The End of Open Doom Crescendo
MAILING LIST SIGNUP
Emoness writes itself naturally. Let’s get into it.
Looped beyond reason to Sputnik’s “Agatka (Agatha! You’re Being Melodramatic!)”
Mike Wood was one of the people I met at last December’s Paradise premiere who moved me the most that night. He came on a spontaneous whim to what I was pretty convinced would be the only screening ever of my life’s work. And while I’m still banished to the off-map outskirts relative to even underground cinema, Mike has been one person who never stopped showing how out-of-the-way he’d go to include a delinquent’s work like mine in the oddities he champions. This by not only showing up to each of Toronto’s Open Doom Crescendo screenings but Curating the third one as part of his unprecedentedly badass summer outdoor DIY screening series.
Mark Hanson was the first and then-only film critic / journalist to reach out and support Open Doom Crescendo back when it was in pseudo-prequel-pilot mode, giving it singular voice in 2021 ahead of the March 27 Spectacle online screening, and so he is a direct part of the hope I most needed during that time.
Since then he has never stopped supporting and believing in my work and personhood like no one else in the field of film discourse. He’d be the one I can confide in during the most demoralized feeling that I’m left behind even by the underground scene, self-servingly having “been here before my peers yet watching them all fly past me”… It was my all-or-nothing wish to have the climactic Toronto screening of ODC MC’d by Mark, and I will forever cherish my time with him, now immortalized.
5 years onwards and Peter Kuplowsky and Justin Decloux are still showing up—
—Peter increasingly rationing life-force units as if the remainder of his mangoshake enthusiasm are at emergency backup reserve to get him through the last Open Doom Crescendo Toronto screening and the last time he’ll hopefully ever have to speak at an Open Doom Crescendo screening about the deleted ending of Insidious 2 which apparently he is the only one on Earth besides the filmmakers to have seen. And Justin being the warmest enabler and enthusiast has a way of seeing my heart no-budget-smeared across my sleeve and saying exactly the things I needed to hear and re-moralize / laugh to.
I don’t know what my creative life would look like without them. It certainly wouldn’t be my creative life worthwhile without the programmer of Midnight Madness willing to stand in a late-night field doing spooky-storytelling of the Insidious 2 ending, and Toronto’s ultimate cinephile / the man behind The Important Cinema Club and Gold Ninja Video accepting to be my beacon of hope for humanity in exchange for one of my 8 red bulls.
My heroes Have a Nice Life were able to make it out to the screening.
It was something that up to that point I would’ve self-servingly imagined—where my biggest artistic inspirations would show up to the big thing I had to give from my whole life up to this point. For as long as creativity was a path I sought to actualize, music has been the medium that most showed the way. And it’s the outsider art of music that showed the way most of all. That you could take all you barely got and give the grandest-feeling thing possible—to reach beyond the sky with what we give with the time we got.
I finally got Therapy Dogs, Insidious, Insidious 2 as ways to pay my dues to Baystreet Video, Mark’s living, and Ethan Eng. That said, this is the least I could do.
I’m still loading the courage to rewatch Therapy Dogs.
I was always gonna get the blu-ray. That said, to this day I’m still affected by my one and only viewing of the screener on that December night before the Hollywood Reporter knew who he was. As cantankerous as I am to humanity in general, I am unhealthily protective of Ethan, again to a degree that would be cringe to anyone comparing his and Avalon Fast’s clout to mine (WHAT CLOUT)—and knowing of where the line unblurs between staged school antics and very real and traumatizing (at least to me as a viewer) heartbreak, it is painful to even imagine watching again and knowing. I can’t reverse-Ring it and crawl through the screen to anti-Ring comfort Ethan, telling him everything’s gonna be way more than all right for him. I’m not even in the same city and in his everyday life to nag him about how he’s doing, if everyone’s being nice to him and if I should sacrificially beat up anyone for him, if he’s drinking enough so he doesn’t ever have to be the embarrassing a-hole who has kidney stones, if he’s giving all the love he’s capable of and not letting the meatheadedness of young adults around him convince him what’s cool or manly or righteous. But again, he doesn’t need me. He’s tougher, younger, faster, stronger, smarter, sexier, hardcore-er (alchemy) and bolder than I ever could’ve been up to the end of my 20s, let alone the beginning. That doesn’t stop me from still caring, and cherishing the time that I’m granted with him and his family every time I’m in Toronto.
I’ve been very vocal about how Ethan clearly doesn’t need my help or owe me for anything, lest I become his hack senior who tries to freeload-claim credit for his successes. What I do feel is guilt that I cannot do more to give back to him other than not dying and wasting all that he gives to me despite all the people in his life who are ready for everything he’ll give this world. All I can do is get emotional all over again that I get to take space for better or worse.
No one I’d die harder for.
And from him I’ve made some of the realest friends that I otherwise would’ve never found in the social desolate nationalist-and-otherwise-hipster-echochamber that is montreal’s “arts” scene. I know Open Doom was created as a result of the people who were in my life at the time, and instrumentalizing the wastelands of greater montreal’s corrupt construction project. Maybe it was inevitable that my time would run out with them all. Still they could’ve reached out when dad died. Those assholes (my dad + film people), but what can we do?
With the clock lethargically ticking, the who-knows-how-long-between distances between our meetings, and that almost-desperate feeling to be too much if to futilely show my appreciation for new friends albeit maybe too late into our lives—my skin shivers typing this as the evenings start getting chillier but possibly also from the coldness of this loneliness I feel back in stupid mtl, but a coldness that’s at least familiar. I’ve got too much time to think about my life, and it’s the weekend now at the time of writing this exact sentence so I have another few days into labor day to not deal with comparing insurance policies on the car now that my super dead dad can no longer be attached to the vehicle.
I should put on a hoodie, but it’s just the lightest of physical discomfort. My heart’s still warm, even if it aches the blood it pumps.
I’m looping anew Duster’s “Travelogue” now cause I straight up heard “Agatka” almost a billion times in the last couple days and I need to become sick of another song that empowers my emoness. I’m suddenly missing the Chicago people I feel in love with within a few hours of landing there in June.
This is gonna slip away. Just like it does every time. And I’ll be dealing with the bs of artless life and remembering this is why most people don’t need my overbearing visage in the regularity of their own lives. I live in a film-like-world that does all it can to remove myself from the sadness that is a life that passes through bonds, that roadblock-detour around youth that’ll know and share with each other ecstasies I can no longer make the boat in time for, and all I will be left with is this digital real estate blog pontification that up to 66 people read.
Yet contrarily there is beauty—at least to myself—at how even this otherwise-considered searing sadness can be weaponized-for-good into something I can remain emboldened by, and that whoever reading who isn’t sick of my vending-machine-brain-vomit-thesaurussing can hopefully project or relate their own sad-bad-ass feelings onto.
Shoutouts don’t get more badass-hype than with Eyesore Cinema’s Adam Thorn.
Let this be clear: there is apparently no infrastructure or alternative scene in Vancouver. That’s what Chris to Clara to Avalon have attested. And while that’s more than montreal can speak for—cause if there’s a genuine space for pro-LGBTQ+ / BIPOC in my piece of shit city that’s not francophone-corrupted, it sure as Hell is backwards-liberal hipster-exclusive. I get the feeling.
Yet this place is a miracle, and it’s the only one of its apparent kind. It’s been through countless renamings, owners, and crises, but as Henry shared when we hung out at the golden hour-bathed rear of the venue, “This place will live.”
And while I start fights with everyone back in the east coast, seeking through the settled battle dust to claim space for us, it’s an absolutely comforting feeling knowing 648 Kingsway is out there in the west coast.
Every aspect of hope in our lives just takes one person to validate the feeling we need.
It takes one person named Chris aka schnüdlbug to get my film screened and hosted on the other side of the continent.
It takes one person named Clara to make the booking happen, make me feel belonging, and that what I’ve been waiting to give was always being waited for—here in this haven.
It takes one person named Alisa to give a really welcoming conversation with a complete stranger and help me feel more welcomed there than I ever do in stupid-ass montreal.
It takes one person named Henry to give me the most aesthetically iconic / wholesome of alleyroad meetings—and to show that we keep persevering so that we may eventually find and move each other.
If Dufferin Grove Park was brilliant, 648 Kingsway was blissful.
I’ve dragged myself to keep believing in the potential of lo-fi cinema as some outsider revolution or whatever interchangeable terminology you wanna use. It’s only been these last few months that I can more start to believe I’m not so alone—at least outside of montreal, of which its desolation I resent more than ever, while not letting that resentment blind the 3/4 of my eyes that work.
This is just another place. We’re more than where we’re trapped. We’re where we send our signals—our chords, our projections of light, our messages and our letters.
We’re the times with each other to live out, then alone to cherish. We’re the actions we take chances on and the unlikely hearts that reciprocate.
I don’t know what’ll happen next. I get melancholic, just thinking about it.
Don’t feel bad for me; I’m just opening up. I’m gonna return to real life and get in a petty fight with a redneck hillbilly who doesn’t know better or / and an evil liberal arts graduate who should know better. I’m gonna end up unintentionally creeping out someone who thinks they’re more progressive than they actually ever will be and who then with their like-pea-minded friends will attempt to cancel me, except they forgot I was never activated. I’m gonna go on another rant about how everyone with their stupid-ass good-looking-people 5-minute debut shorts will forever be festival-programmed over my 36x-longer life’s work, and that unweird people imperialized and tore away weirdness from the real losers and rejects.
And that it’s up to us losers and rejects to hostile take it over anew, tear it away from the hacks and posers’ carcasses, and reclaim what’s left.
So that it may heal and live beautifully weird again.
This is gonna end, like most resonating times do. But I hope against all hope that something can last beyond this—even if I have nothing to do with it, against all selfish desire to matter in this existence. . . But I was there, and I gave all I had left—as it stands.
Happy Fish Mango Pudding.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 