92

It's morning in Vancouver, although it's not really light out. Rain. Grey. We watched "The Last King of Scotland" last night on Tanya's laptop. We don't know what we're doing today, zoom a couple places on the sky train I suppose since this is a suburban mall area and not interesting for walking around. I fly home this evening.

Recapping a bit more of the weekend, Friday afternoon continued with meeting John Celona. the associate dean of fine arts, who was preparing for a blue screen video shoot. When the van of gear arrived, I helped unload and observed some of the set up that the tech did. They have an actor who, for some reason, they've not been able to get shots of in some fancy car(wasn't there yet) on the right day (a Sunday so there would be minimal traffic) with the right light (it's Victoria remember) so they decided to try to mock it all up. They look like they're doing it fairly minimally but it should be effective. It was great meeting John and getting a new perspective on Fine Arts faculties. Maureen Bradley is teaching there now, she's attached to the creative writing department, which is separate from the English Department. This seemed odd until I considered how peer review might work, how writing a poem or story or novel or screenplay is closer in many ways to drawing or filming than it is to analysis. He pointed out how the studies areas (film studies, art history, music studies, theatre studies) are the real misfits in fine arts as they are academic areas akin to work done by others in the humanities rather than artistic creation done by others in the fine arts faculty. However, in the end I believe we need to keep the fine arts studies courses together with the studio courses to create a more holistic approach to our specific fields. What I also learned is that UofR is not alone in having problems with budgets and with enrollment problems. We do seem to be a step ahead in faculty members willingness to work together across departments and to be open to interdisciplinary collaborations.

I left the university and went to the party being held for filmmakers over at Deluge. Talked a bit with Gina Dionne about John Porter and the creative process. It seems that she was a student of Mike Rollo's at Concordia; I think I taught Mike a course in my first term - Yikes, I'm getting old. The first screening on Friday was a collection of beautiful films which all explored urban life and images of the city. However, the melodic music chosen for most of the films did not really combine well with the four double martinis I'd consumed, so I have a few blurry moments. The second show was all work sent over from Finland. Really diverse and energized. I particularly loved "Splitter" by Pink Twins which involved a landscape transforming into a completely abstract grid of moving colours. Lush.

I went back to my hotel and, even though I was tired and falling asleep, I suddenly got a second wind and had no choice but to watch an animated superhero thing on Teletoon written by Stan Lee. I missed the title but caught the credits. It was about a race of shape changers who live among us and a girl who gets hit by lightening while holding her chameleon (I missed that part, dozed I guess) and she has this power now too, but she can also see people's DNA. We often see through her eyes in DNA-vision. Oh, the contrivances don't end there...