Corpenghast
Many of us are wondering what lessons have been learned from the CBC lockout, and the year that has passed since it began. The following is a piece I wrote a few months after the lockout ended. It's a little bombastic , but I'm dredging it up anyway. It has been edited and updated for the anniversary.
A little while back, I finished reading Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, a slightly absurd neo-gothic novel that I started during the CBC lockout. It occurs to me now, on the anniversary of that ordeal, that the book was a pretty good allegory.
Here's the precis: Titus Groan is 77th lord of crumbling and isolated Gormenghast Castle. His world is so steeped in ancient tradition and arcane custom that there is no room for original thought. There are age-old ceremonies with no apparent purpose, and a Master of Ritual to make sure they continue. Titus’ gaze is forever fixed beyond the castle’s mossy walls, but his path seems hopelessly bound by them.
During the lockout, Gormenghast Castle seemed like an apt metaphor for the Canadian Broadcasting Centre (at least as seen from the sidewalk): an abandoned and echoing fortress, barred to the outside world, manned by a skeleton crew of aged principals trying to stay the course even as the soul of the place leaks away.
The picket line, like the forest beyond Gormenghast Castle, was pretty vibrant by comparison. It was unfamiliar territory, and none of us wanted to be there, but the weather was great, strike pay was adequate and morale was high. In some ways it was like a great weight had been lifted; the inmates finally had time to talk to each other.
That doesn't happen very often, and it proved to be the lockout’s silver lining. Conversations between locked-out journalists became an explosion of innovation, something that could never have happened on the inside. There were podcasts and blogs, concerts and parodies, cross-country caravans and competitive news and information programming.
There's an analog to such free-form creativity in Gormenghast: a wild, feral woman called simply The Thing. Cast out from the castle due to her bastard birth, The Thing becomes an audacious and utterly free denizen of the forest beyond. She scoffs and the castle dwellers and their sacred rituals. When Titus glimpses her, he longs for her and the freedom she represents – though the longing is utterly unrequited. (Unfortunately, despite all it represents, The Thing proves ultimately inconsequential. Bigger movements are at play, and when they reach their crescendo, The Thing is swept aside.)
Toward the end of Gormenghast, a devastating flood threatens the castle and puts its continuum in mortal jeopardy. But as the waters recede, the roles and rituals return. Titus is faced with the choice that was always his, though now it is finally obvious: accept his fate, or flee.
I won’t give away his decision, but I can tell you ours: in a lot of ways, we went back to sleep. When the doors reopened, the rituals recommenced. Management spoke softly of “reintegrationâ€, and the union got quiet. Podcasts stopped and blogs went dark.
In short, both sides did the worst thing possible: they picked up where they left off. For the Corp, that meant the same tired means of reaching the same waning audience. For the union, the same arcane methods of resolving the same conflicts.
Same shit, different year.
But I don't think it’s all doom and gloom. If you look carefully, you’ll notice some decidedly bright spots that have emerged in the past few months, some bastard Things scaling the ramparts.
The CBC has finally bought into podcasting in a big way. CBC.ca continues to grow. There’s an official CBC blog, and a community of CBC bloggers. There’s a sincere interest in putting new voices and new formats on air, with mixed results so far. Former picketers recognize each other, and the conversations continue.
Maybe someone learned something from the lockout after all. I hope so, because forgetting is easier.
When you go to work tomorrow, take notice when you spot an arcane ritual or a tired tradition. They aren’t hard to find, especially when you’ve seen them from the outside. And we have.
C.S. Lewis had a similar reaction when he read Gormenghast. "You have seen nothing like it before," he wrote in a letter to Mervyn Peak. "But after... you see things like it everywhere."
Happy anniversary
Lest we forget... anyone want to take a lap with me?
The CBC Blogging Manifesto
Over the past few weeks I've had the pleasure of working with a group of CBC bloggers to come up with something we've called The CBC Blogging Manifesto. Many of us are passionate about the corporation, but unclear on how we should tell its stories. With the anniversary of the CBC lockout upon us - an event that divided the corporation but crystalized interest in the blogosphere - we felt it was a good time to try to come up with some common principles. I think it's a good start.
The CBC Blogging Manifesto
Preamble:
If you blog about the CBC, it's assumed that you are doing so out of love and perhaps frustration.It's only natural. The CBC is a wonderful institution with a long, proud history, going through an interesting and difficult time. By blogging about the CBC your colleagues, senior management, and the public will all be enriched by your expert opinion. Your insight, experience, and will will only help the world at large better understand a corporation that at times appears stodgy, arrogant, and faceless.
For better or for worse, you are representing the CBC when you blog about it. Keep this in mind with every word.
- Use common sense and don't do anything stupid. Blog to make the CBC better, not to kill it. There are plenty of others who want to do that for us.
- Ad hominem attacks should be avoided but disagreeing is expected.
- Be brave.
Be honest and tell it straight. Talk about new ideas and revive some old ones. Don't be afraid to challenge the “experts,†and certainly not the anonymous ones.- Use audio, video and images fearlessly, but responsibly.
Use judgment if asked to take it down.- Acknowledge and link to your sources.
If it is a rumour, say so. If your co-worker says something you'd like blog, ask them first. If it was another website, link to it. Do your research. Be fair. Get it right. And change it if it is wrong.- Blog wherever and whenever you want, but don’t let it detract from your job.
- Eschew advertising.
Plugging the CBC, yourself, and your work is cool. Banner ads are tacky.- During the next strike or lockout, you may feel urged to ignore any or all of these guidelines. Do so at your own risk, knowing that your words can harm yourself, others, and the CBC itself.
Of course, these aren't rules, and nobody has to follow them. I'll write more about how this came about when time permits. In the meantime... what do you think?
Don’t forget to pack a wife*
Well, that wasn't so bad after all.
Our wee family spent the past four days at Geneva Park, on Lake Couchiching near Orillia. Or, to be more helpful: one stop past Casino Rama. (I was flattered when the nearby pharmacist asked me if I had a band number.)
As I mentioned, Geneva Park is a "family resort", with a vengeance - it's actually run by the YMCA. (Who knew they were still around?) You couldn't avoid "the Y" when I was a kid, but we've had no relationship since - though I know they are still in the gym racket. Anyhow, they seem to have dropped most of the Christian stuff, and their focus on healthy kids and communities is a good fit for a summer retreat.
The "resort" is deliberately old school - a lodge of smallish, basic hotel rooms plus dozens of bare-bones cottages. These are your grandparents' cottages - painted wood, second hand lamps, Scrabble.
We stayed in the lodge, and ate at the communal dining area. Depending on your outlook, this is like:
- Staying at a cottage, except you don't have to wash the dishes and there's unlimited chocolate milk
- Staying at a cheapish motel, with bad beds and no TV or air conditioning
- Staying at a college dorm, without the sex, drugs or rock 'n roll
Once I got over the fact that this wasn't the Four Seasons, I began to appreciate the cottage feel, and the daily supply of fresh linens in no way subtracted from it.
One of the great things about the association with the Y is that the place serves as a leadership training facility for teens. In practical terms, this means there are almost unlimited counselors to help look after the younglings. (At the morning program for children, there were 18 kids and 15 counselors.)
Of course, my kids would have none of it. I think they can smell senior kindgarten and preschool lurking around the corner, and weren't about to put up with being herded into a program of any sort, no matter how fun. Which was fine - they wanted nothing more than to sit on the beach and play with plastic dinosaurs. Whatever floats your boat.
I was less amused by how fussy the little blighters were when it came to meal time. Even when they were served something they normally like, the conversation went like this:
Dad: Have some pasta.
Child: I don't like pasta.
Dad: Yes you do. It's one of only three things you ever eat.
Child: It's too pasta-ey.
Dad: What?
Child: Can you get me more chocolate milk?
Dad: In a minute. Eat your pasta.
Child: I don't like the red sauce.
Dad: I'll give you some without much sauce on it.
Child: Still too red. Wipe it with a cloth.
Dad: Manners...
Child: Wipe it with a cloth please.
Dad: There, these ones are white as chalk. Eat.
Child: Too many.
Dad: There, now there's only one.
Child: Cut it.
Dad: ...
Child: Cut it please.
Dad: There, now it's in quarters.
Child: Take some away.
Dad: There. One tiny piece.
Child: I ate some, and I didn't like it.
Dad: No, you licked it.
Child: I didn't like the lick.
Dad: You have to eat something, or you won't feel good.
Child: Can I have more chocolate milk?
Fortunately one of the 7,000 counselors stopped me throwing her in the lake (leadership at work). Back in the lodge, all was forgiven as the little angel snuggled up to me and fell asleep without a care in the world, or a trace of hunger. Turns out, four-year-olds can swim all day fueled by a single lick of sauceless pasta.
Anyhow, the sunsets were dynamite, the water was warm, and the kids demanded that next year, we stay for 10 days. We'll see.
As we checked out, we passed incoming greenies on their way to the Couchiching Conference, which is held at the resort. This year the event features luminaires like Mark Kingwell and John Ralston Saul. I hope they like chocolate milk.
* Ten cool points to my sister for correctly identifying Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys.
Off on vacation
The title pretty much says it all. I'll be off for a few days at a family resort on Lake Couchiching (hmm, when I get there I'll have to make time to read the I Ching on the couch.)
I find the whole "family resort" proposition a little dubious, but I'll let you know how it goes.
And it's a holiday in Orillia
Where you'll do what you're told
A holiday in Orillia
Where the slums got so much soul
Ten cool points to anyone who gets that reference. Two if you google it.
Globular updo?!
Tee hee hee.
Anagrams make me chuckle. For a lark, I took the names of blogs I've recently visited, and plugged them into the Sternest Meanings anagram machine.
Here are some of the better ones (applying a little creative license with punctuation and arrangement.) The last one is the best by a million, trillion miles.
Paul Gorbould
Globular updo
Tony Burman
On, barmy nut!
The Teamakers
As threat: meek.
John Gushue dot dot dot
O! The unjust, hot, odd god.
The Reasonable Ego
Sober teenage halo
Inside the CBC
The scenic bid
The Garret Tree
Hate regretter
Culture kills... wait, I mean cutlery
Unluckily warm testicular elite
The perfect storm… description
My two-year-old daughter Grace this morning, telling her grampa about last night's storm:
The thunder was like dogs barking.
And growling.
Big dogs.The lightning was like the clouds turning on and off.
Heat stroke
Yesterday afternoon, I wandered out of the TBC's John Street entrance to head over to Starbucks. Through the shimmering heat, I stared up at two mismatched monoliths.
To the east, a 10' high, overly-jovial mural of the CFL on CBC hosts. To the west, towering high above all, a 7,000' tall billboard of the smirking Canadian Idol judges.
Staggering from the 36 degree heat, I began to swoon. Grimacing, I shut my eyes and tried to regain equilibrium. Then, from either side of the street, I started to hear voices. Squinting, I looked up to find the graven images... moving. They had come alive!
And they were bickering.
(On the left, representing CTV: Farley Flex, Sass Jordan, Jake Gold, Zack Werner. Right, for CBC: Mark Lee, Chris Walby, Greg Frers, Elliotte Friedman, Sean Millington, Eric Tillman)
Flex: Dudes, your mural is as tiny as your ratings. We're ten times bigger, and in front of your own damned building!
Friedman: Hey, aren't you Randy Jackson?
Flex: Bite me. Can't you tell jolly, black men apart? Racist.
Millington: I'm jolly and black.
Flex: If you say so. Say, you were a running back. Why dontcha go running back to the Argos, like you did during the lockout?
Walby: And why don't you pick on someone your own size, Funkmaster. I'm right here.
Werner: Careful, he might eat us. Here's an idea: why don't you file a noise complaint instead?
Frers: You sure look a lot like Larry Gowan. Plus there's six of us and four of you.
Gold: Let's even it out then. Red rover, red rover, we call Brian Williams over.
Friedman: Ouch, that's harsh. Here's an idea: develop some of your own journalists instead of just hiring our leftovers.
Gold: It's just Williams. That's not a trend.
Friedman: And Lloyd Robertson.
Gold: So?
Friedman: Tom Kennedy. Vicki Gabereau. Scott Laurie...
Gold: OK, but...
Friedman: Craig Oliver. Murray Oliver. Todd Battis. Alan Fryer. Matt McClure. Linda Sims. Larry Stout. Rosemary Thompson. Ravi Baichwal...
Jordan: Enough! Could everyone please just stop talking and go back to looking at my cleavage?
Lee: At least we're getting Strombo back, and he could kick Mulroney's skinny arse without getting off his motorcycle.
Jordan: That's it! Feel the gleaming whiteness of my pearly teeth! (Shoots beam of pure energy from her choppers, blinding Lee.)
Tillman: You wanna play it that way? Fine! (Melts Flex's face with laser beam spectacles.)
Whereupon Friedman lobs a radioactive "CFL on CBC" football across the road, Werner's mutant forked tongue lashes out to entwine pedestrians, and all hell breaks loose.
Ten minutes later, I found myself lying prone in the Metro Hall Cooling Station, with a frappuccino pressed against my forehead. The streets were once again quiet, the billboards motionless.
It might not have happened exactly that way. The heat makes people a little crazy.
Trading places
I have a friend who is changing jobs, moving on to (as they say) "new opportunities." That's something I haven't done in a long time – though I've worked for different shows and different websites, I've been at CBC for a decade.
It got me thinking about a couple of conversations I've had with other folks who have changed employers. By making the switch, they discovered things I would have never considered. Here are two examples.
- Neal used to work for a major advertising firm. On a canoe trip to Algonquin, he told me about his two biggest accounts: Mercedes, and then Coca-Cola. Both were plum clients – big names, big budgets, established brands. But according to Neal, when it came to advertising, they were like matter and anti-matter.
"Mercedes are just plain good cars," he told me. "We could do zero advertising, and throw stuff at customers as they entered the showrooms, and they'd still buy the cars." (For the record, that was not the creative strategy Neal pitched.)
"But Coke is just sugar and water," he explained. "It's all about the advertising."
Image is about the only reason people buy Coke, or buy it instead of Pepsi. The product constantly needs new ideas and maximum creativity to stay afloat, a model that Neal preferred. Interestingly, neither client made his company rich. They were high profile loss-leaders, accounts that would win the company awards so they could gouge less sexy clients.
- On the blue collar end of the spectrum is Jason, who fixes trucks for a living. Until recently, he fixed cars. Sounded about the same to me: wrenches, oil, manual labour. But at a birthday party, I asked him about the switch, and he was ecstatic.
"When someone's car breaks down, they get mad. It's an unexpected expense, they have kids to pick up from school, and they need their car back yesterday."
Fairly or unfairly, car owner frustrations are usually leveled squarely at the mechanic. For trucking firms, on the other hand, it's all in a day's work.
"We have a fleet of trucks, and when one breaks down they just put another one on the road. It's an expected cost of doing business." Jason fixes the trucks, and nobody yells at him.
All of this got me thinking... I wonder how my workplace experience would be summed up in a single pithy anecdote.
But I think I've been here too long, and I don't have any immediate plans to leave. Wrong guy to ask.
So I asked some new(ish) employees for their takes. Here are a couple:
While very impressed with the level of intelligence and professionalism on the part of CBC employees, I was caught off guard by the extreme bureaucracy and conservatism. As soon as I walked through the doors, I got the sense that I entered a time warp. While other companies I've worked at are moving forward with progressive ideas, attitudes, the CBC still seems entrenched in an old-fashioned bubble a la 1970. (e.g. time cards, no concept of flexible hours, working from home etc.)
It's true: I've been working here on the internet for ten years, but I still fill out a thick, green paper time card each week, using a ball point pen. I presume they are carried away by pneumatic tube to a stenographer for card punching. But she's right about the intelligence and professionalism, too: there isn't a single person I work with who isn't smart, capable, and completely deserving of their job. Any CBC bashers that think otherwise can e-mail me and I'll give them a tour so they can see for themselves. Here's another:
I guess for me the biggest difference is the red tape... compared to the smaller places I've worked at, there are far more people and steps involved in getting things done.
On the upside though, the projects at CBC are much cooler than my previous jobs... just simply because of the content of each project... it's news, sports, arts, or entertainment... aside from the banner ads on the website, my work is detached from the world of marketing and advertising.
Amen to that. From my fuzzy recollections of life in the private sector, I don't remember having to write up a Project Charter every time I wanted to blow my nose. Then again, I didn't have to make a profit doing it.
I think this is why secondments, work exchanges and internships are such a good idea. Employees get to trade places for a while, distill these sorts of lessons learned, and bring them home.
If only you could keep the demo Mercedes...
Bad jobs survey
Following up on my Reviscerator story, I thought I'd write the next chapter in my history of crappy jobs. But rather than pick a job at random, I thought I'd let you (whoever you are...) pick a job at random. Plus I wanted to try a poll. It'll probably give you some stupid ad pop-up, but you'll get over it.
[POLL DEACTIVATED]
I've got this set to let you vote as often as you want, because, well, there are probably only five of you visiting this blog, and plus who cares. This probably violates my workplace Journalistic Standards and Practices, which may or may not apply to everything I do in my waking hours. Once voting ends, I may have to take a week off to write up the statistical accuracy and margin of error. For now, I'll put it at +/- 100 per cent, a bazillion times out of infinity. Or five.
It'd be even cooler if you left a comment on your choice...
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