This piece’s angst is in no way reflective of the gratitude, beauty, or joy I did get to experience throughout this last defining year. This blog has always served first and foremost as a self-serving canvas for the bad feelings that people should not be subjected to other than the comfort of their own private broodaho when they need someone else perhaps disproportionately more intense to relate to. All that said, totally about me now for once in a while, hope you relate however you can!
This is less a comprehensive overview of the year in its entirety, rather what the thoughts/feels that hadn’t been archived as well as the thoughts/feels at the time of this writing.
Open Doom Crescendo blu-ray process:
It’s taking some emotional adjusting to rewatch all this making-of footage of people I see none of today. I got perfectly used to seeing them in the actual movie, but because I never worked with this archive on repeat, it comes with both melancholy but still-fun. On the community side I’m glad I’ve been able to help with essential things as swiftly as I hoped.
November 27:
Remembering dad dying this time last year, which only necessitates double-down-remembering the bonds and community that’ve over these few years given me a saved soul, newfound purposes, and the chance to give beyond myself.
Dec 11
1 year since Open Doom Crescendo definitively premiered at Paradise as the result of Adam Cook Peter Kuplowsky Ethan Eng K-FAB PROGRAMMING. If it took 3 of the most powerful human beings to force-happen 1 pity screening cause the world actively wanted me to die alone with this 3-hour lo-fi odyssey that no one asked for or wanted that I was also very mad-sad people didn’t get, I was pretty convinced that’d be it. I owe my life to them and you who listened to them, came, and ripple-affected things from there. I’ll never let go of that.
Dec 18
Open Doom Crescendo‘s second and final Montreal theatre screening last night was super intimate and low-key compared to the 9th. While the 9th was fully seated, last night had about 8 in the audience (9 with the guy working there cause he really wanted to see it). But it was deeoly moving. Particularly the strangers who came had the strongest reactions. One guy who’s 17 was saying how he was 10 when I started working on the film and now he’s 17 and his life is permanently changed. And he thanked me, saying he’s never seen so much passion in a film, and that it meant a lot to him.
I don’t know where he is now or if I heard correctly that his name’s Johanne. Maybe he’s not allowed to have instagram yet hence why he hasn’t reached out like he said he would but anyway he is this artwork’s youngest legacy after Alanna.
Maybe this all serendipitously weaves through the thoughts/feelings I have (still (forever)) now.
This has started out as possibly the most grueling drawn-out piece to ever write, cause either I depleted all my prose gas or I just haven’t been in the mood. But now that I’ve fully assumed the badass solitude of having no new year’s eve plans and the stray cat is gone to get what’s left of his visage bitten off by gal cats, I am in the mood.
This is the universal shit that has me tilting my head back and sighing heavy-cinematically. For reference, see the scene in Daredevil Coolio Cut where Matt Murdock takes his costume off to reveal all the injuries across his back from having beaten up everyone.
This begs myself the question of why I need to feel modern-self-satirically mad-sad to spawn anything creatively that hasn’t yet been conceived.
It’s just like that damn Vincent Hanna aphorism:
I gotta hold on to my angst.
It keeps me sharp; on the edge; where I gotta be.
I preserve it because I need it.
Vincent Hanna
Anyway there’s no point questioning science.
I somehow lost another sketchbook that rivals the size of my macbook unibody mid-2012, but this one was barely used besides some half-possible-to-read half-lucid rants, a concept art of Keikei, and sketches of me by an at-the-time lover.
I did not want to lose that book for any other reason than the words in there being the only thing left giving to a future I don’t know when I’d ever wake up to (not happening).
I’m more furious than ever at the world at those in power, and more hopeful than ever at the ground-level at those fighting the power.
I watch the media industry crash and burn in ways that have me sweeping for obscure space amongst the rubble.
I learn what a year-and-forever-counting without a father is like. With a well-adjusted brother on the other side of the country and I being the only unwell-adjusted child taking care how I can after a mother who never expected to be grandchildless at the age that she’s at.
I was thinking about this quote way back as one of the most painful things you could possibly be told.
“You are loved.”
💀
No one’s ever said it to me thankfully. I really hope no one ever does sincerely.
These words can be loaded with such abstraction that the only natural response to that is “Am I?” or the go-to “Fuck you.”
It depends who tells you this/to what context/and if you can even possibly believe them. But how sad and lonely can you be that someone feels they have to tell you this to absolve themselves being the one to love you?
To be honest I don’t know if there’s anyone remotely consistent enough in my life who could tell me those words and I’d believe them.
I flow-go’d with the feeling—at different points with different people—that could potentially be argued for being in love, before remembering why true romance is still dead in the modern age, or at least it’s a living feeling that evades me and that I prefer to not waste my withering post-youth reaching for.
And then I was reminded what being in love really last felt like when she came to see Open Doom Crescendo, and all it took was a 2-minute reunion and 1 red bull mind sync to know this will happen 0 more times likely. And I’m glad if that’s the case cause I can die knowing no one completed me on the void path to self-worth. After the screening I write to her that I love her, simple as that, and make love with someone else way hot the next evening who I like a lot less and end it with later anyway.
Maybe those words I wrote in that sketchbook aren’t as important as I briefly mourned them to be. If they were I would’ve last-gasped them into ODC or in the liner notes of the blu-ray ahead of time.
We get glimpses at places we could be instead of where we’re stuck living. We meet people we’d be ecstatic to spend the next eternity getting to experience life with without the reality of what it’d be like for people to have to tolerate you for more than a few days tops.
You hope those individuals understand how much they’ve permanently changed / bettered your life without you needing to harass them every once in a while with “how-are-yous” and the 14th billion thank you dm.
You hope the next person who wants to give as much as you know you wanted to give doesn’t have to also forfeit their entire what-happens-next life doing so.
We can’t do this again. And whatever it is we do do, it won’t be this. It shouldn’t have to be either—cause something’s gotta give at some point. And if humanity doesn’t do the same in the problems it’s dealing with, there won’t be any more global catastrophes to pull out of the jenga structure of our collective self-destruction before we all crash and burn together.
But I know none of the people who I’d like for to have a moral breakthrough will be reading this so it’s up to the people who want a better world to keep wanting it just as bad if not more than ever.
Humanity sodomized itself another 444+ times this year, locally, nationally, internationally. From the centennial of the Chinese Exclusion Act—which not a single p^ssy-4ss party leader in the canadian gov acknowledged—to today’s sinophobia for western hypocrisy to coward behind; from western hypocrisy to white supremacy that falsely justifies continued genocide and ethnic cleansing; from nationalist shamelessness to identity politics as smokescreens against tackling systemic discrimination, plutocracy, inequality, neoliberalism, I could go on.
Free speech is such a hypocritical western double-standard.
Next time a liberal calls out a “foreign nation” like China for censorship, they should be reminded that their version of free speech is terribly convenient to who their institutions are owned by or sided with in geopolitical dodgeball with.
I’m still not over the fact that not a single one of these bitch-ass cowardly party leaders showed up to acknowledge the centennial of the most racist legislation to ever be passed in Canada, because showing your ugly bitches faces—lil bitch trudeau, pussy-piss poilievre, sissy-smelly singh, white wet french nation blankette (also drink shit premiere filthy frank lego)— because showing your ugly bitches faces to the representatives of the Chinese-Canadian community means to these politicians even the slightest risk of association with the Chinese communist regime, and therefore means Canadian democracy is defeated by authoritarianism, and therefore they’ll lose the next election. This is as if no Canadian can be trusted with the most basic critical thinking to differentiate Chinese diaspora from Chinese communists, or that politicians don’t have the responsibility to lead the way for a more intelligent and open-minded country. So when these dickless-spineless politicians enable and perpetuate sinophobia that spreads to the distrust, alienation, and real consequences against my community, and then don’t even show up to acknowledge the very racism their country has oppressed onto my people—and they don’t show up cause they’re too busy associating my people with our ancestral homeland which has nothing to do with the Head Tax and Exclusion Act, then these politicians can drink the same coarse piss that has them equating pro-Palestinians with Jewish exterminators.
That said, I’m a citizen of the west and love free speech, but when monopolist “expressive institutions” like not only mainstream media but hollowwood also censor anyone who calls out factual genocide and ethnic cleansing as automatic anti-semitism hate speech, we’ve ascended to another level of double-standard hypocrisy. It’s just another extension of a western system of control that just self-serves holier-than-thouism as a way to display itself as do-no-wrong and their rivals/enemies as always-wrong, or in the case of Palestinians, not even human enough to know right from wrong.
I’m against sinophobia and anti-Asian racism. I’m against Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism. I’m against transphobia and homophobia. I’m against colonialism and erasure of first nations. I’m against colonialism altogether. These should be such obvious things to say. I’m against hate. The problem is when people can’t tell being against hate versus being hateful, or mask bigotry/intolerance as liberalism, or weaponize words that should bring awareness to intolerance and histories of intolerance As Ways to be intolerant.
Too much has happened this year. And that’s not a brag cause I humbly consider my life largely unexciting save for the few things I’d have going but bleed out as the only things going.
Almost feels like you had to pick and choose what to show up to, what you think you can best put your time to. And I wish more people can wake up to understand that caring about one crisis/conflict is not an excuse to give 0 sh1ts about another as a way to perform selective consciousness.
But I know that those of us on the ground, from volunteers to coordinators, all of us on the side of the have-nots, underrepresented, oppressed—it’s clearer than ever how much we all gotta show up for each other.
This year was one of personal release and catharsis.
It was one where all these things I’d been describing over the years of building and hoping towards finally came to a head. I’d finally put to peace and cement what’s mattered most, at least to me, in my life.
I also finally got around to all of Bowie.
I’m grateful to all the people who proved me wrong when I did the clichéd thing of saying I was gonna die alone with my art.
Is there— … No there is worth in the solitudunous ethical obligation one has: to take the bad feelings that they’re left behind with and turn it channel it into deep brooding art that can give cathartic meaning to anyone who relates.
What should I say to you if I see you again in this imaginary afterlife I nevertheless wanna believe in? Shall I tell you that strangers miss you? It should just about be a decade since we met. I’d say it doesn’t feel like that length but I don’t feel so young anymore. I still act it, but I know we’re long gone since those days.
There’s a price to be paid for dreaming.
I made new close friends. I lost one. Not to death. They moved. But they were Just becoming the one consistent one, so of course god wants my bonds consistently void.
The dreams are still there. They’re just older now.
Pete
I’m in a stasis and don’t know how to get the feeling back. And then I’m given enough reason(s) to wake up while the sky’s still dark.
I pick up Monique from the airport. While voguing by a pillar awaiting her arrival, I appreciate again how relatively empty the airport can be. The next time I’m here it’ll be headed to NYC. It’ll be the third time there in the span of a year of which I’ve done more travelling than the rest of my life combined. I’m gonna safely bet that this really won’t happen again. But it’s been beautiful. And it still is where I find it.
On the drive back to drop off Monique we catch up on the last few months.
Hopefully Murielle and we can get that license from the community for that film club.
For my part, it’s not quite a microcinema, but for what it’s worth, as Ed has said.
There’re still things to look forward to.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 