My Ears Are Burning

I got an email from my wife today with “Are You Ears Burning” in the subject line, directing me to this post by Kenneth George Godwin.

I tried to post a comment in response, but there’s a glitch in his site. There was no sign of a captcha, but an error message said I hadn’t filled it out correctly. So I sent him this in a email instead:

Hi Kenneth George Godwin:

I tried to post the following comment on your post, but got an error message saying I did not enter the correct captcha.  Couldn’t find a captcha anywhere.  Anyway, here’s what I tried to post in the comments:

Don’t know who it is at the editing bench, identified as Dale Zalen, but they bear no resemblance to me, Zale Dalen. Not an uncommon mistake. (This has been corrected, and the picture replaced with one I provided.)

Aside from that, this was a very fair and generous article. For a time I was the West Coast advisor to the Canadian Film Development Corporation, and spent many meetings pleading with them to expand on the special investment program, under which “Skip Tracer” was made, and fighting off the industry types championing big budget American style production. I was also pleading with them not to go into supporting television production, a move they made because they couldn’t justify the money they were losing  supporting feature films. The name change to Telefilm Canada marked the final defeat of that battle.
I wrote a post some time ago on why I believe “Passion” is an underappreciated and historically important film, but that post seems to have disappeared from https://www.artisanmovies.com/ pages.  I guess I’ll have to write it again. My main pitch is that it was the first prosumer digital production made completely outside of the movie industry that made no excuses for the technology and actually managed to look like a movie. (the fact that you reviewed it as just a movie kind of makes this point.) Plus I just like its social statements. Check into http://www.zaledalen.com/zaledalen/ in a week or so and I should have it up there.
Thanks for the ink and attention.

Zale Dalen

My Father’s Death Was Perfect

It couldn’t have been better, for me at least. Well, okay. It could have been a hell of a lot better if my father hadn’t died. But we all have to go sometime. As my father said, “Dying can’t be so bad or everybody wouldn’t do it.”

That was 1986, the year of Expo in Vancouver, and I’d been hired to make the film for the Saskatchewan Pavilion. That was a year of work, starting with rejecting the script that had been commissioned and paid for and instigating a search for a new writer. There was already a concept in place – a big screen anamorphic 35mm. film with an actress under the huge screen interacting with the film. I wasn’t sure that was going to work, so the Director of Photography, Richard Leiterman, and I flew down to L.A. to take the Universal Studio tour because we’d heard that the tour included a section during which the tour guide interacted with a Hollywood celebrity. That didn’t tell us much. Our concept was for the actor under the screen to talk to the audience and talk to characters in the film. The Universal Tour sequence simply handed the Master of Ceremonies job to the Hollywood celebrity and stood down while he talked. Did that mean what we wanted to do wouldn’t work? It was something to worry about.

There was also the question of eyelines. If the characters in the film were going to believably talk to our actor, where should we have them look to make us believe they were talking to her. Richard stood in various audience positions while I stood on a ladder under the screen, still just a framework, and pretended to look at the actor. Things were getting scary. It turned out that the actors would have to look down toward the base of the camera tripod, but looking left, right, or center depended on where the audience was sitting. Compromise would be required.

The script writer search found Carol Bolt, a Toronto writer who gave us the conflict that was missing in the original script. The actor would be a “girl next door” from the prairies who had been hired as a living narrator to tell us about her province. While she was very happy to have the job, she was also desperately homesick and missing friends and family back home. At the end of the film she would apologize to the audience, run off stage and reappear on the film running toward her boyfriend.

I won’t say too much about the actual production, other than it was fraught with personality conflicts and technical problems. There were politics involved. I was from B.C. and Saskatchewan had its own film community. I was getting attitude from my AD, my assistant director, who had been laid on by the client, and it took me some time to realize that he had made a very competent tourism movie for Saskatchewan the year before, and felt that they owed him the director position on this one. Richard Leiterman was getting attitude from his camera operator, who had been the director of photography on that same tourism movie. While they both did a good job for us, the subtle vibes on location made for a less than wonderful shoot. On at least one occasion, words were spoken.

We had a tiny budget compared to what was being spent on the B.C. film. This meant a very limited shooting schedule, and weather wasn’t cooperating. Saskatchewan was supposed to look beautiful, and it looked downright gloomy. The client wanted the people of Saskatchewan to seem hip and very modern, emphasizing that computers had to feature prominently. I tried to explain that everybody had computers. They didn’t make much of an impression. And a computer in the tractor connected to the futures market, a system that was still in the beta development phase, would seem a bit silly. An Expo film is a difficult film to make. In essence it’s a tourism movie, but it had to be somehow more than that. It had to have size, and big scenes with hundreds of extras, like the two hundred plus dancers in Rainbow Danceland in Watrous, and the big country wedding. But what would make it work was actually simplicity, the love and connection between the characters on the screen – the mother and father, grandfather, first nations uncle, the school friends, particularly the boyfriend – and the homesick girl presenting her province to the audience. What I was really making was a twenty minute romcom, though the clients and sponsors didn’t know that.

The good news in all of this was that the film was produced by an old friend of mine, Tony Westman, and he generally gave me a free hand and supported my decisions. I’ll never know what he had to do to protect me from the politicians, the clients. There must have been something, because they freaked out several times when they saw my rushes.

So… I was involved in the script development, the choice of music, client meetings, casting, and of course shooting. Then came months of editing. In those days I had a complete editing room with an Intercine flatbed editing machine, benches, rewinds, split reels, and all the other gack that editing a large format film required. Finally we had a rough cut, and a sound mix, and then we had casting for the five actors who would perform under that big screen. We found one key actor to lead, learn the lines and moves, and train the four other young women who would take turns performing. With a performance every twenty minutes for a ten hour day, one actor simply couldn’t do the work alone.

There were surprises. We were all worried that a tiny figure of an actress under that big screen would not be able to compete with the movie images. During rehearsals and staging of the actors, we discovered that the opposite was true. The only time the audience would look at the screen was when the actor gestured and directed their attention to it.

All of this had the tension level of a big budget feature. There could be no last minute revisions. No trial runs. It had to work, or fail miserably, right off the hop. The producers advertised for Saskatchewan ex-patriots and packed in a full audience for the first screening, and the lights came back up to a standing ovation. One of the ushers came to me with double handfuls of kleenex, soaked in tears. We had a hit.

It ran with long lineups, every twenty minutes for the duration of Expo ’86, with the actors suffering through repetitive strain injuries from looking up at the screen.

Through all this, my father was dying. We knew it was coming. Lung cancer. That’s what a lifetime of unfiltered Sportsman cigarettes will do to you. The tobacco industry said it was his choice, but I remember him trying to quit when I was eight, when I was ten, when I was twelve. He didn’t manage to kick the habit until his diagnosis, and by then it was too late. “If you want the whole world to say I told you so, get yourself in my position” he told me. I desperately wanted him to see my work, work that had taken over my life from concept and script development through casting, shooting, editing, and casting and directing the live performances. But I realized that he was never going to make it to Expo to see it.

My mother phoned me to tell me that I’d better come to see my father, because she felt he didn’t have long. She had a sixth sense about that kind of thing. I was afraid that I would forget to say something that needed to be said when I actually saw him, so I sat down and spent a few hours writing him a letter, which I took with me and read to him when I went to see him.

In the letter I told him what he had meant to me, that he had been my hero and role model, the most important man in my life. I asked him whether there was anything he wanted taken care of discretely after he was gone, or anything he needed done. I recounted a couple of time when he had set a standard for integrity and compassion I’ve always tried to live up to. For example, there was a time during one of our trips when he was fishing in a shallow river. While my father fished, I caught a tiny frog and showed it to him. He told me that some people would use a frog like that as live bate to catch a fish, but that we weren’t the kind of people who could do that.

I asked him whether there was anything that shouldn’t be left unsaid between us, because now was the time to say it. The only thing he could come up with was to express regret that his grandchildren were growing up in a drug environment. That made me laugh. “Dad, you’re twenty years behind the times with that. Laara (my first wife) won’t even take an aspirin any more. We don’t do drugs. So you can put your mind at ease about that.”

He had been sleeping in a hospital bed in the living room, but felt well enough to come out to the kitchen for a cup of tea, a key part of our family culture. Knowing that he would never see my movie, I decided to perform it for him. I told him every image, every sound cue, where the music swelled up or faded away, every line of dialogue, every action, and the audience response. By then I knew it all, and I did my very best to let him see it in his mind’s eye.

When I was finished he said, “Now I’ve heard from a real artist.” I helped him up and walked back to his bed with him.

I wanted to stay, but I had a wife and new baby girl back in Gibsons, a ferry ride away. Who could say how long this could go on. When I got home there was a message on my answering machine from my mother. My father was gone.

Why Am I Doing This?

Writing such personal stuff, I mean. What do I hope to achieve? (insert brooding photograph here)

No getting around it, I’m old as dirt and downright ugly unless I’m smiling, at twilight with the light at my back.

I well remember Manny, a girl I knew in university, her fishnet stockings as we sat in by pool at Kanaka Creek Falls, her impish smile, the scars on her wrists. She had been held for a while in a mental hospital after a halfhearted suicide attempt, and she talked about how difficult it was to convince the doctors and staff that she was sane, how she needed to be totally phony, always cheerful and smiling, to be considered safe for release. She talked about the dangers of life among the other patients, and how the neurotics were the worst because they would latch on to her and tell her the most intimate details of their lives and thoughts, after which they would want to kill her. I asked her why this would be so. “It’s because knowing who they are gives a person power”, she told me. “Revealing themselves makes them vulnerable.”

I wonder where Manny is today. I wish I she would find me, though that would almost certainly disappoint us both.

If knowledge of my life, experiences and thoughts give power to strangers, as a neurotic would have it, why would I want to expose myself? It’s not like I expect people to understand me, or have any expectation of influencing them. In fact, I expect a very superficial understanding of who and what I am at best, and great ammunition for trolls at worst. What’s to be gained by “sticking my head above the trenches”? I am generally happy with who I am, or so I tell myself, and quite comfortable in my own skin, but I don’t have any deep wisdom or insights to offer. I’m a fool, and in so many ways a failure. Why reveal this to strangers, or even to friends and family. My revelations can never be concise enough, complete enough, or brave enough to have any value. WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING?

Worst of all, why is the subject of my writing so trivial. Is this world so uninteresting that I can only write about me. How incredibly boring.

I admire an honest and brave autobiography. “The Original Sin” by Anthony Quin comes to mind. An unvarnished portrait brave enough to reveal that Quin beat his wife on finding out that she wasn’t a virgin when they married. Even more impressive for shameless self revelation is the autobiography of Julia Philips, “You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again”, replete with heavy drug use and hallucinations of insects crawling out of her vagina.
My writing, so far, amounts to self aggrandizement and censors the behavior that I’m ashamed to have fully known by the world, my betrayals of friends who supported me, the drug use, the inappropriate sexual advances that amount (in today’s world) to abuse and predation .

I also seem to be incapable of creative invention of interesting characters. I’d have no problem doing a roman a clef based on thinly disguised people I have know, but weaving them into a cohesive story just seems like too much work. What happened to my ambition? Where did my work ethic go?

Of course, the above are all rhetorical questions. I know exactly, precisely, why I’m writing. First of all, I like to write. I want the practice. Writing is an exploration of my brain and can give surprising results. Every once in a while I produce a story, or a turn of phrase, that delights me. So this personal website, which some might call a blog, is really just a wank. I can no longer do that in physical reality. Maybe this writing is just a substitute for diminished mojo.

And then there’s the thing of trying to connect with you, my reader, if you are out there in cyberspace somewhere. I think I have a deep need to be known, to be admired, to be appreciated. I think I harbour the hope, deep down, that I can persuade you, my invisible and imaginary audience, to have thoughts about me. Whether admiration, amusement, or disgust hardly matters.

It’s a pathological hunger for attention. A need to jump up and down yelling, “I exist.”

Along those lines, please drop me a comment some times if one of my posts triggers a thought or a feeling. I live for your comments.

And thanks for reading.

Barry and “Banish Misfortune”

I’m in that demographic now. You know the one, the demographic where old friends are dying and funerals, now called “celebrations of life”, become a weekly event. And still we chug along, those of us who are left on the planet. I’ve known Barry Carlson since my university days. We played in a jug band, The Vacant Lot, in 1966, a long time before I picked up the fiddle, back when I was bending notes on the blues harp. My friend J. Douglas Dodd had a minor stroke some time back. It hasn’t left too much damage. He’s still the genius I’ve known and loved since he was the music director on my first feature film. But it has caused a problem with his vision, and that caused a problem with keeping his drivers license. I drive him wherever he needs to go now, and last week that was to Victoria for a follow up appointment on an eye operation.

Once we got that out of the way, we joined Moira and Barry Carlson for lunch in their beautiful home decorated with Moira’s amazing art. Barry and I had a rare chance to try out a fiddle jam. This piece is called “Banish Misfortune”, an appropriate title for two old geezers with cancer and a third with vision problems. It’s just the demographic were in now.

“Banish Misfortune” should rightfully played about 1.25 times this speed. The next time Barry and I get together to play it, I’ll have it up to that tempo. I’m not happy about the fumble in the A part. I am happy about the way I aced the double stops in the C part.

I see improvement already.

Getting Started and Granny’s Quilts

Unless you were born into Hollywood royalty, like one of the Carradines or Coppolas, getting a foot into the film industry is a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, especially from a socially remote location in Canada. Back in 1969, the only path I could see was to do anything that would put me in contact with movie people, like working as a sound man or an assistant editor, and then doing anything else that I could call making a movie. That last part is far easier today, when an ambitious kid can make a short movie on his phone and edit it on his computer. But when I got started, making anything cost a ship load of money.

How much money? Well, for starters you needed a camera that cost thousands of dollars, but you could rent, and sound equipment costing slightly less which you could also rent but I had saved up to own. Close to three thousand bucks for a Nagra IV with crystal synch and a Sennheiser 804 microphone with wind cage and carrying handle – the basis of a documentary sound kit. Then you needed film to run through the camera. You couldn’t edit that film without expensive equipment, unless you had the dedication of Jack Darcus and were willing to shoot black and white reversal and edit the original with a magnifying glass and a pair of scissors.

Even at that, the film and processing was going to set you back hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. To give you some idea of the expense: Film stock, processing, and a work print would cost approximately one dollar per foot. Sixteen millimeter film had forty frames in a foot, running through the camera at 24 frames/second. So every couple of seconds of shooting, another dollar was going into the movie. You could count on, conservatively, a ten to one shooting ration though on a complicated documentary that might go up to a hundred to one or more. A ten to one ration meant each ten feet you ran through the camera and work printed, would result in one foot of finished film. This caused a great temptation to try to edit in the camera, which was a false economy and severely restricted the choices in editing.

For example, if you have a performer entering the scene through a door from another room, it gives the editor choices if you film them going from that room, opening the door, entering the other room, and closing the door behind them. Similarly, you want to overlap the action in the other room, starting with the door closed and having the performer enter and close the door behind them. That way the editor can chose where to cut to make the action flow smoothly.

This principle of overlapping should extend to every action. If somebody stands up from the table in the master shot, it might make sense to start with them sitting down, thinking about rising, then standing up. Your cut to a close shot might call for the actor starting sitting and then rising into the frame. It’s vitally important to give the editor choices of cutting points, and that inflates the shooting ratio.

Then, of course, there are the flubbed takes and pick ups on takes. Both of which call for overlapping action and dialogue.

And that’s just the shooting. After that you have the cost of post production, the sound transfer from quarter inch magnetic to sprocketted sixteen millimeter magnetic film stock that can be synchronized with the work print. You’ve all seen the clapper boards with the film name and scene number and take number on them. Those served a purpose. They allowed the film to be synchronized by matching the frame where the clapper board closed with the click of the “sticks.”

The sequence for starting a shot was for the Assistant Director the AD, to call “roll sound”. The soundman would then say “speed” when the tape had stopped bouncing the guide rollers. Then the cameraman would say “slate” or “mark it” and the camera assistant would waste no time announcing the scene and take number before loudly closing the clapper board. Of course that footage, that dollar or more of shooting, would be thrown away, which is why the slate was in position and ready to close by the time the cameraman said “mark it”. Nobody wasted any time when the camera was rolling, which could be quite disconcerting for the actors. It was why I always gave a second or two for things to settle before calling “action”. Some waste was necessary.

I don’t think I need to go any further into the process. You get the idea. Making any kind of a movie cost money. When I was working as an office junior at CBC in Toronto, Brian R.R. Hebb, another office junior, and I teamed up to make a “filler” in hopes of selling it to the CBC. Brian wanted to be a cameraman. I wanted to be a director, or at least make movies. So we kicked in our own money to buy a few 100 foot rolls of Kodak reversal stock, rented a camera, and set about making a little film to celebrate the vanishing streetcar. We shot some of the streetcars still operating in Toronto, shot a day at a streetcar museum close to town, added in some stolen stock footage of streetcars in the early days of Toronto, laid on some cleared music from the CBC’s music library, and I cut our little film after-hours in one of the CBC editing rooms on CBC editing equipment. I don’t remember how all the numbers worked out, but when we sold “The Short Train” to CBC we turned enough to pay our costs and pocket maybe a hundred dollars each. Since we were both earning $50/week at that time, that felt pretty good.

Cue Digression Cam: Years later I was hired to direct an MOW, a Movie of the Week, about Tai Babalonia and Randy Gardner, a figure skating pair who were headed to the Olympics when Randy pulled a groin muscle and they were out of contention. To my surprise and delight, the producers wanted to use Brian Hebb as the Director of Photography. He’d worked his way up to a cameraman position at CBC, an amazing achievement in it’s own right, after I’d left the mother corporation. Then he also left the CBC and was making a name for himself as a freelancer. So there we were, some twenty years after making our little filler. Me the director and Brian the Director of Photography. Both of us where we’d wanted to be way back when. There was a scene in “On Thin Ice” that called for a television to be playing in the background in a hotel room. I managed to get CBC archives to find our little film, and that’s what’s playing back on the TV in that scene. Full circle, eh.

That little filler was about as much as I could do without more money, and getting more money meant finding government support. The Canadian Film Development Corporation, later rebranded as Telefilm Canada, was catching flack for not spending any money out west, so they threw B.C. a bone with a short film program. It called for submitting a script and budget, so I wrote a half hour based on one of my father’s stories of working for the railroad in Northern Saskatchewan. I think that gave my first wife, who had become my producer, $7,500, with which, being extremely frugal, we figured we could make a television half hour, twenty-two minutes of finished film. We lucked out with the weather. It started snowing on our first shooting day, stopped and turned to rain on our seventh, and by the time we wrapped the snow was gone. The end result was a short film that looked gorgeous. I managed to sell “Gandy Dance” to the CBC.

I also found a distributor for “Gandy Dance”. He was based in Toronto and mostly handled educational films. I don’t think he managed to get any revenue out of our film, beyond what we got from the CBC sale. I was looking for an economic base, a foot in the door as a film maker. So I asked him to lend me three of his top earning educational films. From a film making point of view they were not very impressive, downright ugly even, but they did fit the parameters of educational rentals – they were designed for art classes with titles like “Working with Papier Mache” or “Working with Crayons”. They were no longer than twelve minutes running time, which meant that a teacher could show them to a class and still have time to have the students do some work inspired by the film. They were extremely simple – just one camera angle, hands entering frame to do the artwork, no editing, and one sound track of non-descript music. No sound mix. Obviously they were very cheaply made.

I thought maybe we could have a winner if I made an educational film that had instructional value, but also had some mood, some heart and soul. And that made me think of my grandmother and her quilt making. Granny was eighty-seven years old at the time. She had been making quilts since she was sixteen, and her first quilt, a log cabin pattern, was still in the family. I managed to borrow it from my cousin Alice, and it truly is an amazing quilt. Look at it and think red, and a pattern of red rectangles emerges. Think blue and a different pattern of blue rectangles comes out.

I gathered up maybe twenty other quilts from members of the family, hung them on the wall of our cabin, and shot clips of them. Crazy quilts. Dresden plate quilts. And the aforementioned Log Cabin Quilt, with Granny’s voice over comment “I guess I was ambitious in those days.” I had a wealth of visual material. Then I spent hours and hours interviewing Granny about how she made quilts.

A lot of what she told me hit the editing room floor. Granny had made thousands of quilts. A quilt a month in her final year. She had sent quilts to the starving Russians during the famine in the Stalin years. She made baby quilts for every child born in the family.

With the basis of a sound track in hand, I brought in Ron Orieux, the cameraman who had shot “Gandy Dance” for me and who would go on to shoot my first and second features, “Skip Tracer” and “The Hounds of Notre Dame”. That gave me almost everything I needed to make the movie, but I still brought in Gordon Fish, another freelance cameramen, for a few extra shots.

By this time I had purchased a 16mm/35mm sound transfer machine, so I could do my own transfers of the 1/4 inch magnetic to 16mm. sprocketted stock. I had also purchased a six gang synchronizer and a guillotine splicer, a viewer with a tiny screen, and a “squawk box” reader for the synchronizer. I put together an editing bench, with rewinds and split reels and bins to hold the film clips. It was all very expensive equipment, not the kinds of things you could buy at a garage sale. The guillotine splicer alone was hundreds of dollars. Big money in 1971.

I set about cutting the visuals and laying in Granny’s narration. I recorded my aunt Belle’s piano music to add to the sound track. Aunt Belle played ragtime, and old tunes like “Ke Ke Ke Katy”, Granny’s theme song. For transitions I recorded some “stingers” on our own piano, and transferred them at double speed because that seemed to make them sound better.

After a start at the painful process of editing picture and sound using the synchronizer and sqawk box, I found a well used Moviola editing machine I could afford. That completed my first editing room.

The Moviola editing machine. It had a tendency to eat the workprint, but at least it let me view the picture with one track of the sound. It was far superior to the squawk box and synchronizer. I ended up editing several tracks of sound, music and sound FX, and put out the money for a sound mix at the lab.

Editing took months. I was running out of money. But I snagged a Canada Council grant to get some finishing money, to pay for the sound mix, neg matching and answer print and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think the Canada Council grant came in at $3,500. That was inspiring to me. To think that I could work for hundreds of hours at the wage available at that time, or sit down and write a grant proposal in a few hours and have that huge sum of money come into my mail box a few months later. Well… it made me think about money differently.

Artistically, my main problem was that I wanted the film to bounce along. But when I tried to use shorter cuts, it ended up looking like a badly made commercial. I finally realized that the film had to be paced to suit the subject matter. This was an old lady making a quilt. It was a mistake to try to make it exciting. it just had to flow, and finding that flow took me a lot of time. But finally it was finished. And here it is:

This was Granny Scott’s last quilt. Shortly after we finished shooting, she went in for cataract surgery and she never made another quilt.

Of course, making something to sell is only the first step. I took “Granny’s Quilts” to schools and was told that, much as they loved the film, they got all their movies for free from the National Film Board.

That was the beginning of my feud with the Board. If the government spent far more than any shoe maker would afford to spend to made shoes of exceptional quality and then gave them away for free, the shoe makers would be up in arms. But somehow, film makers were supposed to accept this situation and lavish praise on the National Film Board in hopes of getting a budget for the film subject du jour. It was discouraging. Obviously, my only hope lay south of the border.

I took a print of “Granny’s Quilts” down to a school in Seattle and immediately got a sale. I think in those days we were offering prints for a couple of hundred dollars, which gave us a slim profit margin. The really lucky break was that I learned about Landers Film Review, an American publication that went out to all the libraries and school districts in the country. After I submitted “Granny’s Quilts”, and got a glowing review, the requests for preview prints started coming in. We were soon getting two or three requests for preview prints a day, and for every three requests we made a sale. So my humble film about my granny kept us eating for a couple of years while I explored other possibilities. And that’s how a film career begins.

I can’t end this without acknowledging that, while I did the creative work and manual labor to make our films, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything without my wife and partner, Laara Dalen. On days when I wasn’t bringing in any money, she always was working some job or other. She kept the groceries coming and the lights on. Those were lean times. I would take my grandfather’s Silver Pidgeon Baretta shotgun down to the nearby dairy farm and blow off both barrels at the pigeons that were eating all the grain. Laara cooked up a mean pigeon-a-dobo. We supplemented that meat source with the rabbits we raised, or with oolichans we scooped from the nearby Fraser River.

And when money came in to make something, Laara was the best producer and production manager I ever worked with. So my best advice to anybody who wants to become a film maker, starting from zero, is find yourself a supportive partner. Best case scenario, marry them.

Nostalgia Ain’t What it Used to Be

Thank goodness. I’ve always disliked nostalgia. Reminders of my past, or unbidden memories, made me feel so very sad. That life, those experiences, are gone and not coming back. Often the memory would make me cringe for one reason or another, usually at behavior I’m not proud of. Or else it would just make me sad. The entire previous generation in my family is gone now, with the exception of Aunt Mary in England who keeps on trucking into her late nineties. Friends keep falling off the planet. Many of the big names, the stars, the celebrities I worked with or knew, have also shuffled off this mortal coil. My world is being hollowed out.

For me, the worst thing about the nostalgia presented on social media can be summed up in the phrase: “Those were the good old days”. No they weren’t, damn it. I was born into a sexist, racists, gender essentialist, intolerant society. Don’t tell me about how great it was to ride in the back of a pickup truck, or drink from the garden hose or run loose and unsupervised until the street lights came on. Yeah, those things were fun. My childhood was wonderful. But it was also a time when a woman couldn’t get a credit card or open a bank account without her husband’s signature. It was a time when farm boys went into the big city to beat up queers – good farm boy fun. A time when a black man couldn’t drink at the courthouse fountain, let along become president of the United States. It was a time of intolerance. During my long hair hippy phase, I was refused service in a restaurant for having hair about as long as it is right now.

When I was a kid, women’s rights, gay rights, black rights, and colour television were still years in the future. The silent light switch still hadn’t been marketed and turning off a light made a loud clack. A long distance phone call meant that somebody had died. In every way I can think of, society and technology is better by far than it was in my childhood. Now I play Chinese chess every weekend (great game, much better than international chess. You can check it out for free here.) with my friend Danny, an American still stuck in China. Or talk to him, or former students in Shanghai, on voice calls or video links. For free.

Chinese chess is more fun than international chess. It’s a great way to overcome the language barrier when you meet Chinese people. I may not be fluent in Chinese, but I play Xiangqi like a boss.

Subtle improvements in technology keep sneaking up on me. I mentioned the silent light switch. The enameled pots and pans of my childhood are gone now, as are the aluminum ones. Gotta love stainless steel cookware and utensils. Air hand dryers in washrooms actually work and I don’t mind using them. Battery powered drills and screw drivers are amazing, as are all of the battery powered tech from laqwn mowers to our car. I just noticed that our new toilet seat closes gently, without the loud clack of the old one. It’s hardly worth mentioning that my smart phone does everything my computer can do. In fact, I left my laptop at home on my last trip to Italy. Didn’t need it.

The only thing that was better in the fifties, if you were straight, white, and of the male gender, was our youth, health, and energy level. That was the only thing that was good about the good old days.

Most annoying about social media rants about the good old days is the dissing of kids today. The kids today are great, okay. They are smarter than we were, better educated, more engaged, and the world will be in good hands when we finally turn it over to them. The young people I meet, beside being awesomely beautiful, are just wonderful people. We boomers are just jealous.

To get back on track here, I’ve hated nostalgia for some years now. But recently I woke up in the wee hours of the morning, unable to get back to sleep as free association memories flipped through my brain. The six years old, fishing in our gulley, redolent with the smell of skunk cabbage, alive with mosquitoes, racoon tracks like tiny hand prints, for the the little trout I would stick in my pocket and take home to clean so my mother could fry them up for my breakfast. That lonely drive down I5 to Los Angeles, feeling sorry for myself because I had to leave home to scare up some work. High points like the standing ovation in Alice Tulley Hall at the New York Film Festival, or on the bridge of the Yukon while we steamed into a tropical sunset with porpoises leaping in our bow wave and flying fish with iridescent cellophane wings, a hundred in a school, launching from the waves to glitter in the sun. Low points like getting fired from a job I never should have accepted. Random memories, good and bad, in no particular order. Riding high. Crashing hard. Nostalgia writ large. But this time, for whatever reason, they didn’t evoke the usual sadness and longing for the past. This time it was like watching one of those corny Hollywood biopics about my life and times. It was just a great movie.

I think the difference is that I can see the end coming now, and, looking back, I’ve realized that there’s no point in taking anything too seriously. Nobody gets out alive, as my father used to tell me. Sure, there were tough times, terrible moments, but also moments of triumph and exhilaration. It’s been one hell of a life. A hell of a ride, as Bill Hicks put it. I’m so glad I got to live it, to marvel at all the changes, and to still be here for another trip around the sun.

So Where is it Now – My Italian Violin

In previous posts I told the story of how and why I got my rather expensive Italian violin made by Maurizio Tadioli, an award winning luthier who lives in Cremona, Italy. I told the story of how it was lost and all but destroyed in China, and how, after seven years as a decoration on my wall in China it made it’s way back to Maurizio for repairs, the two years it took him to repair the instrument, and my travels to Italy to get it back in my hands. I recently did a post about my tour of Scotland with the Szasz family and my young fiddle buddy, Kipling, playing Scots melodies in locations where they originated – “Over the Sea to Sky” on the Isle of Sky, “Callums’s Road” on Callum’s Road, “Hut on Staffin Island” in Staffin, and “Flowers of Edinburgh” in Edinburgh, plus a couple of others in random castles and ruins.

Now it’s time to tell why I don’t have my beloved violin any more and where it has gone. I guess this is the final chapter, at least as far as my involvement goes.

When I learned that my prostate cancer had jumped ship and gone ashore into my bones and lymph glands, I jumped to the conclusion that this meant curtains for Zale Dalen. That’s what Dr. Google told me, and I believed it when I read that the chances of me being alive a year after that diagnosis were 45% and my chance of being alive five years after that diagnosis was 1%. I’ve since been told by my oncologists that treatment has come a long way. Prostate cancer, even prostate cancer that has metastasized into the bones, is now considered a chronic disease rather than a fatal disease. I’m on a new drug, a testosterone blocker, and my numbers are looking good. Going on three years since that scary diagnosis, I feel generally okay.

But one thing that wasn’t feeling good was the arthritis in my hand. The thumb on my bow hand, my right hand, grew increasingly painful after the Scotland trip, to the point where playing the violin for a few minutes took all the fun out of playing and practicing. The specialist gave me cortisone shots into my thumb joint, and that helped a little, for a month or so. But it seemed obvious that my days of playing the fiddle were numbered. I had already decided that I wanted Kipling to have my violin. In fact, that was the only way I could feel comfortable letting her father pick up the tab for my trip to Scotland.

Then I learned that Kipling, who prefers reading music and playing classical violin, rather than fiddling, was going to take her grade nine Royal Conservatory test. She was at a critical stage for a violin student, a point where one either falls in love with the instrument and strives for perfection or puts it aside for other interests. I decided that perhaps having a piece of wood she could fall in love with might motivate her to practice, and really go for concert performance level in her playing. So my Mauritzio Tadioli Il Cannone became hers. She renamed it Cosimo, after Cosimo de Medici, the renaissance patron of the arts, which I took as a sign that she was forming a personal bond with the instrument. I took back the Chinese violin I had given her to use when she reached the size to need a 4/4 sized instrument. That certainly is good enough for me. I will never be more than a fiddler, and a mediocre one at that.

Here’s Kipling performing with Cosimo as part of her grade nine violin examination.

Since passing my Italian fiddle along to Kipling, I’ve had an interesting surgical treatment on my arthritic bow hand. The specialist told me that she could cut off the arthritic end of the bone and glue on some tendon from my forearm and that would possibly be a more permanent solution to the pain than the cortisone shots. My first reaction to this idea was astonishment. What? Take a tendon from my forearm? You’re kidding. Don’t I need those tendons? Well, it turns out we, at least some of us, have a vestigial tendon in our forearm that no longer has a function. It does virtually nothing. So I had the operation and… it’s been a miracle. It was a slow and painful recovery, but I can once again practice for an hour or two without undue pain in my bow hand thumb. Now the limiting factor is the rotator cuff in my bow arm shoulder, which has also had a surgical repair. But that is also improving with stretching and exercise. This doesn’t change the fact that I will never become a really good performer. Kipling has a shot at doing that, and I’m hoping she takes it. But that’s up to her.

I will admit to missing my Italian violin, and occasional twinges of regret at giving it away. But I’m finding that a new set of strings and daily practice has awakened the Chinese fiddle. It is also a hand made violin, made by Jin Lin Rui Lin in Shanghai, and is indeed a lovely instrument. When sunlight hits the Burmese maple of its back, it bursts out in ribbons of gold. But sadly, no matter how good a Chinese violin is, it will never have the status or value of one made in Cremona. I refuse to succumb to that cultural foolishness. Pure snobbery. It looks amazing and sounds wonderful. That’s what matters.

This is the Burmese maple back of my Chinese violin. I’ve always been a sucker for a one piece back, and this maple burl is amazing. It’s such a hard wood, with such interlocking grain, that I can’t imagine carving it.

Whether my social experiment with Kipling works out as I hope it will is up to Kipling. I feel good about the deal, and the chain of events that lead to making it happen. I feel good about myself, and I’m enjoying playing again. That’s enough.

Know-it-All Meddling Foreigner

I’ve always wanted to make a difference to this world. I also have a substantial ego that makes me think I can do something as significant as change China’s culture. Hence my campaign in China over a number of years to get the Chinese to wear bicycle helmets. Overall, I guess this is just another of my failures, though I can say that by the time we left China after nine years of teaching there, I was starting to see helmets on bicycle riders. Whether I had anything to do with that cultural shift is debatable.

Brain injuries in China are an invisible plague. A young person doing well in school, on the university track, doted on by their parents, slams their head into the pavement and ends up one of those shabby pathetic creatures sweeping up the litter every night after the market closes. Forgotten. Ignored.

For university students, bike helmets are just uncool. They are trying to fit in, and terrified of being ridiculed by other students. So it was an uphill battle. I bought a hundred or so helmets and gave lectures about the results of brain damage, then offered to give a helmet to any student who would sign a pledge to wear it. I don’t think many students took that pledge seriously. But they did love to get free stuff.

We had fun making a public service promo. I think we might even have managed to get it played on a local station.

I also talked to stony faced Chinese executives, presented my power point pitch, and even took a train to Guangzhou to meet the owner of a helmet manufacturing firm. All I got from that trip was two high end helmets, one for me and one for Ruth, which I had to pay for.

The big plan was to convince a helmet company to donate helmets to all the students, provided the university would make a rule that helmets must be worn on campus. If I’d managed to sell that idea to either side of the equation maybe it would have worked. I would have generated huge international attention for my university, Jiangnan Da Xue, already one of the top universities in China. But I couldn’t sell peanuts to monkeys (no racist metaphor intended, I love the Chinese people) so we left China without a major, culture shaking, achievement. I sure gave it a good try though.

Please obey that impulse to leave a comment. I live for your comments, and shouting into the void is unmotivating. Thanks a ton.

The Good Son

In the post about my name change, I briefly touched on the tension between me and my father in my teen years, but that was just a part of it. John LeMay’s mention of his relationship to his father reminded me of this story.

When I was thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, I was counting the days until I turned sixteen and could get a drivers license. I got my learner’s permit the day I turned sixteen, and my full on drivers license two days later. Then I took driver education, simply to get a reduced rate on my insurance.

My point is, I lusted after the freedom that driving would give me, and I loved to drive. I learned to drive on the family farm, driving my uncle Bill’s three ton dump truck, a stick shift with a non-synchromesh transmission that required double clutching to shift gears. I learned to drive a “three on the tree” family sedan on that same half mile of dirt roads, long before I could legally venture out onto the highways. My idea of the perfect date was to borrow the family car, throw an arm over my girlfriend on the bench seat, and just drive someplace.

Dad was a Chevy man, but without the fuzzy dice. He wanted a plain Jane car
that was not pretentious. Middle of the road and middle class.

My father’s car was important to him. He was a manager with Great West life Assurance, working with salesmen under his authority but also still in the field as a salesman himself. His car was as much his office as his office was. So it was incredibly generous of him to lend me his car for a Saturday night date. I appreciated that.

On one particular Saturday, I left the family farm to pick up my girlfriend. I drove down into Washington state, to Birch Bay where we could sit on the beach. Then I took the long way home, just enjoying her company and enjoying driving. Back roads. Highways. Small towns long since forgotten. But, being a grateful son, I stopped someplace at a gas station and filled the tank. In those days I think it took about two dollars to replace the gas I had burned. Thirty or forty cents a gallon if I remember correctly. Actually, I just looked that up and it was $.31 an imperial gallon in 1963 in B.C.. A penny less in 1964. Gotta love the Internet, eh.

So that was my date. Totally satisfying. But the next morning my father was furious. “Where’s my gas cap?”

“Your gas cap? Jeez dad, I don’t know.” This was back before the days of self serve. “I guess the guy at the gas station forgot to put it back on.”

“Well, where did you buy gas?”

“Uh…Dad, I have no idea. But just let me borrow your car and I’ll scoot into town and buy you a new gas cap.”

And that’s what I did. Problem solved. Except the problems were just beginning. For the next week, my father was having car problems. His car would start fine, and run fine for ten minutes for so, and then it would quit. He twice had it towed into a garage, where it would start fine and the mechanic would look at him and shrug. Can’t see any problem with your car, Dave. So off my father would go, only to have his car quit again after ten minutes of driving.

Finally somebody figured out the problem. I had purchased a non-vented gas cap. After a few minutes the engine would suck enough gas out of the tank to build up a vacuum, stop the flow, and stall the motor.

“Dad, I’m sorry. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a non-vented gas cap, or that your car needed a vented one. I was trying to do the right thing for you. I’m really sorry this happened.” And that should have been the end of it, except it wasn’t.

A week later, my father was on a business trip up into the interior with a couple of his sales guys. Halfway through the Hope-Princeton highway, well past the sign reading “Check Your Gas, Next gas 80 Miles”, his car stopped. Although the gas gauge read half a tank, he was out of gas. The vacuum caused by the non-vented gas cap had collapsed his gas tank enough to throw out the gauge.

Once again, my father was not happy with me. I felt bad about it, but what could I do or say. “Dad, I’m sorry. I was just trying to do the right thing to thank you for lending me your car.”

My father got his revenge. Accidentally, and, like me, with the best of intentions. My uncle John offered me work for a summer on his fish collector, the MV Advise, working out of River’s Inlet on the B.C. Coast. His contract called for him to steam around to the trollers and gill netters, pick up and weigh their night’s catch, and deliver the silvery bounty to the packer in the evening, from thence the fish would go to the cannery, or the fresh fish market. That was the summer of 1966, the largest salmon run in fifty years.

I had never, and haven’t since, worked so hard. We’d start at first light in the morning. I’d get out of my bunk to get the coffee started before pumping the bilges. We were taking on a bit of water due to hitting a log going under the Lions Gate bridge, an event that bent the propeller and caused a stop in Gibsons to put on a new prop. The added vibrations of the bent prop had also damaged the stuffing box, so we were taking on a substantial amount of water over night, and during the day. Part of my job was to monitor the water level in the bilge and keep us from sinking by pumping it out. Next I’d cook breakfast, and by then we’d be approaching our first gill netter. I’d get a line on it, jump from our boat to the fishing boat, and fork the catch onto our deck, where John would count the various species, weigh them, and dump them from the deck scales into the hold.

By the end of the day, usually by eight or nine o’clock, the hold would be full and fish would be sliding around on our decks. By ten we’d be back at the packer. I’d jump into the hold and start forking the fish into the brailer, a net basket which would swing up over my head, dripping scales and slime, to take the fish to the packer. By eleven the hold would be empty. I’d be down there with a deck brush and the deck hose, scrubbing the slime and scales out of the hold. I’d have to jump out every few minutes to pump the ship, because the water from the deck hose had no place to go but through the bilge pump. Ah youth. In those days I could jump up and catch the combing of the hold to pull myself out. John was too short to do that, and needed a ladder to get out of the hold.

By one or two in the morning I’d pump the bilge for the last time and get to my bunk. In the morning, I’d catch hell if Captain John found a fish scale in the hold. It had to be clean.

That was when I learned to sleep whenever I could, under whatever circumstances, including sitting at the table while we steamed between fishing boats. That was a very useful skill to learn. I can still lie down on the floor anyplace, at any time, and be asleep in a matter of minutes. But that’s not the point of this story.

The thing is, what should have been an idyllic summer in a beautiful world was damn near ruined by the constant attention from Captain John. He was critical of my every move. If I put a knife in the sink, “You’re going to cut yourself on that knife”

“No I’m not, John. I’m washing it. I put it in the sink to wash it.”

Finally, near the end of the season, he said, “You know, this accident prone business is nothing but a lot of damn carelessness.” and the penny dropped.

“Accident prone business? Did somebody tell you I’m accident prone?”

“Well, you are, aren’t you?”

“No. I hardly ever have an accident. Haven’t had anything I’d call an accident in years.”

My father had told him I was accident prone so he would take care of me. Damn near ruined my whole summer.

That was the first phase of my father’s revenge. The second was worse. I’d earned enough to cover the rent for a couple of months in Vancouver by writing a film script and as an assistant editor on a Canadian feature, but couldn’t find work after that delivering pizzas much less something in the film making. Toronto was where the action was. So I hitch hiked to Toronto and got a job immediately at the CBC. A year later, my wife to be, her mother, and her two sisters drove her big red Pontiac, Big Red, from Vancouver to Toronto where we were to be married. Along the way they stopped at the family farm to put some of her things into storage, and her mother had a chance to take my father aside for a parental chat.

“I want to know what you are going to do for these young people,” she asked my father.

“Absolutely nothing.” was his blunt response. “My son is a bum. If you want to do your daughter a real favour you will convince her to call off this marriage. No good will come of it and it won’t last.”

The result was that my fiancée and her sisters were treated to a non-stop tirade as they drove the endless prairie miles, to the extent that Rena considered having her mother committed to a mental hospital when they reached Regina. It took some pleading on her arrival in Toronto to convince her the marriage should go on. That marriage lasted 32 years and resulted in three amazing children. A great partnership and not a bad run.

Ah, father. You had such a low opinion of me.

Thankfully, in later years, I managed to turn that around, and got to see him break into tears on reading my certificate from the Moscow Film Festival, “For peace and friendship among nations,” not realizing they would award that to anybody who made capitalism look heartless, which my first feature film, “Skip Tracer”, certainly did.

At a later time, after my kids were born, my father and I became very close. I taped interviews with him every weekend for months and transcribed the tapes into an oral history, which is an amazing document and a story for another day.

Damn but I miss him.

Let me conclude this post with another appeal for feedback. If you found my story interesting, if it touched you in any way, or even if you want to tell me to learn how to write, please leave a comment. I live for your attention.

Another Blast from the Past

Recently I was contacted by Michael Rawley, a Toronto actor who received a kidney transplant in the year 2000. It was my good fortune to be able to document the lead up to the operation, and result.

I had pretty much forgotten this effort, but Michael’s request for a copy sent me on a search through dusty storage in subterranean caverns. I couldn’t find any of the original cassettes, or anything labeled as final version, but I did turn up a MiniDV cassette labeled “Transplant, rough mix”. Even more amazing, I dug out my now ancient Canon GL1 camera and found that it still works just fine, despite not being out of the case for at least ten years.

The next questions – do I still have the technology to capture video from a MiniDV cassette and turn it into a digital file? That took some time and effort to figure out. But in the end, success. Now my very first attempt at digital film making is up on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.

Wendy’s Michael’s Kidney” my first digital documentary. I was hooked.

The gear I had to produce this was primitive in the extreme, a tiny amateur level camera with very limited control over focus and lighting, a ridiculously shaky tripod, and only a clip-on lavaliere microphone to capture the sound. Yet I’m still impressed with the quality. Although I never made a penny from the considerable time I spent making this documentary, and could never get anybody to broadcast it, the result convinced me that I loved the new technology.

Only a few years before I made this, something equivalent would have cost thousands of dollars and required at least a two man team. Making it was a taste of things to come. The finished film still brings a tear to my eye. It was a first step toward my eventual bankruptcy and flight to China.

Funny how things get started, and how they work out.

One last thing for anybody reading this: Please, for the love of mercy, make a comment. I’m pretty sure a few people are reading my personal website now, but I hardly ever get a comment. Even if you just say hello, please please please say something. Please let me know I’m not alone. I feel so very alone.