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August 06, 2008

Coming from a land without hinterland: inside baseball with Guy Maddin

Guy Maddin still hasn't crafted a "See you at the debate, bitches!" but he remains a key konversational kut-up. Among his words to Brian Darr at Greencine: "[T]he person I became before I even considered making a movie was a direct result of Winnipeg's isolation. I'm kind of an obsessive, and as a kid I became obsessed with baseball broadcasts from very distant American AM radio stations for a while. Listening to them is like listening to secret CIA short-wave 'casts - they're very layered with interferences from other stations, or percussive signals from satellites or something. It's like listening to sound sculpture, and every now and then a pitch count, or a play-by-play announcer's voice would weave in throughout all of the layers of static and crackle and give a little bit of desperately needed information before weaving off into the distance again. Since the reinforcement was so intermittent I really got hooked on listening to this stuff in my loneliest, most virginal, deepest darkest adolescent days. I sort of constructed, in the isolation of Winnipeg, this model, almost like a blind person would, of what America looked like, based on the acoustic landscape I got from these things. That would only happen in a city with virtually no hinterland. Once you drive out of Winnipeg, it's 8 hours to Minneapolis or 6 hours to Regina which is just another Winnipeg. And so you're far from the places. Other artists from Winnipeg, more successful ones, often say the same thing. That unlike big cities, where there are lots of things to do and warmer weather, we don't talk our best ideas out into the cafe night air. You're stuck inside, and there's nothing to do but actually doing your stuff."

Posted by Ray Pride at August 6, 2008 11:30 AM

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