Whose bright idea was it to open the university? Why did anyone expect anyone to go anywhere? Who asks you into work when transit and traffic are in chaos and the roads are dangerous? Some people better pull their heads out of their asses because this is a waste of everyones time and money and not least of all a few people’s lives.
Hipsters and wankers and ponces and a disturbing number of the general population have taken to the newest and yet lamest form of conversation. Yes, even more shallow so then the much maligned, yet ever useful topic of weather.
This new form of communication has send us back to the verbal equivalent of the tickertape. It is list based, it is brief, and it is incapable of depth. This is codification of cool, canonized by the yuppie demagogue’s of the city’s “creative” professionals and imposed upon a desperate and clamoring throng of those daring to seek social and economic mobility . It is competitive, stagnant and stupid.
This method is a form of one upsmanship. Conversations consist of competitive list making and name dropping. What movies have you seen? Have you had coffee at this cafe? What kinds of things don’t you eat? Any actual content is removed as life is broken down into bullet points of qualifications decided upon by an ignorant hipster elite.
Case in point, once while trying to talk about movies at the party of some Kitsilano fuck, Lee Marvin came up. Now firstly, this topic is about ten years to late but I like Lee Marvin so I try to join in. Here is what I hear:
“Lee Marvin?”
“Oh, I love Lee Marvin.”
“Lee Marvin is great.”
“He’s Lee Marvin.”
“Have you seen Point Blank?”
“Yeah! You must have seen Dirty Dozen.”
etc…
So, tired of lists, I mention my favorite of his movies and try to discuss the movie itself. What was good, what was bad, why he was good for the role etc. All I get is blank stares and an end to the conversation. It wasn’t like I took over the conversation, I was giving lead ins and prompting feedback but it was obvious these guys just had nothing to say about the topic, they were empty besides the handful of data consisting of “Lee Marvin” and “Title list.”
Yet these are the people who are successful in our much touted “Vancouver Film Scene,” which has turned out to be entirely a lie. Artists and craftsman from Canada and around the world have flocked here in hopes of being part of the magic that is cinema. They come and find not a thriving creative place but an industry that is nothing more then a prostitute to Hollywood, run by a tight fisted group of technocrats and their courtier hipsters.
They find that they are expected to spend years working for little or no pay in bad and over demanding working conditions. They find a film philosophy that is dominated by a school that caters to factory film making and rich students, a school that doesn’t even acknowledge the action movie as a viable form of film making. They find absolutely zero support for film in terms of art or independent production, the money being locked up tight by film execs forever suckling the Hollywood teat.
Vancouver occasionally has a decent production come through “ie Juno” but internationally we are getting a reputation for the unending stream of crap that issues forth from our movie factories. It is even becoming visually discernible. Watch enough shitty movies and you can pick out from the nature of the shittiness which ones are filmed in Vancouver (one reviewer lambasted a movie by saying it looked like it was shot in a closet in Vancouver, which it pretty much was.)
We are shit monkeys, churning it out as fast as we can. This might not be so bad if the money from these shitty productions were reinvested into local work, supporting our own voices, but this never happens. The money is kept in the same hands, invested in more facilities to produce more shit.
Local productions do happen occasionally but they are shit too, the uninspired feces of the hipster courtiers, trying to be too cool for school but who are really just hacks with a chip on their shoulder. Meanwhile our artists, from the avanteguarde to the small budget narrative are left to starve. Not only are they given nothing, they are immobilized by restrictive and expensive permits, burnt locations and constant belittling by the hipster elite.
Vancouver thinks it is some golden international city but it is still a dirty backwater resource town exporting locations, taking what it can, cashing in and shipping out. Fuck you Vancouver.
So I’m installing a lawn at this big ass house by the drive and this young man with quite swarthy skin and dark curly hair comes walking by. He starts asking about the house, asking if “a Chinese” owned it. I said no, it was an Albertan woman who had bought the thing.
The young man then says “Isn’t it good to have white people buying houses again.”
First of all, who are these “white people” you want to be buying houses? And because I am ‘white’ this for some reason means I should be happy that an obnoxious Albertan with alabaster skin bought a house?
Secondly, this imaginary “white” group you so obviously crave to belong too, well my friend, do you really think you would be welcomed into this fold as you, by appearance, are semitic mulatto? I doubt this mythic organization of albino property owners would be interested.
Generally one of the most annoying things that you can do in an office is make microwaved popcorn. Sure the buttery richness makes you salivate and more than likely will fill your snack craving but then everyone’s workspace smells like Orville Redenbacher molested your desk for the next two hours. As a result many offices institute an non official no popcorn rule. Its simple really; kinda like the no farting in confined spaces rule. You break it you get the minor often immature punishment. There are two other things that Id like to add to the list:
1.Tzaziki – Now dont get me wrong, I love tzaziki as much as the other person, just not a container of it sitting on a desk acting as the improptu air freshener. It stinks after awhile hence no Tzaziki fabreze.
2. Ranch Dressing – Tzaziki’s retarded American cousin. This one smells worse with time
Stop the stink. 2 day old Tzaziki smells raunchy.
“I brought oatmeal but noone told me that I needed to cook it! I mean who cooks Oatmeal! With water too!”
iPodgirl
