Tyler Gibb – Writer, Director, Editor, Filmmaker

Little entertainment TV background on this: At the end of September, Joseph Cerniglia, a one time reality TV participant and failed restaurateur committed suicide. The show on which Cerniglia appeared was the US – and terribly tacky – version of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. What gives this non-story its legs is that back in 2007, a former participant in Ramsay’s show Hell’s Kitchen also killed herself. Ooh! A trend! Let’s all make that today’s conversation!

I’ll preface the following with this: It’s a damn shame these unfortunates were so succumb with emotion that they took their own lives. Did their descent into this state have anything to do with Gordon Ramsay or reality TV? Who knows. Is this in anyway Gordon Ramsay or reality TV’s fault?

In the parlance of chef Ramsay:

Fuck off out of here.

This trend has however opened the debate. Do reality TV producers select mentally unstable people to be in their shows? Are you joking? How is this even a debate? Of course they do!

Fuck off out of here.

You are deluded if you think entering the entertainment business isn’t going to either, at some point, destabilize you mentally or exacerbate a current mental instability. Would you send someone off to work on an off shore oil rig with no training whatsoever? No. So what makes some burger flipper think that they can just waltz into the national spotlight without some expectation of peril?

Not the same thing?

Fuck off out of here, it is too. One may have an immediate physical danger but there is no doubt in my mind that prolonged exposure to the emotional business of entertainment can be just as life threatening unless you’re mentally equipped to handle it. On screen performers are trained professionals. They toil and sweat and bleed to get a shot at being in front of that camera. They don’t just fill out an online application and wait for the phone to ring.

I know it’s a wondrous thing to turn on your TV and all these vibrant sights and sounds come shooting out at you but there are a great many people with varying degrees of serious mental issues making that world look as glossy as it does. If you are not one of them, you’re going to get hurt. Please stay behind the yellow line.

Fuck off out of here.

 This is the story of a raccoon. I’m not going to personify the raccoon with a name as I doubt that raccoons would ever raccoonify a person with a name of their own. He was simply a raccoon and content to be such.

The raccoon, awoke in the hollow of a tree one evening. The air was warm enough but you could tell it was going to be chilly again tonight. Spring was struggling its way out of the woods all around him.

A little drink from the creek nearby and it was time to get scrounging. The sun has just set. Spring is that time of year that gets even an old raccoon moving, searching, scavenging for food after a long, barren winter.

He makes his way through the woods. New sprouts poke their heads up through the forest floor. He sniffs at them. Fresh, earthy but not breakfast. Not for him anyway. Up a little incline, waddling along. There’s a robin perched in a tree above singing her twilight song. The raccoon comes to a clearing. A rock flat. He sniffs the air. There’s a sound, distant; rushing water, maybe. Water could mean fish. Fish would be delish. The raccoon sets off across the rock flat, the thought of a delicious breakfast of fish on his mind.

And that’s when I see him in my headlights and it’s too late and the raccoon’s life is snuffed out in an instant.

The rest of drive was a long one even though I didn’t have much farther to go. At the moment I ended the raccoon’s life I’d been dwelling on an important decision that would affect my own. A career decision that would inevitably affect my life as a whole. Should I or shouldn’t I? What were the pros and cons. Maybe I should ponder it further. Give it some time.

Then, THUNK! and in an instant a life form, born and bred of the same country as myself – sharing the same water, the same air – is gone forever.

It made a hard decision easier to make. And quicker to make. It was simple in fact. It was so clear what I had to do. Here’s an oldy but a goody for you: Life is short. Getting that reminder sucks. But it sure advances the plot.

A few months ago I was sitting at my desk, minding my own business, when the world started listing to the right. I caught myself just before hitting the floor. Fortunately I hadn’t fainted nor was it an inner ear infection; my office chair had just snapped off at the stem.

This did not fit into my schedule. I quickly replaced the wreck with what was available to me, a wicker chair from the living room. It did the trick. For a while.

See, I’ve learned to read the signals. My body’s signals. If my left eye starts to twitch, it means I’m starting to stress a deadline. If my stomach gets queasy it means I’m starting to stress a deadline. If I can’t seem to fall asleep it means I’m starting to stress a deadline. However, if my back starts to get chronically sore for no apparent reason, it often means there’s something wrong with my chair…

Turns out Ol’ Wicker was starting to see some stress of its own. It seems that over the past few months that I’ve been planted in its seat, the wicker chair’s legs have been splaying outward like Bambi on the frozen pond. The result was that the chair was incrementally sinking lower and my back was incrementally getting more sore.

I’ve learned from achy experience that it can take as little as an inch of height disparity between your chair desk to completely destroy your back.

So Ol’ Wicker is back, recuperating from its service, in the living room and I’m breaking in a brand new office chair. We’re still getting to know each other but with a little time and Young Officy’s pneumatic height cylinder, I think we’ll get there. I certainly feel like I’m finally getting the support I need at any rate.

You’ve got to have those day to day things in order for everything else to fall into place.

A few years ago I was driving by a suburban children’s park at night. It was early spring, still cold out, no leaves on the trees yet. This made it easy for me to spot a flaming garbage can in the middle of the park. Uncharacteristic of the placid neighbourhood to say the least.

I pulled over and headed into the park. There was no one around, no indication of who had started the fire. What to do? I had no phone, couldn’t call the fire department, didn’t even know if a (so far) contained fire in a garbage can warranted disturbing emergency services much less the sleeping houses around me…

I can handle this, I thought.

In the absence of any water, I thought I could snuff the flames with some sand from one of the nearby sandboxes. But lo and behold, I got out there to find all the sand was frozen together with the remnants of the winter’s ice. I used a stick to chip away at it, applying all my focus to the task. Finally I gathered what I thought might help douse the flames and scooted over to dump the sand into the bin.

It didn’t put out the fire. Worse, I looked up to see another car had pulled up outside the park. The mortified face of the suburbanite woman in the passenger seat, staring at me. Her husband, beyond, on his cell phone, urgently calling for help.

I made my way over, smiling pleasantly, waving a hand disarmingly. I said, “Are you calling the fire department? Good, because I don’t have a phone and I don’t think I can put it out myse–”

It was too late. The passenger side window was rolled up protectively. The woman was in a panic, ordering her husband to quickly get a move on; the crazy man burning things in the park was heading straight toward them. The car blasted off. “No!” I was left shouting in the street. “No… No… It’s not what you think… No…”

A few minutes later the fire trucks careened around the corner – seemed a little dramatic but granted, the frozen sand wasn’t exactly doing the trick. I left fearing further accusation.

When I hear bad things about someone I like to remember this experience. It reminds me that things aren’t always how they appear and that there are at least two sides to every story. Reputation can be a dangerous thing. But at the end of the day, you either get a chance to tell your side or you just have to buck up and accept what you can’t change. After all, it’s up to the person driving away to believe what they want about a pile of garbage that’s gone down in flames.

Interesting encounter the other day. I was minding my own business when the door bell rang. Misanthrope that I am, I nearly didn’t answer but when I looked out the window to see the scruffy mop-tops of a couple teenagers on the stoop I figured I better respond. What if something’s happened to my car?

So I open the door to find this kid – me, fifteen years ago – with a stack of self-packaged CD-Rs in his hand, delivering me a sales pitch.

His name is Marc but his artist moniker is “Scratch.” A bit of a misnomer as his music is not so much turntablism as it is laid-back guitar alt rock.

So the sales pitch: I delighted in listening to it. I must have had a grin on my face like the witch who lived in the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel. I think the two buddies he had tailing him were simply there for the same reason – to marvel at this guy’s moxie.

This is what it’s come to, my friends. Musicians are now going to door to door to make ends meet. Naturally, I bought one of Scratch’s CDs. And as I did so, I knew I wasn’t buying it for the music – I hadn’t even heard it yet, after all. What I was buying was an interest in this guy’s career. In fact, whether he’s overtly aware of it or not, that’s what Scratch is actually selling door to door and it’s an interesting principle at this point in time.

We’ve completely devalued content to a point where new ideas are actually shunned. Think remixes and mashups – in film; remakes and sequels. I don’t believe it’s the audience in general that’s driving this trend, it’s the fearful distributors of this content – they’d rather play things safe. So there’s a gap developing. The audience is hungry for new things and there are always artists willing to provide them but the middle man is dying and his death rattle is one of recycled junk. Yes, the internet is sweeping in to fill that gap and connect the audience to the artists. But as we’ve all encountered while navigating through all the crap to something worthwhile it becomes pretty clear why the middle man came to be in the first place.

So how does someone create a career amidst this madness?

It’s becoming a perennial question. And I’ll bet there are as many answers as there are artists.

What I do know is that I did buy one of Scratch‘s CDs. And now I’m writing about him. And I think that’s really interesting…