I figured today marks an event worthy of a little post. Its January 1, 2010. The first day of a new year, a new decade and for me, a new age. I’m never a fan of this time of year. You have to come out of the glorious family-oriented sloth that surrounds Christmas and return to your normal life, and because of the new year (and for me, the new age), this also comes with this frantic anxiety and pressure to one-up yourself and make the new year your most productive yet.
That said, I have to say I’m pretty satisfied with both 2009 and the 2000s in general. 2009 was my first full year out of school, and while that at times proved quite disorienting and confusing, I’m happy with where things headed. The 2000s, well, they aren’t exactly easy to sum up. I turned 16 on this day ten years ago. So it was really this massively definitive decade (and kinda the first one that really counted). I hate to say it, but it was the decade of my youth. I fear the 2010s, in which I’ll go from 26 to 36, will be the decade where I have to start taking life seriously.
I spent a few days this week going through hundreds of photos I’d stored away in albums, and scanning them initially just for digital keepsakes (I didn’t get a digital camera until 2007). Then this weird archival side of me took over and I began obsessively turning all the photos into a giant virtual scrapbook (which you can view here and here).
It was an intensely nostalgic progress. In 2000, I was a chunky, awkward boy living in a small army town and deep in the midst of coming to terms with his sexuality. I cringe at the thought of the headspace I was in back then. And visually witnessing that time evolve into this one via four or five hundred photos is really unbelievable. It put me in this end-of-year/end-of-decade/end-of-age daze that I’m hoping will fade in time for Monday’s return to reality. But it also was kind of cathartic, and I’d honestly recommend a similar project to anyone. It really gives you this strong sense of personal evolution as you begin a new chapter.
So anyway… on Monday I’ll begrudgingly return to life - and this blog’s - regularly scheduled deal. In the meantime, I’m a raising a glass to this guy… and being very, very grateful that ten years later, I hardly know him:
Before I return to regularly scheduled blogging (mainly end-of-decade/end-of-year lists, of which I’m seriously lagging behind), I figured I should get some final Dubai-related thoughts out of the way.
I could have just existed within the film festival for 8 days and not really developed much emotion toward Dubai itself, but I’ve always found it difficult not to explore a city when you get this privileged opportunity to go there. So I did. And I’ve never been struck with such inauthenticity (though I’ve never been to Vegas). I mean, in a certain sense of the word, Dubai is amazing. It’s like a capitalist experiment gone mad, and for the first few hours you get to witness it, a lot of jaw-dropping is involved. On the ride out to the desert safari, our driver kept pointing out all these fun facts about various buildings and developments we passed. There was the university shaped like a submarine. And the plans for a building that will be 30% higher than the Burj Dubai, which is already the tallest building in the world. And Dubai World, a 3 billion square foot world’s biggest theme park/world’s biggest hotel/world’s biggest mall that includes a residential area where robotic dinosaurs walk around.
But you can’t help but root for rough financial times ahead. There is such a disgusting amount of greed and wealth and gluttony in Dubai that hoping its insane ambition meets its match in a recession and that the whole city turns into a futuristic ghost metropolis just feels right. And there’s obviously corrupt shit going down. The much-reported migrant-labour underbelly is evident when you see these busloads of workers going onto the construction sites, knowing they are paid next to nothing and living in squalor outside of the city. I asked a local about this once and he recited “they make much more than they would in their home country,” which is probably true but means nothing considering they made almost nothing to begin with. Someone else told me dozens of people died building the Burj Dubai but not one of it is reported.
I also just kept wondering why the fuck all these rich people were coming here for holidays. As my friend said when we were there, “If I had this kinda money, I’d be renting a castle in Italy.” I mean, my room & flight was paid for by the festival, but whenever I attempted to see the sights it was waay out of my price range. I went to the Atlantis Hotel (where - excess alert - a fucking LIVE WHALE SHARK is in the aquarium in the lobby) and was going to go this water park where you can swim with dolphins. I didn’t even want to swim in the dolphins (that cost like $500 US), but just to ENTER the premises you have to drop $100. I had actually hoped to do some Christmas shopping there as the UAE’s tax free shopping is apparently a big deal. But nothing was cheaper, as everything is imported. The only deals are gas and cigarettes.
Dubai also prides itself on being a “liberal, Westernized city” (I don’t know how many times I heard someone or some ad or some magazine describe the city this way), when in fact its obviously intensely repressive. Which I knew going in, but discovered more severely firsthand.
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At least the UAE’s archaic censorship laws inspire imagination among those that have for too long lazily relied on the internet to do that for them.
So this is what I see when I glance up from my laptop right now:
Not too shabby. And I’m sure once this jetlag wears off and I re-discover a sense of feeling alive, I’ll start to enjoy it. But for now, Dubai is a very strange place to feel out-of-it in. Half desolate desert, half insane skyscrapers… I feel like I’m living inside an overambitious game of Sim City 3000.
It’s been 36 hours since I left for Dubai, and I’ve felt few joyous moments. I got to Toronto airport around 7pm on Monday expecting a somewhat minimal crowd, ignorantly believing that not many people would fly Toronto->Dubai on a Monday night. I was wrong. After waiting in line for well over an hour to check my bag, I found myself in a waiting area with mostly dozens and dozens of families, all with screaming children. Together we filled the economy section of the double decker Emirates airplane without a problem, and thus began my 12 hour flight from hell. No amount of pills or high-tech backseat entertainment system (which I must admit was very impressive - 100s of movies, camera-views of various places outside the plane, plugs for laptop) was enough to fully drown out the screams. So I just caught up on 2009 releases I’d yet to see (“The Private Lives of Pippa Lee” and “Funny People” were unsurprisingly both greatly overshadowed by a third viewing of “Up”) and stared at the stairs to the upper classes, picturing people lying down in their pods as I continued to smell nothing but corn nuts and diapers.
I got to Dubai at 8pm local time Tuesday, meaning I didn’t see any of the daylight December 8, 2009 had to offer. Intensely hospitable folks from the Dubai Film Festival met me and another, not-so-economy-classed Canadian, and led us to a swanky lounge to wait while they went through customs for us. I smoked a good 10 cigarettes in 20 minutes, and then was escorted to a car that would take me to the hotel I now am sitting in (not without a stop at Duty Free, where a carton of Marlboros costs the equivalent of 10 dollars!). After a reception clerk overeagerly tried to get me to upgrade my room past what the film festival was paying for, I went to my room and, at 10pm, went to sleep.
Four hours later, I woke up, and couldn’t fall back asleep again. Watching the sun rise was a definite bonus from the insomnia, but running around getting accredited and covering opening festivities has not been. Worse is that it’s somewhat high security and on my way into festival headquarters to get my badge, I was nearly turned away because they didn’t believe I was a journalist:
Security guard: “You can not be journalist. You could be volunteer?”
Me: “No. I am a journalist.”
Security guard: “Can you call someone at the festival who can come and get you?”
Me: “No. I have no phone. I didn’t bring it because of long distance charges.”
Security guard: “Sorry, you can not be journalist. You look like teenager.”
I ran back to my hotel and got a business card and a print out of the e-mail from the festival, and all was well. Say what you want about how lucky I am to look childlike, but it’s situations like this that I want to look like anything but.
Anyway… so now I’m going to down a can of what looks like an Arabic version of Red Bull and attend the opening night festivities, which could be quite something: The festival is screening Rob Marshall’s “Nine” for its opening night film, quite possibly the gayest public event the city of Dubai has ever seen. Afterwards, I hope to spent at least 8 hours unconscious in the fetal position, with optimism that tomorrow I’ll be in more adventurous spirits.
After interviewing him in Toronto in ‘06, following him through the streets of Cannes in ‘07, and dining next to him at Sundance ‘09, I had my fourth Gael Garcia Bernal encounter last night at the Tribeca party for his new film “Rudo y Cursi.” I’m somewhat surprised I’ve yet to be served with restraining order papers, as I’m sure Gael must notice the extreme and creepy googily eyes I shoot his way and the incoherent non-language of cracked voice that I articulate whenever he’s around.
Either way, here are a few pics from last night, and tonight Gael will be speaking at one of indieWIRE’s Apple Store Talks, which might just give me the access to him that will finally get me that restraining order. Expect videos from the event tomorrow, that is if I’m legally allowed to post any Gael-related entries by that time.
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