As I mentioned in my previous post, we didn’t make it to Montréal during the three days my brother and I spent in Québec back in August, but we did make it as far south as Trois-Rivières, which is about one-hundred-and-ten or so clicks southwest of Québec City. It’s actually about halfway between Québec City and Montréal. We wandered around the downtown a little and popped into the tourist information centre. It’s a very attractive city, and it was nice to explore a place I’d never visited before
It also was incredibly hot that day, so despite how nice the downtown area was, air conditioning was something we desperately needed, so we ended up having supper at a very nice Italian place called Mondo Resto-Bar. Later we sought out a music store so I could actually purchase an André Gagnon CD in Québec. That was something I’d been wanting to do right from the start.
As with Québec City itself, we only spent a couple of hours in Trois-Rivières, but the city has a charm all its own, and I’d like to get back there some day and spend a bit more time. I also want to get to Les Forges de Saint-Maurice National Historic Site, which is about a dozen clicks northwest of downtown. It’s a site run by Parks Canada that commemorates the founding of the first industrial community in North America.
It also happens to be one of my André-Gagnon-related destinations. (more…)
Well, I think it’s about time I got down to talking about this August road trip to Québec before you, gentle reader, begin to believe that it was all just smoke and mirrors (or, to quote one of my favorite televison characters, “hokum”). The time has come. So, here goes…
The plan was simple: drive to Montréal, stopping at various André-Gagnon-related points along the way and taking video footage of attractive and interesting scenes. I had the camera, the tripod, a big-ass SD card loaded, and I was ready to rock and roll. I also had my new iPod touch and was psyched to do some on-the-road video blogging.
Well, you know what they say: The best laid plans… and all that.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a fantastic trip. It just didn’t turn out quite the way I expected. (more…)
Back in the summer, I went on at length here about the road trip I was about to take with my brother Scott. The road trip did take place, even though the blog entries that were to accompany it did not. It was a great trip, much needed, and a mere tip of the iceberg in terms of progress down the road of my ambitions.
Much has happened since that early August rumble down the highways of English and French Canada. The summer was good, filled with adventures and moments galore. It was a vast improvement over the previous summer, which saw me changing jobs twice in as many months and watching my mother go from hospital to transitional care to nursing home. The Summer of Stress, as I have dubbed July and August of 2010, doesn’t have quite the hold on me it once did, but it lives on in memory and serves as a reminder of how fickle life can be. (more…)
As someone who is involved in the process of putting a documentary together (yes, I still am, and yes, it’s taking a bloody long time), I think a lot about the bits and pieces that make a film a film. You know, the small stuff like story, style, narrative, composition, and framing. I think about what music to use under what shots, what shots should come before or after other shots, how to make a sequence out of a group of shots, and how to put sequences together to make up an act.
Sometimes I wonder how filmmakers (or reviewers, even) can sit back and just enjoy a film if they are so aware of how films are made. One might think that a deep knowledge of craft could pull one’s attention from the film as an entity unto itself and draw it towards the minutiae of the process.
This evening I did a little experiment. Not intentionally; it just sort of happened. I was given a free movie pass at work today (always a good thing), and, in a flurry of spontaneity, I decided I would also use it today. Before leaving work, I checked the Empire Theatres website to see what was playing downtown. There wasn’t much I wanted to see, but I was mildy interested in Contagion, as I had seen the previews and thought that a big-budget, big-cast, high-stakes thrill ride was just what I needed after a day at the office. So off I went, stopping at Starbucks for a chai latté along the way, low expectations in hand.
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Wow, another blog entry only five days after the last one. And another video blog, to boot. I must really be jazzed about this upcoming road trip.
Okay, so the sound on this video sucks the big one. I’ll have to learn how to reduce wind noise on the iPod’s microphone if I want to do anymore outdoor video blogging. But it sure was fun talking into the camera out at Peggy’s Cove. It really was a fabulous day.
So far the footage from the day looks good. I haven’t transferred everything to the computer yet, but I like what I’ve reviewed so far. And in putting this video blog together, I learned about a few more features of iMovie that I hadn’t looked at yet.
The video pretty much says it all, but I do want to clarify one point: I’ll be using the iPod touch for video blogging while I’m on the road, not for taking actual documentary footage. I have my Canon PowerShot SX20IS for that. Plus, I’ll be taking a Zoom H2 digital audio recorder with me for capturing additional audio.
We’ll be stopping in Kamouraska (André Gagnon’s birthplace), Verdun (in Montréal, where my dad was born), Lachine (also in Montréal, where my dad grew up), Ville Émard (also in Montréal, from the title of André Gagnon’s song “A Ride to Ville Émard”), Forges du Saint-Maurice National Historic Site (from the title of André Gagnon’s song and album “Les Forges de Saint-Maurice, written for a television series of the same name), and Charlevoix (from the title of a movement of André Gagnon’s three-movement piece “Le Saint-Laurent” called “Devant Charlevoix”). I’ll also be taking footage of whatever strikes my fancy along the way. I’m particularly looking forward to visiting Trois-Rivières, a town I’ve heard of many times but know next to nothing about.
Every once in a while, life just hands you a treat. It’s usually unexpected, outside the realm of the everyday, and genuinely smile-inducing. When it happens, it can make your day.
Just such an event came my way last Friday as I was walking to work. I was at a major intersection, just up the hill from where I live, waiting for the light to change. I looked to my right, and there, also waiting for the light to turn green, was the oldest-looking car I had even seen in my entire life. It was sitting well past the crosswalk, it’s nose nearly in the intersection, and the driver was signalling to the cars behind him, presumably that they might have to go around him.
Needless to say, I gawked. I love old cars (I don’t know many people who don’t, actually), and this was total vintage staring me in the face. I was going to wave at the driver and make some kind of comment, but for some reason I held back. I just looked at the automotive wonder before me and grinned.
When the light changed, I had to be careful of my steps, because my head kept turning to my right to look at the old car. The sound of the engine starting jarred me into the realization that it had been shut off while the car was stopped for the red light. As I crossed the street, the old car got into gear and finally passed me as I reached the curb on the other side. (more…)
So, when I’m not rattling on about my lack of blogging, I can often be found rattling on about writing and language. Why? Because, dammit, language is important to me, and I happen to be fairly proficient at stringing linguistics bits together in coherent and interesting ways.
[Aside: Would we call a string of linguistic bits a linguine?]
[Aside Followup Fact: The word “linguine” literally means “little tongues” in Italian.]
I have on occasion been accused of the crime of pedantry in the sphere of language. I will confess to bouts of nitpickiness bordering on pedantry, but as to full-on pedantry, I don’t think I have the qualifications for that. One thing’s for sure. I need to loosen up a bit. While I’m not prone to fits of letter-writing when I read or see something that is grammatically, punctuatively, or orthographically incorrect, I do often cringe, and I do often complain about it.
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I’ve often been harsh with myself about my lack of blogging. I’ve even gone so far as to write entire blog posts about the fact that I haven’t been blogging. I don’t know if blogging about not blogging actually counts as blogging or whether it somehow cancels itself out. That’s more of an existential dilemma, I think, and one I won’t be delving into here.
What I will touch on, however, is a little bit of insight into this whole blogging process, and what I’ve recently discovered about it.
Well. Ahem. As many of my readers know, I started this whole blog thing just under two years ago, with the intent of writing a post every day. Every. Single. Day. Which I did. For about seven weeks. After that, it became spotty. Sometimes an entire month would go by without a post. I didn’t like this, and it made me anxious and ill-tempered.
The solution would have been to start blogging regularly again, but oh, no, I couldn’t do anything quite that simple, could I? I had to ruminate and cogitate and every other –ate word you can think of—and some I wish you wouldn’t—in order to figure out what my problem was.
Feh. Enough of that. I’m done with beating up on myself. It is what it is. And if I blog, I blog. And if I don’t, well, geez, guess what? I don’t.
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I like to think of myself as a fairly discerning moviegoer. Part of me knows this thinking to be delusional—after all, I am the guy who loved The Da Vinci Code and hated Angels and Demons (when most folks thought the latter was far superior to the former) and actually enjoyed Ang Lee’s take on Marvel Comics’ Hulk—but I like to think that I’ve seen enough films and read enough about films to know a thing or two about what makes a good film and what makes a stinker.
Oh, yeah, and I happen to be a fairly decent writer, too, so storytelling is pretty darn important to me.
Nonetheless, when something really appeals to me and entertains me, I do have a tendency to gush. And gush is what I’m about to do here, so brace yourselves.
Last evening I went to see Thor, the latest instalment in Marvel Studio’s vast campaign to bring their cinematic heroes home. It began with Iron Man and will culminate with The Avengers. In between, we’ve had The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man 2. And now, Thor.
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