Tuesday, May 22, 2001

I Am A Commercial!

The CANOE website reports that the guy who plays Joe Canada in the famous (in Canada, anyway) beer commercial is moving to the US to look for work.

"And Canadians are not happy," the article goes on, and though the actor insists he's not gone for good, "it's still a slapshot in the face of Canadians, who took to heart his 30-second TV spot for Molson beer."

When I read that, I spit out my beer (figuratively speaking, of course: for one thing, Molson's is swill, and for another, a Canadian does not spit out beer for any reason whatsoever).

The article added that "[a]n official in the heritage ministry suggested [the actor] be designated a person of 'national historical significance.'"

Now, Canada has had some big historically significant drinkers - our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, still smells like scotch over a century after his death - to name one, but let's remember two things about Joe Canada: first, he didn't write the thing - and this leads me to the second thing - He is an actor. He is not the voice of the Canadian Identity, he is not Johnny Canuck come to save us from evil. He just wants to work in his field. The last beer-commercial hero was the "If I wanted water, I'd ask for water" guy in the Labatt's Blue Light (another swill, I might add) commercials. Nobody ranted about him going south and getting the lead role on 'Ed.'

We have the Heritage Ministry wanting to declare an actor in a commercial 'historically significant.' How about the Heritage Ministry doing something helpful for something that's really historically significant, like coughing up some dough to keep the walls of the Fortress at Louisburg from crumbling, or preserving some parkland, or upgrading the War Museum? What about a few dollars for the CBC, the only network in the country that isn't a repeater station for 'Everybody Loves Raymond' or 'Friends' or whatever?

My name is Brian. And I am Canadian. I'm just not a Molson Canadian.

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Monday, May 21, 2001

Pope Art.

From the November 21st National Post:

A provocative art piece featuring a sculpture of Pope John Paul crumpled under a black meteorite fetched US$886,000 at a Christie's auction that broke sales records for several contemporary artists. The sculpture, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, caused a stir in Poland last December when two members of parliament removed the meteorite. The room-sized piece features a life-sized wax figure of the Pope felled by the meteorite and holding his processional cross, surrounded by shards of glass from a skylight the meteorite has broken through.

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Thursday, April 26, 2001

Jobless in Seattle. Well, eventually.

Hey! I got canned on Monday!

They've been restructuring at work (the high mucky-mucks at head office having determined that earnings of THREE BILLION DOLLARS isn't enough to support us anymore). Oh, and that's three billion in the first three months of the year...

I'm not bitter, disappointed or surprised. I was a little taken aback by the timing - I figured it was coming in August or September, but otherwise this is okay for me. I was going to go anyway - there's summer vacation on the west coast and (I hope) a green card by the end of August. For me, it's actually better than resigning. I get a package and I'm eligible for Employment Insurance. (Others have ranted elsewhere, volubly and indignantly, about the doublespeak perpetrated in that program's name, so I will leave the Canadian government alone and save my contempt for another time.)

So I'm playing out the string. Our last day (there are twenty or thirty of us) is at the end of May. We're sticking around to train our replacements, mostly.

Remember this, will you, in four or five months when I post from a computer in a public library, filled with fear and panic that I haven't got a job yet, okay? Or when I post that I've got a life rich with all the things that are really important, like enough to eat, good friends, a sense of humour and a wife and stepdaughter that I love more than I can say.

Of course, I have that now.

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Thursday, April 19, 2001

Space Cheese.

The explosion of fire, the shudder of the launch tower, the thickening and lengthening pillar of smoke that starts like a groan made visible and turns into a streak of power and fury and heat and fear and excitement and envy and awestruck, breath-held wonderment is a visceral event, even when seen on a TV screen two thousand miles away.

"We have main booster ignition and liftoff of Endeavour, extending the reach of the Space Station and extending partnerships on Earth."

Come again? I've never seen a launch in person, but even watching one on the six o'clock news stops my heart and my breathing for a moment. And then the announcer offers his utterly mindless, pointless, self-congratulatory and oh-so-corporate-sounding tag line.

"One small step for [a] man, and one giant leap for mankind" was poetry. You heard it and you knew what Neil Armstrong meant - everyone heard the other space boot drop and realized what a monumental thing had been accomplished. "Extending partnerships on Earth" sounds like they're opening another mall in the suburbs, or maybe it means Cisco just bought another company.

Maybe another Shuttle launch IS just a mall opening compared to going to the Moon, but even the new mall's slogan talks about joy and happiness and wonder and hope.

I'm already watching the rocket. I don't need them blowing smoke up my ass.

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Saturday, April 14, 2001

Vonnegut.

"So it goes," the Tralfamadoreans would say it Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five as they observed Billy Pilgrim and studied life and death here on earth.

I've been thinking about Tralfamadore a lot lately, mostly because I seem to have fallen into some kind of Kurt-Vonnegut-synchronous orbit and keep bumping into him, figuratively speaking.

It started a few weeks ago when my wife and I rented some movies for the weekend, one of which was "Breakfast Of Champions," adapted from Kurt's book of the same name. Around the same time, I stumbled across "God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian" at the library and, just last week, "Fates Worse Than Death."

Early in "Fates" he mentions Mark Twain, which struck me as a nifty coincidence because the other book I had checked out with it was Twain's "Life On The Mississippi." Then, last weekend, on top of a box full of new arrivals at our local used bookstore, I spotted "The Eden Express," by his son Mark. I'd read the chapter in which Kurt discussed Mark's book a few hours earlier.

Is it all part of some cosmic alignment? Mere coincidence? A sign from Kurt?

So it goes. So it goes.

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Friday, April 6, 2001

Armless.

The Telegraph Online reports that "a motorist with no arms is facing jail for defying a court order banning him from driving." He steers with his left foot and uses his right foot for the gas and brake.

He's been doing it for EIGHT YEARS, they say. One of his neighbours reported him to police.

Eight years. I have to wonder why the neighbour waited so long. Did the guy suddenly start using a cell phone while driving? Was he drinking coffee and weaving wildly across the M1? Did he give his neighbour the toe one morning as he raced off down the street?

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Thanks to the Telegraph Online, again, Things that make you say, "Yes, but is it ART?" Part II:

A British art gallery has put on an exhibition of absolutely nothing. There are no paintings or sculptures. Visitors have been simply confronted by the whitewashed walls of the huge hall at the Custard Factory arts centre in Birmingham, central England, reports Reuters. A few captions, written on scraps of paper or on a bus ticket, have been dotted around the walls of the display, titled Exhibition To Be Constructed in Your Head. However, Custard Factory spokesman Miles Grundy admitted to having doubts about the exhibit. "While this may be a good test of people's imagination, I personally prefer art you can see," he said.

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