a minute awareness of what IS. In those fragmentary, glass-darkly glimpses, the warring factions of Pride and Self-Hatred are becalmed and the Truth allows self-love, humility and the love of Others to fuse in a paradoxical unity that is both before and beyond my oh-so flawed and troubled, temporary self.

Usually, I must admit, I am an idealist in the worst sense - the sense in which my extreme ideas blossom into thorny, offensive bloom from the soil of self-righteous indignation at what is indisputably a world gone mad. Sometimes, though, despite myself, Reality shines through the cracks. Truth wins.

Should I give up on ideals? Should I abandon the inevitable extremism of a striving after Truth merely because, I, too, stumble repeatedly over the obstacle of my flawed self? I think not. The difficulty of knowing who one's enemy is (when it is, so often, yourself) is not, as a more moderate thinker might say, a proper incentive to abandon the quest in favor of more reasonable, attainable goals. It is, rather, a rousing call to renewed action tempered by a spirit of constant introspection. When you choose to stop fighting evil because you, too are evil, this is what happens: evil wins (at least in you). The answer is not to quit, it is to fight both harder and humbler.

The world is a Poostorm, whipped into being by us, our ancestors, malignant forces and primarily, I believe, by the way God allowed things to be. I do not understand this and my tendency in contemplating it is to despair. I cling, however, to hope in the potential of everyman towards good and change. I believe we're fragments of a Good God's Self and, as such, have as our true nature the desire, ability and character to slough off lies and be the TRUTH. Maybe not much, or for long (not with our history) - and yet...

I believe, also, in Jesus (although I'd be hard-pressed, often, to tell you why). I believe in his Truth and example. I believe that he is the Truth, despite all the lies foisted on the weak in his name and despite the legions who've hijacked his message and fashioned it into a Religion in their own image and with the gratification of their paltry Selves as its central tenets. I also believe that Jesus is and always was the Voice of God to the world and that he is involved in an eternal process of communicating the character of God to the world in almost any way imaginable, if we but listen. I believe he wants us to listen - yearns for it - but that he will not force it, because coerced love is no love at all.

I cannot prove this, any of it, in an entirely satisfactory way to your entirely rational mind - but I believe it and falteringly put my hope in it, nonetheless. I do this despite nagging fears and doubts and self-loathing.

I may be a fool, but I believe what Jesus taught about the dark, proud, selfish heart of people and I believe in hope of the possibility of an upside-down kingdom in which the mechanics of pride, power and selfishness are turned on their heads. I believe that Jesus talked more about money than anything else because he knew that money is the crux upon which our little world spins - the grand indicator of where, in fact, our loyalties lie. I believe in an older, deeper magic. I believe without knowing. Often I believe this (yes, you humanist pigs) because I need to believe it, but I defy you to show me a better focal point for my belief, one with the potential for better (and more true) results on a personal, familial, cultural, national and global scale. Idealism and Youth be darn-diddly-arned - I'm holding out for an Idealism of Truth.

That is my extremism and I, despite my arrogant, lazy, selfish self, am going to cling to it until my fingers get worn clean away...

...then I'll use my arms.

the wages of sin

Whose sin? I'm not sure. The petroleum industry? Ours? Either way, it seems a dismal waste of breathing air to walk a crew of six in for a kilometer to spend half a day planting five hundred willow trees on a dust-choked lease site at 30 trees a plot. For the non-planters in the crowd, that is a miniscule number of trees planted at a tree's pace in a maximul amount of time. Nonetheless, we trudge on, content to do our part to assuage the conciencii of our collective employers... due diligence and aren't we such a green oil company and so on and so forth.

Until next time, be safe. Ridiculously safe.

reclamate the world

Tommorow, I will become a grass planter. My crew's first job as oil-site-reclamation-specialists is to plant grass grown in plugs on defunctified rig sites. And so, suited in reflective-striped blue coveralls, orange hard hats, gloves, safety glasses and CSA approved steel-toed boots, we will venture where pretty much no one has gone before.

While sites have been reclaimed, and planters have been called in to plant, there has never before been a crew of planters specifically assembled for the purpose of reclamation. We are the lazy elite. The chosen soft-core few with the eye of the kitten and the resolve of the jellyfish.

You can take those environmentally unfriendly petroleum products and burn them off with your ludicrous over-sized modicum transportatii, but somewhere out there in Alberta will be a two thousand square foot patch of dirt with fresh-planted grasslings swaying in the breeze, looking all natural and soothing and such. You can go there when your town gets unliveable. It'll be nice.

rednecksvilletown

I'm in Alberta now, at my uncle's house, having ridden my decrepit bike over four finger-numbing mountain passes. I have decided to celebrate this event by blog-publishing an article by a man named Ted Byfield, originally printed in the Alberta Report on December 2, 1985 and republished in a hardback entitled, The Book of Ted: Epistles from an Unrepentant Redneck. This is appropriate because Alberta, as everyone knows, is populated almost entirely by rednecks. So here we go...






The Playboy Revolution's Bitter Legacy of 'Freedom'






The western world learned last week, with a yawn, that one of the great revolutionary figures of the late twentieth century was ill, perhaps mortally ill. How callous we are. The news itself merited only a tiny squib in the back pages of the papers. Nobody, in other words, gave much of a damn. However this yesteryear revolutionary was not a person. It was, in fact, a magazine - Playboy by name. It is going very broke, and may fold. But, after all, nonchalant indifference to the historical moment - and to just about everything else, for that matter, was the sine qua non of the Playboy view of life was it not? "What kind of a man reads Playboy?" its promotion ads used to ask. The answer was an empty-headed ass, but it has taken thirty terrible years to figure that out, and the price has been beyond description.


To lay all the ills of our sick and sickening era on a single magazine and its publisher is, of course, a bit much. Hugh Hefner was nothing more nor less than a perceptive merchandiser, the man with the right product for the right market at the right moment. The moment was the mid-Fifties whose inhabitants for at least two generations had been hearing the liberal whining about fetters and censorship and taboos and "the personal freedom to choose." But the fetters, as Mr Hefner well knew, had already gone. Religion had been debunked by secularism, inhibition had been debunked by psychology, decency had been debunked by cynicism, and human responsibility had quietly retired in favour of something called human rights. The market was the middle-income, middle-aging male who was, as always, resentful of the social bond under which he laboured and endowed with an extraordinary capacity to feel sorry for himself. The product was as ancient as the species. It is called sex.


I was there when Mr. Hefner's half-clad ladies appeared in the Fifties, followed in the Sixties by ladies not clad at all. To denounce it as disgusting would be, I'm sure, the right thing to do. It would also be a lie. Certainly the conscience put up its case, but the case was lost in the raw extravaganza of the event. The grand no-no, the thing one dast not see, the curtained delight that lay hidden behind every smock, bodice and tight sweater, there i twas, all of it, for a mere buck, on every newsstand every month, a veritable seraglio of the most awesome pulchritude the imagination could possibly ask. How had that earthy Mr. Donne described it?


Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothe'd must be,
To taste whole joys.


There were the foreseeable prosecutions as the law of the state struggled in vain to replace the law of human nature and failed, as usual, to do so, as it has been failing ever since. Mr. Hefner, duteous defender of the Right to Choose, piously made his way to the bank.

There were, however, problems, chief among them the fact that the product was a fraud, the ultimate fraud of the unfulfillable fantasy. Pictures, unhappily, are not people. Mr. Hefner was not as it turned out actually in the business of sex. He was in the business of thrill. Thrill required novelty, and novelty required an inexorable slide into the slime. It was a descent Mr. Hefner, something of a romantic, one suspects, decided to forgo. Others, less inhibited began stealing his customers with the kind of photography we, as enterprising 12-year-olds in Washington, D.C., used to secretly seek out in the human anatomy section of the Smithsonian Institute. Thrill, however, demanded more yet. So the revolution went from there into the candid depravities that are now on sale in the magazine shelves of every corner store.

Pornography, however, is not the worst disaster occasioned by the Playboy revolution. It is the mere companion of another consequence of far graver dimension. For the appearance in the Fifties of Mr. Hefner's seemingly abandoned ladies was a signal to the simple-minded male of the day that the old rules had at last been lifted. Life-long vows no longer obtained. Familial obligation now negotiable. Fidelity had been repealed. To walk out, to choose one's "freedom," was no longer disreputable. It had become you might say, almost noble. The term "single parent" entered the vocabulary, and the single parent was nearly always a single mother.

The woman's reaction to this new-found male enlightenment was prompt, understandable and devastating. By the Sixties feminism had burst in all its fury. If the man would not sustain his share of the marital contract, then why should the woman? She, too, had rights. She, too, would have a "career". She called it freedom from servitude to the man. But it soon became clear that the worst oppressor was not the man. It was the child. It was from the child that she really sought escape. If need be, she would deny it the right to live, even if its life had already begun within her.


So now in the Eighties we have a stand-off between the two halves of the species. Since vows are considered worthless, we have trial marriages. We have public schoolrooms in which two out of three children are being raised by one parent. We have the highest divorce rate in history, a suicide rate that defies explanation, and a birth rate so low that a number of western nations fear virtual extinction within three generations. Finally, we have tens of thousands of bitter people facing old age alone and in crescent despair. They are, that is, "free", free of every human bond, of anything, in fact, that ultimately makes the difference between a life of all-encompassing purpose and one of total futility. Moreover they have produced to support them an alarmingly diminished generation. The discover themselves dependant on the children they did not have.


To attribute all this to poor faltering Mr. Hefner is, as I say, absurd. But to attribute it to the spirit and attitude of the age that produced him, and that he and his magazine eloquently espoused, is altogether accurate. He called it the "Playboy Philosophy." That philosophy has failed us, and miserably.

- Ted Byfield, December 2, 1985

bye bye stardom

You want to hear a cliche? Awww, c'mon - of course you do. What else is there than cliche, but silence? So here is yet another cliche: Hollywood is a meat market that will grind you up and spit you out and step on you.

I just thought I should explain why I quit the movie/tv industry. It really wasn't that, at all, though. I was actually having fun, allowing myself to get sucked into a world where you get paid just for standing around looking cool. I had promoted myself to A-List extra and had begun to spend time on set joking around, drawing attention to myself. When myself and a clump of extras were herded onto the set of the show Psych by our "handler", for instance, I hollered out loud enough for everyone to hear "OK, EVERYBODY, PAY ATTENTION! THE TALENT HAS ARRIVED!"

You have to understand that it's a no-no for background people to presume to rise up out of the background. Seen and not heard, y'know. But Psych is a comedy, so it seemed the right thing to do. Because yes, I am that shallow, and plus I didn't care because it was the last extraing I was going to be doing before heading back out to the bush for the summer.

That's right. Tomorrow I am hopping on my motorcycle with a duffel bag on my back full of planting and camping gear and riding over the Rockies to Alberta. I might even make it (my motorcycle is 25 years old and I am not a mechanic). Before I go, though, I thought I'd share one last tale from the world of "atmospheric background performing".

It is tempting to tell you all about how I met Lou Diamond Phillips and how we chatted deeply and meaningfully about the weather and about "the peoti scene in Young Guns", but that would betray the true nature of extraing. It's mostly just about sitting around, talking to the other extras.

OK, so the following adventure occurred on the set of Eureka, a TV show set in a small, government-built town in the U.S. populated entirely by certified geniuses, who invent nifty things like hoverboards and clever new ways to kill other people. The scene was a picnic on Main Street in the middle of summer, so even though the temperature was actually hovering just above freezing, we had to walk around in shorts and t-shirts for the shot, which was basically a whole bunch of different takes of picknickers hanging out in anticipation of an eclipse.

Now, the level of direction you receive from set to set as an extra varies greatly. In a pawn shop scene for the show Kyle XY, for instance, I was the only extra in the store, so the director went so far as to give me my "motivation" for the scene (you've just bought this guitar and you're itching to get home and play it) and to loudly dedicate the first rehearsal to me. This was all a joke, of course, since I was just doing a camera wipe, where you walk a couple feet in front of the camera, making a quick blur that breaks up the action.

On Eureka, however, I was given more general guidelines, like "just start over there and at some point end up over here". This left a lot to my discretion. So while I huddled shivering in my coat at the edge of the shot waiting for someone to shout the obligatory "CAMERA'S UP! SOUNDSPEED! ROLLING! BACKGROUND! ACTION!", I decided to go over and strike up a conversation with a mammoth of a man I'd been admiring (really, there isn't any other word) for most of the morning.

This guy was a tall blond Aryan guy who actually looked a lot like Brad Pitt. You could probably have fit two Brad Pitts into him, though. I mean, this man was a beast, a real monolith of a man. I had actually overheard a couple girl extras approach him, giggling, and ask to hang off his biceps. Still, he had on a perma-smile and looked to be a pleasant enough chap, so I sauntered his way. Now, normally you aren't allowed to make a peep on set. The microphones are very sensitive (it's surprising how quietly the actors say their lines) and so you have to mime and mouth your way through the scene. Still, it helps the authenticity if you're actually faking a real conversation, so you either read lips or, when you are far enough from the microphone to get away with it, whisper.

So here is the scene:

Eureka Background, Scene 1, Take One.

Actors:

Joshua Barkey: a diminutive (read, 140 lb wuss). Looks about 18 years old. A joker. Wears a blue striped shirt, khaki shorts and sandals.

The Beast: 300lbs of striated muscle straining to escape a t-shirt and jeans. He is handsome (in an "I can't lower my arms to my sides kind of way") and has a number of tattoos that somehow don't offset the disarming smile on his face.

Admiring Blond One: part of the scenery.

The Scene:

It is a bright summer day in the town of Eureka. Josh the Genius walks up to the Beast (also a genius), who is lounging on a reclining lawn chair surrounded by a small gaggle of admirers. They speak entirely in whispers.

Josh: Hey, man! I haven't seen you in forever!

Beast: No, way, it's you!

Josh: Yeah, man! Crazy running into you here! What's it been - like five, ten, fifteen minutes since we've seen each other (he refers, of course, to the craft services buffet back in extras holding).

Beast: No, dude, I think it's been more like years! Like five, ten, fifteen years!

Josh: Oh, yeah. Right. Fifteen years. What was it, back in third grade that we went to school together?

Beast: Oh, yeah. Man, that was a long time ago, I barely even recognized you.

Josh: Well, we've both changed a bit. I used to be a lot bigger than you back then.

(The Beast pauses. Starts. Almost reacts - but manages to pull himself together)

Beast: Oh, yeah...

Josh: Yeah, remember? I used to beat you up all the time in the lunch room. Ah, the good old days, eh?

(At this point, Admiring Blonde One, who has been captivatedly following the conversation, breaks in)

Admiring Blonde: Are you serious? Do you guys know each other? Are you for real? You've gotta be kidding me?!?

The Beast, turning to the Blonde: Um, it's called acting. We're actors. We're serious actors here, trying to do some serious acting. Maybe you could try it some time.

The Beast grins, widely. Josh and the Beast chuckle together, as if sharing some private joke. "CUT" yells the director. Exeunt.

_ _ _

And that's it. The end of the silliness. The end of Hollywood. Back to the real world of bending over and working for the Man.