It's the Music

Music is a big part of my life, and one of the first things I did as I packed for the hospital last year was fill throw a couple of gigabytes of music onto my PSP. It didn't take long for favourite songs to emerge, based on mood or pain management. Here's a rough idea of my playlist necessities.

Fight Songs
These are the songs I listen to when I have to focus past pain or extreme discomfort. They get my blood pumping, my adrenaline up, and sometimes just plain angry enough to deal. Most of these songs involve some form of protest (sometimes political, sometimes not), or at least an element of flipping the finger at somebody, somewhere.

- Almost anything by Michael Franti and Spearhead, but to really get me going it's "Rock the Nation," "Yell Fire," or the remix of "Bomb the World" with Sly and Robbie.
- Lo Fidelity Allstars: "Warming Up the Brain Farm" and "Battle Flag"
- Red Hot Chili Peppers: "The Power of Equality." "Can't Stop" isn't actually a fight song, but it's energetic and of course the title is appropriate.
- LL Cool J: "Mama Said Knock You Out" (the definitive "I'm not going to take this crap" song, and the source of my recent "Don't Call It a Comeback" title)
- Artists United Against Apartheid: Remember the feel-good "Sun City"? "Revolutionary Situation," off the same album, is the this-is-why-we-get-up-and-fight track.
- The Pop Will Eat Itself (PWEI): "Bulletproof," as the title implies, is a great "I'm invincible" song, but for a true fight song "Ich Bin Ein Auslander" has a hard-driving beat, and is a stark look at the alarming rise of the extreme right in Europe in the mid-'90s. Sample lyric: "And when they come to ethnically cleanse me/Will you speak out, will you defend me/Or laugh through a glass eye as they rape our lives/Trampled underfoot by the rise of the right." Whenever I listen I think about how this is still going on elsewhere, and still needs to be fought.
- Public Enemy: "Night of the Living Baseheads," "Rightstarter" and "Prophets of Rage." Can't touch 'em.
- Meat Beat Manifesto: "Acid Again." This is only a fight song in my mind; I choreographed a space battle scene to this song years ago.
- Geinoh Yamashirogumi: "Kaneda," the opening track from the movie Akira. (It's played during the motorcycle gangs' fight.) It's all drums and chanting, and it doesn't let you go.
- The Prodigy and PWEI: "Their Law." One of the few lyrics in the song is "F--k 'em, and their law." Clearly an appeal to disenfranchised or alienated youth, but damn you can dance to it.
- Consolidated: "Tool and Die," "Guerillas in the Mist," and "Crackhouse" are some of the most pointed works they ever did on inner-city problems. And, again, you can dance to them.
- Fishbone: "Fight the Youth." Another response to the mid-'90s rise of hate groups.
- Oasis: "F--kin' in the Bushes." Damn, those kids can rock hard.
- Gary Clail's Tackhead Sound System: "What's My Misssion Now?" Classic '80s British industrial, on the subject of America's military spending.

Songs I Listen to at Night
Again, these are the essentials. I notice they're mostly albums, rather than single tracks.

- David Sylvian: Weatherbox and Weatherbox Instrumental. Soothes even the most troubled soul.
- DJ Spooky: Celestial Mechanix: The Blue Series Mastermix. Two CDs worth of mixes that put me into a contemplative state.
- Miles Davis: Kind of Blue.
- Pop WIll Eat Itself: "X, Y and Zee," from the Cure for Sanity album. Upbeat, poppy, only slightly melancholy. Sample lyrics: "This is the time, the time of our lives/Escape in time for the all-time highs/Of love, lust, laughter that make us sweat/Let's simulate sensory amplification/This is PWEIzation/This is this, it's the living end/'Je t'aime!' 'Encore!' 'Je t'aime!'"
- Quincy Jones, Valerie Simpson vocals: "Bridge Over Troubled Water." This is the version I grew up listening to and is, so far as I'm concerned, the best one. One night in February my fever spiked so bad I spent hours clutching ice bags to my body. I listened to a lot of my fight music to focus past the intense cold, but when I played this song in the early morning I just started crying.

Honestly, though, the one song that always makes me stop what I'm doing comes from Santana's Supernatural: "Put Your Lights On." Aside from the fantastic instrumentation, Everlast's vocals are incredible. It came up randomly when I was alone one night in the hospital in January, and couldn't sleep. These lyrics in particular really spoke to me:

Hey now
All you children
Leave your lights on
Better leave your lights on

'Cause there's a monster
Living under my bed
Whispering in my ear

There's an angel
With her hand on my head
She say I got nothing to fear

There's a darkness
Living deep in my soul
Still got a purpose to serve

So let your light shine
Deep into my home
God don't let me lose my nerve
Don't let me lose my nerve

Japan Media Arts Festival 2007: Entertain Me

Every year there's something in the Japan Media Arts Festival's Entertainment Division which also happens to be animated, and worth a mention. (The categories are porous like that.) This year that honour goes to the music video for Ryukyudisko's "Nice Day."

The entire video is a progression of still photographs starting somewhere in the 1970s, with a couple getting busy under the covers and producing a young boy. We watch him get older, get a job, and then he hits the clubs and meets a girl–and the whole starts going into reverse, as we go back into the girl's history. However, we find ourselves going back even farther than her parents, for reasons that eventually become apparent—and the eventual trip forward again carries its own surprises.

There's a lot of whimsy in this video, and the pity of the Flash-based video above is that you lose some of the detail in the historical photos, as well as the deliberate colour choices to replicate older film (up to a point—director Junji Kojima skimps a little when he starts getting into the 1930s and earlier).

By the way, if you think the tune is catchy you can drop a couple of sawbucks for an import of the single at Amazon.

[Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

Japan Media Arts Festival 2007: Not So Short Shorts

Veterans of animation festivals know that the term "short film" is pretty elastic, from Malcolm Bennett's 30-second Rocky to Yuri Norstein's 29-minute Tale of Tales. They also know that the longer films are usually programmed at the tail end of a given screening, and that prior to the end of the Cold War many of those films were from Eastern Bloc countries—often gorgeous, sometimes inscrutable, sometimes dark.

What's surprising about the 2007 Japan Media Arts Festival's award-winning works is that there are four films that pass the twenty-minute mark. The longest, Love Rollercoaster, is the most straightforward. The remaining three are reminiscent of those old Eastern Bloc films.

I'll start off with the 21-minute Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor because (a) director Koji Yamamura pretty much roped me in with his Mt. Head and The Old Crocodile a few years back; (b) it's actually based on the work of the Jewish-Czech Kafka, which gives it that weirdness that can be supplied only by Eastern European creators in general, and Kafka in particular; and (c) I can't help re-watching it whenever I can. Like any Kafka story, A Country Doctor starts with a seemingly normal premise combined (a country doctor is summoned at night to take care of a young patient) with some bizarre aspect ("unearthly horses" transport him there instantly). As in Kafka's better-known The Metamorphosis, the introduction of the preternatural element marks the moment the protagonist can never go back to the way things were. As in Yamamura's Mt. Head, the pace, sketchy images, and hand-drawn transformations complement the story nicely. At the rate A Country Doctor has been racking up awards, I think Yamamura's going to have to put serious thought into new shelving.

Ryu Kato's The Clockwork City also mines the surreal with traditional tools. The film is pretty much wordless, and you should expect to have to work at sorting some aspects of it out. A young visitor comes to a new city, and it's quickly apparent she doesn't quite fit in—every person, every bird, and even a few buildings have these wind-up mechanisms stuck in them, and she doesn't. After exploring the city for a little while she meets with the town's honcho (who wears a wind-up crown) and exchanges fruits and other goods. Soon after the city goes to war with an unknown enemy, its soldiers identically featureless and wearing blue ties and white shirts. In the aftermath, our protagonist confronts the top man and his flunkies over the discovery of a giant wind-up key; what mysteries does it hold? This is definitely on my "must rewatch" list.

Yusuke Sakamoto's The Dandelion Sister takes us into the realm of stop-motion animation, where a young girl has to contend with her older, sick sister—who happens to be a giant dandelion. There's a lot going on here: There's the younger sister missing out on social activities because of her responsibilities; her resentment of how much attention is heaped on her sick sister; her inability to draw, and express her feelings; and her fear of her sister's death. Like The Clockwork City, The Dandelion Sister is wordless, but as its concerns are more grounded in reality it's open to a number of interpretations about adolescence, caring for sick relatives, and acceptance.

{Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

Japan Media Arts Festival 2007: Happy Birthday

Another odd little parallel shared by some of the award-winning animation shorts in the Japan Media Arts Festival: three of them had to do with birthdays—after a fashion.

My least favourite of the trio was also the longest: Hiromasa Horie's Love Rollercoaster unfortunately has nothing to do with the Ohio Players song, but is instead about a cutesy young bear cub named John trying to solve the mystery of a mysterious birthday present left behind my his late mother. Involved in the search are his friends, and they soon drag in the creepy Lovegun, an eyeless, sharp-toothed green-skinned critter who lives half in and half out of a rocketship. I like the idea behind some of the characters (especially the pair of mischievous panda siblings), and the overall story idea is a solid one—the ending is particularly sweet. But the whole thing is killed by the execution.

As a clay animation fan it shouldn't bother me that a CGI film tries to emulate a plasticine look for its characters. And I've never had a problem with Japan's cult of kawaii. But whenever the characters talk or scrunch their eyes, their skin wrinkles and folds in an a way that quickly renders them uncute. I'm sure John's initial concept drawings were very cute, but his textured skin, along with the bags under his eyes and all that wrinkliness just made me ill. Throw in excessive camera movement, the same kind of needless bobbing and weaving that bothered me in Skyland, and a half-hour–plus running time, and, well... let's just say that sometimes I watch these things so you don't have to.

(As an aside, I should mention that Love Rollercoaster is one of several projects generated from a Japanese talent incubator called Anime Innovation Tokyo. I'd rather have seen just about anything else their creators have put together.)

The much shorter, lo-fi Ushi-nichi (or, as the English titles say, Happy Birthday) is pretty much Love Rollercoaster's exact opposite. Created with pencil and paper (complete with smudges) by Hiroko Ichinose, the nine-minute short features a motley crew of characters each going through their own machinations. A man stands in the desert waiting to hitch a ride, but turns down almost everyone who stops for him; a man wakes up every morning transformed in some way (extra-long arms, a huge 'fro) and cheerily skips to the employment office to find new work based on his condition; a woman starts eating pieces of her pet giraffe, mindless of the transformations it causes to her own body. Everything comes together in a whimsical denouement. Deep meaning? Who cares? The jittery, rough and utterly charming style makes the whole film a pleasure.

Meanwhile, Toshiaki Hanzaki's Birthday puts another spin on the word, relating the evolution of life on Earth from one-celled organisms to man and, it seems, beyond. Working mostly with silhouetted forms, it's slicker than Ushi-nichi, but it is, if anything, more whimsical, with its portrayal of a giant fanged asteroid killing the dinosaurs and aliens accelerating our evolution. (It's also in the opposite direction of Hanzaki's earlier Birds, my favourite of the Digital Content Association of Japan's 2005 Digital Creators Competition's award-winning works.) Finally, at about a minute and a half, it's more compact. It gets where it needs to go, and then ends. Brevity really is the soul of wit.

[Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

Don't Call It a Comeback

So last night I decided to shower -- my first deep cleansing since the pneumonia decked me -- in an effort to work out some of the aches in my muscles before I went to bed. I've mentioned before that showers are a time for me to think, and this one was no different. I had a startling epiphany where I realized that my attitude started to take a downward turn after that whole gurney affair last month. In fact, I had the specific moment: It was when I thought that the gurney had beaten me.

Ever since that moment, I've been acting beaten. Vicky has commented more than once that my posture is more slumped; I've been speaking in a quieter voice; my posts have become increasingly negative.

Frak that noise, I decided. Nothing has ever beaten me down in the past, and nothing's going to beat me down now. I realized that every pain and discomfort I'm feeling now is nothing compared to other pains I've experienced over the years. Enough, already. Time to stand up straight again and face this leukemia down.

Japanese Media Arts Festival 2007: Livin' La Vida Low-Res

One of the pleasures of film festivals, whether you're watching them or organizing them, is in discovering unintended themes in the films. Sometimes it's inevitable, such as when social or political issues are on everyone's mind, but these are so unsurprising as to almost be banal. It's the small, quirky and sometimes trivial themes that are the most interesting to discover, and this year's award-winning short animation offerings from the Japan Media Arts Festival has a few worth mentioning.

One thing I look forward to in any compilation is when people take a backward step, especially when it comes to CGI. There's such a tendency to lard on the detail, be it photorealistic or natural-media or whatever, that few make the deliberate choice to step back and pare things down.

This year three films made a point of dialing down the detail, each in different ways. Youhei Murakoshi's Blockman goes the furthest. The viewer peers through a telescope to a strange world where everything is made up of identically sized cubes. Some are black, most are white, some make larger blocks, and some of the larger blocks have faces, courtesy of dots or lines on individual blocks. The curious lifeforms walk, fly, float, combine and come apart in a variety of ways, with the telescope lazily floating from one vista to another. The effect is similar to that of the even more minimalist Dice—an earlier Japan Media Arts Festival honoree—but perhaps more mesmerizing.

Sejiro Kubo, Ichiro Tanida and Katsunori Aoki collaborated on Copet, a series of shorts starring a cast of animals that are all straight lines and simple curves, plugged together like deranged Lego. At first glance it's appallingly cute, but little touches like camera shake and nifty bits of business (like a gorilla who repeatedly shivers himself out of a stupor) are at odds with the simplistic motion, and the tension works. But what really kept my attention were the bits that didn't follow the simple-is-better formula, like an erupting volcano, a meteor streaking toward Earth and water that looks, well, watery. The characters' occcasional forays into the live-action world, along with incomprehensible but still amusing storylines were also bonuses. If you can read Japanese you can check out the Copet website, which goes into the shorts' world in considerable depth and pimps Copet merch, including a DVD.

Hiroshi Chida's Boneheads was produced by Polygon Pictures, which I mention because it shares a certain aesthetic sensibility with Polygon's Polygon Family shorts, in which the characters' blockiness is celebrated, rather than smoothed and textured to death. But Polygon Family is mostly monochrome, whereas Boneheads' colour pops with Day-Glo intensity. The latter's characters are also every so slightly asymmetrical, which just makes them kookier.

Moreover, where Polygon Family's animated used the anime and fighting videogame idioms, Boneheads is pure, non-stop Tex Avery-style mania (it's running time of seven minutes makes it even more reminiscent of a Golden Age cartoon). Roccos and Bone are two primitive creatures fighting over bananas—between themselves, and between other critters who get wind of the tasty fruit (or them). The whole thing is really just an escalating chase scene, but as every Blues Brothers fan knows, that's not really a bad thing. Radar Cartoons reps Polygon in the U.S., and Boneheads was produced for Viacom, so here's hoping that it pops up on our screens soon.

[Cross-posted from Frames Per Second.]

Again, Blood and Ottawa

On Wednesday I went in for a followup, which of course means a blood test. My hemoglobins were still dropping, but I felt fine. I was given two options: get one unit of blood on Wednesday, then come back for another on Thursday or Friday, or come in on Friday and get both. Since it was approaching noon already—when everything in the oncology clinic slows down—and a transfusion, once it's started, takes about 105 minutes, I elected to come in on Friday. Besides, I felt great, right?

Wrong. By the time I got home, I was starting to feel fatigued. The next day was a bit worse, but in the afternoon, when I was alone at home and typing away on the computer, I felt myself starting to black out. I stumbled upstairs onto the living room couch, called Vicky—I could barely speak—and closed my eyes.

I eventually woke up and felt marginally better, but objectively I was a wreck, with my muscles aching and my head pounding. We called my hematologist (actually, Vicky did when I was semi-conscious) and when I spoke to her later she pointed out that I was probably anemic (which should have been obvious to me—all the signs were there) and that the headache and dizziness might be caused by the recent upping of the Hydrea, which we'd done to keep my crazy white blood count under control. My Hydrea dose was knocked down back down to its old level, and I stumbled through dinner, and eventually sleep.

This morning I woke up, muscles still aching and still damned tired, and forced myself to get out of bed so we could get to the hospital early. (The oncology clinic is always busy; five minutes can make all the difference between a ten-minute wait time and a two-hour wait time.) The strategy paid off; I got two units of blood in record time, with the new bag of blood switched out just as the first one ran out. I got in around 9:15, and was done pretty much at 1:00 on the dot, a new record.

(By the way, for those counting that's now blood transfusions #31 and #32, for a total of 44 transfusions overall.)

Usually after a blood transfusion I feel pretty peppy, but this time the difference wasn't as noticeable. I felt better, but still not particularly good; my muscles still ached, and I was still feeling tired. My blood pressure was low—something like 96/57—and my white blood count was still up there. I pretty much went straight home and straight to bed.

Some other news, though: while I was busy getting the red stuff, the Ottawa General Hospital left us a message at home. I'm going in for some preliminary testing next week, and the actual transplant date is starting to get a bit clearer: they're saying it'll be the second week of September. Right away, my hematologist picked up on the fact that I wasn't too enthusiastic. The plan, as you'll recall, was to get in the best shape possible so I'd be ready for the transplant. But right now I feel like the last few weeks have been piling up on me.

Friday to Tuesday

Just a few updates from the last five days.

On Friday morning my mother told me that my grandmother had died the night before. Like my grandfather last year, it was pneumonia that did her in. (See, I was right to be worried before.) She was 93, passed peacefully, and one of her granddaughters—arguably the one grandchild who spent more of her childhood with her than any other—was with her. Honestly, I can't think of a better way to go.

I have a lot of memories about my grandmother, but there are two that have stuck out in my mind since Friday. One: Her Scrabble skills were razor-sharp. It didn't matter if her opponents had more schooling, she would whup all comers. She was pretty formidable at Boggle, too. Two: No one in the world has ever made homemade chocolate-chip cookies as good as hers. Ever. Suggesting otherwise will earn you hostile glares—if I feel like letting you off that easy.

I spent enough time in Kingston, Jamaica as a kid that I consider it one of my three home cities (Montreal and New York are the others). With my grandmother's passing, the three family members I saw most often when I was there are gone. Going to Jamaica won't feel right without them there.

Saturday, of course, was awesome. Sunday was less so, but still pretty good. I was still a bit bummed about missing the SIGGRAPH conference, but several compatriots have been sending me updates (and a great personalized video!), so I don't feel too bad. I've also decided to attend in spirit with a series of photos.

When I went to get my shots yesterday I also had a blood test. My hemoglobins are down, but since I felt (and still feel) reasonably energetic, I elected not to receive a transfusion. My white blood count, however, has skyrocketed. Since the azacitidine shots often depress the white blood count, my hematologist took me off the Hydrea. But with these results, I've ended up going back on them.

The down side to going back on Hydrea is the effect on my mouth. It's not as harsh as my earlier chemotherapy regimens, but Hydrea does reduce some of the mucous in my mouth, making it a little more difficult to eat. Really, I just had to be careful. However, the azacitidine has the same side effect, and it's starting to kick in as well. Last night I gingerly but greedily enjoyed pork souvlaki with rice, vegetables and naan bread; this afternoon I couldn't eat a tuna sandwich with soft bread. It's back to soups and potages for me until things get better. There's also the fact that, as before, more foods just aren't tasting right. I have what should be a tasty glass of chocolate milk with me now, but I took a swig and it's actually kind of revolting.

(I should confess that I've been toying with the idea of pureeing a tuna casserole. After all, the one in the hospital wasn't bad, and I'm sure my casserole would be yummier. Still, it seems like sacrilege somehow.)

With all that said, today was my last trip to the hospital for azacitidine shots. Since last Monday I've received seven injections on each side of my abdomen. The needles are tiny and in the hands of a good nurse the shots don't really hurt, but after all the jabbing my abs are extremely tender. I'm glad this phase is over.

Coping With Cancer

Whole books have been written on this subject, but today I nailed it in five steps:

Step 1: Watched my son's soccer practice.

Step 2: Made and ate a mean tuna-fish sammich.

Step 3: Spent almost an hour on the phone with my best bud.

Step 4: Successfully completed this mathematical equation: 1 sunny afternoon + 1 volume of Popgun + 1 comfy chair + 1 bowl containing a 2:1 ratio of Reese's Pieces to chocolate M&Ms + a half-pint of root beer + DJ Spooky's Celestial Mechanix: The Blue Series Mastermix for background music

Step 5: Nap.

So what if I woke up sweating ten minutes ago and my stomach still feels like a pincushion after a week of two daily abdominal injections? I honestly don't care.

One Lump or Two?

While I was still in hospital on Thursday—in fact, in the middle of a conversation with my hematologist—I noticed a small bump on my right forearm. It looked kind of like a bug bite, but didn't really feel like one. I pointed it out to her and she said we'd keep an eye on it.

Saturday morning I woke up with a lump pretty much like the first one, only this time on my abdomen. This one was a bit different; it was tender like a spider bite, but the lump itself was harder. Two lumps in three days? While watching Max's soccer practice I got on the phone with the oncologist on call and made an appointment to come in the next day.

The entire time I was, of course, quietly freaking out. Having one form of cancer makes you more susceptible to others; hell, even cancer treatment can make you more susceptible. The suddenness of the lumps' appearance was bothering me, and I kept checking to see if others were showing up.

Sunday morning I was at the hospital, and the oncologist on call looked both the lumps over, pinching them, rolling them a bit between his fingers, and asking me a barrage of questions about when they appeared, how they felt, and so on. Then he disappeared and got on the phone with my hematologist. The verdict: they probably weren't life-threatening, but I should bump up my checkup from Wednesday to Monday.

And so this morning we went through my usual checkup routine. I got a blood test and a catheter dressing change in the oncology clinic. Then Vicky and I froze to death in the waiting area for my hematologist. (The clinic was unusually quiet, so I sped right through, which had us waiting longer for my hematologist.) When it was finally time, my hematologist also did a physical exam. When I sat back down she said, "Like I thought, it's the leukemia."

I didn't miss a beat. "How is it the leukemia?"

"Sometimes it 'leaks' from the blood and gets under the skin."

"So it's a tumour."

"That's right."

Dammit, dammit, dammit. Months ago, when I was looking and feeling great, she'd made the comment that I didn't "have rip-roaring leukemia." Now, with the transplant so close, I'd had three infections and now this? I visualized myself sprinting hard on a track, racing against the leukemia to beat it to the transplant date at the finish line.

Already prepared, my hematologist gave me the course of action. I was to start one of the chemotherapy treatments I was going to do before we met with the transplant specialist; an outpatient procedure where I'd get seven injections of Vidaza over nine days. Vidaza on its own wouldn't be as hard on my system as previous treatments—I'd keep my hair, have no mouth sores, and the potential for nausea would be far lower—which meant it wouldn't interfere with my transplant readiness, but it should slow the leukemia's spread. Because I'd already been cleared for the Vidaza, treatment started today; I went straight back up to the oncology clinic, waited through the noontime rush, and got two injections in the abdomen.

Interestingly, when I pointed out the abdominal bump, my nurse noticed a black dot right on top of it—a sign that it might just be some fluid trapped under there from my Lovenox injection last week. It so happened that my hematologist was there, and when she looked at it again she concurred, especially since it was more tender. "Do you mean to tell me I just spent thousands of dollars in treatment for nothing?" she joked. (This is why we like her.) She still felt the first lump appeared and behaved exactly like a tumour, and I may get a biopsy to be absolutely sure. But with the finish line so close, we're not taking any chances.