Remember last entry when I was talking about being in the States? And I was categorizing everything? Because who wants to hear about my travel itinerary? Remember that? With the chopped salad and everything? And the itineraries? Here's more. But first:

Scarletwh0re likes me! Moving on to the US categories.

LOOKING

In Vegas I looked at books, slot machines, tacky architecture, women with extravagantly fake bodies, lights both neon and incandescant, LED display boards stretching over four blocks of downtown. We looked at a monitor in a control room above Fremont Street and manipulated a half-dozen cameras that could zoom in to the lettering on a T-shirt or the title of a book from 90 feet up. If you're walking on Fremont Street in Vegas - and if you go to Vegas you eventually end up on Fremont - you are being watched. We rode up and down Fremont in a motorized cart, interviewing the driver about his job, which was to replace those 12.5 million LED bulbs. I sat in the passenger's seat while Chris perched on the dash facing backwards, somehow maintaining his balance with $50 000 dollars of camera on his shoulder. Drunken tourists chased after us, screaming "Hi Mom!" (if you can believe it) or giving us the finger. Really, why travel hundreds or thousands of miles to say "Hi Mom!" to a camera? Couldn't you just sit at home in the dark, weeping silently over your frumpy round-shouldered body, pumping your fist in the air and sobbing out "hi mom" before giving in to another Pop-Tart? Here's something: why don't you go say it to your mother? Fuck. Nonetheless, it made me realize that looking, like any broad-based phenomenon, has subgenres, and my favourite one is

PROSTHETIC LOOKING.

Prosthetic looking can be done by any amateur with a Polaroid or a teensy digital Pentax, but for high quality, best-results prosthetic looking, you need a monstrously expensive but relatively portable Betacam. Its size and technological apparatus distinguish it from all lesser forms of looking, prosthetic or otherwise. In Canada this activity is not so highly valued (except in Vancouver), and most often people here try to keep out of the way of the camera's eye. Even those who have agreed to be interviewed tend to turn their faces slightly away, as if the camera were emitting light instead of sopping it up. They feel implicated and subtly committed, perhaps. Or maybe just inconvencied. South of the border no such compuctions apply, and ordinary citizens turn into attention-starved idiots when the Magic Eye sweeps their way. In America the realm of the Eye is privileged. We went from being a couple of guys with a Betacam to mysterious adjuncts of celebrity, roaming gatekeepers of fame. People pulled their cars up to us, chased us down alleyways (I shit you not) to gain access into "the business," as one of them called it. Sex, crime, film - they're all "the business," the trinity of transgression. The best response to these people is to say "Canada". Their faces close up and they walk or drive off without a word. They carry a slightly hurt look, as if our foreignness, our irrelevance to their ambitions were an insult. It never felt so good to be unimportant.

It's even better when we're filming something or someone in public. People pass by, staring at our subject, obviously thinking: Who's that person? Where have I seen that person? What makes them so special? I'm better looking than that, I could be in front of that camera, easy. The prosthetic look creates celebrity out of thin air. It's an emblem of concentrated attention, a signal of consenus. Is that person important? Hell, a network thinks so! Before I take this too far, let me point out that many of the people I interviewed in the States were not particularly impressed by the camera and the lights, the remote microphones and the orange-and-blue gels. But these were people who were used to cameras, figures who worked in the media or had been interviewed many times over the years, usually for the very same things that we had come for. They actually led interesting lives, went out and accomplished things that made them worth interviewing; they provided the content for the rubes who watched them on television and wondered how to get over to the other side of the screen. On our flight back home the only people on the plane who asked us about our camera turned out to be American tourists.

HEARING

I went to see Stereolab in Chicago with the ever-pleasant Luvabeans. I was a little nervous, because we had never met face-to-face, and I tend to either click immediately with people or not at all. I hadn't thought about it beforehand, but the evening we'd planned out - a bite to eat and a drink to start, a concert followed up by more drinks - was, in form if not in content, disconcertingly like a date. It also made me realize that I'd never really been out on a proper date before, a familiarizing-through-planned-activities evening. The concert was actually a good bet for a first meeting - if conversation lagged and the encounter turned into fidgeting and gulping of beer, we could always head to the concert and let Stereolab do its thing. As it turned out, we got on like old friends, generating daft in-jokes (the Arrythmic White Guy, the Toady Waitress, the Full Circle Sitting Dejected Trudge w/ Dismount). I was almost sorry to leave the restaurant (Leona's?) and head to the concert. Afterwards we walked to another bar to pick up where we left off, but fatigue hit me hard and I had to drag my sorry and - truth be told - hairy butt back to the hotel. Have you ever ridden the Blue Line at 1:00 in the morning? Those who do, sleep or shout or both. One guy sat stock still for 20 minutes and suddenly screamed out "Meditate on that! Yes sir, meditate on that!", which made me duck in sleep-deprived terror. In Regina this would cause a bit of a stir. On the O'Hare-bound train, nobody paid attention.

But if that guy had had a Betacam with him...

parode - exode