Triple Sensation random thoughts

Triple Sensation finished airing on CBC this past weekend, and for those of you who don't know, I got to go to Montreal early this year for the second round of auditions. Now that it's all over, I thought I would write down some more details of what the process was like for me, and a review of sorts of the actual TV show.

The first audition, in Halifax, was not filmed. I had to sing one song from a list of possible selections, and one monologue of my own choice. I did "Reviewing the Situation" from Oliver, one of my favourites, largely because it's a character song and not just one note emotionally. The monologue I used was a piece I'd done for Nigel Bennett at the ATF, a comic bit from the film "How To Get Ahead In Advertising". I did well with that audition, and was selected to go to Montreal for the callback.

This was sweet. Not only did the folks at Triple Sensation pay for my plane ticket, they put me up at a swank hotel in downtown Montreal, right next to Chinatown and a 20 minute stroll from the Old Port. That, and no one at the hotel complained that Erin was staying with me in a room that was technically a single. :) Erin and I had an entire day to just wander around the city before auditions started the next day.

For the second audition, I sang "The Impossible Dream" which ended up being entirely fitting, and I did one of the Chorus parts from Henry V: "Now it is that time of night, when creeping murmur and the poring dark fill the wide vessel of the universe..." I thought this segment of the callback went very well, up until the point when they asked to see me enjoying myself. I was enjoying myself! Anyway, I got through it just dandy. I must say though, I do find that sort of audition to be awfully artificial. I would much rather do a cold read of scene with someone else than do monologues - acting is, in many ways, more about listening and relating than about going "TA DA!"

The dance call was the next day, and my thoughts on that catastrophe are here.

Anyway, I tuned in to the show over the last few weeks, just to see if anyone I knew made it through - turns out, one of the gals I hung out with after the dance call won the 2nd place prize! Go Anwyn! There's a picture out there somewhere of the two of us chillin'.

I only watched the last episode all the way through, which was very cool. I totally called the prize winners, though not the exact placements. Thought most of the song selections for the final performance were unfortunate: Gershwin is just overdone, period. I would have much preferred to see character songs rather than standards anyway. The Shakespeare scenes felt forced, aside from Anwyn and John-Michael's Kate and Petruchio, which is always fun. I wish some of the others had taken their scenes as far as those two did. Pierre Trudeau - I mean, Colm Feore showing up was kind of random. All in all, it was very well put together and tastefully produced, and I'm happy to have been part of the process.

ATF Blues

So, for all those of you who might possibly be interested, no, I am not going to be on stage at the Atlantic Theatre Festival this summer. I'm not saying don't buy tickets or anything, because I'm sure that there's going to be some interesting stuff going on and everyone should drag their families with them, but just don't expect me to be a part of it.

I can't tell you why I'm not in it again this year, because I really don't know. They only had one non-Equity position in the first place, and there are plenty of non-Equity actors out there. A dime a dozen, quite likely. I did try to get an audition (unsuccessfully) so I can't really get pissed off at myself for not giving it a shot.

There was an amateur company in Windsor of all places that wanted me to try out for the lead in their summer musical, but I turned them down. There might be a certain amount of irony in that, but according to Alanis Morissette, there's irony in almost everything. Meh.

To meat or not to meat...

OK, so here's my latest dilemma. I've recently watched a few videos on YouTube by a user named strangeholm. These videos were a series devoted to answering questions about veganism, which as many of you may know is the ultimate vegetarian lifestyle - no animal products eaten at all. Now, most of the time I'd scoff loudly at the notion - us human beans have been eating animal flesh almost since we climbed down out of the trees, and indeed, our physiology is tailored to the mastication and digestion of meat. This is not to say that we should be meat eaters, but that it's the natural thing for us to do as far as evolution goes.

Strangeholm, however, expresses an ethical argument for veganism which is pretty darned difficult for me to ignore. I have, by and large, accepted the idea that we humans are no more "special" than any other creature on the planet; just because we are the most intelligent and self-aware doesn't mean we are the centre of all that is, was, and ever shall be, amen. The only bits of the universe that place a high premium on human existence are the bits that happen to be human themselves. So, if we are no different from all the other creatures that we share the planet with, shouldn't the same moral axioms that go for us, go for them?

Well, part of the problem is that we don't even apply those moral axioms to ourselves 100% of the time. In fact, it seems to be almost pathetically easy for us not to. We simply need to declare someone, or a group of someones an enemy, and we can strip them of humanity in our minds as quickly as we need to in order to award them some horrible fate. How can we talk of treating animals the way we treat ourselves when we treat ourselves so despicably?

I'd take this a step further. I think we treat animals horribly because we treat ourselves exactly the same way. We simply need to turn off our ability to empathize, to shift our attention away from the suffering of others. Actually inflicting that suffering becomes something of a trifle after that mental adjustment is complete. I might even go so far as to say that its evolutionarily adaptive- be concerned for the suffering of your own clan, those who share your genes, but ignore the suffering of those outside it, who might be in a position to consume resources and deprive you of mating opportunities. I'm just guessing at that part, but it seems likely enough.

What makes it even worse, if such can be said, is that those of us who eat meat genuinely enjoy it. Even more, we look forward to it. Tell me, my meat eating friends, who doesn't begin to salivate at the thought of a nice, juicy steak on the barbecue? Couple our enjoyment of meat and the ease with which we ignore suffering, is it really any wonder that factory farms are so proliferate?

Anyhow, these are just my initial thoughts on the matter. Now that I've gone this far, I could probably write a paper on it, but I'm more interested in hearing people's responses to this than spouting off several thousand more words.

Here's the video that started me thinking about all this crazy stuff.

Update: Strangeholm also has an interesting blog, which is over in the sidebar, but the entry of interest is here.

MBR's continued

Having taken the machine to Staples, I discovered that I did NOT, in fact, have to replace my hard drive. All that needed to be done was to run a little disk repair utility off the XP CD's, which I was not provided with when I bought the machine. This lowers my opinion of Cisnet tech support even further (or at least the dolt that I talked to). I was told by the Staples repair dude that MBR errors are common with fragmented drives, and running the defrag utility in every copy of Windows would mitigate the chances of them happening again. If errors like this are relatively common (given the circumstances) and so easy to fix in general, why the heck did the guy on the support line tell me to replace my bloody hard drive!!??

I've had some experience on the other side of a tech support line, so I feel for the people who do the job, but not for those who neglect the obvious troubleshooting steps. The first thing I would have done, confronted with an error of this kind, would be to ask "Have you run the MBR repair utility on the Windows XP CD?" If, as in my case, the customer did not have a copy of Windows, I would then suggest that they find a legit copy and use the MBR fix on it. I would never suggest such a drastic step as a hard drive swap or even formatting the existing drive until all other options had been exhausted.

What the heck is an MBR?

Well, I suppose if you buy a computer the manufacturer of which you've never heard of, you should probably expect some issues. I recently bought a Cisnet clone from Staples during a little sale they were having. It was meant to replace the Dell laptop that I'd gotten cheap from Acadia, which had died on me in a series of progressively frustrating stages. I've had the Cisnet for little over a month now, and a few days ago I started getting weird system hangs. No error messages, no screen glitches, not even a handy BSOD to let me know something was really wrong. The thing just stopped responding. I was able to wriggle the cursor around a bit, but even that stopped once I got too click-happy.

After a manual reboot, things seemed OK for a bit, but the same thing happened about 15 minutes later. Both times I had been using Firefox, so I figured I'd try Internet Explorer to see if it was the browser that was giving me problems. The system hanged itself immediately upon opening a single Explorer window. Gah.

I'm not entirely discouraged at this point. I then try to do a system restore on the machine, which seems to do the trick, until about 4 hours later, it happens again. This time, when I reboot, I get an "MBR error" on start up (mbr = master boot record, something apparently very important), and it tells me to select a proper boot device! I manage to get to the Windows loading screen a few times, apparently by complete accident, but it just sits there, endlessly waiting for an instruction from a system that has apparently given up the ghost. Finally, I try the last resort - formatting the drive using my recovery disks. What happens? I get a "hard drive write error", which essentially tells me that the machine is well and truly fucked.

I did call Cisnet tech support, who were singularly unhelpful in the giving of explanations department. I run through the troubleshooting steps that I have taken with both level 1 and level 2 support and all I get is an instruction to have my drive replaced. Not to mention that the singularly unhelpful tech support people gave me no indication as to what might have actually happened to my machine, AND they spoke in nigh incomprehensible accents so I had a hard time telling what exactly they were saying.

While I accept that, yes, I am going to have to replace my hard drive, I really don't know why, and whether or not I can recover anything from my current one. The only explanation I can think of is that Cisnet makes shitty PCs. I'm going to keep the computer, because I can't afford to get a new one, but I wouldn't buy another Cisnet if I had other options. Luckily I have a 2 year warranty for the machine, which means a new drive won't cost me anything.

Yet Here We Are

Interesting feature article by Jakeet Singh on Rabble recently. He's responding to a series of articles in the Globe and Mail, specifically pieces written by Maria Jimenez about "ethnic enclaves" in Canada that exist by and large because of multiculturalism. Unfortunately, my attempts to actually read the articles were, as ever, stymied by the Globe's insistence on making people pay to read archived material. I don't have ready access to the print Globe the way I used to, so the context I'd like isn't entirely complete, but Singh's comments make sense without necessarily having to read the other articles.

I'd like to echo John Ralston Saul's argument in his book Reflections of a Siamese Twin. The main thrust of his argument is that as Canadians, it is our acknowledgement and embrace of the differences between us that make us special - that those differences, and the means we have used to push past them to create a thriving society, are in fact part of what defines us as a country. We are a people separated by language, geography, cultural norms, religion... all of these things were once great excuses to start killing and/or subjugating lots of people. The very fact that Canada came into being was unlikely, and the forces that were at work in the beginning to try and stop the efforts of men like Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine are still at work today, in the form of pernicious ideologies. Yet here we are.

I think that if we're going to have a discussion about the merits of multiculturalism, we have to understand that from the start, Canada has been multicultural. It had to be for any kind of French/English political partnership to work. It's almost ridiculous to speak of multiculturalism as "policy" when the very existance of the state is predicated on it. It's clear that some people have forgotten (or they were never taught) why Canada exists they way it does. The councillors in the Quebec municipality of Herouxville certainly seem to have (click on "Avis Publique" and scroll down to read the "Standards" document).

Constant talk of possible terrorist attacks on Canadian soil, constant fear of the unknown, has caused at least some people to actively condemn the cultural norms of other citizens. According the Globe and Mail, this leads to the point where they are willing to advocate splitting communities up to better make their members "fit in" with ice hockey and maple syrup! Imagine what would happen if anglophones demanded that the francophones be scattered across the entire country in order to assimilate into "Canadian culture". Most people would laugh out loud at the very notion. We seem to be more than willing to say as much about ethnic minority groups more recently arrived.

I will say this: in the absence of any monolithic Canadian culture, we have by and large adopted the one that's closest at hand, American culture. But that's a story for another time.

The Impossible Dream

I'd like to relate a story of what happened to me this past weekend. Unfortunately, a tricky little thing called a non-disclosure agreement was signed, so I find myself wanting to express thoughts about something that really make very little sense out of context. I'll do my best anyway - I've got to get it out.

I went to what was essentially a "cattle-call" musical theatre audition. It was my first experience of the kind, and I really had very few expectations going in. No, wait, that's not entirely true. I did expect that I could handle whatever got thrown at me. I mean, I've been involved in musical theatre for years and years. The major part of the audition was the dance call, and boy, was I in for a shock. Or a treat, it all depends.

Nearly everyone there had some kind of dance training, and many of them were absolutely amazing dancers. I wasn't. In fact, I think it's fair to say that I was the most incompetent dancer there, period. I talked to some of the others who expressed consternation at their lack of dancin' mojo, but I don't think anyone else sucked nearly as much as me. A fact of which I take a certain twisted pride.

It wasn't that way at first, naturally. I'm the type of person who likes a challenge, especially if it's within the realm of things I know I can do. Anyone who was in Jenee Gowing's 2003 movement class at Acadia knows I can be just as much of a dancing fool as I am a singer and an actor. I just need plenty of rehearsal, which this particular situation did not offer me. With probably 80 people or more in the studio, and only a few hours to get through the whole thing - there wasn't time to teach everyone how to actually do the dance they were teaching. Just watch and learn, that was how it went. I was so frustrated.

I met a lot of nice people who were very encouraging. To everyone who told me I could do it, even when I knew that it was pointless, thank you. It made the day a lot better, and it allowed me a sort of Zen acceptance of the fact that I didn't make the cut. There were people who cheered me on when they didn't have to, and I appreciate that even more. A big thank you to everyone.

Here's the thing. I nearly gave up completely. I nearly said to myself, "This is nuts. I'm out of my league, time to go." I didn't. I could hardly stand being in the room, let alone try to dance, but I made the best I could of what I thought was a pretty much impossible situation. My old high school music teacher, Bob Rushton, used to say, "We can never be perfect, but we can always try." As trite as it is, often the effort is more important than success or failure. I stuck with the dancing, and tried to push the thoughts of humiliation out of my mind for long enough to get through it.

I think that I did make the cut, at least the one that really matters. If I hadn't bothered, if I'd left before the end, I would probably have hated myself for it. The whole trip, the whole experience, would have been nothing but a waste of time. Instead, I have not only a healthy sense of self-respect, but a better sense of who I am as an artist and what I want to keep doing. That's pretty fucking cool.