The AMAAS 2006 Conference in Olds, Alberta
Friday, May 19
Best quotes of the day:
"I can't warrant the presence or absence of goat parts." ~Don Filipchuk
"I want to go around tonight and take all the Ss off the signs [in Olds]." ~Aidan Rimby
"You call that a penis?" ~Don F.
"God's finger was where??" ~Aidan
A silver HandiBus-sized wagon pulls up at seven minutes to 5:00. As the eleven of us pile on, a quick inspection reveals no cupholders, much to Don F.'s dismay. We are forced to endure holding our own beers and coolers. The seats are upholstered with rainbow ribbons that I wish my furniture had.
I am already inebriated.
Richard has put me in charge of bringing the mirror-ball, forgotten by the QAS crew that departed earlier. Foolish man. But in its box full of bubble-wrap, it has a decent chance of surviving me with little damage.
Behind me sits Stephan, a soft-spoken young man from Yellowknife, listening to Colin Macdonald tell sordid tales of giving his roommate's drug patrons engine oil as hash oil.
We stop at the Humpty's/Esso near Crossfields, just barely squeezing past the tail end of a massive traffic jam of irate vacationers. Our driver takes a side road and bypasses much of the backlog, taking the overpass to skip to the west side of the highway when our scenic route abruptly trails off into a field. Continuing north, we finally see the cause of the vehicular constipation: a collision between an RV and an SUV, both flipped and being highlighted by a circus of police and ambulance lights. We all indulge in a bit of rubbernecking, taking pictures and hoping to see some gore but finding none.
Hoping to drown out that horrible reality, I try to add a bit more kick to my orange Crush but both the road and the shocks on this bus are terrible and I end up with nothing more than a vodka-soaked lap.
Suddenly we're here. The campus reminds me of U of S, lots of good-sized trees everywhere and quite beautiful, but the place is a goddamn labyrinth. With many confusing directions, we flounder our way to the Faculty Lounge and settle in for an evening of eating, drinking, live animation, and more drinking.
The Oilers' battle in the Western Conference manages to suck in a good portion of the male-majority assemblage. But once the game is over, the party resumes. Independent filmmakers are not an easily distracted species. Even a frank and earthy conversation about sex is no match for the more fascinating topic of stereo photography.
Later on in the evening, a charmer of a tomcat wanders in the open door and despite his best efforts to reach the chicken wings, quickly becomes the most popular guest at the party.
Sometime between midnight and 2 a.m., the sky starts barfing down buckets of freezing cold rain on us, which doesn't make finding an open door to the dorms any easier (thank you Colin for letting us drowned rats in).
I rinse off the day's sweat in the showers, which are so badly clogged with calcium and lime that the water comes shooting out in needle-like jets that leave my skin red and raw. Only when I'm done do I realize I've forgotten to bring a towel. F*%&ing sh!#. I don't dare streak to my room, God only knows what might ensue if I'm spotted by other intoxicated filmmakers, but within minutes of settling into my bed, the oven-like temperature of the room I share with Sharon Adams has me totally baked dry.
Saturday, May 20
Best quotes of the day:
"When you're trying to interpret nonsense [dreams], it can really lead to problems." ~David Hoffos
"Do we ever really know what someone is trying to say to us?" ~Nicole Mion
"Everything is precious and nothing is precious." ~Sandi Somers
8:30 a.m. I drag my sleepy feet into the cafeteria and do what no other species on the planet does to get food: wait in line. I sit down with a cluster of familiar faces and find Andy J. and Alan F. giving bad reviews of the food. Well, it is a college cafeteria, after all. What it lacks in quality is made up in allowed quanities. Fight the hangover while happy rumors of the party lasting until 4 a.m. circulate around the table.
Shortly after the others finish and leave me alone at the table, David Hoffos sits down across from me. I am tempted to badger him but I decide to let him eat in peace. He has lots to do this morning. After a quiet meal, he stuffs an uneaten banana into his bag and puts on his snug blue leather jacket, leaving early to set up for his talk.
I wander around for a bit, finding our blue-eyed tomcat out on the campus grounds again. Meeting up with Don B., Brenda, and a couple of others, we try in vain to find the lecture theatre on our own. Thanks to a commissionaire, we get there just as David is beginning.
My notes on this are very scattered and my recollection even worse. Drag me out of bed hungover in the early morning, fill me full of food, and put me in a dark room, and you've got one very drowsy audience member on your hands.
I would however, dearly love to know what the 63-piece ukelele band sounded like in performance. And I find it amusingly ironic that someone who was once rejected from ACAD is now a more successful artist than 90% of its students probably ever will be.
Temperamental machinery puts a damper on the end of the show but overall, it's better than many artists' talks I've sat through, in spite of or maybe even because of the running theme of anxiety and depression in the work.
Prairie Tales 8 is bumped back to after Nicole Mion's presentation, which is also delayed to 2:30 p.m. With some time to kill, we wander back to the cafeteria; the Christian conventioneers eye us warily as we pass. I am tempted to shriek loudly while dry-humping a tree just to see their reactions.
Mion's first piece to screen is "That Thing Between Us". Three screens project simultaneously, the center screen showing a side view of a blonde man and an oriental woman with beautiful long hair sitting at a table facing each other. The screen on the left wall shows the woman as seen from the man's point of view and vice versa on the right. The actions of the characters on one screen do not parallel their actions on the other.
Mion had suggested that we pick one screen and view it continuously but it turns out nobody can keep that up. It's really quite amusing to watch all these heads constantly looking back and forth, unable to settle on a screen.
Neither character speaks, but their physical interaction makes it clear that this is a tumultuous and hot-blooded relationship, full of pain and pleasure,
fighting and frolicking. At one point I get a rush of goosebumps, but after a few minutes, I begin to squirm in my seat. The moments of high interest throughout the film are broken apart by stretches of overkill.
(writing in progress)
Many thanks to "The Goldberg Variations", "Children's Corner", and Smirnoff Ice for their assistance in writing this article.