FOUR POINTS SHERATON

Hotels are the home of lonely boredom and whipped butter. Professionals in trench coats and golf shirts crowd the business centre, 12 year old girls in bathing suits pad down the hallways with towels wrapped around their hair. The restaurant serves lousy soup but can always be relied on for overpriced steak. In the spa men and women run from their hips and bellies on the treadmill and watch television. Conversations in the lobby run disturbingly like this: �I�d like to see her approach the problem from the other side...� �Mm-hmm...� �I mean, let her come to the other side, be a coordinator for a couple of days...� �She wouldn�t last�. �No way�. �Hey, have you got Windows XP yet on your laptop?� �Sure do, how about you?� �XP all the way�. �I got tired of waiting for the IT desk to install it, so I did it all myself�. �It�s so easy, isn�t it?� �It sure is�. Maids push trolleys from door to door. Inside the rooms, invisible, people turn and flip through cable stations and shuffle their notes and pore over maps, restless and restlessly horny and wondering what there is to do. What next.

FRIDAY NIGHT ACROSS THE RIVER FROM DETROIT

Windsor turned out to be weirder than I�d thought. I spent most of my days there either interviewing old people about a tornado that chewed up several neighbourhoods in 1946 or shooting cover footage on the hemi-demirural edges of town. We ventured downtown a couple of times and shot some establishing modern-day scenes as well: the gigantic empty casino, the public statuary, the Detroit River, what have you. Downtown during the day was weirdly empty. Even with all the offices and stores open, it still seemed somehow deserted. People on the streets looked as if they were a bit lost or just hurrying through, intent on getting elsewhere as quick as possible. Troops of teenagers would go past us occasionally porting flats of beer on their backs, heading for hotel rooms or maybe just parked cars. A girl so high that she could barely walk across the street knocked on my window and asked if she could come inside our van with us for a few minutes. She was the cheeriest person I met in Windsor, now that I think about it.

The weird secret of Windsor, the thing that shadows the rest of the city in muted fear and resignation, is this: on Friday and Saturday nights, hordes of teenagers from Detroit, unable to meet the challenge of the legal Michigan drinking age, pour across the bridge and sweep through downtown, turning it into a screeching hooting drunken grid of obnoxiousness. Do you remember the scene in Pitch Black when the eclipse occurs and swarms of bat-like aliens darken the sky? It�s kind of like that, but with dance clubs.

I NOT ONLY MAKE TELEVISION, I WATCH IT TOO, BUT I ONLY LAUGH AT THE BITS THAT REMIND ME OF HOW ANNOYING IT IS TO MAKE TELEVISION

Last night I was watching the gripping gripping hard-hitting gritty balls-to-the-wall CTV drama The Eleventh Hour, which is all about a news show and the thorny ethical and moral issues they face while exploiting people for their tragedies and providing content to hold people's attention and give advertisers the opportunity to bombard viewers with idealised images of products they never needed and never knew they desired from the core of their beings. Anyway. My biggest laugh of the evening? A crew had gone out to Vancouver to get cover footage for a story, but they'd shot the wrong house. There's a scene in the editing room with people staring at the script, staring at the screen and going "Ah, fuck!". Then trying to figure out just where the hell the crew was at that moment, whether their flight plans could be changed, just who was at fault and who could legitimately be blamed &c. It was dead-on perfect. Anybody want my job?

parode - exode