OPRAH, CRUISE, POL POT...

A few nights ago on t.v. I caught the end of the really fancy/schmancy concert that was held recently in Norway for this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a distinguished female African university professor whose name I've of course forgotten, but she did really important things for the environment in Kenya, so she deserves her props.

The weird thing was, the hosts of the show were Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise. Not exactly who first comes to mind when you here the word 'Nobel', is it.

Makes perfect sense to me, though. Both Oprah and Cruise represent the kind of innovative thinking that the Nobel spirit represents.

I'm serious.

Oh, and they can sing.

For the finale, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall did her version of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (with various other artists contributing a verse here and there), and so we were treated to the sort-of-weird sight of Winfrey and Cruise rocking and holding hands and squinting at a teleprompter as they did their best to sing in key.

Here you have the most prestigious, important prize in the history of the known universe, a concert hall filled with the super-elite of the world's hoitiest-toitiest intellectuals, all of it presided over by two people who, when they were growing up, were nobody's vote to succeed at much of anything.

Winfrey was a poor black girl in 1950's Mississipi; I don't need to say anything more than that. Cruise had a single mom who bopped around America with her three daughters and little boy looking for work (and ending up in Ottawa, Ontario, for a couple of years, where Cruise attended junior high, believe it or not. So let's consider him an honorary Canadian, alright?)

Neither is a university graduate. Neither was groomed for success. And yet they are, without question, two of the most powerful people on the planet, if power is measured in money. (It usually is.)

How does this happen?

They did their own thing, is what they did.

They went after what they wanted to go after.

All too often, the good things in life tend to go to those who follow the traditional path -- the university educated, play-it-safe scholars and businessmen who become part of the Establishment and reap its benefits.

But the true movers and shakers, innovators and inventors, are the ones who have created alternate pathways for themselves, or been able to emerge from circumstances that do not seem to necessarily lend themselves to lives of greatness. The Bill Clinton who was the son of a hairdresser in smalltown Arkansas; the Bill Gates who dropped out of university; the Einstein who was a patent clerk; the Quentin Tarantino who dropped out of junior high. These are the people who society neglects to consider, or who are deemed somewhat insignificant, and yet they are the very same people who, later in life, create the disruptions that truly revolutionize the worlds we live in. The middle-to-elite help run the world; the oddball who persists changes it.

There's a downside to this kind of fiercely independent thinking, of course. I'm reading a new biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short (which is very readable, because the guy's a journalist and not an academic) and in this book we discover that, by age twenty-seven, twenty-eight, Pol Pot was, well, not much of anything, really. Not considered a revolutionary. Barely remembered years later by those who attended school with him. Gained a little bit of clout as a really, really good teacher of French literature. (Go figure.) And yet, slowly but surely, daring to live outside of the Cambodian norms laid down by Sihanouk (first as king, then as p.m.) within twenty years Pol Pot was the murderous dictator responsible for reimagining, then destroying, an entire country.

Works both ways, I guess.

I just find it strange -- that those who are born on the outside of the elite economic and political systems that rule us all are sometimes the very people who end up representing, modifying and altering those very same systems. The very people we look to for entertainment, enlightenment, illumination. The very people that can lead us into temptation or (some) form of collective redemption, if we're lucky.

PRELUDE TO A COUP

Five a.m. air, cool and dark

Cloaks the Royal guard as he sleeps

At his post.

I run past,

Aware

Of the limp M-16

Resting against his leg

As somewhere beyond him

The newly crowned king

Stirs in his sleep

Troubled by dreams

That hint,

That allude,

To inertia

Unrest...

A trigger cocked.

His patient enemies

Rely on sleeping guards

To sleep a little longer.

All of them,

Waiting

For the day

To break

THE TAO OF BILL MURRAY AND THE WOW OF WES ANDERSON

I'm not sure what universe Bill Murray inhabits, but it's not ours. I think he just visits here, popping in from time to time to visit old friends and make a few movies. His latest, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, is directed by Wes Anderson, who previously directed Murray in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums; Anderson, too, is not from this earth, so when his universe and Murray's universe somehow align themselves in space and time, weird stuff happens. Good stuff happens.

I won't say anything specific about the movie. It's out now in theatres in big cities in North America. I watched it here in Cambodia. If you've seen Wes Anderson's other movies, you have an idea of what you're in for. If you haven't, and you watch this flick expecting another Ghostbusters or something, I feel for you. Usually, a lot of people come out of Wes Anderson's films saying "I don't get it". This time, I think a lot of Wes Anderson fans will walk out of this Wes Anderson film saying "I don't get it."

This is a good thing. This is a great thing, in fact, because The Life Aquatic is a bizarre, slightly off-kilter experience that resembles Anderson's past work, yes, and it bears some kind of tangential relationship to the real world that we walk through and talk through most of the days of our lives, certainly, but it has an inexplicable, internal logic that our world lacks, and that Wes's world somehow summons at will.

I actually met Wes Anderson in '97 or '98. This was before he had worked with Bill Murray three times, before Martin Scorsese had labelled him his favorite young director, before his first movie had even been released in actual theatres. His first movie was called Bottle Rocket, a small independent movie he had shot with his Texas roommates Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson, and the three of them (along with the older Wilson brother whose name I forget) were schlepping the flick around Canadian college campuses, hoping to generate some buzz before its limited Toronto release.

It wasn't working. At York University, they used to (maybe still do?) have movie nights using the big screens draping the lecture halls. This particular night they had a screening of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, followed by Bottle Rocket, with the director and stars in (nervous) attendance.

A few hundred people laughed their lily-white asses off all the way through Ace Ventura II.

Then came Bottle Rocket.

Then came the sound of seats being thwack-thwuck-thwicked down as people gradually, then rapidly began leaving the theatre. After the movie was finished, there were only a dozen or so people left.

Wes Anderson came out, as did Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson and the other Wilson brother. They didn't look happy. They looked, what's the word, glum. (I felt bad for them. I don't think it was their movie that people didn't like, necessarily; York is mostly a commuter school -- I think people just wanted to get home, that's why they were leaving so early. And hey -- Jim Carrey is a tough act to follow.)

My friend Eric asked a particulary filmish question to Wes Anderson, who replied with a particulary filmish answer. Anderson had geeky classes and Don King hair and looked exactly like they kind of guy who would, and did, inhabit our film classes. (In fact, he looked exactly like the kind of guy who would make movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

After the (very brief) q and a was over, me and Eric went up to talk to the director and stars. They were all very nice, low-key guys in their mid-twenties, not much older than us, and I remember talking to Owen Wilson, who later went on to co-star in movies with such no-names as Jackie Chan and Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman, and I got them all to sign my copy of ESQUIRE with Al Pacino on the cover, and I'm convinced that I was the first one to ever get an autograph from these guys. To tell the truth, my friend Eric and I kind of felt sorry for these dudes, because most of the audience had left during the flick. I cornered them in the hallway outside of the lecture hall and had them sign their names and felt kind of dorky, them not being famous and all, but what the hell.

And then they walked out of Curtis Lecture Hall L that dark and snowy night, probably talking dejectedly about what a poor screening that had been, not knowing that they would soon, in a few short years, be big, big movie stars, and high-profile directors, and that that black and cold York U night would recede into their memory like a bad (but not forgotten) dream.

It's so weird, is all I'm saying. Anderson's movies, Murray being in them, me watching them in Cambodia. I was watching a scene with Owen Wilson arguing with Willem Dafoe, and I suddenly remembered that I had spoken to both of these guys at different points in time, Owen Wilson before he was famous, in a classroom at my school, and Willem Dafoe in a movie theatre in Toronto, when I suddenly realized that the guy waiting in line in front of me was none other than the dude who had died in Platoon and died as Jesus. So I asked him if he was Willem Dafoe, and he sheepishly smiled that creepy smiled and said he was, and I asked him what he was doing in Toronto, and he said filming a movie, and I said which movie, and he said Existenz, by Canadian director David Cronenberg, and I don't know why that's so important to me -- this acknowledgement, as I watched The Life Aquatic here in Cambodia, that I had exchanged a few words with the people on my t.v. set.

Maybe it goes back to where I began. To Murray, and Anderson's movies, and their mutual, unspoken agreement that life is filled with unusual coincidences and longings.

Bill Murray is a real, honest-to-goodness human being. (I know, because I was the biggest fan of Meatballs and Stripes in the world, and when I was fifteen or sixteen I convinced my dad to take me and my friends to Camp White Pine while we were in Haliburton, Ontario, because it was there that Meatballs had been filmed fifteen years before, and just the fact that we drove along the same road leading to the cottages that Murray had trod upon many summers ago was enough to make my day, month, year, enough to solidify once and for all that Murray was flesh and blood, had walked the same earth as me. And, incidentally, if you haven't seen Stripes, or even Meatballs, you must. This is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form. The Murray in Rushmore is the Murray of Stripes twenty years later, the wiseass engulfed by the drudgery of life who yearns and learns to smirk and feel once more.) And yet Murray marches to his own drum. So does Anderson. In fact, it's not even a drum they march to, no, but another, unfamiliar instrument only they can hear.

When you watch their movies, so much is intrinsically offbeat and skewed; so much is angular. But there's a rhythm to their off-rhythm beat, a recognition of our need for connection and empathy. Murray is not sentimental, and neither is Anderson, but boy can they taunt and toy with emotion; man can they hint at what makes us puny humans love and need each other so muchy.

It's in Murray's smile, I think. He wields it like a knife. He doesn't smile often, and he doesn't do it easily, but when he does, what you see is humanity shining through. You see goodness. You see his smarm and cynicism about life that is his trademark stripped clean. It's a wink to the audience, a nod to the good will we can still summon through the dark.

Overanalyzing? Of course. When you're dealing with people as complex and heightened and enlightened as Bill Murray and Wes Anderson, you can't help but examine life differently. You can't help but wonder whether our own individual versions of the world will somehow, someday resemble theirs, of if they sometimes already do.

A CNN HAIKU

From my third floor balcony

Larry King talks tsunami

as coal-black clouds ponder rain

SAY WHAT?

Teaching English has become one heck of a big industry around the globe (just check out www.daveseslcafe.com to see how big), but if you're not white and from Canada, America, England, Australia or New Zealand, you might have difficulty in getting a gig in developing countries like Cambodia.

I'm not sure it's racism. If it is, it's a kind of benign racism, if such a thing is possible. Meaning, for some reason that eludes, the thinking is: white skin = native speaker of English. The people who are acting racist don't actually know they're acting racist, if that makes sense. (Which I guess makes it even more racist, doesn't it.) If you're black, they might not hire you simply because they don't think you actually grew up speaking the language; again, the thinking is that white skin equals native speaker. Period. Being a black or African English teacher in this part of the world isn't impossible, no, but it ain't too easy, let me tell you.

Similiarly, if you're from a country like the Phillipines, they might decide not to hire you because English technically isn't a native language there, even though most Filipinos speak better English and can teach better English than half the Canadians I know.

A lot of this unconscious (?) predjudice has to do with accent. English language learners are paranoid that they have to learn from teachers who speak the Queen's English, and that if they learn the language from someone who doesn't speak exactly like the Queen Mum, then they're screwed, their linguistic future having been lost to the wind, their money burned to a black and pointless crisp.

Doesn't work that way.

The fact is, English is a global language, spoken with extremely different accents not only in every country, but usually in different parts of each country as well. (You ever heard a Nova Scotia or Newfoundland accent? Or an authentic Alabama one?)

If you learn English from someone with a slightly odd accent, it makes you listen harder. It forces you to listen closer. It engages you in a way that may not be easy at first, no, but it will actually improve your overall comprehension ability. And in a place like Cambodia, many students will eventually try to get a job at an international NGO, where the people speaking English will be from places like Sweden and Germany and Finland and Norway, and guess what? Their accents will be thick as molasses. If students aren't accustomed to hearing English in somewhat altered, even eccentric ways, they're in big trouble.

Language is a commodity that is bought, sold, traded and given away, free of charge. It does not belong to a particular national group, let alone race. It arises from a particular place and time, true, but once you learn it, it becomes your currency, and you will add to it your own shadings, nuances and pathways to its presentation. It becomes personal, individual and possessive. To limit the teaching of English to solely those individuals who were lucky enough to have been born into its daily use is to deny the willing learner of the essence of language itself -- namely, its magical, slightly mysterious ability to seize hold of the foreigner, the novice, the illiterate, and slowly, gradually make its powerful presence heard, then felt.

THE FREAKY-LOOKING TEENAGE KID WHO BAGS YOUR GROCERIES

Right now I'm reading this book called The Koreans: Who they are, What they want, Where their future lies by a British journalist named Michael Breen, and it raises a couple of points that are a little bit interesting -- at least to me, hopefully to you:

1) Koreans don't allow non-Koreans to become Koreans (in a spiritual, nationalistic sense). This is a typical refrain that I've read in countless books about Japan, too -- that foreigners, even those who have lived in the country for decades, speak the language, are married to its citizens, are still not fully accepted into the patriotic brotherhood of the country.

I've never quite gotten the point of this point, because it's usually used to highlight how xenophobic Japan/Korea/insert country name here usually is. It seems to me that almost every single country in the world, with the possible exceptions of, I don't know, America and Canada, wouldn't accept a foreigner as one of its own. I don't find that racist or indicative of a 'closed' mentality at all; I find that to be human nature. It's like that new kid that joins your elementary school in Grade 4, after you've gone through the last five years of school with the same classmates. Sure, the new kid is part of the school, yeah, but he'll never be considered truly one of the boys. Most countries are freaking old, right, so how or why could a foreigner possibly be accepted, integrated, amalgamated? (New countries like the U.S. and Canada, being immigrant countries to begin with, are better at this sort of thing...although, I'm wondering by how much.)

2) It's a shame that most people can't read Korean, because they're literature is out of this world. This is a point that I wholeheartedly agree with, meaning, it is too bad that the majority of the people in the world can't read a certain country's language. There's so much nuance, texture and just plain coolness in foreign languages; if you don't know the language, entire artistic continents are, unfortunately, labelled off the map. (Certain of the arts, namely cinema and music, are still able to be enjoyed by the world's masses; others, like books, are forced to rely on the good graces and skills of translators, who do admirable jobs of capturing the essence of the work, but inevitably, something is lost -- that something being the musical cadence that makes language, well, language.)

The root of this book, and others like it, centres around identity. Who are these people, and why do they act the way that they do? Anytime you're in a foreign country, whether it's for days or weeks or months or years, you're going to be find yourself asking these questions.

And I'm not sure an answer is possible.

I'm not sure an answer is necessary.

The search is necessary. The questioning is necessary. It puts you more in touch with yourself and allows your curiosity and empathy about others to flourish.

The answer, though?

There is no answer to the who and the why. There's theories and observations. That's all. And yours are just as valid or crazy as the next guy's.

In the end, trying to pin down the actions, emotions, sensibility and transparency of an entire nation is a pointless task. It's hard enough to understand a single person, let alone a country or its people.

Just imagine if you could understand, truly understand, in all his contradictory human complexity, the freaky-looking teenage kid who bags your groceries at the supermarket, the kid with the tattoo of you're-not-sure-what on the base of his neck.

That would be a book worth reading, I think.

THE TRUE NORTH STRONG AND FREE

An old Canadian co-worker of mine here in Cambodia wrote his masters thesis centred around the idea of internationalizing the curriculum in Canadian universities -- only to be met with a resounding lack of interest which sounds typical of a problem that I think infects far too many Canadian schools, both secondary and post-secondary (or did when I was student, anyways.)

What did I learn about the world in high school? I'm not talking about the world of literature, or the world of science, or the world of dodgeball. I'm talking about the real world, the one that exists beyond the boundaries of the Canadian border.

Very little, I'm afraid. I vaguely remember some South African lady coming into my geography class to talk about apartheid...and that's about it. I swear. Even our history classes were concerned almost soley with WWII, and the geography lessons made use of film reel strips that dated from the seventies (and looked it).

Maybe times have changed. Maybe the Canadian curriculum, thanks to the rise of the Internet, has become a bastion of internationalism.

I kind of doubt it.

So why is this relevant?

I think it has to do with the issue of dreams, the notion of belief, the concept of reaching out beyond your usual boundaries.

Very few Canadians travel to foreign countries outside of the U.S. Our knowledge of the world is pretty limited. There are terrible, atrocious events happening halfway around the world, yes, we know that, but what time does Seinfeld start again? Is it the one with the 'contest'?

Part of this lack of awareness (or interest) in the world comes from our schooling. Canada was voted by the UN as the best place to live in the world for two years in a row. The magnitude of that had never even occurred to me before I lived in a place like Cambodia.

What that means is, there is no other way of life on the face of the planet that is better than the suburban lives most of us grew up in. This is it, the top of the human food chain, the cream of the crop of human existence.

(And if you're thinking: If suburbia is as good as it gets in the world, I might as well kill myself, well, I hate to say it, but you're wrong. It is as good as it gets. Wander around some of the villages over here and you'll find it hard to moan about the 'cultural wasteland' of the suburbs. We should be kissing the grass on our weekly-cut lawns on a daily basis just to have such a wasteland to grow disillusioned with.)

Given that our place in the world is so high, I think Canadians have a responsibility to at least consider the rest of the world for even a moment, because guess what? The rest of the world is considering us, big time, and the amount of immigrants coming to Canada does not seem to be stopping. My old co-worker here is a Somali whose sister lives in Canada, and who wants to become a Canadian citizen himself.

Why?

Because Canada is seen as someplace good, honest, fundamentally better than other countries.

That's a reputation, is what it is.

And that reputation has to be validated by the people who are left with the responsibility of holding it up.

To cut to the chase, I don't think students are given the sense of power that they should have, the sense that they can go out and affect the world and, possibly, even change it. I know I sure as hell didn't have any teachers that were telling me that kind of stuff. Good, kind people, yes, but not inspiring, not lighting the flames under the asses of energetic teenagers who have not yet allowed the cynic inside of them to take full flight.

Abnormal success is caused by abnormal people, I read recently, and 'abnormal' does not have to mean deranged. It can mean different from the norm, parallel to the norm.

Canada is abnormal compared to the rest of the world. It is filled with abnormal people, ones who actually have qualified doctors to go to, clean water to drink, lawns to water. If there is a problem, you can go to the police. You can't do that over here. The police don't care.

I think it's time that Canada lost its provincial, small-minded ways, its relentless, ultimately pointless inferiority complex that causes it to constantly compare itself to the States.

Maybe the new influx of immigrants and refugees will bring the stories and legacies of their homelands to the rest of Canada, and together a new Canada can be built, one composed of third and fourth generation Canadians and first generation Canadians working together to integrate Canada more fully and completely with the rest of the (developing) world. All of the Chinese and Indian and Pakistani and Somali young people (soon to be Canadian citizens themselves) that are increasingly filling Canadian classrooms can somehow help the rest of us whitebread Canucks create a new kind of patriotism rooted in a true global consciousness.

That's only going to happen through education. That's only going to happen when Canadians who have lived abroad and have a grasp of international issues are brought into the education system and allowed to create learning systems that reflect their overseas experience. That's only going to happen when young black and white and Asian and African Canadians are reminded again and again that they are a strong, resilient, powerful, abnormal people who live in a place that millions are trying to reach, and that they, themselves, have the obligation to sustain and transform. That's only going to happen when they utilize their potential and capacity to bring themselves up and out of their tiny world and into a state of being much larger than themselves.