blinkit

Nervousness and No. 6

WMD: My interview with Tricia Helfer, better known as No. 6 on BSG, here rendered in my column:

Down-to-earth star committed to work, fans, and cats

From an Alberta farm to a faraway galaxy

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Near the beginning of our interview in a downtown Starbucks last week, Tricia Helfer couldn't stop scratching her leg. "Sorry," she said self-consciously, and followed up with a quick laugh.

Helfer, a part-time Vancouverite best known for playing the steamy robot chick Cylon No. 6 on the critically acclaimed and locally shot Battlestar Galactica, was just a little bit nervous. That's when I decided I liked her.

It's admittedly not hard to like the 33-year-old Helfer. Life has been almost too good to her. An impossibly attractive five-foot, 10-inches, she stumbled as a teenager into a modelling career that took her around the world. Later as an adult, she started a second career as an actress by risking everything in a move to Hollywood and quickly landing a key role on one of the most talked about television shows of the past decade. She's smart as a whip, happily married (to a Los Angeles-based lawyer) and is building a vacation dream home--off the grid, of course, as an example of environmental responsibility--a tractor sprint away from the Alberta family farm where she grew up and to which she maintains close ties. She also rescues and adopts cats.

She's personable, in the forthright way that girls who grow up on farms can be. She's got acting chops that have yet to be fully appreciated. And her nervousness, while reassuring to my own nerves jangling with the reality of talking to a hot actress in a public place, was a sign she took the interview seriously. That marked her as an honest professional, which, combined with her emerging talent, makes her worth watching.

Helfer returned to town last week from her California base to promote the film Walk All Over Me, a Robert Cuffley-directed black comedy in which she plays a Vancouver dominatrix whose tightly bound world is undone by the arrival of a would-be younger protege. BSG fans, who range from traditional science fiction geeks to such decidely non-geek bastions as the New York Times, would say her latest role is a natural progression from her TV character. Played by Helfer with a liquid sultriness and a reservoir of sadism simmering below the surface, Cylon No. 6 is the prototypical S&M domme, alternately seducing and bullying a hapless scientist into betraying humankind. This sense of Helfer has translated into much of the media coverage surrounding the film's release--as if latex was her best and only fit.

But in BSG, Helfer's No. 6 is a conflicted soul who demonstrates surprising moments of remorse, characteristics brought alive by the actress as much as they're suggested by the writers. Helfer accomplishes similar complexity with her role in Cuffley's film. The easy choice, she said, would have been to play up the role's sexuality. "I played Celene," she added, referring to her character who we never see nude or with a client and whose profession is used largely as a plot device and not an opportunity for gratuitousness. At the start of the film, Celene, initially seen in a black wig that's almost in deliberate contrast to the platinum blonde of No. 6, is firmly in control of her work and what she calls her "life plan." By the end of the movie, she's at the mercy of fate and dependant on the resourcefulness of others. Her Cylon cousin is in a galaxy far, far away.

Helfer is proud of Walk All Over Me but agonizes about its traditionally meagre Canadian promotional budget. It's not the first indie film she's appeared in, and by her account, it won't be her last. She's eager to promote Canadian films and thinks it's a shame Canadians don't support more of their rarely observed indigenous cinema.

Helfer is also refreshingly invested in her BSG mainstay. Far from delivering William Shatner's infamous "Get a life" line from Saturday Night Live, she enjoys meeting fans of the show. Their intelligence impresses her. They, in turn, would be impressed by the intelligence and passion with which she discusses the series. She loves to talk it up, analyzing which season was strong or weak or revealing how members of the cast hold detailed discussions of some of the show's science fiction concepts.

Helfer's future after BSG, which enters its final season next year, is indefinite. She plans to continue acting, and eventually producing, with Cate Blanchett as her role model of a character actor who can take lead roles. The construction of the Alberta vacation home may be turned into an environmentally based reality TV show, and there are talks with agents and directors about other projects.

Whether Helfer's nervous about her future, I couldn't tell. If she is, it's a good sign.

blink@vancourier.com

Gibson at home

WMD: After seeing him appear half a dozen times in recent years haunting the neighbourhood around my office like an apparition of post-hippie art geek coolness, I finally got a chance to sit down and interview William Gibson last week. He was back in Vancouver on the final leg of his book tour for Spook Country, his latest novel. He was 20 minutes late, for which he apologized, but he noted that after weeks of touring he was reaching the end of his ability to keep up with one interview after another. He was also unfailingly polite, thoughtful and intelligently entertaining. Apart from the fact that I dig his writing (although what's up with all the happy endings ...), it was one of the most enjoyable interviews I've had in awhile, largely because he listened, thought and answered in real time, as opposed to spinning off rote answers. That's probably a bonus of interviewing writers.

My latest Courier column, available here, came out of that conversation, although it necessarily contains only a little of what was an hour's worth of Q&A. I've reproduced the text below. We talked largely about Vancouver, where he's lived since 1971. Aside from a short story or two, his adopted home city, for which he has great fondness, has never appeared in his fiction before. I wanted to know why:

Futurist fiction writer never imagined Vancouver in 2007

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 10, 2007

William Gibson's fiction has been set in San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Most of it is a vibrantly imagined vision of the near future which, when it first appeared in the 1980s, anticipated the wired and increasingly virtual world of 2007.

It's a future alive in technology, with computer interfaces that rival the Matrix movies, buildings that "grow" into being, and people deliberately replacing parts of their bodies with machines. But it's also a harsh world, with lethal violence on the streets, corporate brawn usurping representative government, and a yawning chasm between rich and poor right out of the Fraser Institute's wettest fantasies.

It's also why, having lived here since 1971, the South Carolina-born Gibson never included Vancouver in his novels. He didn't want to do to his adopted hometown what his imagination had done so skillfully to other cities of the world: make them disturbing.

That reluctance ended with his latest novel, Spook Country, a contemporary tale in which Vancouver plays a prominent role in the final third of the book. But while the novel is a fascinating and often funny meditation on how the U.S. has been thrown dangerously off balance in the wake of 9-11, Vancouver comes across as anything but disturbing. We look pretty good.

Gibson didn't set out to include Vancouver in the story, he told me during an interview last week at a favoured Granville Street cafe. He doesn't like to predestine his narratives. On a good day, he said, "I'm not making executive decisions over the life of my characters."

But as the story developed, and the search by competing and shadowy agencies for a shipping container and its mystery cargo seemingly adrift at sea unfolded, his cast of spooks, criminals and former rock stars landed in our town. Gibson said as soon as he knew they were coming, he was nervous for weeks.

It turned out they liked it here, or at least found little that put them off, as they focused on international intrigue. Vancouver in their eyes is freshly scrubbed and clean smelling. Dollar coins baffle them, and they are surprised to be stuck in horrendous rush hour traffic. But the North Shore mountains amaze them. The green and blue glass condo towers of Yaletown and Coal Harbour look like they were built last week. The locals--with the exception of a Downtown Eastside drug dealer--are friendly, and downtown commuters going to work in the morning have, in the charmingly trippy mind of one key character, a low "f--kedness quotient."

Gibson found it "totally cool" to be a tourist in his own city while writing the book, and the experience his characters went through mirror what he's seen in countless other visitors. Cory Doctorow, a Toronto-born science fiction writer and blogger whose intellectual horsepower rivals Gibson's, once told him Toronto is a place that's easy to live in but hard to visit. Gibson says Vancouver, by contrast, is a city newcomers adore. "I've seen people from Paris fall tragically in love with Vancouver," he said. "And they dread having to return to Paris." Who would have thought Robson Street could beat out the Champs-Elysees.

Yet for a science fiction writer, Gibson never expected the Vancouver we have now. He remembers not only when neighbourhoods like Coal Harbour didn't exist, but also when no one ever imagined Coal Harbour was even a remote possibility. He also never thought Vancouver would become so dense, or that real estate would morph into a gambler's vocation. The rapid change in so short a period concerns him, and he worries about the city's sustainability.

Will he stay? He doesn't know, but only because he says he never knows what the future holds. But it's clear he'd like to remain here. Vancouver gave him a fresh start. The city wasn't as interesting or as big as Toronto, where he spent part of the hippie era after leaving an America convulsed by Vietnam. But it also had no baggage for him when he arrived 36 years ago. His wife is from here, his children were raised here, and he learned to write fiction here, eventually producing some of the most influential novels to come out of Lotusland.

He's grateful to Vancouver for that fresh start, and it shows.

- Gibson appears as part of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, which runs Oct. 16 to 21. For more information, see www.writersfest.bc.ca/.

blink@vancourier.com

Today's bLINKit: The Courier's award-winning historical writer, Lisa Smedman, writes about the coming of the Swede-Finns to B.C., as seen through the eyes of her grandmother.

BlinkitTV debut on YouTube: Hit Me With Your Best Chop

Today marks BlinkitTV's debut on YouTube (along with about an estimated 100,000 other people today ...) with a short parody doc. I created it out of footage I shot using the video function of a Canon point and shoot camera. It was the day before the Christmas break, our work was done, and my colleagues were engaged in a little "housecleaning." This is the story that came out of it. Other segments came out of stock non-royalty video clips. Software used for this production was Magix Movie Edit Pro 11, a great, underestimated and powerful German-made program, and ACID Music Studio 6, a robust and easy to use looper and studio. The music came from various ACID loops.

Defending downloading

WMD: My latest Courier column attempts to defend the downloading of BitTorrent versions of broadcast TV. I think there's a larger argument at play about the rights of the individual consumer vs. the monopolies of entertainment and cultural corporations, but I'm not sure I made the point strongly enough.

Today's bLINKit: A much smarter and more knowledgeable person about Internet and cultural issues is Cory Doctorow, post-millennial Renaissance Man, who was in Vancouver giving a speech last week courtesy of SFU. I missed it, but you can find it here on MP3 or streaming.

Goodbye old PC; some Blinkit catchup

WMD: Farewell to my old Alienware: it was my computer workhorse for five years, through one motherboard burnout, extra RAM and a new video card. It sounded like an F16 taking off thanks to all the fans, but it also had, in its day, lots of working class horsepower under the hood, which is why it needed those fans. But WinMe, which was phased out almost as soon as I bought the computer, was not so much fun, and really, motherboards shouldn't burn out, or so I'm told. Would I buy from Alienware again? Cool looking machines, but unless I win the lottery, no. I'm too old for that racing car-meets-orbital-weapons-platform aesthetic. Plus I've found a good whitebox-building geek who does nice, neat work and makes house calls, and the new machine he built for me is shiny and sleek. So far, it's best machine I've owned.

The last little while has been about renovations and work. The good thing about spending a week doing renovations, even the mild form known as painting, is that going back to work doesn't feel so much like work. At least you can leave it behind and go home. But two weeks out, I'm happy to report the paint has settled in nicely. The fireplace needs touching up, but all else is fine.

In celebration, and to recover, I spent whatever free time I've had in recent moments watching Season 3 of The Wire. If anyone doubts it's the best show on television, watch Season 3, which appears to be its last, judging from the way various character storylines were wrapped up. It's the best, or among the best, because it's a novel as much as anything else, suggesting that on this continent anyway, limited run television serials have replaced the novel as the primary popular forum to explore issues of race, class and power. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, read this.

Today's bLINKit: You've probably already seen it, but in case you haven't, here's Stephen Colbert's speech to the annual dinner U.S. journalists hold with Beltway insiders and pols. Colbert apparently broke quite a lot of rules at the speech and made lots of people uncomfortable. And he also created an instant Internet classic. Up in Canada, we've already got a kind of Stephen Colbert in this guy, better known for this. Read the latest blog post, then look at the Photoshopped pics of Harper, McKay and Bush.

Plus, I'm glad I wasn't the only one annoyed at the tedious Expo 86 nostalgia. Let's be clear: Expo may have helped recruit more American tourists here. It may have kickstarted the redevelopment of industrial land downtown on the waterfront in Vancouver into the urban and civil condo/tower neighbourhoods that exist there now (although how that developed had a lot more to do with farseeing planners at city hall than anything else). But Expo was not some great moment in our social history. Most of the exhibits were thinly disguised tourism booths and not worth setting foot on. Expo also did not "invite the world" here. We had lots of Americans during Expo, which is nice because they have money, but Americans are not the world. The "world," specifically Hong Kong Chinese immigrants, invited themselves over here en masse in the 1980s because of the fear of the handover of the colony back to the mainland. They barely knew about Expo. Housing here was cheap (at the time), the air route was convenient and Canadian immigration policy was reasonable, which is also why the rest of the world -- from Indians to East Europeans -- have settled here. That and because you don't need a parka to live here.

Plus, don't blame the Internet because newspapers are dying, says Dvorak. His points: too true. If newspapers have lost readers, it's because newspapers left readers.

Marriage commissioners exonerated

WMD: This past weekend, websmith got married. It was a fine, elegant and friendly affair, and it explains why his photo blog hasn't been updated in a couple of weeks. He and his (now) wife were too busy planning the event, the first wedding I've been to which was organized with a spreadsheet. The ceremony and reception were also held at a local hotel, which pointed to the virtue of holding everything involving the wedding in one location.

The wedding was conducted by a marriage commissioner, and she did an excellent job. And that reminded me that last year, I ranted about marriage commissioners who couldn't project properly during marriage ceremonies and who had little sense of the need to involve the audience in the ritual of the moment. Soon after, I got this calm and measured reply from Diane Brown, who is a marriage commissioner in B.C, and completely forgot to post it. With her previous permission, I'm belatedly running it now:

I have been one for seven years now, and love it. I just hope that I was
not one of those who officiated at any of the weddings you attended.

In BC, couples can get married at any place of their choosing. They have
the option of being "miked' or not. Should they choose to get married at an outdoor location, there is always the chance that noise will be a problem.

Commissioners are not selected because they have theatrical expertise,
although most do have some experience in public speaking.

Should you choose to become one, all you have to do is wait for a
vacancy to be posted on the Vital Statistics web site.
You will then find that no matter how much time is spent on any wedding,
the commissioner receives no more than $50.00 (plus mileage and parking)
for each ceremony. Any pre wedding interviews are conducted in the
Commissioners own personal time, and while they receive reimbursement
for mileage and parking. there is no compensation paid for the time
involved in getting to and from the venue, which can be as much as 45
minutes each way.

This fee has not changed in the seven years that I have been doing this
Please feel free to put your name forward now, so that you will not be
killed in the rush.

Diane Brown: Marriage Commissioner

My thanks to Diane. And congrats to mr. and mrs. websmith.

Moving, ants and Rapture flicks

WMD: My boxes arrived today from Moving Blocks, a company which rents out plastic boxes and other storage material for moving. I went the rental plastic box route to avoid having to find and collect boxes and, hopefully, to prevent taking any little cardboard-loving critters with me to the new place. The boxes were delivered to my door this morning, and they'll be picked up from new place when I'm done with them in a couple of weeks. Thanks to Randy for the Moving Blocks recommendation.

The only problem now is that the boxes make the move real. I now have to put all my stuff in them. And that's work.

Meantime, the ants smell victory. Their patrols have been small but steady (with heavy casualties inflicted on them by me), and this morning they set off the smoke alarm again for about three seconds just because they could. The silverfish also grew bolder, skittering along the living room carpet in plain sight, but a well-placed foot put a stop to that for now.

Today's bLINKit: The Tyee seeks donations to pay for independent investigative journalism. The Onion reports on yet another new television standard coming into play in the U.S. And certain kinds of Christian filmmakers still seem to be making cheap, awful movies. Back in the day in church, we had to put up with the worst cinematic dreck you can imagine, especially the Rapture-paranoid The Thief in the Night series, discussed at hilarious length here. Not all Christian films targeting aesthetically gullible evangelicals were bad. One exception is the film version of the moving Holocaust-story The Hiding Place, with a terrific cast including Julie Harris and Jeanette Clift. For its camp value, there's the The Cross and the Switchblade, starring (and I'm not making this up) Pat Boone and Erik Estrada.
 

Too many moviemakers, not enough movies

Today's bLINKit: Digital technology was supposed to allow us all to be Spielberg. The problem is there is room for only so many Spielbergs, says Wired.

And the new set on the Daily Show freaks out some critics.

Media Monday: The impermanence of online

Today's bLINKit: A PC Magazine columnist laments the loss of past content on the web, as old web pages disappear or new owners take over existing news sites and trash all the old files. A lot of stuff that was only found online is disappearing for good. Maybe someone should have thought of this eventuality when they designed the whole thing. We're recording massive amounts of history and documentation that's as permanent as a mayfly.

Plus the recording industry association in the U.S. tried to sue an 83-year-old dead woman, claiming she, despite being dead and not having a computer, was trading hundreds of pop, rock and rap songs online. Dead 80-something women will do that.

Finally, something I found at caterina.net, this excellent and very funny Venn diagram.

Media Monday: Free lectures; we hit 5,000

Today's bLINKit: Richard sent round this year's list of Vancouver Institute Lectures, one of the best free things going in this burg. The Vancouver Institute has been putting on these yearly lectures for the better part of a century. They're varied, they're free and they usually draw big crowds, considering the quaint format is some smart person talking at a crowd for about an hour or so and then answering questions. The crowds are both the aging and well-off supporters of the Institute itself with a large complement of students and the general public. The popular lectures fill out early with people sitting in the aisles or being shunted to overflow rooms with closed circuit TV setups. I usually get to one or two per season.

Vancouver Institute Fall 2004 Program * Free Public Lectures *

Lecture Times

Saturday evenings, 8:15 p.m. Doors open 7:30 p.m.

The Fall 2004 season comprises eleven lectures, from September 18 to December 4, omitting October 9 (Thanksgiving).
Please note that the first lecture in November is on a Monday, rather than the usual Saturday, that it will be held in the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, and that admission to this lecture is limited.
Fall 2004 Lecture Schedule

Sep 18
Professor Joel Bakan, Faculty of Law, UBC
The Corporation

Sep 25

Mr. William Deverell, Lawyer and Author, Vancouver
Obscenity, Hate and Artistic Freedom

Oct 2 CECIL AND IDA GREEN LECTURE
Professor Kelly Oliver, Women's Studies and Chair, Philosophy Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook
Conflicted Love: Why We Feel Unloved and Unlovable

Oct 9 Thanksgiving-NO LECTURE

Oct 16
Professor Ransom Myers, Department of Biology, Dalhousie University
Consequences of Global Overexploitation of Fisheries

Oct 23 CECIL AND IDA GREEN LECTURE
Professor Ramachandra Guha, Historian and biographer, Bangalore, India
Arguments With Gandhi: In His Times and Ours

Oct 30
Dr. Martin Gleave, M.D., Department of Surgery, UBC, And Director, Clinical Research, The Prostate Centre, Vancouver General Hospital
From Mice to Men: Translating Discoveries in Prostate Cancer Research Into Improved Patient Care

Nov 6 NO LECTURE

Monday Nov 8 RALPH BUNCHE MEMORIAL LECTURE
Dr. Hans Blix, Chief Weapons Inspector for the U.N. in Iraq
Weapons of Mass Destruction: Lessons from Iraq
Alternate location: Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, University of British Columbia

Nov 13
Professor John Oleson, Department of Greek & Roman Studies, University of Victoria
Ancient Humayma: Water and Society in the Jordanian Desert

Nov 20
Professor Thomas J. Ruth, Director, Positron Emission Tomography, TRIUMF, UBC
A Needle in a Haystack: The Science of Radiotracers

Nov 27 ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE LECTURE
Professor Immanuel Wallerstein, Department of Sociology, Yale University
Whose Right to Intervene? From the "Discovery" of America to Today

Dec 4 Mr. David Tarrant, Horticulturist, UBC Botanical Garden
Chasing Spring Around the World

WMD: Sometime this past week, Blinkit registered its 5,000th hit.