Tales From Parts Unknown – Page 27 – Adventures in travel, theatre and life in the future

The vending machine and the bear

So a couple of years back I began to realize that I had feelings for a friend. Wasn’t the first time this had happened, and this time I was determined not to be a jerk about it. You know, the kind of jerk who hangs around being “just friends” while hiding his true feelings and hoping that one day she magically realizes that the perfect guy has been right in front of her the whole time.

Because man, fuck that guy.

Anyway. Actually having the conversation proved… difficult. I suspect she saw it coming and, being afraid of conflict, did whatever was necessary to dodge it. Which I found weird, because this was going to be a way less pleasant conversation for me. But I’m not here today to talk about that, or the few highs and powerful lows of the year and change that followed. You see, the other day I came across something I wrote that fateful February. My attempt to explain, through a certain amount of self-depreciating humour, what being in my position felt like.

I present that for you now. Enjoy.

And now, a metaphor gets weird

How to explain it. How to say what I’m thinking without actually saying what I’m thinking? Because that’s crazy. Can’t actually say it out loud. Then people would know. What’s the point of secrets if you’re going to let people know what they are?

And this is where we turn to metaphors. Literary code. Yes, metaphors are the way to explain what you find unexplainable.

But this one gets kind of muddled. Bear with me.

Imagine a weight. A pressure, pushing down on you. All the time. As though a vending machine had collapsed on top of you. The weight is a constant. Some days you can manage it, you find a way to distribute the weight or manage to distract yourself until it doesn’t seem so bad, but other days it feels like more than you can handle. You don’t know if you can live with it.

Well, no, of course you can’t live with being trapped under a vending machine, you’re going to run out of food and water, even if you do break the machine open. Also those things are heavy, you’re probably bleeding internally. But that’s literal thinking, it’s what we’re trying to avoid. None of that is germane to the metaphor.

Germane. No, not the Jackson brother. It’s a word, look it up.

So. Stuck under the vending machine. There is a way out, but it’s not exactly ideal. The only way to free yourself is to… and this is where the metaphor begins to get muddled… is to surround yourself with fresh salmon, so as to lure over a nearby bear, which will pry the machine off you to get at the fish.

(Yes, I know. Took a weird left turn there. But muscle through it and it’ll all start to make sense.)

The problem is, you don’t know how the bear is going to react once it’s dislodged the vending machine. It came for fish and found you. What will it do? You want to believe that it will just ignore you and let you leave. Maybe, and this must be wishful thinking, give you a friendly lick on its way? But no. You’re pretty sure you know what’s going to happen. It’s going to maul you. Maybe you’ll live, maybe you’ll die, but that bear is coming at you tooth and claw and it is going to be terrible.

You put it off as long as you can, but the non-stop weight of the machine won’t be denied. You have to do something. You have to make it stop. You’re willing to risk the mauling just to get away. So you summon the salmon. Freedom is close.

Look, I don’t know where the salmon comes from. Maybe it was in the machine, maybe there’s a delivery chute or something, but no, there is no delivery guy that will help you escape. It’s the bear or nothing, and the salmon is on the way so you’d better brace for that.

And so you do. You try to steel yourself for the moment, figure out what you can do to protect yourself if it all goes wrong. The fear builds. The adrenalin kicks in. And there’s that spark of hope, that thought that maybe, just maybe, everything will work out better than your feared. But if you let yourself believe that, the mauling will only be worse. Better to be prepared for the worst.

Only the salmon doesn’t come. For whatever reason, maybe the tube is blocked, I don’t know, you can’t get the salmon when you ordered it. Maybe later. Next week, something like that. There will be no summoning the bear, no mauling, no anything. It’s hard not to be relieved, isn’t it? Your situation hasn’t improved, but for one more day, one more week, possibly, you don’t have to worry about it getting worse. You can just relax.

Except for that weight. Apparently you get to keep living with it. Well, crap.

“Are you even trying?” presents…

This may or may not be a new recurring feature around here, but sometimes you have to look at a promotional campaign, or a public figure, and ask yourself… Are you even trying?

Today, I ask this of the people trying to pitch the idea of “drinking less.”

Don’t drive drunk, you moron

First of all, convincing people not to drink themselves into oblivion and then risk innocent lives by driving a car is a noble aspiration. I know several people who could stand to learn a thing or two about that. I know more people who say “I’m not drinking tonight, people are depending on me to get them home safely,” and that’s admirable and should be celebrated.

Some anti-drinking and driving ads manage that. One ad on the radio recently has a woman talking to her friend about that great guy who gave up drinking for a night to be the DD, and how she totally let him take her home (she’s describing it fondly the next day, so we may assume he wasn’t a serial rapist). Another ad in the same campaign celebrates the drunk dial, as a man calls a friend in the middle of the night because he’s had some epic adventures and needs a ride home.

Well done, those ads. Show us the alternatives to driving drunk and make them look cool. That’s the way to do it.

And then there are these idiots.

No! Only drink at designated drinking areas!

Watching the Daily Show on the Comedy Network website means dealing with ads. Fine. I read Achewood or surf Reddit and mute that terrible Mio ad set to Eye of the Tiger until John Oliver is back (I imagine this trend will continue once John Stewart returns). But one of the frequent ads is from a campaign called “Every Drink Counts.” They’re fighting against drunkenness by attacking the idea of pre-drinking. They show a bunch of people preparing for a night out, with the banner “pre-drinking…”

Sober, contemplative preparation to party

And then this happens.

This has clearly spiraled out of control. — WANTON ALCOHOLISM

The idea being, once you start drinking, it’s called drinking. Pre-drinking still gets you drunk, you fools!

Okay. Where to start.

Nobody thought that having drinks before the party would mean they were still sober. That concert or bar or birthday party doesn’t have magic powers. The beers don’t suddenly become alcoholic or not because of the place you drink them, and we all know that.

Let me explain it to you, Every Drink Counts. By and large, “pre-drinking” doesn’t mean “drinks before we start drinking.” It’s an abbreviation of “pre-event drinking,” meaning “we want a bit of a buzz when we get to the party, because it’s fun and we’re goddamn grownups.” Yes, it is possible to have a good time sober. Look at my colleague the Video Vulture. He doesn’t drink and he’s one of the most fun people I’ve ever known. But it’s also possible to have fun with the aid of some adult beverages, and we get to do that, because we live in Canada, not Egypt.

So if we want to have a drink or two before we leave, and we have a ride, so be it. We know we’re getting drunk when we pre-drink. That is the entire point. Combating this notion by saying “No! You’re still drinking!” is aiding nothing. Stop it.

Although demonizing excessive drinking by demanding you only drink in the designated venue doesn’t come across nearly as stupid as trying to make moderation seem awesome. Observe.

Woo! Fitting in with the preferences of officials! PARTY!

I don’t know if this campaign made it outside of my home city of Calgary, so maybe you haven’t heard of Responsibly Beer and Responsibly Coolers.

Basically, it was a series of radio ads and billboards selling the notion of moderation the same way advertisers in the 80s and 90s tried to sell Coors Light. A male announcer would talk excitedly about hitting the town with Responsibly Beer or a female announcer would talk excitedly about having a ladies’ night with Responsibly Coolers (women don’t drink beer, silly people) while either a hair metal or calypso band, respectively, sang things like “Moderation!” or “Safe!” or the real kicker, the money phrase anyone looking for a good time wants to hear, “Government approved!”

I don’t care what calypso crooner or Poison cover band reject is singing them, the words “Government approved” are never, ever going to sound awesome or cool. You’re just going to have to accept that.

They’re not trying to say drinking an entire bottle of Jagermeister and throwing up all over someone’s living room is perhaps undesirable (I don’t want to do anything in that sentence, personally). They’re trying to say a three-pack of beer (or a two-pack for the ladies…their claim, not mine) is a party.

It’s just… how to… argh. One the one hand, just sitting around drinking does not qualify as a party. It’s merely something one can do at a party. But on the other hand, there is just something inherently futile in trying to dress up responsibility as awesome good times. Say that we can still have fun with only three drinks? Fine. I believe you. That is true and a positive message. But I just want to doubt you so much because you’re coming across like a 45 year old white math teacher trying to seem “hip” and “with it” by saying trigonometry is “the bomb” and describing a “totally fresh” way to find the hypotenuse.

Basically, Responsibly Beer, you’re not wrong. But you’re embarrassing both of us.

Alright, wrapping it up…

I give these campaigns a hard time not because I think “drink less” is a bad message. From time to time it’s an unnecessary one, provided you’re being safe, but it’s not a bad message. I just hate to see someone do an important thing badly. Like when awareness of gay teens being bullied hit an all-time high and the almost annoyingly gay-friendly series Glee responded by being weirdly pro-bully.

Before you disagree, ask yourself: did the people who bullied Kurt for being gay, or Finn for seeming gay, or the people who tried to destroy Mr. Shuester (mostly Sue), or threw eggs at Rachel, or who mocked that girl until she had an eating disorder years after I gave up on this show for being a hollow, badly-written exercise in selling bland, toothless, auto-tuned covers of popular songs on iTunes … did any of them face any sort of consequence? Or did Finn, Mr. Shuester and all face a consequence for daring to fight back?

That’s a digression and I’m sorry. Where was I? Right. Drinking responsibly isn’t a bad idea, but you’re making it look like one.

I mean come on. Are you even trying?

Danny G writes plays: Two Guys

Time to continue my look back through my old scripts. Next up, my second collaboration with Jason Garred: Two Guys, a Couch, and the Fate of the World. A play-within-a-play, with the ridiculous turned up to 10.

What’s it about?

Phil and Chris are two friends attempting to write a play together. Phil wants action, adventure, and romance. Chris wants something weighty and philosophic. They settle on a spy thriller: the adventures of Dirk Rhombus, secret agent. The audience watches Dirk and the play come to life as Phil and Chris are writing it upstage. As Phil and Chris fight for control, characters twist and change, plot elements are introduced, discarded and re-written, the occasional musical number sneaks in despite Chris’ protests, but we eventually make our way through the tale of Dirk Rhombus and Canadian agent Janet DuBois’ battle against the fiendish Swedish supervillains Simone Saiz and Bjorn “The Barbecue” Berger.

We did like puns, didn’t we.

So why did that happen?

Simply put, we wanted a follow-up to Trigger Dandy, and we wanted to keep the band together. So we needed something with a similar cast size (bloody huge), similar levels of wacky (again, bloody huge), and that comic energy that had worked so well in the Trigger trilogy. The way I saw it, Jason and I had such differing senses of humour that anything we agreed on must be hilarious. So we hit this thing with everything we had. There were carless car chases (a concept it took three productions to make truly hilarious–the early directors weren’t great at big comedy), a fiendish mad scientist, references to pop culture (me) and Canadian government officials (Jason), and a key sequence in which Phil, having broken up with his girlfriend Tina, starts attempting to kill Trina, the character he clearly based on her, while Chris is forced to keep saving her as she’s become essential to the plot.

There were, of course, those who claimed that Phil and Chris were somehow based on myself and Jason, respectively. These claims were harder to deny when my mother insisted on saying “I watched them write this, and that’s exactly how it went.” This would not be the last time that I’d have to duck accusations of Phil and Tina being based on real people.

How’d it turn out?

It’s silly. It’s incredibly silly. But if you can make yourself okay with that, it’s also a great deal of fun. Of course, as we learned, it requires a director who understands “funny.” The first time we did it, I had to volunteer to block some of the sight gags myself as the director wasn’t quite getting it. The second time was co-directed by Jason Garred, so whenever the other co-director screwed something up (often–she habitually directed away from the joke), I was able to correct it through Jason. The third production I gave up and just directed it myself, despite my insistence on also playing Phil.

Damn it, young me, why you gotta be so stupid all the damn time.

And even I managed to blow one of the sight gags! After being so insistent that only I could wring the maximum hilarity out of this show, I let one of the cast convince me that instead of having a horde of ninjas burst out and defeat the villains (Phil had been trying to get a horde of ninjas into the show the entire time, and finally succeeds in the climax), it would be just as funny to cut to a blackout and bring up the lights on a horde of ninjas standing over the defeated villains.

Well, it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. But it happened because I allowed it to happen. Damn it.

This was my last full-length collaboration with Jason. We’d reunite years later for the previously mentioned Cube Root of Death, but that was it. After Two Guys, I started flying solo.

With initially mixed results.

Flash forward?

So. The Flash.

People who know me know that I’m a hardcore DC fanboy. I love Superman, am at best ambivalent about Wolverine, and own more Green Lantern paraphernalia than suit jackets. It’s not that I have anything against Marvel comics (I read many of their titles), or the Marvel movies… in fact, here’s me co-hosting a Marvel movie marathon for my theatre group.

Not pictured: Superman pint glass, with cape. Not kidding. — My co-host didn’t feel I was embracing the spirit.

So, yeah, love me some DC comics. Have been wanting a Justice League movie for years, even though they let me down every time.

And yet even I’m confused by all the love getting thrown at the Flash all of a sudden.

Why Flash?

When laying out their plans for the future at Comic-Con, (plans that move much slower than Marvel’s, as DC Entertainment is but a portion of the Warner Brothers empire rather than a separate studio like Marvel) DC Entertainment announced that their Superman/Batman movie in 2015 would be followed by a solo movie for the Flash before taking a swing at a combined Justice League.

This caused a few raised eyebrows. After all, the holy trinity of DC Comics isn’t Superman, Batman, and the guy who runs fast, it’s Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. The greatest female superhero of them all. Remember? Wouldn’t making her movie next be the logical move? I mean, other than Incredible Hulk, Marvel opened with their big trinity–okay, well, no they didn’t. As far as the Avengers go, the big three have traditionally been Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor, but in Marvel as a whole it’s Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Deadpool. Two of whom are even Avengers now, at least in the comics. But in terms of characters they still owned the rights to, it’s Cap, Tony, and Thor.

I digress.

I suppose the Wonder Woman movie they tried but failed to make with Joss Whedon (HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN–sorry, rant for another time…), the TV series they tried but failed to make with David E. Kelley, and the more Smallville-esque origin TV series they can’t get even sell to the network that deliberately ran Smallville for a goddamn decade, Warner Brothers is feeling gun shy with Wonder Woman. And they’re not eager to return to Green Lantern, given the harsh reception the last movie got. And Entourage aside, I don’t see them making an Aquaman movie before they’ve tested him in a team flick. Assuming that Justice League is a hit, and they follow it with solo movies. Neither of which are in the same time zone as “sure things” yet. So, yeah, if they’re going to do one more solo movie, I guess I can see why they’d pick the Flash.

And I love the Flash. Ever since Mark Waid’s run on the title in the 90s, it’s been one of my top books. The Flash is definitely one of DC’s top characters when handled well–any character is awful if you write him awful, so don’t throw any silver age nonsense at me–so I allowed my enthusiasm for a Flash movie to override any confusion over their “Man of Steel, Man of Steel sequel–NO WAIT ALSO BATMAN, Flash, Justice League” plan.

This this happened.

Flash of Two Worlds?

For those who didn’t click the link, in addition to a Flash movie in 2016, they’re trying to launch a Flash TV series in 2014 by introducing the character in an episode of Arrow, a move known as a “back door pilot.” And, for the record, the executive producers/showrunners of Arrow are the guys who are supposed to be writing the Flash movie as well.

Um… okay. Interesting choice. This is the part where I might have flipped out in joy. Ranted about how great it would be to set up the Flash in a TV series, a medium far, far better suited to adapting comic books than movies ever were, then do the Flash movie and link the TV universe of Flash and Arrow to the DC film universe. Like how Agents of SHIELD is linked to the Avengers movies.

If only I believed that’s what they’re doing.

Because, you see, as the second season of Arrow starts, super powers still aren’t a thing. The season two sizzle reel showed no sign that they were going to do the one thing I stubbornly hoped for, despite how unlikely it seemed: references to the events of Man of Steel. It’s the first time Arrow has ever failed to bend over backwards to please me, so I let it go… but now the Arrow universe is priming to include the Flash. Super powers are coming to Starling City.

And yet I can’t help suspect that they’re planning on keeping the movie Flash and TV Flash separate. I don’t know why they’d do that. I can’t picture the thought process in which having a movie about a character while running an unrelated TV series about the same character is a good idea. Man of Steel didn’t come out while Smallville was airing. But if you’re willing to fire Joss Whedon off a Wonder Woman movie, you’ll do any damn stupid thing.

Final thoughts

So maybe… MAYBE… this will all become the simple wonder of synergy it logically should be. Maybe the DC cinematic universe started with Man of Steel will link to the televised universe of Arrow, and Flash will be the bridge. After all, Flash was the first character to travel from Earth-1 to Earth-2 (long story). And yet I can’t shake the suspicion that they’re going to go the other way. Hire one team to write two Flashes, going to bizarre lengths to avoid a united universe.

I hope I’m wrong. But I also hope that one day I’ll learn to love things that don’t disappoint, hurt or try to kill me, but my commitment to community theatre and craving for Pizza Hut suggest otherwise.

Still, though. Flash on TV. Didn’t expect that to happen twice in my lifetime. Might yet be worthwhile.

In Which Dan Talks About Comic Con

I am a geek with opinions and I have a blog, so we’re talking about Comic Con now. That’s what’s happening.

Age of Ultron, you say?

So at the end of their panel, Marvel brought out Joss Whedon to announce that the full title of the Avengers sequel will be Avengers: Age of Ultron. For those who don’t follow comics with the same unhealthy intensity I do, Age of Ultron was a recent event comic Marvel put out in which Ultron has successfully conquered the world and the few remaining heroes need a desperate plan to stop him. It was pretty clear, from the word go, that Joss was only going to be using the title “Age of Ultron” rather than the story. The actual miniseries couldn’t work as an Avengers sequel, since A) it hinges on Ultron being a long-term established threat; B) Ultron is barely in it, and non-comic readers would likely respond poorly to announcing a villain who doesn’t actually appear; and C) it’s not even about the Avengers. It’s a Wolverine story. Even moreso than most Marvel events.

So, Ultron’s our villain for the next movie? Interesting, should work out. Still, does kind of make a liar out of that end-credit tease of Thanos, doesn’t it? “Hey! That spooky boss of Loki? It was this guy! Maybe we’ll put him in a movie some day! Just not soon!”

And this is not the first time they’ve set up a future villain and then dropped him. Iron Man set up the Ten Rings, a terrorist organization named after the signature weapon of the Mandarin, Iron Man’s biggest enemy. Iron Man 2 had Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer, evil corporate rival from the comics, dragged away by the police promising to return and seek revenge. And Iron Man 3 dropped all of that to take its own angle on the Mandarin and bring in a new corporate rival in Aldrich Killian and AIM. I mean, Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin was neat, and putting Guy Pearce in a movie is never the wrong choice, but still. That was a lot of build-up tossed out.

Incredible Hulk had Banner-blood leak into fellow-scientist Samuel Sterns’ head to set him up to be the Leader. But that would have required them to make another Hulk movie.

So is that Thanos tease going anywhere? Who knows. The other examples come down to changing creative teams (Iron Man 3) and lack of sequels, but in this case Joss Whedon decided to include the Thanos tease, and Joss Whedon decided to make Ultron his next villain instead. Maybe he’s planning on using Thanos for Avengers 3, but that is still five years away. I’m all about the long game but that’s really pushing it.

Superman/Batman? Go on.

Warner/DC’s big announcement? The sequel to Man of Steel coming in 2015 will be a Superman/Batman movie. This one announcement has generated enough attention that a legitimate website actually asked who won Comic Con, DC or Marvel, despite the fact that Marvel had footage from three movies (including one that had been shooting for less than two weeks) and trotted out enough stars to have a pickup soccer game in the parking lot, and DC announced one thing with at best tentative plans for two more, hasn’t cast the new Batman yet, and said more about what Batman/Superman won’t be than what it will (it won’t be an adaptation of Dark Knight Returns or a follow-up to Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy).

So, yeah, Marvel wins because their panel had Amy Pond and The Piemaker on one panel, but there’s still something important in what DC had to say. Producer Emma Thomas confirmed that this is not going to be a continuation of the Nolan/Bale Batman. It’s a new Batman, a Justice League friendly Batman.

And they’re not introducing him in an origin story.

How is that not the conversation? How are we not excited that they’re actually going to trust us to remember what Batman’s deal is rather than start over at his parents dying again? And once they’re done fighting each other, who will they be teaming up against? Come on, this is cool. This could be super cool. Plus, how about some credit for trying to expand the universe in a different way than the Marvel model? Huh? That worth something?

And, let’s be real, summer of 2015 they’re up against the sequel to the most successful superhero movie ever made. Putting Superman and Batman in the same movie puts Warner Brothers back in the running.

Final thoughts

There are two things that are truly important from this year’s Comic Con announcement. First, and most important… Summer Glau is on Arrow next season. They… they get me. They really do.

Second… DC is aiming to have the Justice League on screens by 2017. Thanos will not be in any Marvel movie before 2018, if that. Warner Bros, this is your chance to get Darkseid in a movie and not be accused of ripping off his pale imitator Thanos.

DO. NOT. FUCK. THIS. UP.

Thank you and good day.

Back on the coast

Ah, Vancouver.

I’m currently on a brief sojourn to the coast, where I’m visiting family and taking a break from some of the stresses that have been hovering over me as of late. Well, not many of the stresses, actually… I plan to fit in some serious writing time now that I’m a 12 hour drive away from my video games, and can either be on my computer or watch Netflix, but not both. Reduces the diversions.

A friend recently accused me of being in the creative peak of my life. Okay, “accused” may seem like an odd choice of word there, but he has a very judgmental tone when discussing anything I like that he does not, or vice versa. If I mention a TV show I like more than twice in a day, I’m “clearly obsessed,” and likely wasting my time watching so much TV; when I remind him I don’t like olives, he acts like it’s a personal failing.

After which he will continue to advocate poor life choices, prostitutes, and beverages that taste of black licorice. Despite the fact that liking the taste of black licorice is a warning sign of psychopathy. And he wonders why I find his advice suspect.

Writing up a storm

Wait. Where was I? Yes. Creative peak, he calls it. Hadn’t thought about it like that. I’d only been thinking of it as “I’m surely working on a lot of things.” A new play for next year in its third draft. A webseries I hope to launch this fall, assuming my cohorts and I can get it written and shot. Two projects I try to avoid mentioning lest discussing them get me too excited about what could happen if these tempting yet unlikely ships come in. And my unnecessarily verbose blog. I do seem to be in a creative storm here.

And the truth is, that’s because it’s what I need right now. I lost the latter half of my 20s. Well, in a way I did. I wasn’t in a coma or anything, I just… wasted my time. Working as a projectionist and lurking in my dingy apartment, passing the time alone in the dark, waiting for my life to start. It took until two months before my 30th birthday to fix all of that, and I won’t go back to that place. I’ve become acutely, worryingly aware that I have much less time left to waste, so I’m on the hunt for ways to make the most of it. And love and family seem off the table (for now…ladies), so instead I’m on a quest to go places, see things, and above all create. Create as much as I can, and find a way to make it last. Get it to people.

But for any of that to happen I need to actually break away from my routines and write my cold, black heart out. Maybe find a way to keep my goals for the week in mind so that some of them actually get done. And a good first step is getting away, giving my head a little space.

So… Vancouver.

And maybe some day soon I’ll have exciting news. For now, though, it’s just me and the grindstone. And my niece. Who I should probably go say hello to. Ta for now.

Danny G Writes Plays: Trigger Dandy

Alright stop. Collaborate and listen. Danny’s back with a brand new edition.

Right. No. Sorry. That was the wrong way to apologize for a lengthy absence from blogging. One writing project sort of eclipsed all others, even though everything else I’m working on has a far better chance of ever seeing the light of day. Still… write what’s in your head, you know?

On that note, time for the first entry in a series I promised back in spring, before the Europe trip, before the rivers rose and the city briefly drowned: a look back at my various plays. To begin, we travel back to the before times, the longago, a time some of you may have read about in school called “the mid-90s.”

The Amazing (and Almost Accurate) Adventures of Trigger Dandy

It began in the room that would, more than any other, shape my entire life to come: my high school drama room, the classroom/theatre where my best friend Sean and I spent most of our time, especially by grade 12. Sean was doing his math homework there over lunch, and muttered something about trig identities. Our teacher, Mr. Stromsmoe, misheard it as “Trigger Dandy,” feeling it was a great name for a character.

Time passes. Our fall production of Waiting For Godot becomes my stage debut, playing opposite drama regular Rusty Bennett. One night, Rusty cut his foot on a bottle that had broken onstage. He didn’t let it hold his performance back, despite the bleeding. In the show’s post-mortem, Mr. Stromsmoe referred to it as the “blood, glass and Rusty” incident. He then turned to Sean and said “Hey, there’s a play for that Trigger Dandy guy.”

“Yes,” I thought. “Yes it is.”

Blood, Glass and Rusty

Before long, I had enlisted Sean and our good friend Jason Garred into the creation of a short film noir detective parody to take to that year’s high school drama festival. We had fifteen minutes to tell the story of private eye Trigger Dandy, trying to solve the abduction of his sidekick, Rusty Buster, and the theft of the Macguffin Diamond. We crammed as many jokes, sight gags and one-liners as we could into it, not wanting to waste a moment of our fifteen minutes. The result? Hilarity. Audiences cracked up at our debut performance at our school and at the festival. At the festival, our cast got a second wave of applause when they came back onstage to clear our set. And it wasn’t just a hit with audiences: our adjudicator also loved us, and gave us an award for writing.

Buoyed by this, we thought the only logical response was to keep going, write a sequel. Well. It’s not like you never made questionable decisions at 17.

Potatoes in the Mist

Sean began to pull back from the process, but Jason and I plugged on and, by the end of our first year of University, wrote our Trigger Dandy sequel, Potatoes in the Mist.

Wacky titles seemed the way to go. Shut up.

An older Trigger Dandy reunites with his old sidekick, Rusty, to investigate a potato cult, planning to summon their Evil Potato Goddess with what turns out to be a piece of an alien starship engine, oddly British aliens working with Trigger’s estranged girlfriend from BGR (as its fans had come to call it).

We attempted to get the band back together, as it were, and stage our follow-up back at the old high school. This ultimately had less to do with rational thought and more to do with anxiety over University, and my failure to research what I might actually have to do for my preferred major. I wanted to be a big fish in a small pond again, and that meant going back to the only place I’d ever felt like a big shot: my old drama room.

Sadly, putting on a show at a school you no longer attend is trickier than it seems. I had yet to master the art of self-producing (the secret is get someone else to be the producer), and it became clear that we weren’t going to get the show up and running by the end of the school year, and attempts to pick up where we left off quickly collapsed the following September. We thought no more of good old Trigger Dandy.

For, like, a whole year.

Cube Root of Death

Jason and I eventually felt the need to be creative and theatrical again. At his suggestion, we answered an ad in Fast Forward, a local weekly newspaper, calling for people to be part of a group doing radio plays. We joined up, went to meetings, wrote a few sketches… and nothing really happened. One of the other members, also frustrated with the general lack of action in the group, suggested the three of us split off and form a sketch comedy troupe, grabbing what actors we wanted on our way out (particularly one Mr. Tebbutt, whose acquaintance was the single greatest thing we gained from the radio drama group). We had some meetings, wrote some sketches… and nothing happened. Jason and I decided enough was enough: we were setting a concrete goal. We were going to dust off and stage our Trigger Dandy plays, and by god we were going to take them to the Edmonton Fringe.

But first, we needed a third entry. Something to make it into a full trilogy. A prequel: an origin story for Trigger Dandy. A spy parody called The Cube Root of Death, in which a young Trigger Dandy gets wrapped up in an adventure with British secret agent Max Forky, out to foil the Australian mad scientist Tarkin Drubik, who is planning the rule the world with hypnotic cube puzzles.

In June of 1997, The Amazing and Almost Accurate Adventures of Trigger Dandy played for one night only. The laughs were big and frequent, but the triogy had its flaws. Potatoes in the Mist was twice as long and half as fast-paced as the other two, which is not what you look for in a concluding chapter. It would also be the first and greatest warning of my coming struggles with pop culture references: several of our “jokes” boiled down to simply quoting Star Wars while doing something silly. At the time we thought it clever. I would later see it for the hackery it was.

Years later we’d replace it with a new third chapter: Doom’s Pointy Talon, in which an aging Trigger Dandy, retired from the PI game, is drawn back into the field by FBI agent Rusty Buster. We kept the strangely British aliens we’d introduced in Potatoes, devised wacky encounters, slipped in a Matrix fight scene (still had a few pop culture issues in 2002, it seems), and made a far more satisfying trilogy.

It’s still not perfect: it’s tricky to do a three-act play when the acts are twenty minutes tops, and some of the jokes are a touch corny. Some of the others are highly corny. But for something I wrote at 17, or co-wrote in any event, it holds up okay. And it holds a definite appeal for most people who work on it. Maybe one day it’ll be back, but I’m not holding my breath.

When I next return to this series, we’ll look at how Jason and I tried to keep our Trigger Trilogy cast together.

Dan and Ian Wander Europe: In Bruges

So, you know that annoying thing people on the internet will do, where they fail to update their blog/comic/whatever, and then apologize by saying that they were working on something super cool that they can’t tell you about yet?

Welp.

The real problem is that, since we last spoke, I’ve been working on something that I’m not telling people about because the odds seem very small that it will go anywhere. It might. It might go somewhere, and if it did, it would be the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me by a significant margin. Save for “successfully being born,” I guess. But until that switches over from “dimly possible” to “actually probable” I’m trying not to get my or anyone’s hopes up by making a big deal.

And now that I’ve done that exact thing I dislike, onwards. Belgium. Let’s do this.

Bruges

I won’t lie to you. Bruges did not get on the itinerary through the noblest of methods. We weren’t in Belgium to see Flanders Field. We didn’t hit any World War memorials. We did not swing by the EU Parliament building in Brussels. No, we were in Bruges because I saw the movie In Bruges and thought it looked worth visiting.

And I was not wrong.

Since my return, people ask “What was the highlight of the trip?” And that is often a difficult question, since so much of it was great. But when I do come up with an answer, it’s usually “Other than London? Paris for the city, Rome for the weather, and Bruges for the food.”

Seriously you guys, everything in Bruges was delicious.

Show me where your noms at

My primary goal for Switzerland was cheese fondue: for Belgium, it was waffles. And the old town had plenty of waffle take-out windows to get lovely, fluffy waffles doused in chocolate, caramel, whatever you desired… I had a waffle in Calgary not so long ago. What a bland waste of time it was in comparison.

Belgium is also the birthplace of the french fry, thus giving us all the excuse we needed to gorge on street fries outside of the famous Belfry. You see, there’s a regular contest in Bruges: local fry makers compete against each other, and the two top entries get the right to set up a fry cart in front of the Belfry. This means those two carts are pretty much guaranteed to have the best fries in the whole city, and if you’re not helping yourself to an order from each one to see who comes out on top, why are you even there? Why are you even there.

I did not expect to say “Bruges had the best meatball I’ve ever had,” but there it is. It’s said. It happened. A random lunch stop brought us to a mom ‘n’ pop restaurant with a hilarious name and absolutely incredible food.

If you’re in Bruges, go there. Get a meatball. You will thank me. Do this or I will find you and hurt you.

Time for beers

I’m not a beer drinker. This is generally known about me. Just never developed a taste for it. When I finally began experimenting with alcohol, I drifted towards whiskey and cocktails, and skipped over beer completely, finding it unpleasant. But we were in Belgium. They brew over 2000 beers in Belgium, and they take it seriously. How seriously? They have designed individual glasses for each of those beers to optimize the drinking experience. And if you were to serve, say, a Hoegaarden in a Duvel glass, a Belgian drinker will send that shit back and demand you do it properly.

So while beer had never been my thing, going to Belgium and not sampling their ales would be like going to Italy and not having any pasta, or going to Greece and not having a single souvlaki, and god damn it I am not doing that again.

So, on our first night in Bruges, I eventually opted to skim the beer menu, see if I could find something palatable. What’s that, Duvel? You have a 12% alcohol content? Why, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

New friends

Also, if you’re in Bruges on a budget, by all means check out the St. Christopher’s hostel. Best room? No, not really. Best beds? Not quite. But it’s got a bar. A bar full of fellow travelers. The perfect place to hang out and have a few drinks with new friends. Ian put up another “Hey, we’re nice but shy, so come talk to us” sign, and within minutes we were invited to what became known as the “Commonwealth party:” a table of four Scots, two Australians and a Chinese woman living in Germany (for variety) that had met doing the In Bruges walking tour, something we’d been eyeing for our full day in the city, given my fondness for the movie and Ian’s fondness for looking at stuff.

The people behind the walking tour (which used our hostel as home base) also had two other gatherings: a beer tasting, in the pub connected to our hostel, and a pub crawl. I continued to succumb to local fares and signed us up for the beer tasting the following night, where I learned that Belgian ales are, in fact, not too shabby in general. Yes, I was like Christopher Columbus: boldly discovering something that millions of people already knew about.

We chose not to go on the pub crawl, despite the fact that it meant parting ways with our lovely beer tasting hostess, Caitlyn (being named Caitlyn makes you 10% more attractive to me, not sure where that comes from). Instead, we hung out with a new friend we made during the beer tasting, a ginger from America who may have moved to Florida but never lost her New York attitude. Once we’d finished the beers that came with the beer tasting experience, we set off into the damp night in search of other bars with other beers. Our primary targets, including a small tavern at the end of Bruges’ smallest street that brews a beer unavailable anywhere else in the world, were closed, but we continued undeterred, determined to find more beers. She suggested we make an adventure out of it.

We managed to only subtly imply that our reaction to being asked on a drinking adventure by a cute ginger was less “Oh, if we must” and more “Where the hell have you been the last three weeks?”

Oh, but before we left she had to check in with a guy from Scotland she’d “accidentally fallen in love with,” so don’t get excited.

I thought one full day would allow us to get the full Bruges experience. I don’t know why I thought that, but I was quite clearly mistaken. Perhaps one day I shall return… one day…

Dan Discusses his TV: Skins of Thrones

Or should it be Game of Skins? No. No, clearly it should not.

If you’ll permit me, I’m going to take a brief break from relating European adventures to talk about something I’ve noticed this week. One of the things I leaped into after I got back was an attempt to catch up on the television I’d missed during the trip. Three weeks’ absence during May sweeps leads to a dangerously full PVR. I’d planned on my priorities being Doctor Who, Game of Thrones and Arrow, but something happened: on a whim, I decided to resume watching the BBC series Skins.

Skins in the Game? No, still awful…

Skins, for those unfamiliar, is a British dramedy (supposedly a comedy but some dark shit goes down from time to time) about high school students trying to lose themselves in sex, drugs, and maybe, just maybe, some approximation of love and happiness. To keep things at that awkward and painful age, every two seasons they change the cast almost completely, referring to them as generations 1-3.

I had four Arrows to watch, five Mad Mens (and counting), and a swath of other shows less important, but I couldn’t tear myself away from Skins, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I hated 90% of what was happening. Sorry, that’s not explaining it right… it’s not that the episodes were badly written, as they were not. It’s not that they were badly acted, as the first generation cast is top notch (including Nicholas Hoult of X-Men: First Class and Warm Bodies and Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire and the Newsroom). It’s just that the actual stories, while at times funny and moving, make me want to scream at every character involved. It’s that kind of show. And after the most recent Game of Thrones episode (Rains of Castamere–no, no spoilers here), it became clear: these two shows had a very similar grip, because despite one being a fantasy series about a bunch of jerks fighting for control of Westeros and one being about British teenagers attempting to sort their sad little lives out, thematically they’re quite similar.

Allow me to explain. The differences are clear: one has kings and dragons and magic, the other has “behind on his homework” as a plot point, but there are a few distinct narrative tropes they both share.

Lovable (?) narcissists

At the center of each show are some of the most selfish, destructive people you’ll ever be dared to actually sympathize with. Game of Thrones has the Lannisters: ranging from the frequently awesome Tyrion, to the weirdly likable Jaime, to the utterly irredeemable Joffrey and Cersei. They’ve been told all their lives that Lannisters are better than other people and believe it so fiercely that they use it as justification for the terrible things they do, and as their punishment they create a monster in Joffrey and start a civil war. (That’s not a spoiler, it’s practically the premise of the series)

Skins has Tony and to a lesser extent his girlfriend Michelle. Michelle is simply pretty and popular and addicted to the attention being pretty and popular gets you, but Tony… Tony is said to have “the cheat codes to life,” as he’s good-looking and charming enough to get away with nearly anything, and self-aware enough to know he can get away with nearly anything, meaning he spends the first season seeing how far he push people in the pursuit of whatever he wants in that moment. His manipulations of his friends, girlfriend and other lovers go from simply thoughtless to selfish to borderline psychotic before… well, that would be telling.

Tony and the Lannisters’ narcissism borders on religious fervour, yet there are moments when we’re supposed to root for them, not hope that they suffer for their sins. And when they do suffer, it’s just never as satisfying as we once wanted it to be.

Good deeds are seldom, if ever, rewarded

My generation was raised on feel-good family sitcoms. Now many of us are able to see them as disposable, two-dimensional morality fables with thin jokes and catch phrases passing for humour… “You’re right, Uncle Jesse, honesty is the best policy,” audience goes “Aww…” then Jesse impersonates Elvis and everyone has a good laugh, that sort of thing. And since they were trying to impart proper values… we’ll skip the debate over what constitutes “proper values…” doing the right thing came with a reward. A kiss on the cheek from the girl, or being told you’re a hero by the cops, or improbably getting the promotion you thought you’d have to lie and cheat to get but yet you still chose the high road and the big boss is impressed.

Not so with these two shows. Doing the right thing might satisfy honour and duty but that’s about it. Honour won’t save you from Lannister scheming on Game of Thrones any more than being a good friend on Skins will save you from getting beat up by a bunch of chav teenage girls looking to hand out a kicking to the first convenient target. Game of Thrones is better at handing out shock value, while Skins often goes for the laugh at the character’s expense, but both are clear: you’d best hope that virtue is its own reward, because it’s the only reward you’re likely to get.

Mistakes are punished…

Which is not to say that doing the wrong thing does come with a reward. I mean, sometimes it does. Joffrey gets the throne and Tony gets whatever girl he wants, but sometimes a character will slip up, and that slip up will have consequences. Sometimes horrible ones. It’s hard to go into specifics without spoiling things about both shows, but the examples are out there. On Game of Thrones, if you make the wrong choice tactically, even if it was the right choice morally, you will pay for it down the road. One character on Skins makes some short-sighted decisions and it ultimately costs him everything, including the shirt off his back.

…but not as much as redemption.

The only thing that gets you beaten down harder than mistakes in these shows is redemption. If a character begins to redeem him or herself, walk a better path, try to become a better person… brace yourself. Something bad is coming. Look at what happens to Jaime Lannister right as he was becoming likable in season three. And in the case of Skins, it’s not even something they deserved. It’s not like someone starts to turn over a new leaf but his past sins come back to haunt him. There are multiple cases where a character finds redemption, finds peace and possible happiness in that redemption, and then BAM! catastrophe from nowhere. Nowhere. And the collateral damage will hit someone you like. Usually Sid. Nothing good ever seems to happen to Sid, no matter how much I–you, the hypothetical viewer, that is… might want it to.

I was going to add a section about characters you like getting kicked in the teeth for no clear reason, but that’s, like, all narrative everywhere. That’s just good storytelling. Also, this got long for something that I once believed would fit into a Facebook status update. But, hey, what else are blogs for, amirite?

Am I not right?

Look, just come back next time. Belgian adventures for reals, I promise.

Dan and Ian Wander Europe: Switzerland!

I dropped my phone onto wet ground last night. An hour or so later, the screen began to turn purple. This morning, the purple was going to black. Within the next hour the screen will no longer function at all. Within the next two business days, I’ll have a replacement of the exact same model and colour (who said warranties were a waste of money?), but I’m still melancholy at watching it slowly die. I mean, we made it through Europe together, it shouldn’t end like this. Bizarre sentimental attachment to inanimate objects: this is how my brain works. I’m just glad to have not gone full-blown hoarder yet.

Right, yes, Dan and Ian Wander Europe. Where was I.

There is still a staggering amount of world I haven’t seen. And thus each window I have to take a trip becomes a struggle over where to go: do I go somewhere entirely new, see things I’ve never seen, seek out new adventures? Or do I return to somewhere I’ve been and loved and want to see again? A day will come when I visit London for the last time but it’s a terrible thought and a moment I’m not exactly racing to meet.

So for this trip, I went for a hybrid. London, Paris, Rome and Florence were all old friends, even if I hadn’t seen them in nearly 20 years. But from Venice on, I picked out new places to go, including two new countries. The first? Switzerland, a country that had had my curiosity for some time.

Zurich: where the party at?

Our train from Italy never quite managed to get up to full speed, given the mountainous terrain it had to navigate. Switzerland swiftly reminded me of parts of British Columbia: all forests, mountains and lakes with cities crammed in between said lakes and mountains wherever possible.

Now this trip had one major difference over past vacations of mine: a lack of swimming. The vast majority of my trips over the past decade have involved at least some scuba diving, or at least some quality lake-time on a summer houseboating weekend. I haven’t been diving since Hawaii, 2011. I haven’t been to a lake since the summer of that year. Despite having spent the previous day in flooded Venice, I was feeling a distinct urge to be in a large body of water. And now here I was in lake country.

Anyway. Upon arriving in Zurich, we made our way to our hostel with aid from several passers-by. The Swiss people were already making us feel quite welcome. We discovered that the very night of our arrival there was a pub crawl sponsored by the hostel. Ian was waffling on the notion, but I thought this was the clear way to get drinks and meet people, something we (particularly Ian) had previously considered a priority. But in any event, first we set out to explore the surrounding area: Ian wanted to pop into the local supermarket (as he often did), and there was an amusingly vandalized traffic sign we wanted to grab a picture of.

We did not expect to spend two hours searching for it. Only to discover it was only five minutes’ walk from the hostel and we’d passed it without knowing.

By the time we returned we were too late to get dinner at the hostel bar and too late to make the pub crawl. Slightly dejected, we settled into the hostel’s large common room to have a few drinks and access some sweet, sweet internet. Ian did up a quick sketch in his sketchbook, announcing that we were Dan and Ian, and we liked meeting people but were terrible at introducing ourselves. Did this ploy have a hint of desperation? Maybe. Did it work regardless?

Thank god for the one other guy at the table who didn't speak German. — BOOM! New friends!

Did it ever. And so we achieved exactly what we were looking for: drinks and meeting people, at a fraction of the cost with none of that pesky “walking” stuff. And zero douchebags. Huzzah! Now… what to do with our one full day in the city…

Lucerne!

We tried asking friends for Zurich tips over Facebook. The overwhelming response was suggestions of stuff to do in Lucerne instead. Which, I felt at first, was nice and all but wasn’t really what we’d asked. However, it did turn out to be the exact right advice, as Lucerne is everything that’s great about Switzerland.

There’s old town, with it’s quaint medieval look, historic bridge and great shops and restaurants. Including one where we finally acquired my primary objective for this leg of the trip: cheese fondue. A cheese fondue with bits of bacon in the cheese. God bless Switzerland. There was the Lucerne lion, a famous carving in the wall of a mountain.

There was the vast lake. Still no swimming, but it’s for the best: we dipped our feet in the glacier-fed river coming from the lake and mother of GOD it was cold. Even for us Canadians it was bloody freezing.

Lucerne was gorgeous, and I only wish we’d had more time to enjoy it before we had to return to Zurich, find dinner near the hostel and meet up with some of our new friends again.

And find out that the hostel had a pool, a pool that I never managed to track down. Blast it all.

Next time: Belgium! Beers! Belfries! BRUGES.