Follow-Up To Last Blog

I haven't blogged in almost two years. Wow.

And that's due to both the contents of my last blog below and what resulted from it. So I'll cover that now.

After my wholesaler job ended in February 2016, I couldn't get hired anywhere for a new day job, including our competitors. Part of that I'm sure had to do with the fact everything is online now, and I have difficulty with that because my internet is dialup. I can't afford high-speed. I do all my high-speed stuff either at the public library's computers, or at a coffee shop or library using their free WiFi with my laptop. All of my Hard Rock Heroes videos were uploaded in this manner; actually, most were uploaded at the Osborne Cyber Cafe before that place closed and became The Toad's new Whiskey Bar. Additionally, my area of expertise is extremely narrow; I'm proficient in the more office functions of a warehouse, like paperwork and buying/ordering. Not the warehouse functions of a warehouse, like using the forklift. As well, I am most certainly NOT going to make a different resume for every job I apply to: That is cruel and inhumane punishment. So the Osborne Village Resource Centre and their advice can sincerely go fuck themselves. I want every potential employer to know ALL of the skills I have and EVERYTHING I have done in the past on my resume so they have no opportunity to misjudge who I am or what I can do. I want to open up that street mailbox and pour a wheelbarrow of 75 photocopied resumes with everything on them into it, with someone who recieved one of those 75 applications hiring me, THAT'S the ideal scenerio. Sending to a simple email address is fine, too. And I would suggest that anyone who would tear up and not even look at a resume that is longer than 3 pages is someone who is not considering the fact some of us are 55 years old and have had many years in their lives to do a whole lot of things. I wrote up 17-page Call For Orders on sale prices on the entire Jamieson vitamin line to be sent to our stores at the same time I was doing interview legwork for Hard Rock Heroes. And I want employers to know that. And that, specifically, was never even in my resume, that at one time was 17 pages long! I did shorten it to three pages, but if I added my new job to it (next paragraph), it would be longer than that again.

So when a merchandiser job I applied to called me for an interview and offered me the job, I was too afraid to turn it down, even though the job is to work overnight on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, with only Tuesday and Wednesday as my days off (my weekend) 52 weeks a year, with no long weekends. I had lost all of my Fridays and Saturdays, and there would be no such thing anymore as Christmas, New Year's Eve, Thanksgiving, Canada Day, etc., unless they fell on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Not only did I fall into a deep depression, I certainly had no time to blog anymore. I had to figure out when I was going to do everyday aspects of my life now with no long weekends to catch up on anything.

And certainly no broadcasting jobs came my way, although I received a few compliments for my Hard Rock Heroes work, including a nice one from CTV News Director Karen Mitchell. I thanked her on Twitter for her kind words.

After I had been at my new job for a year and qualified for holidays, I was able to negotiate those two weeks as only Thursday/Friday/Saturday holidays, where I would still work my "solo" shifts without my co-worker on Sunday/Monday, and take off four Saturdays instead. So it became not so bad in 2017, and the weather was absolutely excellent for almost all of my time off. It felt so exciting on that first day, Saturday, June 17, to see my first Saturday with all those people in the Exchange District around all the clubs for the first time in a year and a half! Much different from the barren depressing Wednesdays where everything's closed and no one's driving around except me and the cab drivers. Things were better in the summer for clubs on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, though. Thanks to The Pint and LaRoca and The Cavern for being there on Tuesdays and Wednesdays!

I will always be interested in broadcasting, though, so if anyone reading this in that industry is interested in me, you can still feel free to contact me and maybe we can make a deal. My contact info is in my last blog post below.

So maybe now, in the future, I can get back to doing blogs on regular things, not myself. Hopefully. We'll see.

Would you like to hire me?

So I'm losing my wholesaler day job after February 5.

I will be looking for a suitable replacement day job, including at our main competitor, but as far as this blog is concerned, I will also be re-stepping up my efforts to take my old TV show I used to produce and host, Hard Rock Heroes, to the next level, whatever that means. As an entertainment reporter? TV stations don't have that anymore. Maybe you can think of something that for someone in media I can be an asset to.

After Hard Rock Heroes ended, I had gotten busy at my day job with different hours, then the internet started and I eventually created the Hard Rock Heroes website. Then I found myself with enough time around 2002 to send resumes and tapes of my show to all the TV stations and a few radio stations. In that material I also talked of my interest in scheduling, and TV stations' scheduling/traffic deptartments. Then You Tube started, and I started uploading Hard Rock Heroes videos to You Tube. Then, instead of sending VHSs or DVDs in the mail, I started e-mailing links to all my You Tube videos.

But I haven't done that in a while, so now I have a reason to start that all over again. I might not get hired anywhere, but I have nothing to lose. I wonder if people are more aware of me now due not only to all of the above, but due to my Twitter presence, as well.

So if anyone in Winnipeg broadcasting is reading this and is interested in me, please drop me a line at beauh@mts.net.

Check out my Hard Rock Heroes videos at http://www.hardrockheroes.com, click on "Video" for video. Or to go directly there: https://petrosal-variations.000webhostapp.com/video.html

Check out my Linkedin page at http://www.linkedin.com/in/beau-hajavitch-09a09b49

For examples of a more journalistic style of writing, check out my band write-ups at my Zoo Archives page, all about the Osborne Village Inn's Zoo & Ozzy's bars at http://www.zooarchives.0catch.com - this includes my editing of bands' bios to correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes, in case you see a band's bio you recognize (copy and paste is the best thing about computers).

For my radio voiceovers I did with daCapo, check out that page as part of my Hard Rock Heroes site at https://petrosal-variations.000webhostapp.com/voiceovers.html

And my Twitter page is at http://www.twitter.com/beauhajavitch

If I get a day job, will I remove this blog entry? Good question. Not sure about that yet.

Thanks for your time, and I hope you've enjoyed The Beau Zone so far.

Still here, people

Don't worry, everyone, I haven't suddenly dropped off the face of the earth. I just kind of made a conscious decision after I did the last blog entry that I was so satisfied with what I wrote that I was going to leave it up as the last blog entry for a really long time. So it's been around nine months now, and I don't really have any ideas for a new blog, at least none that don't require a lot of time, which is in short supply these days. Add to that the fact that in November I went through some horrid audio-video computer problems that were mostly fixed before the end of 2011, but not fully fixed until two weeks ago. So that's why, for those of you who watch my You Tube videos, I haven't done a "Webcam 2" video yet. But that can now be green-lighted again. And I still use my MySpace blog as a secondary blog for secondary issues. I think the way I used to do The Beau Zone in the past (check the archives) is dead now due to lack of time, plus the fact the jokes I think of are now directed to my Twitter feed. Although I could reprint that stuff here, I suppose. I've just never thought of it. Maybe I'll consider it. But for now, this text you're reading is my free pass to make even more time pass to keep that last blog entry I did prominent on this page before I do a next real blog, and to direct you, if you haven't already, and especially if you're someone in the media who has power and influence in hiring, to check out that blog entry that is called "Toys In The Attic: The Aspirations And Regrets Of A Media Fan And Personality." It is directly below. TTYL, everyone, and don't drink the water in Mexico.

Toys In The Attic: The Aspirations And Regrets Of A Media Fan And Personality

I don't have a broadcasting degree.

I sort-of took a broadcasting course, the old NIB one, and at night, too (you can roll your eyes now, people), but got so disgusted with the place I never came back after the last official class and never officially graduated.

And the first part of that course was actually during the last few months of Hard Rock Heroes in 1993.

So, on occasion, I find myself wondering for a second of any possible regrets I might have about not taking a full-time broadcasting/journalism course - a real one - at the time most people take such courses, which is in the years directly after high school.

And the answer is always the same - no.

How could I? The world was different back then.

I was a teenager in the '70s. I graduated high school in 1980. On my show Hard Rock Heroes, I was like a Muchmusic VJ. In the '70s and early '80s, there were no such things as music video channels. There weren't even any specialty channels, as they're called in Canada, yet. (I prefer David Letterman's label "cable deal.") Winnipeg/Canadian TV was represented by three channels - affiliates of CBC and CTV and independent CKND - and "cable" was affiliates from North Dakota of U.S. networks CBS, NBC, and ABC. And that's it.

People on TV were very stuffy and intellectual older men in suits like Ray Torgrud, save for the occasional attractive weather girl. Men I couldn't relate to. Men whose words that came out of their mouths still mostly went over my head (Torgrud again), even after two years of Mr. Keddie lectures from his Glenlawn Collegiate history classes.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone even wearing a pair of jeans of television back then, never mind anyone talking about Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, The Hangover (both the movie and real ones) McDonald's Big Macs, or anything that comes out of the mouths of anyone, including hosts, of today's daytime talk shows and reality shows. Even look at just the studio audience of the more women's-oriented shows today like the Marilyn Dennis show or The Talk and compare it with '70s versions of shows like that. The '70s version had an audience that looked like war-torn babas from the Ukraine who had never heard of facial expressions. Marilyn's studio audience is all rocked-up gals in jeans, who no doubt partied until 5:00 a.m. when they were teens in the '80s at alcohol-fueled house parties laced with Van Halen played louder than God when someone's parents were away.

There certainly weren't any entertainment reporters back then, either. And that's about the only thing I would be cut out for in broadcasting. (I'm going to leave radio out of this essay, because I'd kind of be digressing if I discussed radio due to my long-time opinions about rock radio and all the great music they don't play that intertwines with this subject.)

Not only that, but even today, I would be over my head when it came to news reporting. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to the goings-on of the federal, provincial, and civic governments, or the American government. Certainly not the economy. I understand the most basic things, and I know how the parliamentary system works, and how a party's seats won translates to who governs and what majority and minority governments are all about. But a lot of the contents of, say, Tom Brodbeck's Winnipeg Sun column, or the things Marty Gold used to rant about on The Great Canadian Talk Show (and still does on his blog) that involve the inner workings of government and the police are things I just don't have the mental resources to ever come up with, or even comment on, myself.

So there was absolutely nothing that existed in the '70s and early '80s that would have made me aspire to being any kind of on-air personality.

The course I took did do one thing to me, however. Throughout the course, the instructor (if I can use that term) used the word "broadcaster" a lot. Well, yeah, because we're supposed to be there to learn how to be broadcasters. But I didn't get that at first. That's why I started off the eighth paragraph above by saying "people on TV," 'cause I'm trying to paint a picture of me in the '70s there. See, with Hard Rock Heroes, I wanted to promote myself from being just an ordinary concert audience member. It frustrated me that I couldn't go hang out backstage and hobnob with all the celebrities and media types back there. The routine of buy a ticket, watch the show from your seat, maybe buy food and hang out in the concession area checking out girls, socialize with your friends, and leaving the show afterward had started to get old to me. Doesn't matter if I went with friends or by myself. So I thought that, of all us audience members, if I had a forum for it, I could be the guy who COULD go backstage to talk to the band, as long as I had a microphone in my hand and a cameraperson to record it. Then I could air it in my forum, which, as it turned out, manifested itself in the form of being my own TV show called Hard Rock Heroes. I became the guy from that show. But.....a broadcaster? That word never entered my mind. I never thought of the VJs on Muchmusic as broadcasters, either. They were like me: Hot dudes and babes on TV, wearing jeans and talking about music, and awkwardly finding ways around using rock fans' favorite swear words. I spent the Hard Rock Heroes years so wanting to be a Much VJ - sending in tapes, having an in-person interview with Much's Nancy Oliver. My idea of a "broadcaster" was still someone like Lloyd Robertson. Then later, I became interested in the power of television, and tried to use my power, if I had any, to promote local bands.

But, fast forward to the present, and I have become more comfortable with the word "broadcaster." It's grown on me. I'm pushing 50 now, and, while I'm not your parents' 50, I'm way too old to be on Much now. But that's okay. Because, as I illustrated in the paragraph above where I talk about things like Marilyn Dennis' audience, the world has changed. '70s and '80s teens have grown up, but in a different fashion. They've taken their rock albums with them. The MTV/Much casual/rock music attitudes in which now everyone is an overgrown teenager, college degree in something or not, have swept North America. News departments at TV stations have entertainment departments and reporters and segments, and, beginning with Entertainment Tonight in 1981, there are now a slew of TV shows dedicated solely to entertainment reporting. And I love all of them. And I want to be on all of them. I'd love to be a Winnipeg ETalk correspondent for CTV, if there was such a thing. I'm a complete couch potato for those shows, but with the eyes of someone paying attention to who the reporters are and how they do their jobs and everything revolving around "if I was in their shoes in being given this assignment" when I'm watching one of their reports.

So, yeah, I would feel like, if the job was the right one that I could perform, like an entertainment-oriented one, that I would certainly feel comfortable performing it, and calling myself a "broadcaster." If I were in jeans or a suit. And hopefully it's an awards-show type of suit, not the one Lloyd's wearing.

Now the flip side: What I WAS doing in the years after high school.

I actually cover this pretty well in my biography on my Hard Rock Heroes website. In a nutshell: Throughout grades 1 to 12, I pretty much had the same curfew. I did "break through" to see my first rock concerts - Alice Cooper, then Aerosmith/AC/DC - in 1978, but I basically had a sheltered life due to a parent who didn't know how to parent. Good thing I had friends to teach me about life back then. Then I got so busy with homework in grade 12 (all 300 courses) I just did homework all night, every night. I didn't even watch TV. I might spend 1.5 hours figuring out one math problem. Then, through a friend at school, I got a job at McDonald's on St. Anne's Road. The crowd there was totally different than my high school. My classmates were like the guys on The Big Bang Theory. My McDonald's co-workers were all rock and roll partiers and Judas Priest/AC/DC fans. All denim and leather. So were the girls, and they looked like Playboy centerfolds, too. (Too bad it was still the era of jeans, white socks, and white runners for girls, and not today's minidresses and black high heels, but I digress.) The people were different because my classmates were from St. Vital, and my McDonald's co-workers were mostly from Windsor Park and Southdale, the suburbs across the Seine River that I still today refer to as "the party capitals of Winnipeg." So began a good three years of what most people experience during their high school years but I experienced AFTER those years, the ROCK AND ROLL PARTYING YEARS. And there were a lot of parties during those years, including in the McDonald's crew room. In fact, those years and the Hard Rock Heroes years are tied in my mind as being the best years of my life.

So it's kind of hard to regret not going to college - well, actually I did try twice, with other courses, but quit both times, and again, more details are in the "Beau's Biography" section of the Hard Rock Heroes website - when that would have taken the place of the best partying years of my life.

I should acknowledge somewhere in here that, while MTV started in 1981, it didn't seem real as a career aspiration because 1) it was new, and 2) it was American. The odds are too overwhelming against coming up with the idea to do something like Hard Rock Heroes and doing that for three years to use it to springboard to being a VJ on an American music video network. No way in hell can a Canadian with what would still be seen as too-little experience become an MTV VJ. I don't think MTV can convince the U.S. government that they can't find, among 250 million U.S. citizens, someone to be a VJ, causing them to have to hire a Canadian like me. That's the way it works in getting a U.S. job, unless a particular field has shortages, like nursing. Plus we couldn't really see MTV on our Canadian TV screens. Red River College showed MTV in their lounge in 1981 via satellite, and fortunately, I had a friend then who attended that college, so I would drop him off and pick him up all the time, giving myself an hour either before or after to watch MTV in the lounge. So I did see original MTV VJs Nina Blackwood and Mark Goodman. Muchmusic started in 1984, but as Winnipeggers like me residing on the west side of the Red River (I moved from St. Vital to Osborne Village in 1984) that had cable company Videon back then know, Videon could not provide us with Much or TSN until September 1987. In fact, a popular hangout in the '80s for my crowd was the bar at the Marion Hotel, on the east side of the Red River, first because they presented on their huge TV screens in 1981 this new invention called rock videos, then later because they had either Much or TSN on their screens, even though it was just the pictures only due to the DJ music in the bar. I first saw Much VJ Erica Ehm do her thing on the Marion screens, and I remember when we were in the bar early one night, before the DJ started, and we could hear the TV sound, and I was fascinated watching her and hearing the sound of her voice for the first time. When we finally got Much in September 1987, I remember watching her in my living room and being thrilled that I could finally hear what she was saying on a regular basis.

The point being that music video channels, although they started in the '80s, remained on the peripherals of our lives for most of the decade, not really ingraining themselves into our lives, or my life, until the last years of the decade. With the exception of the frustration of reading about the goings-on on MTV in U.S. rock magazines, especially the Headbangers Ball, and not being able to see any of it. (Hey, there's something I should look for on You Tube.)

So here I sit, a former cable access Muchmusic-style-oriented TV show host, having bombarded the appropriate people in my city of Winnipeg with the appropriate materials - and yes, over the years I have done that - in hopes of parlaying my unique broadcasting experience into some kind of full-time paying gig, and receiving little real interest. Well, at least they know me. Both from that and, by now, all my internet stuff.

I am a fan of Red River's CreComm, though. Saw their pamphlets in the early '80s, thought they were too intellectual for me back then or that the course was more for the print journalism or advertising industries, or to teach people how to be Ray Torgrud. Basically, in some form, those may have been a combination of truths and excuses and that I wasn't ready. Now, it seems closer to what I'm interested in, maybe partly because I've grown and matured as a person and can relate to the material more. It's also fun now, with the internet, perusing the blogs online of both the students and instructors and following what avenues students have gone on to. Which students? The ones I saw at one of their yearly Independent Professional Project (IPP) presentations that are open to the public, this one held at the Park Theatre. And heck, the way the world seems to be today, you can't just be a fan of media anymore - if you are, everyone tells you you should be in media, and/or in this course. I'd love to take the course. But I have to work to make a living. I can't work and take a full-time course at the same time. And if I were to take CreComm, I would not want to work anywhere, even part time. I would want to devote my entire life to that course and to the media.

But the elephant in the room for me is - well, besides the fact that Red River College might not accept a 49-year old (this July) man into CreComm - that I don't know whether a course like CreComm, or the Academy Of Broadcasting course, will do any good for me. Maybe TV stations in Winnipeg just "don't want that Hard Rock Heroes guy" regardless of whether I have official broadcasting credentials or not. Maybe I've pigeonholed myself with my Hard Rock Heroes persona. If so, then taking those courses are just a waste of time. All I can do is speculate, because when there's no interest, you don't get anything in the mail as a response. Well, I did get a couple of responses from news directors, but they were short and didn't say much about what they thought about my personal broadcasting experience.

If I won the lottery, then I could quit my job and take CreComm, even if it were just to entertain myself. I'm sure I would just love it. Maybe make some new friends. But that will never happen, because I don't buy lottery tickets.

And that again brings me to: Do I have any regrets over how things have turned out up to this point? And I have to mull it over, think of all the things you have just read, and conclude yet again: "No."

Was I born too soon? Maybe, but I loved growing up when I grew up, so I wouldn't change that, either. The Archies, The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch when I was 7 to 10 years old. Kiss, Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, Aerosmith, disco, north Portage Avenue record stores when I was a tween, then a teen. No, man, I wouldn't change a thing.

My being ahead of my time is just the way it turned out.

And life isn't over yet.

The Beau Zone Now On Blogspot!

As Triple H of Degeneration X would bellow, "ARE YOU READY?"

Good, because this is the official relaunch and rechristening of THE BEAU ZONE in its' new home on Blogspot.

The Beau Zone, for those who aren't aware, is where you'll find all my controversial opinions on everything that aren't usually reflected in regular media, Winnipeg or otherwise, along with some cool pop culture jokes. Although, I admit, lately, there's been more of those pop culture jokes than anything else. That's because there hasn't been time for me to assimilate the longer opinion pieces in with the funny stuff. You see, when The Beau Zone was formerly a page of my website on my old TV show, Hard Rock Heroes (http://www.hardrockheroes.com), I had a page to fill and change every two months. Well, two months became six, and as I write this, I haven't done a new Beau Zone in a year. No time. The material is certainly there; most of what's on The Beau Zone is just copy and paste from stuff I write for other purposes. So what I have decided to do, for a variety of reasons, is to take The Beau Zone off of the Hard Rock Heroes site and move it to this Blogspot page, where I have the luxury of doing one post at a time. I don't have to fill up a whole page at a time anymore. Additionally, the archives are all here; I don't have to keep them elsewhere anymore, like on that MySpace page that will now function as just my personal MySpace page. (Meaning it took me a few months to redo the archives, i.e., to copy and paste them onto this Blogspot site.) So lick it up, people, and if you want to act out this symbolic christening by chucking a bottle of beer at the wall and smashing it all over the place, you're completely welcome to it. Hey, what's a party without smashed beer bottles all over the floor? And look at all the items on the left you can click on that take you to the entries in the archives; isn't that cool? That's one of the things about Blogspot I feel more comfortable with now. So I'll leave you with that for now; I want this writeup to be front and center for a while so I'm still going to hold off on any new entries for at least a month. I'll probably still do the pro wrestling entries in a conglomeration of several items, like the way I used to end off each Beau Zone on the Hard Rock Heroes site with the pro wrestling comments. They'll just appear whenever now, that's all. So call or e-mail all of your friends, friends with benefits, co-workers, co-workers with benefits, lovers, enemies, teachers, family, parole officers, and anyone else, and tell them THE BEAU ZONE IS NOW ON BLOGSPOT and that IT'S READY TO ROCK!

Portage And Main

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON THE THIRD EDITION OF "THE BEAU ZONE" ON THE HARD ROCK HEROES WEBSITE FROM SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER 2004.

Agencies have been looking for ideas on what to do with the corner of Portage & Main recently. I wrote in, and here's what I suggested:

Perhaps one component of the corner could be provided by Global, now that they own the TD Centre.

Muchmusic has been doing live TV in their ground floor "environment", or outside it, with people on the street being part of the scenery, for 20 years now. NBC and ABC have copied this approach, unbeknownst to Americans without Much, for their morning shows Today and Good Morning America, respectively, making them more vibrant and exciting shows. ABC even gave Good Morning America their own studio in Times Square for this purpose.

Maybe Global can do the same thing: Move their suppertime news broadcast from St. Vital to a new studio at the ground floor of the TD Centre in front of the windows and the street, where we would see all the passers-by. It would make for fun TV, and would open up new possibilities for Global to add more local broadcasts to the day shot from this location, like perhaps a competing show to A-Channel's The Big Breakfast, or even a late night weekend entertainment and music video show. Perhaps, as the former host of VPW's Hard Rock Heroes, Global would let me host it, too. We could get a steady stream of people from the nearby nightclubs late at night for audience interaction.

All of this would definitely add people traffic to Portage & Main, along with excitement over being in the background on TV. People could set their VCR's and watch themselves later.