Christmas Eve

[handful_ofdust]

Somebody was talking about Night Heat on Someone Else's Friendslist today--one of three or four I regularly surf, so you'll never know where I am, heh heh--and made me think, once again, about the subject of Stealth Canadianism on LJ, let alone the Internet itself. That thing where you suddenly realize that someone you'd default assumed was American gets the same ridiculously local cultural references you do, so...oh right, they're from Vancouver, or St. John's, or Red Deer. Or Montreal. Or Ottawa. Or maybe they live in the same city as you, and you just didn't figure that out, somehow. Because we could all be typing dogs, for all we know.

Then again, Canadian shows are widely distributed, globally--far more widely than we realize. My Mom gets intermittent cheques from ACTRA's Performer's Rights division every once in a while, usually for the grand sum of $3.25 or so, probably because that episode of The Littlest Hobo she was on once just screened in Bahrain. People in Australia have seen Night Heat. People in Denmark have seen Due South. The people who tend to forget all about these shows are, in order, A) Americans, who often never saw them at all and B) Canadians, who are trained from an early age to avoid acting like they give a shit about CanCon product, because don't you understand that if it comes from your own country it simply isn't cool? (Unless you're from Quebec, that is. And maybe not even then. Maybe if you're from Nunavut.)

Meanwhile, it's the Day Before the Night Before, and Cal is watching Toopy & Binoo, a CanCon product I personally wish had never been approved, let alone distributed. Yesterday's visit to the doctor--my last in 2009--confirmed that though I appear to have two holes in my left-hand anchor-scar, the flesh beneath is pink and healing, uninfected; I just have to resign myself to it being an "unstable area", keep changing the band-aids, and call him in February. Etc.

Minutiae. Happy Merry, all.

Comments

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

An interesting way to talk about it for sure. I've got enough Northern friends and have spent enough time Up There to get most of the references -- or, if not, I have the wherewithal to look them up or ask politely.

I actually can't rest easy in the assumption that most of my own local references to anything will go heeded, because they're often about things that even other Americans won't latch onto.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

No, no, I understand. But there's still a larger vocabulary of "oh, everybody's seen that" which just doesn't seem to translate, in Canada. It's like we either bond with something fiercely or (more often) go: "Ah, Canadian, must be shit: Extreme filter mode! Followed by retroactive memory-scrubbing!"

My conversations with students in Canadian Film History class were always fun, because I'd have to go ten to fifteen layers deep in order to find a reference which would put any of the people I was talking about in some sort of context they could understand. I remember how grateful I was when The Shipping News came out, so that I could find a Hollywood (ie "real", "genuine", "legitimate") reference point for Gordon Pinsent, because any other moment in his fifty-year career was simply some sort of "blah blah blah BLAH, Ginger" "what we say to dogs/what they hear"-type noise.

[benet.livejournal.com]

You mean Blacula wasn't enough for them? Fools. You should have destroyed them all.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

But Blacula's OLD. These were people who thought Silence of the Lambs was practically a grandma film.

[sixteenbynine.livejournal.com]

The only other Canadian film figures of import to most people with any awareness of film are either Atom Egoyan (who seems to identify himself more as an Armenian than as a Canadian) and David Cronenberg (whom I used to wonder if any country would want to claim as their own). I'm sure the picture's a lot better than that.