Value in barter

Honest Ed's knows bargains are where it's at.

Will trade services for goods!

I learned a valuable lesson this week in the value of trades in the current economy. The lesson comes courtesy of a local winery’s event – Township 7′s Taste the Stars – that I’m filming tonight. Because I’d already filmed their grape stomp in October, they asked if I would come back and film the making-of sparkling wine demonstration.

Since I’m always up for more time on the camera (we shoot with Sony’s PMW EX1-r) and…. because it was fascinating… and for a good cause… and… so…

I had to pull out the camera. I couldn’t not record the making of a local sparking wine.

Without going into specifics, we eventually agreed on a trade for services that didn’t involve money.

“But, but!” the business-minded entrepreneur sputters, “You’re trying to start a business! Shouldn’t you be charging for services?”

Absolutely. You cannot afford to stay afloat and actually build a business if you do pro-bono or practically free work all the time. If you provide a service, generally you get paid for it.

But I’m starting to see that credibility and providing a service can be very different things. To get to the point where we can be seen as professionals, we have to bank credibility and track record. It doesn’t just come with the website.

Our company is new. Blue Cyrus is just starting out and no one knows us from a regular wedding-video service, or that we’re professionals who have graduated a little beyond handheld camcorder status. Sometimes, to build credibility we need to work a little harder to prove our true value.

So proving ourselves as professionals can sometimes can mean going the extra mile and doing things for free. I’m ok with that.

Besides, there’s a reason I chose a winery after all…

Let’s just say Township 7′s wine is good enough for Queen Elizabeth II, and it’s said she has great taste.

Company website up and running!

Check out www.bluecyrusmedia.com to have a glance at our new website.

We welcome any suggestions for improvement. Much tweaking still needed!

Thank you, Tobi Elliott and Charlotte Gentis

Horses on my friend Carl Gitscheff's farm Photo credit: Tobi Elliott

PS Thank you to my awesome little brother Matthew, who helped me immensely getting it together. Best birthday present a girl could ever ask for!

Trouble in the Peace

B.C. Peace River

I came up to BC’s beautiful Peace region last week with a plan to follow my trapper friend Carl on his Tumbler Ridger trapline, and get him talking about the confluence between natural habitat and industries like coal mining, oil and gas.

I filmed him last in November 2008. While he comes across excellently on screen, and he’s the most articulate conversationalist I could hope to find – ever – the footage was not as professional as I would like.

So I came up again with the idea of re-shooting… But Carl had other ideas in mind.

He got me talking to a few people in the local community about their battles with gas companies and the rampant disrespect with which they’ve been treated. From the first story, my mouth fell open and I listened, aghast, thinking, “how could this happen in CANADA?”

This is a battle for land of epic proportions, and it’s being fought over some of BC’s most fertile farmland, next to it’s most untouched wilderness. The stakes are huge. The health risks are unimaginable. And the oil and gas companies do not play fair.

I won’t go into details now because I’m still at the research stage and will need to consult with Charlotte as to whether we will go ahead with this as a possible. But suffice to say: I’m hooked.

This 1-minute trailer “Trouble in the Peace” sheds a bit of light on what I’ve been uncovering over the last few days. It’s for a documentary in the works about the area by Julian Pinder and Six Island Productions. Pinder is a little more sensationalist than I would be, but he gets the point across that there’s a battle in this region, and it ain’t pretty.

It also tells me I’m not the only one interested in this story. However, there’s more than enough drama and high stakes for seven documentaries to be made.

The Peace may never be quiet for me again.

Groan

Going to watch the Habs play tonight in what is hoped to be the LAST game of the season. Lest I sound uncharitable, let me assure you: it’s for the good of Montreal that they should lose tonight’s game, and any hope of advancing in the playoffs.

Because…

Don’t we all have better things to do Montreal on fine spring nights? Like walk the village square, fall in love, converse over our balconies with the neighbours, wine glass in hand?

Yes we do. Which is why I’m to be found tonight at a seedy little bar in St Henri, cheering on the Pens.

T

“wildly exciting and endlessly entertaining”

That’s what I’m going to call the movie about my life. Stay tuned.

Post coming right up on recent trip to Quebec City with filmmaker and director Magnus Isacsson.

Here’s a picture of the appetizer, a talk to CEGEP students about activism and his films. In the background, one of his more recent films, Art in Action, is playing.

Magnus Isacsson spoke to a CEGEP class about citizen activism in the context of his documentaries. This was just before we set out for QC to screen his film La Bataille de Rabaska at an environmental film festival. Photo by Tobi Elliott

New story coming up on the Journal de Montreal lock out

Spoke this week to the union secretary for the Journal de Montreal‘s 253 workers who’ve been locked out of their workplace since January 24th 2009.

Story coming in the Concordian, Jan 26th. Might have photos as well as Sunday night I’ll probably head their benefit Show du Cadenas (“lock”), at La Tulipe. It will feature Richard Desjardins, Tricot Machine, Louise Forestier et El Motor, Loco Locass et Jean-Sébastien Lavoie. http://www.cnw.ca/fr/releases/archive/January2010/20/c2412.html

Tickets are sold out I hear, but you can get in if you’re press…

A plug for my tv crew’s “Fabric” blog

You can find our progress on THE show about Montreal, debuting April 2010. The show is called fabric, and it’s going to be really really cool. I’m setting up interviews for it right now.

http://fabricmontreal.wordpress.com

Watch this site.

Hey! Maybe you can help! If you know someone who was in the manufacturing industry in the 80s and 90s and watched it all go down, send me an email at tobi.elliott@gmail.com.

Applying for CIDA grant end of November

The Aim: to go to one of the poorest nations on earth, Mozambique, to report on humanitarian work being done by Canadians

Host organization: I’m hoping Iris Min will have me. They do fabulous work there. You can see the photos and newsletter updates at www.irismin.org

Why? seriously… why did I go for a degree in journalism? To sit on my butt re-writing copy about the Alouettes or the Habs, or Twittering on behalf of some busy network news anchor? I want to report on stories that matter…. on people doing work that isn’t seen and is rarely praised, but which can be the difference between life and death for someone.

My words have to count for something. That’s why.

Words matter. Stories should too.

This generation’s war

As Canadians pause this Remembrance Day, and take a minute or two to honour with silence those who died in service to their country, there is one particular battle that should give us pause to reflect.

That battle is the will to understand – to truly hear and understand – what is happening today in Afghanistan.

In this oversaturated information age, we have access to combat images through television, news backgrounders at the click of a mouse and reams of copy from embedded journalists writing about their time with the troops. Today, more than at any point before in history, news consumers know what our Canadian troops are doing “over there.” We may even think we understand the politics behind this war, and, from the safety of our living rooms, we can debate whether “we” have a right to engage in combat in Afghanistan.

But knowing about a war is a very different thing to feeling its pulse, to actually being there in it. While technology can bring us images we couldn’t before access, it can also give news consumers a comforting illusion: that with foreshortened geographical distance, they have increased their understanding.

But therein lies the rub: if telling the story of war is easier than ever with technology, are the young veterans of this most recent war correspondingly more eager to share their stories?

That issue is one of the themes of Ted Barris’s new book, Breaking the Silence: Untold Veterans Stories from the Great War to Afghanistan, released last month. This chronicle serves as a platform for many soldiers who share their wartime experiences for the first time with the public.

Barris has some ideas about why some soldiers bury their stories and, most likely, the truth is that each reason is as unique to the veteran as the soldier’s experience of war. One common thread, however, is that the horror of war simply can’t be translated to anyone who hasn’t been through it.

While that horror hasn’t much changed, the public’s perception of war seems to have undergone a drastic shift. The Great War and WWII were valiant, honour-drenched wars that drew Canada’s young men into battle against a gigantic menace, which the Allied nations were determined to withstand through bravery, perseverance and a moral imperative.

The public’s perception of war seemed to turn with the Korean War, also called Canada’s “Forgotten War”. Unsure of our place in a conflict in Korea, the public held back from supporting the service of Canadian troops, and it took forty years to honour the men – over five hundred of them – who died in it.

Then, the link between honour and war shattered almost completely as the world watched the U.S. mire its troops in bloody Vietnam. Going to war was seen as a shameful, rather than an honourable act, and men who volunteered were seen as dupes rather than heroes.

Today, we must ask ourselves if there is still a stain on the principle of sending Canadian troops to war on behalf of another nation, backed by a smug justification of our greater “understanding” of the political issues at play.

If so, will the men and women who have served in Afghanistan find it easy to share their stories upon their return? Or will they find an army of armchair critics, unwilling to listen or learn from their experience, safe in their knowledge of what is “really” behind the theatre of war?

Unless we want Afghanistan’s front to become another forgotten Korean War, we need to encourage our veterans – young and old – to tell us their stories even if the rationale of their excursion raises doubts for us, or for them.

And unless we want to consign the men and women who served there to remaining quiet bearers of buried stories, we must face this battle more often than on Remembrance Day.

Evolution as logged by a withering brain

I have evolved.

I have evolved from a relatively smart human being who carried most important dates, times and appointments in my head, someone who regularly put pen to paper, a person who proudly kept a personal journal for thoughtful reflections on life and love, someone who always had a spiral bound notebook on her person for important reminders, notes and lists and even possessed, briefly, a Moleskine black book that served as a loving daily diary.

I was literate, and somewhat literary. I knew how to put a sentence together, and I mostly knew how to spell correctly.

Sad to say, that is no longer the case, and the delicious irony hit me again as I typed out that last sentence and my Word program corrected the words ‘mostly’ and ‘correctly’.

I’ve evolved into one-who-taps-on-iPhone for nearly every scenario I encounter in my dangerous existence as an urbanite.

I need to make a list? I tap out a note.

Need to find my way around a new city, or forgot where that store was on St. Laurent? Google map-it.

Can’t remember the recipe for banana bread? Safari – look it up.

Don’t have a radio handy to get the latest newsbreak from CBC? Use the free application I downloaded last week.

Met someone new? My address book is right there to enter the info – although I’m having trouble remembering who the third Ben is on my list, seeing as I was not sufficiently evolved at that point in time to tap in his last name.

New appointment? I must, absolutely must immediately enter it into my calendar – God, I don’t even know what I would do anymore if I had to remember an appointment.

Need a reminder to call someone later to set up that appointment? Email myself.

Sigh. How did my life get so digitized? My early resistance to technology was as pathetic as it was futile – I’ve made up for it in the years since with such a plethora of gadgets and electronic toys that you’d think I was an early adapter.

I waited for (a whole) two years before I got my first cellphone, and this after watching my father carry – or more accurately, lug – around one of the first models, one that would have also served equally well as a brick or a weapon. Once I got a cell I adapted to using it regularly right away, and from there it was a small step to my first personal computer, a 12-inch aluminum (can I get a spell check please?) Macbook, on which I began my first journal entries and started blogging – I didn’t know it was called blogging back then – as I took four months out of busy Toronto life to sail in the Bahamas and Cuba.

Once I climbed ashore, it was a small leap to texting rather than calling my friends, but I managed to make the shift. From there, the next big step in my evolution was from regular, run-of-the-mill cellphone to iPhone, the current tool I use to accessing pretty much everything except my toothbrush.

With all this evolving, I’m worried my brain is withering away. I might look hip, texting as I zip down the sidewalk, navigating by the little black phone in my hand. I might show up on time more often than I used to, I might remember your phone number even if I didn’t get your last name, my bag might be less bulky without a notebook or a Moleskine, I might be one of those people you look at and think, “gee whiz, is she ever busy, how does she get it all done?”

But I’ll tell you the truth: I can’t navigate without it, can’t write anymore in cursive handwriting, cannot honestly spell if left to my own devices, cannot store names, dates, appointments or important facts in my head, am paranoid that I’ll get something wrong if I can’t Google it right away, and would be utterly lost if – God forbid – I should lose my phone.

My brain has taken up residence in a little black tablet that fits in my back pocket. I have evolved, but I’m not sure my intelligence or memory is any better off for it.