XXIX little details, thoughts, and links on dreaming, design and other stuff. Good morning everybody, I apologize for the delay in getting this to you. I hope this unexpected break in your Friday is a welcome one. I've pulled together a few links that I think you'll enjoy. As always, I'd love to hear from you. Read GDPR. It stands for General Data Protection Regulation.
It's why you're getting a dirth of policy updates in your inbox. Saved searches Remove. In this conversation. Suggested users. MovieMayor's profile. Bert Xanadu. Bert Xanadu MovieMayor It's circa Joined September Close Go to a person's profile. Close Promote this Tweet. Close Block. Cancel Block. Turn on Not now. Close Your lists. Close Create a new list. List name. Description Under characters, optional. Save list. Close Copy link to Tweet. Close Embed this Tweet Embed this Video.
Learn more Add this video to your website by copying the code below. Include parent Tweet. Include media. Close Why you're seeing this ad. The notorious Yonge Street strip was right in front of the Imperial over a few summers, so there were bikers and strip joints right there. It was like the crossroads of the universe in that way, and it was thrilling and sexy. Grant: [] Yeah. Could we have a little bit about the process of the creativity out of which Bert comes.
What is that like? Is that the right way to think about it? His words hurt a little. But in his Grant: [] You literally say what would Bert say or is that just a stream of consciousness in consciousness? You know if I find a theme like his plan to redevelop the Toronto Islands or to fix traffic in Toronto by banning pedestrians. I get on kind of a roll. It does speak to the way Canadians had this over-respect for figures of authority.
Mayors and captains of industry, and that sort of thing, and Bert definitely is that realm. And he also told me about an accent that he that I think Bert would have. It somehow just evokes authority, but also a kind of cardboard dictatorship or something. One be so sophisticated in Toronto in the s. Does he ever take umbrage at anything? Is he ever indignant?
Gerry: [] Yeah I think. Sometimes I will present him as filled with rage. He has an ongoing battle with the projectionists union at the Imperial Six, and the union is run by communists, and they bring prostitutes and booze into the projection booth, and they want the right in their contract to project in the nude. People should know their place.. Do as I say, not as I do. Grant: [] Some of the tweets are unmistakably poetic and [that creates] a strange kind of duality then.
Gerry: [] The Toronto of Bert Xanadu is always I mean I try to mix enough of what the city was really like and the truly surreal. I found an inadvertently hilarious book in a used bookstore, an academic volume published out of York University in or But if you take somebody and you drop them at the corner of Queen and Spadina and said this was this was grimy, slaughterhouses and like chemical spills, and fights in the street beer parlors.
Where is that? You know like that might have actually been something in Soviet Bulgaria in It might have had somebody in charge of that. But because we just have this tolerance in Canada and Toronto for layers of things that got regulated and managed, you had to fill in a form to do things. So I just tweak it a little bit to make it more surreal. You have to create rules. Grant: [] Yeah yeah. I reached the point where I felt I could assemble them into a book.
But also maybe do more with this world as well. People are tired of him. So he attempts one last re-election campaign. You know I have a character who is a kind of a John Sewell-type, who became mayor of Toronto briefly, but in the 70s he was like the hippie Alderman, a social activist and really challenged the old guard. So what Bert does is he in desperation is meet up with one one of his many foreign jaunts with a kind of a kind of star architect and urban planner, sort of a Le Corbusier figure, who sells Bert a plan to completely redesign downtown Toronto.
Essentially it involves tearing down every building in downtown Toronto and rebuilding it as the city of the future. Part of the plan is to raze all of the buildings and not replace them for about a year or two, and just pave it as a giant parking lot just for revenue purposes. Everybody would have to be moved out of the city and everything. Toronto was really good at erasing its past and building pathetic little fractions of a future.
And yet in a way it is the future that I saw in these overheated plans from Buckminster Fuller and people like that in the 70s who came to Toronto. Perhaps it is a weird way to develop a storyworld — just start with one character and just write thousands of tweets for nine years.
A more disciplined way, I supposed, would be to initially consider the many, many facets of this storyworld. I guess people would probably think of George Lucas as someone who had it all figured out. Or look at James Cameron. It seems sort of insane. I remember actually writing a parody. When Avatar came out they published a book which was a guide to all of the animals and plants of that planet. Toronto in the s. A movie theater. And a lot of posts but otherwise apart from the time and creativity that you invest in Bert you know your production costs are nothing.
James Cameron or Lucas you know having to invest hundreds of millions of dollars just to and then to get something into a theater just to tell any part of the story takes heroic investments. These movies are as big as most corporations. One of the reasons I really love, Logan the last Wolverine film out of the Xman series. I thought that was an incredibly brave thing to do. Logan is almost like a film noir. But it was very daring to make him you know almost like a pathetic figure.
With Bert I had no aspiration to do anything larger with it, just doing it one tweet at a time. But if I was to set out to do this again, I might do it the same way, but I would just do it a lot faster.
I like the idea of building it kind of brick by brick rather than designing it. Grant: [] So you know in a digital culture we have so many more people participating because the barriers to entry are so much smaller. But the promise has always been on many more people participating but you know what talent still rises.
We have a way of finding them and when we find them we can communicate so effortlessly using social and one kind or another. Maybe I should just buy some followers. Brent Butt, the creator of The Corner Gas sitcom in Canada, which is probably the most successful television series ever in Canada, has a lot of followers, and he tweeted he likes Bert.
And so it may be that piece by piece Bert is not very comprehensible. Maybe I need to be more strategic. One of the rules I follow is I never leave I try not to use hashtags. I almost never do. Maybe just a narrow narrow taste window. I mean, there are characters other than Bert Xanadu, there are some recurring figures, but barely. So I may have missed the mark there. If I had a a cast of 25 recurring characters who engaged with Bert.
Are you aware of many many other people doing story building of the kind. I wrote for years and still do occasionally for The Globe and Mail. I wrote satire in my own name, it was sort of making light of some recent thing in Canadian politics or whatever. So I wrote his acceptance speech in which he reached out to the.
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