Using InDesign, I created this mock-up magazine titled Catalogue. Pretty good for a non-designer.

catalouge-magagzine.pdf

These two instruction manuals were written specifically for new volunteers at the Wildlife Rescue Association’s Burnaby facility. It was intended as a quick-access document, written using plain language principles. My excellent colleagues with whom I woked on this project are Kai Jansson, Christine Romani and Melanie Scott.

wra-tech-man-cleaning-65.pdf

wra-tech-man-nestlings-fledglings-65.pdf

Theatre Terrific Society is a non-profit group that promotes the participation by disabled people in the performing arts. Along with my colleague Jeff Schering, we prepared this report that looked into declining enrollment levels for some of Theatre Terrific’s acting classes.

final-report-april-5.pdf

The Bone Cage
By Angie Abdou
Newest Press, 2007; 235 pp.; $22.95

The Bone Cage, Angie Abdou’s first novel, follows the lives of fictitious Olympic hopefuls Sadie Jorgenson and Tom “Digger” Stapleton. The novel focuses primarily on the rigors of their training as the two athletes (Sadie is a speed swimmer and Digger is a wrestler) prepare for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Abdou, a competative swimmer herself, certainly has first-hand knowledge of the privations of training. She captures the physical and mental strain that Sadie and Digger must endure with a fair degree of writerly acumen. But as a former competative athlete, I know that besides being physically and mentally difficult, training for any athletic discipline can be intensely boring. As I worked my way through The Bone Cage, I found Abdou’s descriptions of training and competition, while vivid and accurate, to be lacking in any real drama. But I do not think this is the fault of Abdou’s abilities as a writer; rather, I think it is a general flaw found in most sports writing. The problem being, that sports writing, whether journalism or fiction, in the absence of real drama, artificially tries to create importance out of what is, in the end, unimportant.

Perhaps anticipating readers’ disdain at having to plow through another account of yet another grueling training session, Abdou fills out her story with detours from the main athletic narrative. For example, Sadie’s life in the pool is juxtaposed against that of her family, specifically that of her grandmother who is languishing in a hospital – a victim of adult onset diabetes and the ravages of old age. The comparison between the youth and strength of Sadie and the failing health and body of her grandmother will be obvious and superficial to some. But to be fair, it is in the tension between youth and age and the limited time we all live under where Abdou is able to pull her story out of the plodding chronicles of Sadie and Digger and their strict training schedules and give her novel some life.

It is not as if Abdou has written carelessly about her two main characters; there is a certain affection for both that seems to be coming from Abdou’s own intimate understanding of sport. However, Digger and Sadie’s lives are so circumscribed by their dedication to their respective athletic pursuits that they are necessarily rendered as dull and uninteresting in spite of the fact that they are both headed to the Olympics – the pinnacle of all athletic dreams.

Perhaps in an attempt to make her characters more human and less the single-minded machines that Olympians must be in order to have the remotest chance at a medal, Abdou vaguely delves into her characters’ sex lives. But this only comes across as tacked-on and shallow – an editorial afterthought designed to prevent readers’ attention from fading. Also, seemingly to maintain reader care, the narration is written exclusively in the present tense. In this case, such a compositional choice only draws attention to itself as “technique” – automatically suggesting, for me at least, that there is something lacking in the story.

Sport occupies odd territory in our equally odd cultural epoch. Existing somewhat as a paradox, sport is primarily viewed as entertainment – frivolous or otherwise – but at the same time it has been given an elevated status. In the absence of real drama, however, the attempt to create a story out of what is fundamentally a trivial subject will lead to a boring tale – in real life or in fiction.

Pain and Passion: The History of Stampede Wrestling
By Heath McCoy
ECW Press, 2007; 333 pp.; $22.95

Back in the early 80s when I was about 11 or 12 I remember gathering with my pre-adolescent friends on Saturday afternoons in Brad Johnston’s parent’s basement. There in the formica wood-paneled room hung with cheap oil paintings depicting scenes that looked like they were taken from a Louis Lamour novel, we would watch Stampede Wrestling. Despite the cheap production values, the action was always over-the-top and predictably violent. But even at our tender age we suspected that the painful submission holds and body-slams administered by the likes of Bad News Allen and the Cuban Assassin were a fiction. In our vocabulary back then we’d shout at the screen, “Oh that’s sooo fake,” and roll our eyes. In Pain and Passion: The History of Stampede Wrestling, journalist Heath McCoy seems to acknowledge our former youthful suspicions by writing about “professional” wrestling primarily as staged entertainment. At the same time, however, he writes with a sentimental attachment that praises the sheer athleticism and, indeed, pain and suffering that went into creating the gloriously absurd spectacle that was Stampede Wrestling.

Written mostly in a sensational journalistic style, Pain and Passion comes across more as a series of outrageous anecdotes and less of a historical account. Indeed, the book has a slapdash feel to it, but this seems to be more a reflection of the subject matter than anything else. As anyone who has watched mainstream wrestling will know (well maybe not everyone but at least a few) there is a contrived recklessness to the “sport” that is part and parcel of its charm – such as it is. Regardless of its lowbrow status, McCoy has gone to great lengths to put together an intensely detailed history of a genuine Canadian “cultural” institution. But rather than be attracted to Pain and Passion as a historical account by itself, readers may be more drawn to the lurid, and seemingly endless, tales of life on the road and in the ring as a Stampede wrestler.

Certainly McCoy writes with serious praise about the athletic requirements of wrestling: “wrestling, for all of its theatrics, should be an athletic exhibition first and foremost, not some circus of depravity.” But it is always the depravity of wrestling to which audiences are drawn; likewise, it is the depraved spectacle of wrestling to which McCoy’s book constantly returns. Whether it is the vague homoeroticism inherent in two men wearing briefs and leather knee-high lace-up boots grappling with one another or watching a “heel” (bad guy) like Abdullah the Butcher purposely cut himself or his opponent with a hidden razor and bleed all over the ring, wrestling is nothing if not a depraved spectacle.

For all of its exaggerated violence and melodrama, professional wrestling can perhaps best be thought of as story telling, as basic and visceral as it is. As 70s Stampede Wrestling mainstay “Cowboy” Dan Krofatt says, “Why do soap operas on TV last for years and years?… They’re propelled not through violence but through story telling.” As we suspected when we were kids, there seems to be more fiction than fact in the ridiculous extravaganza of wrestling. But like anyone who likes a good story we stuck around for the blood. And there is plenty of blood and good story telling in Pain and Passion.

Upon the turning of the year, besides looking back– sometimes with nostalgia, sometimes with regret – at the year that has passed, people are usually inclined to look towards the new year with a renewed sense of optimism. But as the world blindly staggers into 2008 burdened by seemingly intractable conflicts and the ever-lingering awareness that humanity as it stands is pretty much fucking up the planet ecologically, it is hard to be optimistic. And yet life without hope or optimism would be unbearable.

Although it is a predictable choice for this time of year, “New Year’s Day” by U2, and found on 1983s War, seems to be performing a high wire act. Caught between hope and despair, “New Year’s Day,” in the words of Saint Bono, is about “the struggle for love.” The song was originally penned as a love song for his wife, but world events of the early 80s, particularly that of Poland’s Solidarity movement, infiltrate “New Year’s Day” and turn it into a protest or antiwar song as well.

Driven by Adam Clayton’s now distinctive bass line and Edge’s piano, the sound of “New Year’s Day” is both urgent and stirring. As if amplifying the already compelling nature of the song, Larry Mullen’s drums add a distinctive martial beat while Bono’s vocals soar over the music, which is laid down like an army on parade.

Perhaps reflecting the destruction wrought by war, love in “New Year’s Day,” as is usually the case with Bono’s writing, is attended by darkness and loss: “Under a blood red sky/A crowd has gathered in black and white/Arms entwined, the chosen few/The newspapers says/Say it’s true it’s true/And we can break through/Though torn in two/We can be one.” Certainly the music and lyrics of the song convey a sense of darkness, and it seems that most people would be hard-pressed to call “New Year’s Day” optimistic. Indeed, the song teeters around the abyss of violence with the central image of, presumably, two people being torn from one another. However, the alternating arrangement of the words “I will be with you again,” for “I will begin again” in the chorus, although caught in the mournful quality of the music, can really be only understood as the attempt to see the world in a more hopeful light.

In spite of the horrors implied by “New Year’s Day,” the song seems to be more of an acknowledgement of suffering than be voicing an outright disappointment with humanity. Rather than be mired in darkness “New Year’s Day” looks toward the light, however dim it may be.

Happy New Year everybody.