TO SOME, IT'S GARBAGE

Harvey Smith, Winnipeg city councillor for Daniel McIntyre, declared the Garbage and Recycling Master Plan concerning for low-income Winnipeg residents and those on a pension at yesterday’s council meeting.

“I am concerned about people on low income being able to afford this, people on pensions,” Smith stated, the shake of his grasp evident as his coffee cup quivered.

He was referring to an additional $50 Winnipeg residents will begin to see on their water bills near the end of 2012; tax dollars that will help Winnipeg rise from its current 15% diversion rate.   

Concern was also expressed by Mynarski councillor Ross Eadie, who disapproved of the sole dollar amount to be collected by all residents, regardless of income or garbage production levels. 

“I cannot vote for this garbage plan if we do not do it in a fair way,” he noted minutes before the motion was passed.

Residents will receive bins for waste, and the plan orders a charge for bags additional to those inside on top that tagged to water bills. While well-intentioned, it remains questionable if the initiative will encourage a healthier environment through increased recycling or merely provoke residents to eliminate waste in a way that is harmful.            

Lucy Morales-Katz, a Fort Rouge resident, is convinced the latter is underway.

“I believe the new plan will prove, for many people, to be more of an incentive to discard garbage illegally than to recycle.”

Charleswood resident Jennifer Harris agrees, even citing an example.

“There is a small field by Murray Avenue, north of Main Street; I’ve noticed a lot of people already dump their garbage there and I feel that this will only increase as people try to avoid paying extra.”

Many alternatives to the plan should have been considered, argued Harris’s husband, Kyle Harris.

“During fall and spring cleaning season, the city should create more places to drop off grass and leaves to be composted, rather than simply charging for extra bags of garbage.”

Jennifer Harris nodded her head in agreement and commented on the indiscriminate nature of a flat rate. She suggested census forms as an appropriate way to assign increases in tax dollars to individuals of varying income and garbage production levels.

“Census forms should be used to determine how many bins should be allotted to different households and the amount each household should have to pay.”

SOMETHING TO REMEMBER

Between 1980-88, Iranians lived in the dark.

“Every day after five or six o’clock it was all dark, and we should not have any lights on because of the bombing. The enemies come and see if there is any lights somewhere, they come and bomb that place,” said Azizeh Ferdowsi, 62.

Ferdowsi, an Iranian, entered Canada in 1988 with her husband, daughter, and son. The enemy was Iraq: a country northwest of her home in Bushehr, Iran, that invaded in September 1980 following the Islamic Revolution of the previous year.

“Canada was not involved in the war and we did not choose to come here,” she explained. “We were brought to Winnipeg as refugees.”

In 1979, Iranians rallied and protested an economic crisis that yielded high prices and food shortages across the country. The public outcry became the Revolution, Hossein Bashiriyeh wrote in The State and Revolution in Iran.    

In The History of Iran, Elton L. Daniel wrote the eight year Iran-Iraq war was over a number of things, including an agreement Iraq made with Iran in 1975 about the border between the two countries, the comfort Iran and Iraq offered the other’s enemies during early 1980, and fear, ideology, and emotion in general.

Ferdowsi does not know what the war was about.

“I do not know why it happened. And no result come of the war, but so many casualties from both countries,” she said while studying a map of the world mounted upon the wall of her office. “Many people from Iran’s side, we lost our homes, our kids, our properties. Myself, I had a house, but we had to flee the city, we had to leave everything behind: all the furniture, everything. We had to escape.”

A button pinned on Ferdowsi’s shirt pictures two girls: they are her granddaughters. Both her children are married now.

“At that time my son, 19 years old, he was ready to go to army. I didn’t want him to go to army. I remember we had a clothing store. My husband and I sold our store and then we give all the money to the smuggler to take my son to Pakistan, where he meet us in 1986.”

Her daughter was merely two.

“While we still in Iran, I had to go to the gas station to put gas in the car. There was a big truck just running and my daughter was screaming because the noise- she thought it was bombing.”

Ferdowsi blinks her eyes as she remembers what happened.

“I was screaming and I was telling him ‘shut down your engine! Because you are just staying there shut it down!’ Everyone was just looking for some gas to put in the car. If something happen they can flee to another city.”

In the dark one evening, Ferdowsi saw the light of an explosive.

“I remember a rocket came behind our building and many people were homeless there. They were killed. And all the blood was all over our wall on the building. And it was really scary, and we just screamed,” she shakes her head.

“We screamed.”

GATEWAY DRUG

Journalism is more than only reporting the facts, contrary to popular belief.

It is a form of storytelling, and it takes skill to be able to decide which details are essential to the progression of the story, and which details are not. It also takes skill to be able to think on your feet when you don’t know what the story will be - which is mostly all the time, and the way it should be.

Those are only two of the many reasons I chose to major in Journalism in university/college, even though I have known since I was about nineteen years old that I want to write movies.

But I still get asked, and quite often, why I am going to Journalism school, why I interned at a newspaper this summer, and why I didn’t at least choose Media Production as my major if I want to work in film one day.

The answer is the same as what I said above: Journalism is a form of storytelling and it takes skill to be able to do it effectively.

If you think about it, Journalism is the perfect way to start out if you want to work in the movies like I do. You get to interview people every day, to start off with. By doing that, you get a sense of the way they speak, what makes them get emotional (in some cases), and the words they use to describe particular situations and events. If you are lucky and you are interviewing them face-to-face (which you should be, I am against telephone interviews for a whole bunch of reasons but I’ll save that for another time), you get to watch their mannerisms and facial expressions, too.

That material is very useful when developing characters and writing scripts.

I was thinking exactly that when this girl at the newspaper I was at got to interview this woman who had a complaint about the health care system. She was saying the craziest things, comparing health care workers to Nazis and all of that, and the best part was her photograph. She was so dramatic-looking: Liz Taylor eyebrows and beauty-queen style hair. She was wearing a huge white fur coat standing in a yard full of lawn gnomes and reindeer and pitchforks, and her brother was there, too. They might of even lived together even though they both looked well over 60. When my pal interviewed her for the second time she asked if the photographer was coming back to snap another pic.

“I will absolutely be available,” she said. “And that photographer, well he was real cute last time.”

See, that’s a perfect character for a movie. In fact, she already exists if you combine Elvira with Blanche Deveraux and add a little CC Bloom from Beaches to the mix.

Anyway, the point is that Journalism, I have found, can lead to many different things, because it is multifaceted and journalists are challenged every day to see stories from many perspectives. Those perspectives are called sources.

That may also be the reason why journalists can also, somewhat easily, transition to “the dark side,” also known as PR. Once they fine tune thier eye to seeing stories from different angles, they can easily imagine it from the perspective of the audience, which is an important skill to have when working in Public Relations.

I admire and respect journalists who are in it forever and continue to improve as journalists because they choose to stay in that career, but for me journalism is my gateway drug to crazier things, and I think I will have the skills to get there now only because I took this path.  

I'VE NEVER BEEN GOOD WITH BOUNDARIES

Today in Journalism class, students engaged in a discussion about content that is, and is not, appropriate to show in the media.

The discussion happened after anti-semitic posters were posted in downtown Winnipeg, and used to target Mayor Sam Katz among other well-known Jews in the city (and some non-Jews, apparently).

I was surprised to learn some of my classmates agreed with the Winnipeg Sun and thought it was appropriate for a clear photograph of one of the posters to be published. That left me burning fuckin’ mad. My heart was racing throughout the discussion, and it took me a while to stop thinking about it when class ended.

One comment - that a reporter’s job is to report - kept repeating itself in my mind.

And I agree with that comment, but I also think reporters, in general, are responsible to report only information that will allow people to be “free and self-governing,” said a handout given to me in first year Journalism class. I suppose I can see how publishing a photograph of one of the posters would allow people to be free to make up their own minds about the content of the poster, but it would also leave others trapped - specifically, the people whose names appeared on the “list” on the poster.

It would leave them trapped by stereotypes and by no other choice but to be portrayed in a negative and racist fashion, even if only for two days (the number of days the Sun has run the photograph so far). And while not directly, it leaves others trapped by that racism too, because publishing the photograph perpetuates the message  - even if that was not the intention of the media outlet.

I am now conflicted about Journalism and truth and boundaries. But I also gained a little bit of clarity, I guess.

For example, I am now thinking differently about the Youth Justice Act in Manitoba.

While interning at the paper (no, not the Sun) over the summer, I used to question why the names of youth who committed criminal acts were not published. Of course I thought I knew the answer, but I did not understand it as I understand it after the discussion today.

After today, I think their names are not published because it would only trap them if people at large knew their identity. They would become trapped by many of the same things the people on that list were temporarily trapped by  - stereotypes, and in some cases, publishing their names could perpetuate ideas rooted in racism that, unfortunately, seems to exist in society already.

The difference is, of course, that the people whose names appeared on the list on the posters have not, to my knowledge, committed criminal acts.

Anyway, this is all to say that I now have a little bit more insight when it comes to forming an opinion on what is appropriate to publish. I still agree with the hand out on journalism I was given last year - that information published should allow people to be free and self-governing. However, it should be non-discriminatory, so to speak: information should, to the best of the media outlets ability, let everyone be free and self-governing.

Obviously there are exceptions to this rule, and no I am not saying that convicted serial killers and child molesters should remain anonymous, but I am saying that all parties should  be considered when content is published, and in the particular case of the anti-semitic posters, one party was targeted, and the media only continued to target them by posting the content.

The end.

TRUE OR FALSE

One thing I learned after working for a paper this summer: there is more room for truth in fiction than there is in writing that is supposedly fact.

I started to think that after one editor in particular began telling me the responses I should be getting from organizations in order to write any particular story, and even the quotes people should be saying. He was deciding the news, not discovering it.

Then I started thinking maybe it was just him, but as I had more hands-on experience I realized that no, it’s truly the nature of the newspaper beast.

Consider when I have to report on a knife fight - the actual knife fight happens somewhere in Winnipeg. Then someone calls the cops, or the cops see it when they are on patrol. They break it up, and people have to file police reports and whatever, so they get a combination of ‘truths‘ and people generally saying what they think will keep them out of trouble. Then police media relations has to summarize the event into something they can report to the media without compromising the image of the cops. That’s when I give them a call and get the ‘story‘ which, at this point, is really just something derived from what might have happened, but who really knows.

And the paper is a business. The bottom line is to sell papers which makes me see journalism, or at least the side of it I saw this summer, as something that defeats it’s own purpose. I was under the impression before I did this internship that the point of reporting information is to provide people with something that would allow them to be ‘self-governing,‘ to make their own choices or at least have options. I feel as though there is an element of it to that, but mostly every media outlet just wants to be the fastest and that kind of gets lost in everything.

And there are a bunch of rules surrounding what you can and cannot say and I believe they all relate to political connotations, perhaps, and things I don’t really understand. And overall they relate to having ‘taste‘ or being politically correct or whatever. Apparently, I know nothing about taste (or so I was told on the fourth time I was talked to about the dress code). Anyway, at least in fiction, because you are making up stuff that is based on maybe your own experiences or someone else's, you can show ugly details and be really honest about the whole thing because in the end it’s just fiction, right?

You can say things that are not tasteful, but that are true. And while I don’t believe in ultimate truth, at least you can tell someone’s truth in a full way than try to partially tell everyones only to tell no ones at all.

That’s why I will be writing movies one day, not articles. 

IDENTITY CRISIS

On the evening of Tuesday, September 4, members and supporters of the Green Party of Manitoba gathered at Triple B’s and ate Bruschetta while awaiting the results of the Fort Whyte byelection.

It seemed as though most people who were speaking about the byelection throughout the day knew the PC candidate, Brian Pallister, was going to win, and he did. The riding has always been conservative, with Hugh McFadyen, PC garnering 5,594 votes in the last provincial election on October 4, 2011. The NDP candidate Sunny Dhaliwal was far behind him with 2,655 votes, and Liberal candidate Chae Tsai only got 710. 

The Fort Whyte Green Party candidate, Donnie Benham, said he was not nervous, even when results were going to be in any minute. I believed that he was not afraid at all as I watched him casually walk over to the ATM to pull out some cash while some of the other people there, including party members, student journalists, and supporters waited in anticipation.

I started to think about why he would not be nervous and aside from what seemed to be the obvious near fact that he was not going to be elected, it occurred to me that being elected may never have been his goal in the first place. I suppose I started giving this more thought after James Beddome, the Leader of the Green Party of Manitoba, began speaking about awareness as the party’s central focus in the byelection.

“We want to make sure they know the Green Party is out there,” he said. 

The Green Party, I started to think, holds the convictions and values of its members and supporters, and it sounded as though Beddome, and Benham, want to see the party’s identity bloom.

The idea of identity started going around in my mind even more when I found out, minutes later, that Pauline Marois of the PQ had been elected as Premier of Quebec.

I had gotten back from Montreal two days before and each time I walked by a sign of Marois’ face, I listened to my pal Erik, who is an Anglo, talk about Marois as the would-be worst thing to ever happen to Quebec. He spoke of coexistance and expressed disapproval at the prospect of separating from the rest of Canada, saying it would leave him no choice but to leave Montreal.

But then at night I would listen to Mado, my favorite Franco (and all time) drag queen discourage spectators from voting for Charest while performing her show, and denying her status as a Canadian citizen, claiming she is “Quebecois, and Quebecois only,” or something along the lines of that.

“Who here does not speak French?” she asked in her thick and very sexy accent. “Oh, it’s okay to be retarded” she said when people raised their hands.    

And that, too, is all about identity. Because while the Green Party of Manitoba was trying to bring theirs to life, the PQ and their supporters are trying to keep theirs from dying. 

I was sad that Marois won, I guess, because even though it’s unlikely, I don’t want Montreal to leave from Canada. I love how it is now. But I guess I kind of get it because I’ve been to Israel so that gave me a sense of how it feels to really belong. When I got there, I was told a million times that I was home - simply because I’m a Jew. It was cool to see people from my ‘tribe‘ with their own land and their own language and their own way of life, and it was even more cool to know that my blood - my identity - entitles me to be a part of that. So I started thinking that, if I was a Franco, and I lived in a sweet place like Montreal, or Quebec in general, hell yeah I’d want to claim it for my own. 

Anyway, I was also sad to see the official results of the Manitoba Fort Whyte byelection, which were the following:

Brian Pallister, PC got 3,626 votes
Bob Axworthy, Lib. got 2,069 votes
Brandy Schmidt, NDP got 739 votes
Donnie Benham, Green Party got 113 votes
Darrell Ackman, Independent got 19 votes

That means that NDP has 37 seats, the PCs have 19 seats, and the Liberals have 1 seat.

I was sad to see this because I will soon be at a place where I am going to want to build my own identity and it is hard to imagine that even if you believe your values are valuable and your perspectives give perspective, not everyone else will see that in you. Not everyone sees it in the Green Party, I guess. 

“Every vote for the Green Party is a victory,” said Benham, after he saw the results. “I am really happy with the turnout; 100 votes, that’s 100 people that want a more accountable government and a greener future for Manitoba.”

Those things that he said made me understand it definitely was not about winning or losing, and that’s something I will remember about the identity of the Green Party.

A RAT'Z LAFF

I saw Dionysus in Stony Mountain at the Rachel Browne Theatre on April 3. The play was complex and some reviews have referred to it as intellectual. It features a Stony Mountain inmate named James (Ross McMillan), who questions his psychiatrist's (Sarah Constible) role in the justice system. The play, which was written by Steven Ratzlaff, happens in two acts.

I left the theatre thinking it was a good thing it accommodates only a small audience because I don’t believe Dionysus in Stony Mountain will ever see a sold out performance. The language was complicated, and the sentences (sometimes passages) were lengthy. Many times James simply quoted Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th century German philosopher who became of interest to James when he stopped taking his medication. I study playwriting at Prairie Theatre Exchange and I have learned it is unwise to make your audience feel stupid. While I did not necessarily feel stupid when I left, I did not feel like I understood the play.

I read that Ratzlaff is personally interested in Nietzsche’s work and I feel as though he used the play as a medium to expand on his own interests, theories, and ideas. When I try to see it from his perspective, it occurs to me that he may believe that theatre goers will significantly benefit from learning Nietzsche’s work, and some of his own ideas. Unfortunately, a playwright must write for an audience, not for oneself. I mean, I would love to write a play about my cat Dusty and the way she lets me hold her foot when she goes to sleep, and how I use Carbon by MAC to pencil in my eyebrows, and the gap between my two front teeth. Hell, I could even throw in some passages from Fran Lebowitz's Metropolitan Life, but those things are not interesting to everyone. Maybe cats, makeup, dentistry, and New York City generally interest people, but not my own personal thoughts on each one.

I am disappointed because the Canadian justice system and offenders are interests that I pursue outside of learning about them at school or in the news. Before seeing the play, I expected that there was a chance for theatre about this topic to provoke thought and maybe even action on behalf of the audience. 

For me, it provoked regret that I did not stay home and watch Monster for the 31st time.  

I should have stayed home with you, babe.

photo taken from google