Ready or not, here I come

This is the first “official” post to this website, as I’m ready to put it out there and let people start to see it. I’m going to start with the story of my leaving SCN so everyone has the same information.

In the winter of 1989 I was setting off on the great adventure that I expected to define my life for the next several years. I had been invited to spend the Winter as a guest of the Banff Centre, helping them launch their new photo arts facility by setting up the colour darkrooms while printing a series of large colour photographic images for a show I was having in Calgary in April.

I’d been working on a consulting project for SaskTel who allowed me to take a 3 month leave to go to Banff and Calgary, and when I got back to Regina in the spring I told Gerda (my wife) that we were moving to Alberta to be artists as soon as the SaskTEL gig was finished later that fall.

Unbeknownst to me, at the same time in a set of government offices in Regina and Ottawa, the start of another even grander adventure was getting underway. The province had been playing with ideas around using television for public priorities such as distance education and educational broadcasting for years, but suddenly with Ottawa’s help, things started to happen

My stay at the Banff Centre and the show were a great success, and I’d been back at SaskTEL less than a week, dreaming grand Alberta dreams, when I got mugged by a couple of guys wanting to talk about starting a TV station for the province. Somehow I signed on for a three-month contract to see if we could invent this TV service which all the experts across Canada were assuring us would fail.

It’s now twenty years later and it has been a wonderful adventure – SCN has accomplished great things and I am very proud to have been part of it.

I originally moved to Regina in 1972 to go to graduate school at the U of S Regina Campus as it was then known. I had been working in film and television news in the states, and was surprised to find that there was almost nothing of the sort going on here at the time. There were some young filmmakers just going through the University, but things like the Saskatchewan Film Pool were still all in the future.

My first love was always film and photography, and after the Communications MA program collapsed at the University, I went on to (try to) make a living as a commercial and fine art photographer. I did continue to hang out with members of the fledgling film community and was in Yorkton for the founding meeting of what is now the Saskatchewan Motion Picture Industry Association in 1984 (?).

The SCN gig was too good a challenge to pass up, as we pretty well started with a blank sheet of paper. All the experts said it would never fly which made it even more of a challenge.

I started the first day the office was opened as a Program Officer, then a Program Manager. Right from the beginning we decided that we would work with the province’s evolving filmmakers rather than try to do stuff in house, and since then have been involved with over 700 Saskatchewan film and television projects. Not all of them were completed, but many of them were and they kept getting better and better.

When first I started at SCN, I said I wanted to see a Saskatchewan made show be shown on national television, and everyone said I was nuts. At first it was an up-hill struggle but as the industry matured and the product got better, I got my wish. Then I said I wanted to see a show that SCN was part of hit the American air-waves, and everyone said I was nuts again until the Saskatchewan made series Incredible Story Studio went on to be sold in over 100 countries around the world, including the US.

I have been very fortunate to have been part of a number of exciting aspects of the industry, having served on the Executive Committee of the Association of Tele-Educators in Canada (ATEC) and the board of the Canadian Television Fund. More importantly, I have been one small part of the evolution of the Saskatchewan Film and Television industry from a handfull of long haired weirdos playing with movie cameras, to an industry worth millions of dollars annually which employs hundreds of people.

However, SCN is what happened to me on my way to something else, and now it’s time for me to go see if something else is still out there.

So here I am, trying to start another new life in these new “interesting” times. I think we are all going to experience some turbulence over the next few years as big changes are needed and will be happening all around us. We will need to be creative, flexible, cautious, brave and a little lucky to get by, but there are also going to be some wonderful new opportunities out there that we can’t even imagine right now.

So yes, I’m excited about this. Stay tuned.

Richard

Almost ready video test

Todays post will introduce the Regina Sock Puppet Canadian Theatre to the blog. The theatre’s mission is to bring biting, cutting edge social commentary to the web.

Local News of the World

Critics have commented that if that puppet featured is made from a sock, somewhere out there there are some pretty strange feet. While I am not qualified to discuss issues concerning deformities of the feet, I will note that I know of no rule saying the the sock puppet sock has to actually fit a foot.

If you’ve actually read this far, and are still worried about the sock, you should really be getting some professional help. Or you could just wait for my new advice column on “Not Believing Everything You See on the Internet”, coming soon to this blog (or not)

Stupid Daisies

This morning’s forecast called for an unsettled day with rain in the afternoon. This was fine with me – I had spent a lovely afternoon yesterday playing golf out in the country, and was ready to get back at getting this site up and running.

However, on my way out to the studio, I was distracted by the first of the lilies to bloom this year, and then realizing that the adjacent daisies were being terrible bullies to everything around them. I had noticed this earlier but hadn’t done anything about it because it wasn’t going to be an easy fix. Today I was up to the task and set about designing and building a whole new daisy containment system. This gave me a very pleasant couple of hours of playing in the workshop and in the garden, and really in the grand scheme of things accomplished nothing but making me feel good about the time “wasted”

Now the daisies will leave the lilies alone so that I can enjoy then for the next couple of weeks. Because it was the blooming lily that started the whole thing, here’s a shot of it too.

FAST MONKEYS (a story idea)

December 8, 2002

FAST MONKEYS

A novel.

Examines the point of first contact from a human and extraterrestrial perspective. Starts close up looking only at point of initial contact, and then backs away to reveal more and more about both sides of the interaction.

Human side is usual fucked up world with competing agendas and power blocks. First contact occurs as manned missions move to asteroid belt in search of raw materials.

Non-human side is much more complex. Contact has been expected and has been planned for decades based on considerable experience. A slow monkey race of scholars and caretakers called C’reska, has been building a major research and point of contact facility in the asteroid belt for almost a hundred years. The discovery of humans as a race of technologically advanced “fast monkeys” has excited much of this section of civilized space.

Many fast monkey ruins have been found and a lucrative business has evolved by slow monkey races who move in and sort through the remains to mine technology, science and ideas. Fast monkeys have a tendency to self destruct but the few which have attained inter system travel capabilities have caused a general commotion in the neighborhood in the process of doing so.

What is even more interesting is the prospect of a Nova race of fast monkeys. There are only three of these known which have made it to extra-system space, but each of them changed history in the process. About a dozen others came close, only to self-destruct in truly epic fashion. These have provided technological bonanzas and the export of video also was big.

The C’reska are quite certain that humans are Nova class fast monkeys, and have pulled out all the stops to develop a major presence in the solar system. As well as the C’reska, there is a large diplomatic bureaucratic contingent, to make sure that the C’reska take no unfair advantage (of either the humans or of the other races and species in the sector) and that the humans do not escape the system prior to contact. There is also a f

Galactic Federation military presence to maintain order.

About 50 years after the C’reska started the project, a military garrison of Tornadors arrived. The Tornadors are a very old lizard race, led by a sub race of slow kings. The Tornadors claim that humans evolved from the activities of visiting Tornador emissaries, and that the humans are rightfully Tornador property.

This is a fairly common Tornador practice, and will end up tying up the region’s legal system for centuries. Meanwhile the Tornador will siphon off anything of value in the system they can get a hold of. However they are also capable of direct military take over if they feel they can get away with it. Conflict with the Tornador always results in the total elimination of the losing side in the system being contested, but the Tornador only win about 1 in 5 tries.

Over the ensuing years, the Tornadors have established three bases in the belt, one close at hand to the main C’reska facility, one on the outer edge of the belt across the system from the C’reska facility and one buried deep in the most dangerous part of the belt.

The Tornado legal position is based on interpreting human religious texts including genesis, which they claim, shows the snake (Tornador) giving the gift of intelligence to the human monkeys.

Sunday Chicken pix

What could be better than starting out a lovely Sunday morning with a new chicken pix

Saturday Chicken pix

Okay chicken fans, here’s the post you’ve all been looking for – it’s the Saturday Chicken pix!

go play in the garden

Sometime we can get ourselves pretty worked up about all the stuff we are trying to cope with. And I will be one of the first to admit to trying to carry as much of it around as possible for quite some time.  A couple of pieces of general advice -

* You can’t do everything – no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you worry, you can’t possibly do it all, so you’d be much better off to take a break form time to time and go sit out in the garden.

* Much of what we worry about isn’t really that important when you stop and think about it, and most of the important stuff you can only do so much about anyway.

* My mother in law taught me a great lesson about dealing with difficult people. Just be glad you don’t have to sleep with them. (if you do have to sleep with them, please watch for my remedial dating advice coming early next year)

7.10.09

Ask yourself – Is this a date, or am I now looking at this as an” investment”? If you are looking at investing in a relationship, the stuff you need to consider is different from what you looked at as a date. You have to kick the tires, look underneath and poke to make sure nothing is loose or falling off. I know that doesn’t sound very romantic but it makes for a better chance of the investment working over a longer term.

On Indian Land

Standing on the prairie

south of Saskatoon

there I was on Indian land

howling at the moon

As I watched the moon come up

I heard a coyote’s song

I didn’t have to stop and think

I just sang along

Not a house for miles

I just opened up and bayed

And as my spirits let it flow

The less my body weighed

The evening breeze, the smell of sage

and a sky still darkly blue

the rustling of the prairie grass

a few mosquitoes too

“There – I’m glad that’s off my chest”

I loudly did exclaim

“It’s much too dark to find my ball

it’s time we end this game!”

We went back to the clubhouse

Through the advancing gloom

A great adventure, and the best damn part

…was howling at the moon

Cleaning house/cleaning head

I had been working at the same place for 20 years, and I had accumulated a lot of stuff along the way, both mental and physical. When I retired in April, a lot of the physical stuff moved home into my studio, which was already full to overflowing with other stuff.

The first several weeks I managed to stay busy with the Film Festival, with business things and post-work details. This was good as it kept me from thinking too much and worrying about what happens next. After I started slowing down a little, I was ready to take on cleaning the studio and dealing with all the crap I’d brought home from the office. At first I thought I’d just sort out a couple of boxes, but once the process got started it took on a life of it’s own.  Pretty soon no corner of the studio was safe and I was having a wonderful time finding things I hadn’t seen or thought of in years. Thanks to this time spent cleaning, and the time spent playing in the garden this past couple of weeks, I finally feel like I’ve “touched bottom” on this whole retirement thing.

I don’t miss being at work, I miss the people I worked with. I don’t miss the meetings and the memos, the corporate planning or the professional development. I miss doing the stuff that I thought we did that had some value. I don’t miss the policies and the politics. I sure miss having an IT department that could fix almost anything to do with computers, but I don’t miss the technology having such a firm hold on my life.

One of the best parts of the past couple of weeks, is realizing that I don’t need my blackberry on and at my side every waking minute. I start have the time to stop and focus on things that normally I wouldn’t have had the time for. The garden has been great for this – I think it grows new weeds just so I can go out and get lost in pulling them out. Don’t take your cell phone or blackberry weeding with you – it’s no help! The photo is of a bit of edging that has become infested with invasive weeds – a space that I can spend unmeasured time in pulling the grass and weeds out one stem at a time.

And yet here I am, starting a blog to try to record the next phase of my journey into whatever happens next. I guess that’s the question – how to blend this brave new connected world into a simple and well grounded life? Is it possible?