Well, as you may have surmised if you are a regular reader of my old blog and my alan smithee’d psychosis blog and this one, I had a rough spring. Mostly it was because I got off meds due to a scare about the Rash, which I did get and survived and there are no scars, just a very broken heart and a VERY righteously angry ex-whatever. I don’t think we ever actually stated our relationship perameters so ex-whatever might make the most sense, especially since hir gender, while obviously bio-female and ultra femmey, has some definite boy characteristics to it. Anyway, the ORIGINAL issue was mainly that I had decided to transition and suddenly had to come to terms with it. Yeah, I don’t recommend trying to come to terms with gender reassignment while being in a mental health crisis with bad meds.

Anyway, my shrink doesn’t think I look like a boy, which if you saw my boobs you would have to agree with. But I am a guy, and so this summer I’m trying to come to terms with that, more specifically with learning how to be a nice guy and not an ASSHOLE!!! Ugh, oh man, I was so not into becoming an asshole. Anyway, the psych ward I was in didn’t really know where to place me in their system, so I ended up bunking with post menopausal women, who were kind of annoyed at me. And then the nursing staff got more annoyed when on my way out the door they finally got to see what I really think of contemporary psychiatric care in my new film. But overall it was a more pleasant experience than Montreal, which was just a snake pit.

Anyway, there IS a gender clinic in town. I went to my G.P. today and talked about it. She had a student doctor with her and said “Okay, tell us what happened to you.” (She had been visiting me regularly in the hospital, so it was mostly for the student’s benefit). I said “I had a manic episode and went into the hospital to get stabilized and now I am stabilized and I am still thinking about transitioning to male and I am thinking that I can’t see myself not doing it anymore.” And then she just asked how long I had been thinking about it and I said since I was a teenager, and she asked about my childhood and I said I had been spending most of my time with boys and then didn’t fit in with girls. And then I mentioned I had toenail fungus, which we looked at (ew, I know, but I may as well tell you how my doctor’s visit went). Anyway, it was the student doctor who knew of who in town ran the gender clinic or was involved with it anyway.

Chest Surgery is going to be the cost of like, a cheap Saturn car or something! T is about ten bucks every two weeks and it’s a pain in the ass (ha ha ha!). Mostly I am just surfing around looking for cost for everything. I want to get a packer sometime soon, for now I am just using the condom/hairgel packer, well, not even that because I am in a female only care home until september, which is kind of ridiculous, but the shrink and all the doctors were like “Woah, just, knock it off, deal with one thing first!” So the manic episode, clearly, took number one priority and rightly so. Nevermind that I was still coming out to everyone about being a tranny all the time. Well, not so much in the hospital.

I’m trying to learn a sport, basketball to be precise. I need to do something to start building muscle mass, something better than just sitting around on the internet. I’ve taken to wearing hats recently, wich given my penchant for sunstroke is probably a good idea. I’m trying to think of a new backpiece to get, first I wanted a monarch butterfly with David Suzuki’s head in it, and then I wanted a Pegasus, and anyway, not sure. The Pegasus still intrigues me. I’m considering taking fencing classes again, because I always liked the sport. Maybe I could become competitive!

As if I’m not already competitive in the film world. I am still ticked off that no one has noticed I’m up there with Miranda July. Maybe I have to make my first feature to be at her level now, Miss I Won At Cannes. Dammit! If Only I hadn’t had that manic episode. Then again, if I hadn’t had the first episode I wouldn’t have my screenplay. It’s kind of bizarre feeling like my only accomplishment is the completion of a feature film screenplay. And then again there would be some people who would be impressed by that. Maybe it is impressive and I’m just being too dammed hard on myself. Currently it’s in the hands of a producer relative who is reading it. I didn’t realize it was really about police brutality. I mean, it doesn’t really have a main antagonist, just The System, which really does come through as the antagonist to these characters, and the funny thing is that they also have to rely on it. Don’t we all?

Aside from that I applied for a program at the Banff Centre and am also applying to do Freak Show peepholes for Saskatoon that speak about gentrification in the Riversdale Area. The freaks are the upper class in my version. So we’ll see, it would be nice to get a $1000 artist fee sooner rather than later. And my dad could help me make them, hopefully.

Anyway, it’s been a weird ass spring and mostly I’m glad it’s over and mostly I’ll be glad when I get my work being made again. I have another idea for a Canada Council grant and someone suggested I do the aboriginal curatorial grant, I dunno. Maybe. It would be nice to get some video work into Saskatoon. There are little blips of shows and teeny festivals, but nothing major. A major film festival would really make a difference to the art scene in this town.

And then aside from that this summer I do psych rehab AND talk to the shrink about wanting to become a man. A tiny man. With tiny hands and feet. For a girl I have small feet even. Not too small to get toe fungus though.

Ew.

I have studied film and video at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver where I received my BFA. The main component of my career has involved DIY videos, often made with budgets under $200 and self produced. My career has taken me around the world, and my most controversial video, “Untouchable” is currently in the Outfest legacy collection at UCLA. More recent work has tackled the taboo subject of mental illness, in particular my own experiences with depression, which was then diagnosed bipolar disorder. My first video mentor, Maureen Bradley, has encouraged me to continue in this vein in order to disrupt the current view of persons with psychiatric disabilities as mediated in contemporary mainstream media. As a consumer of psychiatric medications, I was in particular influenced by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto to create my latest work, “Madness in Four Actions” which is a video collage of clips from The Miracle Worker transposed with text from various leading psychiatric activists and revolutionaries including R.D. Laing and text from “Mad in America: Bad Medicine, Bad Science, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.” During my last hospitalization I snuck my DVD copy of this video onto the ward only to be censored by the nursing staff who told me not to lend it or promise it out, even though it already premiered at the Mendel Art Gallery on January 17, 2007. My work is strongly influenced by the hope that people, even psychiatric cyborgs, should have the ability to make decisions concerning their own lives. The censorship of a film made by and for persons with psychiatric disabilities just goes to show that there are still societal taboos which must and can be shattered with media interventions.

Currently my practice has expanded to group performance art projects, “Urban NDN Interventions” is a new branch of work, which gathers First Nations artists and our allies to engage the public in peaceful confrontations with High Class actions. The first event, The Treaty Ascot, takes place at Marquis Downs in late summer where we will be crashing the horse track in fancy hats and tuxedos

You know, Bipolar Disorder is practically the Hollywood disease. I can think of no other illness that lends itself so readily to the film industry. I mean, a 15 hr day for six weeks at your job, you practically HAVE to be manic to be able to do that. The reason no one noticed my illness in film school is that in many ways, I fit in.

Kay Redfield Jamison was one of the first psychiatrists (and also has bipolar) to do a major investigation of creativity and bipolar disorder in her book Touched With Fire, which I recommend for anyone studying the connection between madness and the arts. In fact Emily Carr was probably the best school for a person like me to go to, not only because it’s one of the top art schools in the world, but also because I just clicked with the student body.

One Word: “Natasha!”

I mean, if you are a queer filmmaker and there isn’t really much if any of a festival here. Gary Varro does the fest down in Regina and apparently that one festival was enough, NOT! Oh man. So anyway, I do most of my filmmaking career outside of Saskatchewan, obviously, even though there is so much pressure to keep people here.

Did you know we had a Pride parade and it got barely a mention in the news? I mean, we’re not Winnipeg, that’s for sure.

And yet I have gone through the awkward 1st year back, with not, well no, there was trouble. For one thing I had a racist co-worker at the job I moved back here for and when the boss wouldn’t act on it I up and quit. Then my cousin died a week later. Then I moved back in with mum. Now I’m staying in a care home temporarily and having friends outside of who my mum knows. It’s pretty nice. I’ve got a date for canoeing! And, well what else? Oh, I have a new place to live starting September 1.

It’s funny that I am nervous about where I am living based on what I know of Saskatoon,
compared to my one year in the downtown eastside. I kind of think once you’ve done the Downtown Eastside that’s a kind of razorblade type of living that is hard to shake off. I mean, the street savvy don’t look anyone in the eye kind of living. You’d be amazed at the shit I walked past and survived. Well, maybe not if you read my old blog. I think Fit Of Pique is kind of an ode to that part of Vancouver and that part of my life. It’s old stuff, scary stuff. And I made it out alive, more or less. Broken maybe. No, not really, not anymore, but it did leave a lot of anger in my mouth, and the taste of righteous disabled broke anger is not something you can just spit out.

Class is a powerful thing, more so when you feel like someone doesn’t understand you because it feels like they never understood what being lower class is like. But at the same time, I think most everyone can understand discrimination. Someone once called me middle class. It was funny because at the time I was doing pharmaceutical market research AND being fucked over by Zyprexa.

So really, in the end, I think in this world we all feel disabled and powerless, especially when we look at the news. And still I think a lot of people are Mother Joneses and Ghandi’s and so on and so forth. Who knows if I even spelled his name right.

As for myself, I am merely a 29 year old punk filmmaker who’s newest film was censored in the bin. Oh boy, did they ever not want me to show it there. All the nurses watched it apparently. They also saw HELPLESS MAIDEN MAKES AN ‘I’ Statement. Which is a funny version of a real thing that happened to me eight years after I made it.

Pat Mills asked me if my favorite film is still Troop Beverly Hills. Ha ha! Yeah man! I love Pat, this is what he agreed to sing along to on Facebook.

I always sent my KFC comments to Save the Children at 56 Sparks Street care of Morticia Addams!

And now I’m in trouble!

On the National Day of Action, I’ll be eating KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN!
AND COLONEL SANDERS LOOKS JUST LIKE DAVID SUZUKI1

And yet Toonie Tuesday is the only democratic vote for the poor, who often have no choice but to shop at KFC, including many psychiatric survivors.

Can my friend Mikiki convince the government to help abuse survivors AND therefore psychiatric survivors by intervening in the hunt for the Dangerous Bird?

Last we heard:
Stef Llewellyn, my erstwhile camera person, was shopping devotedly at Toonie Tuesday every week, due to extreme aboriginal poverty in respect to psychiatric disability. This in turn set off my old code from my high school days, and Morticia Addams was sent to Save the Children at 56 Sparks Street in Ottawa which has since moved. In it’s place was the bookstore Smithbooks where she picked up a book on AIDS in Africa. She then sent Wednesday Addams to The Lion’s Den to meet Ken and Junior, an African Safari Lion who was born and raised in Winnipeg. At this point the Addams family decided to check in with the Lesbian Rangers, who had pointed out that Colonel Sanders looked an awful lot like David Suzuki, and that perhaps the reason so many bananas kept showing up was due to some lesbian witch in Saskatoon advocating eunuchs to stop the AIDS virus. In fact, the question became one of the possibility of Morticia Addams doing a spell on David Suzuki’s penis in question in order to prove that witchcraft could stop the AIDS virus. Morticia denied it by setting herself on fire and declaring herself the reincarnation of Great Aunt Calpernia, who never went to college.
Meanwhile Mikiki was drafted to stop my cousin Luke from ordering from KFC because the rumour was that David Suzuki was taking a tour of the rainforest to find his own rubber tree to make his very own dildo and to travel back in time via Stephen Hawking’s old wheelchair to before I ever sent my KFC comments to Save the Children C/O Morticia Addams to save his penis from the inspiration of one Miss Valerie Solanas.
In all the ensuing melee, Britta Boden was dispatched to Lesbian National Parks and Services to solve the mystery of the plantains, a type of tranny bannany which only appeared on the scene in April. Mysterious in their fruity goodness, the Lesbian Ranger Corps only wanted to know if these new bananas were lesbian friendly, to which Louis Cruz declared they were, and even Alice upon further inspection agreed.
But still, Luke was on the hunt for the Dangerous Bird, and the Dangerous Bird was on the hunt for Thirza Cuthand, because she didn’t like the ending of Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement. Can Mikiki do something fabulous for abuse survivors in time for the Sacred Chicken Dance?
Only time will tell!

John Cameron Mitchell is going to be in Vancouver at Out On Screen this year and I won’t be there! Such poopy pants!

My career is fine, I am going to finally get in touch with Outfest (L.A.) to curate something for them. My curator buggered off to Venice and Dokumenta (I probably spelled that TOTALLY WRONG!). And my email works again. Hurrah! Plus I found one model for Mintage, a vintage clothing store in Vancouver, and if my devious plan goes well then she’s going to Paris Fashion Week with them. Because, I love Robin Williamson who is NOT a folk singer but is an amazing best friend.

Okay, now I’ll try to do the cheap-o explaination of CBGB’s by detailing punk through . . . Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

CBGB’s is a classic old timey punk rock club, the Studio 54 of the punk set. And Nina Hagen is considered the grandmother of punk. Which is why every self respecting punk knows her name. And CBGB’s had a little queercore son called Squeezebox.

And Squeezebox is where Hedwig’s character was workshopped. Which makes sense in a roundabout fashion BACK to our grandmother of punk, Nina Hagen, who I really did almost meet.

And this is Nina Hagen doing genderfuck in the classic ode to junkies, Smack Jack.

I’m still inspired by this gender trash revolutionary video.

And so is the rest of the world, This is Nina Hagen at the Berlinale in 2006 And this is where my screenplay was last seen before I decided to amend it so that I could do a Canadian German co-production with Cosma Shiva, who can be seen here and who Maureen Bradley recommended in a roundabout way.

Because I need someone awesome for Cassandra AND an excuse for the main character to not only be learning German, but to also have Nina Hagen sing New York for the Sept 11 related psychosis scene.

So what’s my relation to punk? Well, I’ve done DIY for twelve years and seen a bazillion punk shows and was willing to go see Lydia Lunch on my own in Vancouver and bought the Nick Zedd book and basically, yeah man, I’m a punk, I’ve always been a punk, I probably always will be, and irregardless of what you wear, punk is a frame of mind.

I deliberately locked myself out of all my regular email addresses, so now only one works.
So if you are getting email from my old addresses, delete it, because it is spam. Google helped, someone was dumping spam into my account. Disreputable I say!