Whisky Prajer

Listing Again, For The Moment

2012-02-15T15:04:00.007-05:00

Terry Teachout has provoked me to thought (much to the consternation of DarkoV — but what has he done for us lately?) with this list of 10 American novels he wishes he'd written.

It's a rather oddly constructed exercise. The first question screaming to be asked is, Why American? I wish I'd written The Red & The Black, to say nothing of Anna Karenina, Bleak House and The Brothers Karamazov. In fact I wish I'd written À la recherche du temps perdu, in the original French, even though I haven't read a word of it. (Surely my ignorance of content only adds to the trenchancy of my desire to have been its author?)

“You do know I'm gay — don't you?”

It could be an instinctive U.S. American solipsism that is at work here, but I suspect what Mr. Teachout is casting about for in this exercise is a larger sense of the authorial voice and depth of perspicacity that he aspires to when he approaches the keyboard. So neither Stendhal nor Dickens are worth mentioning, because their prose, while exemplary, exists at a great remove from the plain-spoken pipe-fitter's prose that Teachout favours.

If that is indeed the nature of the exercise, then I have to admit my list of 10 works of fiction I wish I'd written would be predominantly American, too. Here are the stories I try to “listen” to when I write; the last two are, of necessity, in translation:

1, Paul Auster's Moon Palace (more here).

2. Flannery O'Connor's, A Good Man Is Hard To Find. “She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I'll never forget the force of those words the first time I read them. What writer doesn't strive for similar effect?

3. Jim Harrison's Julip. All three novellas are Rabelaisian comedies of a gentle sort. I suspect Harrison wrote them while easing himself out of a cocaine dependency. There is a compassion to their telling that I very much admire.

4. Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River. For its interior sense of the exterior.

5. Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust. While I've never been happy with its overwrought climax, I still love following West's misbehaving cretins into the ditches and canyons of Depression-Era Hollywood.

6. Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle In Time. Watching Carnivàle and reading Stephen King's latest door-stopper, while pleasurable experiences, have been sharp reminders of just how profoundly subversive this woman was. With this little novel she is in a league completely her own — a destiny worth striving for, and proclaiming as boldly as possible once you're there.

7. William Gibson, Neuromancer along with Carol Shields, Swann. Both books delight in exploiting the deliberately ambiguous, but steer the craft in radically different directions.

8. Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version. Richler was remarkably assured in his point of view, and impressively sly about asserting it.

9. Bohumil Hrabl, I Served The King Of England. Evocative and immediate — even deceptively so.

10. Franz Kafka, Amerika. Hallucinatory, fragmented, staggeringly incomplete — the most haunting of Kafka's novels asserts that a work needn't be “finished” to exert its power over the reader.

There are other variations I've thought about exploring, including: writers who once inspired, but no longer; the dearth of Canadian content in my list, and why that is; but I'll leave it here for now, so that I can return to the business of the prairie cemetery.

The Prairie Cemetary (But First, A Quick Stop At Home)

2012-02-10T06:59:00.003-05:00

Ah, but who am I to talk? When it comes to beauty we can live with, I am the prince of procrastination.

Our house is nearly 200 years old. When we first moved in, my wife took down the wallpaper, only to discover that, in the bathroom at least, there was no wall behind the paper. On the upside, this has kept the bathroom well-ventilated.

On the downside, it's the ugliest room in the building, and we use it every day. I could give you a sheet of reasons why I don't get to this project. Some of them are pretty solid, too — even experienced renovators are loath to touch bathrooms. But every morning this one ugly room confronts and sneers at my failure of nerve.

And every morning I shrug it off and face some other pressing task. It is, after all, a bathroom — the one room in the house where the contemplation of the beautiful has a piquant irony of its own.

The Prairie Cemetary (Via The Trailer-Park)

2012-02-04T07:47:00.005-05:00

My grandmother on my mother's side passed away shortly before Christmas. She was 96, the last of my living grandparents. For the last few years she'd been living in a care home in a prairie township I'll dub Graben der Freude. My aunt and her husband farm there; most of my aunt's kids have taken up the plough as well.

I spent my high school summers there, helping my uncle out. He and my aunt granted the (much) larger favour by having me. I had no head for the work, but remember those summers fondly.

As my brother drove me, our sister and our father to the funeral, my eye drifted over the landscape, nudging my memory over the contours and conversations and looney-toons adventures of adolescence.

There's one final curve in the road into town. If you go straight, you'll get to the outdoor pool, where I'd go with friends on Sunday afternoons, to cool off in the water, meet up with girls (if we were lucky) and fish for giggles and a pinch.

Keep tight to the curve and you encounter the trailer park.

These singles and double-wides are held together with bailer-twine and duct tape. Most of them have a wood-stove chimney-pipe sticking out the top, and in winter you pass through a tarry cloud of poplar smoke. The whole quarter acre looks like something out of The Grapes Of Wrath, with Mexican Mennonites standing in for bitter, disaffected Okies.

It's Graben's slum, really. And because Graben is so small, its presence is inescapable. Step out of one of those trailers, pick up a stone and throw it, and, depending on the direction you're facing, you could strike the village school, the fair grounds, a church, or the care facility my grandmother lived and died in.

We drove past it shortly before noon. We'd agreed to meet the rest of the family for lunch, but since that wasn't going to happen for another half-hour we pulled up to the grocery store, where we bought some cheese curds from the local factory.

As we sat and nibbled on these little knobs of inoffensive cheese, I wondered why Graben wasn't a prettier town. I grew peevish the longer I meditated on it. In fact, why beat around the bush? Graben is butt-ugly. It's a Canadian Prairie farm-town, and most of those are of a piece: cobbled together with materials found, and quickly, so that the real work could get attended to.

This makes the aesthetic explicable, but hardly comforting. The town has been around for a century, if not longer. As farmers, we got the jump on Nature fifty-plus years ago when we embraced petroleum and its manifold gifts. You'd think we'd take that opportunity to address the business of quality of life, before Nature rallied and set us back on our heels. We settled instead for television.

Why the hell is beauty such a distant concern for my people? It isn't like we lack pride. But with us it always has to be practicalities first. Get the barns up, get the crops in, get the canning done. If you've got some spare time, work on the quilt.

The problem is, practicalities ye shall always have with thee — even in prosperous times. Thus are we endowed with a cultural heritage of vibrant four-part harmonies, lavish quilts, and cheap feed.

Academy Nomination Thoughts

2012-01-26T15:34:00.010-05:00

I am bitterly unqualified to comment on the year that was in film. That is why I'm always grateful for the Academy Award nominations, because the list inevitably generates comment, no matter how few flicks I may have seen.

Of the potential Best Pictures, I've seen only three: Moneyball and Midnight In Paris, as well as Hugo, in 3D — twice. Hugo caught me completely off-guard both times: the first time with its artful suspense, and the second time with its emotional depth. Both times I braced myself to be distracted by/impressed with the technical gim-crackery, but was instead distracted from such superficiality by my love for the story.

So I'd declare Hugo the best of those three options. Midnight In Paris was a pleasant 90 minutes in the dark, although too saccharine in its conclusion to be given a second thought. And I simply can't understand how Moneyball makes it onto lists like this. I have no trouble getting caught up in a rousing sports movie — Hoosiers is a favourite in this category. I also have no trouble enjoying an ambivalent sports movie — and who would argue that Slap Shot is not the best in that category? But Moneyball can't decide if it's rousing or ambivalent.

"Uh ... ambivalent?

The script is a mess. At one point the Brad Pitt character gives an older player an inspiring speech about becoming a mature player, and letting go of the 20-year-old kid he no longer is — being a leader, a mentor, someone who passes along some wisdom, etc. Cut to the next scene, and the older player asks a younger player what's going on. The younger player admits he's scared, of everything. The older player shakes his head, says, “Huh.” End of scene. This, and other dropped balls, puts Moneyball into the same league as the team it celebrates: a phenomenon that gives mediocrity a good name.

My favourite movie of the year isn't even on the list: Margin Call gathers a dream cast that teases and stretches suggestion and insinuation to untested lengths.

MINOR SPOILER: one of the early questions in the film is whether or not the Kevin Spacey character will deliver a monologue he's been assigned. By film's end, he does. It is long (and, if memory serves, uncut) and it is among the most riveting monologues that Spacey has done. END SPOILER.

Margin Call does what indy films do best: capitalise on the energy of a necessarily brief moment — in this case a convergence of two brief moments: the assembling of the creative ensemble, precisely as the American economy collapses.

Might I like Tree Of Life more? I'll tell you when I see it. For now, all I can say is I suspect Tree is the better of Pitt's movies to be nominated.

Let It Go, George.

2012-01-21T11:37:00.005-05:00

I have no good reason to link to this profile of George Lucas. I didn't find anything especially revelatory in the coverage, but was surprised to read that “nuke the fridge” had joined the lexicon of derision — becoming, in effect, a sequel to “jump the shark.” I didn't think that scene was all that transgressive of B-movie credulity standards. Nor is Indy IV the most lamentable chapter in that franchise: Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom tops it both in preposterousness* and unremitting annoyance.**

On the issue of George's compulsive retreats to the editing room, I understand, even if I have no sympathy for, his impulse to constantly tweak his version of “his” films. But did he feel even the smallest hint of gratification when he added “Nooooo!” to the dialog? I doubt it. That kind of meddling is the result of holding onto regret. Dude: let it go.

In fact, let the whole franchise go. It's in capable hands. Make a video game, or something.

*Leaving an airplane sans parachute, tobogganing down the Himalayas in an indestructible rubber dingy and splash-landing in the Ganges, alas, can't be summed up as succinctly or winningly as “nuke the fridge.”

**I submit that it was not an evil spirit, but a temporary moment of clarity, that prompted Indy to send the caterwauling Willy and the witless-quipping "Short Round" to a fiery doom.

Robert Anton Wilson Week

2012-01-14T11:37:00.003-05:00

I've only ever picked up the first instalment of the Illuminatus! Trilogy (A), and that was some years back. I thought it too superficial in its mischief to bother with anything else by Robert Anton Wilson, but the scamps at Boing-Boing have spent all week trying to persuade me otherwise. They haven't yet reached me, but I have enjoyed the attempt.

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, Floyd Gottfredson, and Fantagraphics Books

2012-01-13T07:13:00.011-05:00

I've gushed about Gottfredson's Mickey before, focusing chiefly on the rodent's originally sympathetic character. But if there's one aspect to Gottfredson's work that Fantagraphics raises in high relief, it is his artwork. Fantagraphics' reproductions of the original strips are the cleanest and truest to date, bringing to the fore Gottfredson's mastery of pen and ink, shading, and melodramatic exaggeration. Contrast this strip, an 80s reproduction, with Fantagraphics' reproduction:

Fantagraphics' reproductions in these first two volumes of Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse are an endless source of wonder and revelation. In examples like this . . .

. . . we see the rough sort of cross-hatching and stippling that caught the eye and inspired Haight Street ne'er-do-wells like Robert Crumb and Vaughn Bodé — Fantagraphics' original meal-ticket.

Returning to the “Mickey Attempts Suicide” subplot, we also see the artist's pacing and perspective put to effective use. By the fourth panel, as our confused and dejected hero finally succumbs to despair, Gottfredson gives us only the back of Mickey's head . . .

. . . a self-consciously discreet point of view that filmmaker Martin Scorsese later exploited in Taxi Driver, when Travis Bickle gets dumped (via pay-phone) by his love interest.

When Mickey finally resolves to end it all, his vulnerability and lack of stature are grotesquely emphasized by the elements in his living room, including a framed picture that seems poised to fall on him:

These first two volumes are full of such stylistic discoveries, which seemed to occur to Gottfredson at a Pre-Cambrian rate. By the 40s, Gottfredson has all but traded in his pen for a sable brush, ditching the baroque cross-hatching and endowing the rodent with a more plastic environment, which readers no longer recognized as their own, but as exclusively Mickey's. Gottfredson's work was never again as affecting as the Depression-era stories.

I still hope Fantagraphics continues publishing the strips: Sky Island and World of Tomorrow are two later adventures I'd love to see receive the Fantagraphics treatment. As it stands, I've scanned and enlarged so many frames for contemplation, the current two volumes have extremely well-worked spines. Which gets me thinking: as much as I appreciate the devotion to scale, how much cooler would it be if these physical books were also sold with a DVD-ROM which could be explored for just such minutiae?

Ah, but copyright issues probably bar such a practical solution. Too bad! But don't let that be your excuse for not purchasing these fabulous volumes — now, while supplies last.

Fantagraphics Books
Amazon

2011, Fantagraphics' Year of the Funny Animal

2012-01-11T12:05:00.018-05:00

Fantagraphics Books has been an easy-to-like outfit for me. They've given prestige treatment to the world's rowdiest and randiest alternative (or “underground”) comics artists, at affordable prices that make it difficult for me to walk by without reaching for the plastic. But while the product of cranks and horndogs can be fun to peruse, I've found little to comment upon. Exceptions allowed for (Los Bros. Hernandos and Lynda Barry, for starters), most of the alternative bunch have trouble introducing the element of surprise — chiefly because they have trouble with nuance.

Although still very much devoted to their usual rabble, Fantagraphics took a radical shift at the turn of the millennium — or, more precisely, at the passing of Charles M. Schultz. As the bigger houses churned out glossy doorstops in tribute to Schultz, Fantagraphics quietly acquired the rights to the complete Peanuts archives, and republished the earliest iterations of the comic strip. Although Fantagraphics' hardcover Peanuts library was no less reverential than its coffee-table competition, the reproduced strips — with Schultz's rough-hewn and frequently cruel characters, printed to scale in the original b&w — were a poignant reminder of how trenchant the “Peanuts Gang” had been before they became Hallmark Greeting Card stalwarts.

Sales must have been encouraging, because in 2011 Fantagraphics jumped from Snoopy & The Gang to take on America's largest corporate mascot — Mickey Mouse — and re-expose the charmingly gritty tendrils of his roots, vis a vis Floyd Gottfredson's Depression-era dailies.

Joining the feisty rodent on the bookshelf were also Carl Barks' Donald Duck . . .

. . . and (joy of joys!) Walt Kelly's Pogo . . .

. . . making 2011 Fantagraphics' Year of the Funny Animal.

The Funny Animal genre, particularly as a product of Disney, might seem like a curious form to elicit comment, considering it is probably the most ironclad of comic book genres. To be sure, there aren't many forums buzzing with discussion re: the pulp product of Hanna-Barbera or Walter Lantz. Carl Barks, Walt Kelly and Floyd Gottfredson, on the other hand, are very much alive — and not just on teh interwebz, but in the halls of Academia. That is because, as is so often the case, it is in the most regimented and regulated formats that the truly brilliant artists find unusual ways to shine — exploiting Nuance and its brilliant progeny, Surprise, again and again. These are stories and artists worth commenting on!

First up, Floyd Gottfredson.

Be It Resolved

2012-01-10T15:00:00.005-05:00

NB: The pages on the right are Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions for 1942.

January = New Year? Hardly. Late autumn is the season I typically think of as the beginning of the next year. It offers that brief glimpse into the long view, which is in fact a short stretch of months when household and personal concerns can be addressed with some precision of focus, before the seasonal tide of hormonal zeal returns with spring.

Still, the weeks following Christmas do prompt some reevaluation of the course. Here are some thoughts I've had about mine:

1) Keep posting, once a week minimum. Blown already. D'oh!

2) New blog? Life brings funerals. With the recent passing of my last surviving grandparent I've been given to meditating on generational perspectives, particularly in religious matters. Perhaps the time has come to publicly disclose some of that “grist in the mill.” God knows there's a heap of it.

3) Start stretching. I'm reasonably disciplined about the other physical activity a person ought to attend to, but not at all when it comes to stretching. If passing the 45-mark has hit me with a lesson, it is that I cannot ignore this discipline any longer. Speaking of which . . .

4) Use this book, diligently. Plantar Fasciitis hurts like a mother, let me tell you.

5) Play more hockey.

6) Get a job.

Not necessarily listed in order of importance (obviously).

My Five Favorite Reads of 2011

2011-12-31T19:58:00.006-05:00

The top five stand-outs in a year of pleasurable reading:

#5 -- The Financial Lives Of The Poets by Jess Walter. My review.

#4 -- What Happened Later: A Novel by Ray Robertson. My review.

#3 -- Bangkok 8 by John Burdett. My review.

#2 -- The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Here's my review. I loved this book, which is in fact the direct progeny of my favorite read this year:

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. Happy 50th, Binx (and girls).

Approaching Christmas Eve As The Perpetual Newcomer

2011-12-29T08:04:00.011-05:00

I have issues with Christmas Eve, particularly the church service. That's the service when I discover that I, my wife and my kids, who have lived in this village for 14 years, are newcomers. I know because I'm told so. The sanctuary fills with people who make this their yearly service, and to whom I, the regular attender, need introducing. Pleasantries get exchanged, and inevitably I hear, “It's nice to see new faces.”

Indeed, Christmas Eve is the one night I wouldn't mind hanging out with my peeps, the Mennonites, if only because we know how to sing. If we must sing hoary old Christmas carols, let's at least dress 'em up with competent four-part harmonies. Alas, my closest tribe of robust singers is a three-hour drive away, and taking pleasure in a once-a-year appearance there would be too bitter an irony for my taste. Instead, it's the local United (formerly Methodist) Church for me, where the musical mode is what you'd encounter at any mainstream Protestant congregation: songs with which I'm unfamiliar, being wheezily sung in lockstep unison.

Yet here I was last Saturday, surprised to find myself actively enjoying the Christmas Eve service. Preempted from my usual pew, I sat in an unusual spot in the sanctuary, and discovered a bizarre convergence of acoustics and sound-system manipulation uniquely attuned to the choir, so I was able to hear the harmonies of the songs being sung. And I was charmed by the unfamiliar carols, including this one:

All poor folk and humble, all lame ones who stumble,
Come haste ye, nor feel ye afraid.
For Jesus, our treasure, with love past all measure,
in lowly poor manger was laid.

Though wise men who found him laid rich gifts around him,
Yet oxen they gave him their hay.
And Jesus in beauty accepted their duty;
Contented in manger he lay.

Then haste we to show him the praises we owe him;
Our service he ne'er can despise:
Whose love still is able to show us that stable
Where softly in manger he lies.

The final four stanzas are the chorus, and both times as I approached, “Our service he ne'er can despise,” I choked up.

Since then I've mused over the words and tune, trying to understand exactly what hit the emotional sweet-spot for me. Usually it's my own cynicism I'm choking on whenever I encounter a Disneyfied Nativity Scene; oxen offering up their hay to the Christ child gets me wondering if we won't soon encounter Sleepy, Dopey, Doc and Grumpy among the fabled wise men (who never made it to the manger in any of the gospel accounts).

The second verse is a howler, alright. So it has to be the first and the chorus that caught and kept me off-guard. Married to an ancient Welsh tune, in which the harmonies are easy to hit, the word that, “Jesus, our treasure, with love past all measure . . . our service he ne'er can despise,” was a welcome Christmas message to my ears.

God knows my idea of service is a cautious and miserly bit of business. My bristling hesitance to greet the village's seventh generation — “new faces” to me — is just one example. But these are the small acts on which we slowly build what community we can, hoping against hope that even this frugal service might ne'er be despised.

Of Christmas Music, And Enduring Favourites

2011-12-09T13:13:00.011-05:00

I'm keen on novelty Christmas collections. Ever since the Ultra-Lounge series came out, their Jingle-Bell-heavy selections are an inescapable element in my December playlist. Esquivel's Merry Xmas From The Space Age Bachelor Pad is also a frequent partner in aural crime. I'm even perverse enough to include the odd selection from Eban Schletter's Cosmic Christmas. This year to round out my collection I finally picked up Surfin' Christmas: 12 Yule Tide Classics by The Wave Benders, whose Dutch nationality only compounds the novelty of Dick Dale-style carolling. It's adroit, wipe-out free fun, and it works.

Closer in spirit and execution to Verve Remixed Christmas is this year's Santastic 6, marshaled together by beat-obsessed DJs still hip to the scene. Santastic 6 is a mixed bag of tricks, lacking the uber-polish of Verve's studio product, and striking the odd dud note (if you get the joke just reading the title, there's little point to listening to the entirety of “You're A Loser, Newt Gingrich”). But overall it's a raucous beat-heavy mash-up extravaganza. My personal favourites are Atom's “Wonderland Walker” (Peggy Lee vs Fats Domino vs Bjork), Danny J's mash-up of Danny Elfman and The Supremes, and Martinn's delirious “Blenda Ree” which pulls together Brenda Lee, Golden Earring, Bananarama and the Greenhill Dixieland Jazz Band.

Also, be sure to give Mojochronic's provocative “Merry Christmas 2U” a listen. He cuts and pastes elements from our largest stage-hungry pietists (U2 and MercyMe, for starters), producing a version of "Silent Night" and "Little Drummer Boy" that is surprisingly rousing. I thought his clincher, using the penultimate verse of Greg Lake's “I Believe In Father Christmas” as a benediction, struck me as weirdly flat-footed — a moment when the artist resorted to a sophomoric piety of his own. We all know people whose Christmas mode is to smile as they take the centre of the floor and announce, “It's nice we're all having fun, but let's not forget . . . ” In Mojochronic's case, he doesn't want us to forget It's all make-believe. Yeah, yeah: thanks Dad. Now can we get back to the fun?

With that one exception, these songs are meant to inject the not-unpleasant element of surprise into your Christmas Party Playlist (and if the final minute of “2U” bugs you like it did me, the issue is easily remedied using Audacity). I'm grateful to say, “Mission accomplished.”

Say, maybe next year these hepcats will put their grubby pawprints all over She & Him's Christmas offering, and transform it into something I'll actually play!

“The one thing I used to mourn,” writes txkimmers, in her Amazon review of Porcupine Tree's The Incident, "was the fact that I probably would never love a band the way I did the Beatles as a kid, or the Clash in high school, or Nirvana.” Man, do I love her review! It illustrates perfectly how the Amazon Customer Review (the sincere ones, of course: the snow-jobs are an art-form unto themselves) can trump the “pro” reviewers by taking full advantage of three key non-pro tactics: 1) compulsive re-editing, and additional, later thoughts that reinform the original piece; 2) brazen subjectivity; 3) an artful autobiographical précis that puts it all into context.

I'm also in complete agreement with her about Porcupine Tree “bringing back that kind of rush.” Their Signify originally earned a mere “honourable mention” from me in January 2011, getting nudged out by Arcade Fire and Elizabeth Cook. But let me say this about that: Signify has been this year's most-played album by a very wide margin, out-lapping and out-lasting last year's “favourites” by an astronomical distance, and choking out all would-be contenders for this year's prize of place. And as I've slowly collected the more recent PT offerings, they have quickly joined Signify and jostled for occupancy at the front of the queue. Until I'm able to give this band the Bangsian logorrheic existential shout-out it so richly deserves, txkimmer's Amazon review will have to suffice.

Fly Fishilicious & Yukon Goes Fishing Go Trolling For Linkers

2011-12-09T13:01:00.004-05:00

A shout-out to Fly Fishilicious and to Ivan at Yukon Goes Fishing -- not only because that video camera looks good, but because these are, in fact, charming and entertaining blogs worth regular visits.

The Strangest Dream

2011-12-02T09:30:00.003-05:00

'tis the season for Christmas concerts, which our family attends on a near-nightly basis, thanks to the girls' extra-curricular bliss-seeking. The other evening included a few selections from a boys choir, ages 7-9. They're still small enough in stature to be “adorable” and of course their voices reach that light soprano that sounds so “sweet.” The first song on the menu was, The Strangest Dream.

“Last night I had the strangest dream
The strangest ever before
I dreamed that the whole world agreed
To put an end to war”

Oh, but the sentiment, expressed in such pure tones, does put the lump in one's throat.

At song's end, as the audience heartily applauded, my younger daughter gave a loud snort. “The only thing those little goofs dream about,” she sneered, “is playing Call Of Duty, 24-7.”

Hm, indeed. But where would we be without some adult superimposition?

Whither The Arts Critic?

2011-11-27T17:30:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure I care, and I doubt you do, either.

I read, but didn't bother linking to, this Michael Kaiser lament for the vanishing day of the critic. I'm elitist enough to appreciate where his appeal is coming from, but far too plebeian in my mentality to give it any credit whatsoever. Listen, I miss Pauline Kael as much as any reader out there, but I'm considerably happier living in the current climate than I was in the climate of the 80s when I first discovered her. Kael is gone, movies don't count like they used to, and most of them suck, besides.

If the movies aren't interesting, the variety of little scenes and happenings crowding in to replace them often are. It seems like just about everything is going up for grabs — which is scary, sure, but also not a little exciting. I'm not altogether on-board with Ian David Moss's response to Kaiser, but I did resonate with this line near the end: “(Complaining about the collapsing value of the newspaper arts critic is) like complaining about the oversupply of artists — y’all had better get used to it, because it’s not going away.”

Exactly.

... KISS Me Twice ...

2011-11-23T09:55:00.013-05:00

My parents got home from Bible Study, and asked if everything was alright. I said, “Yeah,” and kept fiddling with my homework.

“So what's the air rifle doing next to the door?” asked my father.

“Oh,” I said. I'd actually tucked it beneath the coats on the rack, to keep it from being seen, a ploy that apparently failed if you were hanging one up. “Right. I meant to put that away.”

“So?”

“Ah . . . I got this weird phone call, kinda freaked me out a bit.”

“What'd they say?”

What, indeed? It was hard to explain, so I took it from the top: I was seated at the basement desk, toiling on my homework. The phone rang. In those primitive days before Call Display, if you wanted to know who was calling you, you picked up the receiver and answered the phone. In this case, my caller didn't identify himself. “How old are you?” he asked.

“Fifteen,” I said, guessing at the age of my caller and hoping to one-up him. In fact I was 12.

“Perfect. Who's the greatest rock band in the world?”

“Uh . . .” The truth was I'd only started listening to the radio, and couldn't name more than two, maybe three bands, tops. I was nervous, and lunged for the obvious answer. “The Beatles?”

“The Beatles? No, no. I'm talking about your favourite rock band, the one you listen to the most.”

“The Beatles,” I said, resorting again to the lie. I didn't yet have a favourite rock band, but would have chosen one with a “harder” sound to it than the Beatles.

“Seriously? The Beatles?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Well . . . I was looking for KISS.” Then he hung up, and I retrieved my air rifle, lest some goon barge through the door to deal me the physical harm I had invited by giving the wrong answer to this improvised bit of polling.

With KISS you never knew. They were obviously tapping into something beyond the pale. The pancake makeup, the flash-pots. Breathing fire, spitting blood. The theatrics tended to inspire a similar degree of extremity in the fans. So far as I knew, none of my Mennonite friends listened to KISS, but there was a Ukrainian Catholic kid in my class who doodled the KISS logo on anything within reach. His locker was papered over with pictures of KISS concerts — a modest shrine compared to his bedroom back home, if you believed his claims (and I did). I wouldn't have classified my classmate as crazy, but I had read the story in the paper about the kid who took his father's shotgun to shop class and blew away another kid, later claiming he'd received direct orders from the band.

The fans called themselves an “Army” and I wasn't about to take any chances. Hence the air-rifle. Now that my father was home I figured I was safe enough. He could absorb the invasion's first salvo, while I crawled out the window and fled for my life.

That ain't workin'...

Thirty-five years later, there's a video of the band making a guest appearance on a sketch comedy show. They show up in regalia as a high-school girl's prom date. Her square parents are shocked and appalled. You can find it pretty quickly, but I'd advise against it. It's gratingly unfunny theatre, because it gets the social positioning completely ass-backwards. These days the scary, dangerous people from the fringe are Dad in his belly-cinched pants and Mom in her high-maintenance coif. The Munsters' high concept has been perfectly reversed, thanks in no small part to KISS.

Indeed the alleged “Knights In Satan's Service” aren't just identifiably human, they're struggling to keep the paint fresh on an increasingly bourgeois facade. Another round of memoirs, another season of Gene Simmons' meta-antics; costumes held together with duct-tape, an inveterate pussy-hound whose marriage is held together with the duct-tape of constructed celebrity drama.

There's the Wizard of Oz, and then there's the chap behind the curtain. Is there a curtain behind the curtain? Is there anything in the comic books that somehow peels back the vital layer and catches a glimpse of the edgy, conceptual power that once summoned an Army?

KISS Me Once . . .

2011-11-20T22:27:00.002-05:00

Allowing my daughters into Canada's Behemoth Box-Store of Books is a risky proposition. They know I can't tell them to cool it with the impulse purchases. But I do try to steer them toward the SALE (remainders) section of the store.

During our last visit I mentioned that a book I was interested in had been originally priced at $80, but was now available for $20. “Too good to pass up,” I said.

“Wow,” said the younger. “What book is that?”

“This one:”

A glance. “Oh, Dad . . . .”

Was that a silent, Why, I heard? Sorry. But it's still coming home with us.

The Power Of Prayer

2011-11-18T11:22:00.003-05:00

Commenting on yesterday's post, Paul raises an interesting point about the potentially fraught relationship between mentor and mentee. I suspect this might be a trait more common among dudes than gals, but usually when someone has the advantage of knowledge and expertise, it gets lorded over the wet-behind-the-ears chump standing in his shadow. Said chump is expected to put up with the abuse, a small fee for the few precious gleanings of technical insight.

As I mentioned in response, BD was not above copping a smarmy 'tude in the face of my ignorance — and neither was I, in response to his. If we knew anything, it was how to make the other rankle. And yet we became, and remained, fast friends for quite a stretch of years. When I finally married, I was astonished to see him show up at the final hour of the dinner reception, having endured a Planes, Trains & Automobiles journey to get there.

As I reflected yesterday over the various slings and arrows we endured from each other, I grudgingly had to admit to what kept us friends: prayer. From age 14 on, we were both standing members of our church youth group, schooled in the Evangelical Protestant prayer vernacular of earnest “Father God”s and “Lord, we just”s. Right from the get-go our burgeoning theologies were as divergent as our personalities.

But we could, on occasion, admit to inadequacy. That's when we bowed our heads and appealed to a Higher Power. And although I approached from the left, and he from the right, I think we felt like God was equally pleased to meet us both. “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst.” Some days the assurance of those words was a profound relief.

These days my intercessory mode is more liturgical. And there are precious few people I feel even remotely comfortable praying aloud with. I haven't talked to BD in years. Would the prayer conversation continue, more or less where we left it? It seems doubtful. But there are sleepless nights when I will my words beyond the ceiling, and whisper, May it be so.

Leaves Mulched, Thanks To BD

2011-11-17T11:01:00.006-05:00

A sunny morning, with the snow approaching (or so the weather reporter says). I figured I could put it off no longer: I went outside to start the mower and mulch the leaves.

Except the mower would not start. I primed the motor, pulled the rope . . . nothing. I pulled again, and listened closely. None of the usual “pop-pop” sounds to indicate the spark-plug was firing. I fetched my wrenches, removed the plug and gave it a cursory look. Rusty, covered in filthy oil. The whole motor could stand a cleaning, but for now all I needed (probably) was a new plug.

A quick stroll to and from the local Home Hardware, the plug was installed, the motor primed, the rope pulled. I was rewarded with a cloud of white smoke and a “BANG-BANG-BANG, MWOOOOOWER” and a mower that would now mulch my leaves.

Mission accomplished. So why bother trumpeting it? Anyone who knows anything about the internal combustion engine knows the lawn-mower is probably the simplest application to get hooked to one. Thirteen-year-old kids who fail basic math and literacy can get schooled in its maintenance and even earn decent coin from it. Replacing a spark-plug is no big deal.

Except my wife couldn't do it. I have accomplished friends who, if confronted with my mower, wouldn't know where to begin, except to throw the damn thing in the trunk of their car and drive it to Canadian Tire. I paid three bucks out of pocket for the plug; CT probably wouldn't let me leave without charging fifty. There but for the grace of God — and my high-school friend, BD — go I.

BD lived around the corner from me. When I got bored with reading and hearing the same 10 songs repeat on the radio, I wandered over to see what he was up to. It almost always involved an internal combustion engine. Sometimes it involved electronics. I accompanied him to Consumers Distributing when he bought his first car stereo, and I sat with him for a few hours while he took apart the interior of his rusty Toyota to install it.

I learned from BD that cars and stereos and, later, motorcycles weren't organic creations that had been squeezed out from between the haunches of an exotic alien species, but were in fact assembled by human hands, and could be disassembled and reassembled by human hands — my own! — as well.

I don't do it very often, especially when I realize what might take me a day to accomplish could be better done by a pro within an hour. But replace a spark-plug? I'm all over it — thanks to BD.

Another BD recollection, here.

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett

2011-11-11T07:08:00.002-05:00

The older I get, the more prone I am to borrowing from the library before I put down money for a book. I was especially hesitant to pick up John Burdett's Bangkok 8, fearing it would be the lurid and grotty sort of “Neon Noir” that British male authors seem to revel in: a cascade of depravity concluding with collapse. (James Ellroy, who writes precisely the sort of novels I most dislike, calls this book, "The last, most compelling word in thrillers.") But the premise held appeal: a murder to solve, another to avenge, both leading deep inside the clandestine world of the illicit jade trade. Lo and behold, the local library had a copy. The price was right!

Around the 200 page mark is a scene that led me to three crucial realizations. It takes place in the back parlour of a bar owned by a Russian pimp. It is a wide-ranging conversation involving the Russian, the book's detective narrator and his American partner, and several of the Russian's bar-girls, and it is fueled by vodka. Here's a snippet, early in the game:

“Every Thai cop apart from Sonchai is a world-class businessman. You simply can't beat them. If I'm not careful they hire the girls, then fine me the price of the the girl — for trafficking in women — less ten percent for my expenses. Not Sonchai,” says Iamskoy, about me. “He's an even worse businessman than me. That must be why I like him, he doesn't make me feel inferior.”

“I wondered,” I say, sipping more vodka.

“That and the fact that he's even more of a head case than me. You should have heard our last conversation. It was like Hindu science fiction. I guess he didn't enjoy it as much as I did, though, because he stayed away three years.”

“You passed out after insulting the Buddha.”

“I did? Why didn't you shoot me?”

“I didn't think you were alive.”

“Anyway, what did I say?”

“You said that Gautama Buddha was the greatest salesman in history.”

To Jones: “I was right. He was selling nothing.”

The group explores and debates the plasticity of identity — religious, national, cultural, individual, sexual, even gender — the various interlocutors monologing with greater passion as the scene builds. I was completely entranced, and realized: 1) I no longer cared if the narrator exacted his vow of vengeance, because I didn't want the book to end; 2) I hadn't read a scene of such compelling, plot-forwarding dialogue among a group of people since Dashiell Hammett or Robertson Davies, and 3) Hold on a sec: Robertson Davies?!

Yes, indeedy. Burdett is adept at playing playing with mystery, in every sense of the word, wreaking a subtle mischief on reader expectations. The chapters are short and easily consumed, but the sense of immersion they provide is exceedingly deep. I took frequent stops, to consider how a once-alien point-of-view had just been ingested as clear common sense. Burdett accomplishes that most valuable of novelistic achievements: making the foreign seem not just explicable, but familiar.

And now I must return this copy of the book to the library, while I wait for my copy to arrive in the mail — so that I can reread this fabulous book with a keener eye, and sharpened pencil.
View all my reviews

A Very She & Him Christmas

2011-11-06T13:30:00.005-05:00

The CD cover shows our heroes decked out in retro hipster gear, standing before the crimson curtain, poised to deliver that retro sound we've come to expect: soaring strings with a haunting sha-boom, sha-boom chorus.

The cover, alas, is misleading. A more accurate photographic portrait of the musical contents would have revealed Him in boxers and a beater, and She in curlers and a fuzzy housecoat. Stripped-down is an understatement, and the “retro” these hip-cats reach for is no older than 23 years: the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Session. There's very little instrumentation happening beyond ward's ukulele-strumming, and Deschanel very occasionally resorts to multi-tracking her voice to provide a sonic palette only slightly larger than the Junkies' singular album. This is much too muted to get noticed at Christmas parties, but it might set a pleasantly contemplative tone for late Christmas Eve eggnog sipping, if that's what you're after. I've got plenty of more satisfying alternatives for that purpose, and would have given this disc a pass if I'd been forewarned. So now I'm telling you.

Recording Artists vs. Marginal Utility

2011-11-04T09:55:00.012-04:00

“Marginal Utility” is one of the few terms I still remember from the Intro To Economics course I took some 20 years ago. For those who can't be bothered with the wiki, here's how it works.

Let's say it's a hot day in July and you've just spent an hour mowing the lawn. You step into your kitchen, and your daughter hands you a tall glass of cold water. You gratefully accept it and guzzle it down, thinking this just might be the most satisfying glass of water you've ever drunk. She takes the empty glass from you, fills it again and hands it back. You take it and toss it back — it is, after all, a very hot day. She repeats the process, and this time you only take a sip, before putting the glass on the counter to return to later, if at all.

If you were to ascribe a value to these glasses, you might call that first drink of water a Five-Dollar Glass. You were still pretty thirsty when you got the second glass, so maybe you'd give a dollar for the refill. The third, however, rates only pennies. That decline in value is marginal utility in action.

This week I've been listening to a new album from an artist I admire and have very much enjoyed in the past. It's the fourth album of his I own, and I can tell it's terrific. The poetic sensibility remains acute, the orchestration is subtle and effective. There are people who already love this album. I might eventually become one of those people, but right now that doesn't seem likely.

It's not his fault. It's not like he got lazy and just slapped together something people have a right to ignore. I'm not going to be a dick (as I have been on occasion) and give him advice in the vain hope he might woo me back to the fold. And he will remain unnamed (you realize, of course, I might even be bluffing on the gender).

There's no delicate way to put this, but I'm wondering if the product of recording artists doesn't have a corresponding marginal utility. In fact, I'm wondering if the magic number for satisfying albums isn't three (3).

There are artists who seem to defy the odds. If my CD collection were cited as evidence, the case for Exceptionalism could be made for the Beatles, Bruces Cockburn and Springsteen, Los Lobos, Rush, Steely Dan and Talking Heads. And Megadeth. But in terms of actual play, Steely Dan is the only act who escapes the three-album fate. And that insidious, 10-year-old device — which relentlessly tracks play-count — bears this observation out.

What to make of it all? Nothing, really. The most important thing is for recording artists to proceed as if none of this mattered. There's no telling which three will make the final grade. The artist I referred to earlier put out eight(!) albums before producing the first-of-three that hooked me. Who knows? One or two Dylanesque reinventions might yet eclipse those.

But more than that, you can't argue with a live performance, which is what most albums harken back to anyway. Keep on keeping on. And please don't take it personally if I lose track of your latest greatest record.

The Pleasures Of Pauline

2011-10-28T14:33:00.011-04:00

So I've got this twitter-feed, and — what can I say? — I kind of dig it. It's not something I devote more than ten minutes of my day to. I don't have it synced to a phone or anything like that, so I don't catch more than a short burst of other people's on-line chatter. It's the equivalent of wandering into Fran's for a cinnamon bun and coffee, and eavesdropping on the young hipsters before they butt out and trudge off to their dead-end jobs.

Do hipsters have those conversations anymore, those wry back-and-forths that aspire to Oscar Wilde and his salon-set? I haven't been to Fran's in ages, but I sure don't hear that kind of chatter when I step into That Corporate Espresso Outlet. In fact, those places are usually pretty quiet, because everyone is taking advantage of the free wireless — hipster-yakking on-line, I'm guessing.

It almost beggars the imagination, but day-to-day living once defied attempts at quip-like summary. Cafe-talk consisted of a rough feeling-around for a shared DMZ that could withstand another volley or two of good-natured ideological cross-fire. When a subject completely foreign to you rolled around, you shut up and listened, asking the occasional question, and venturing forth an opinion only when you were certain the ground had more or less returned beneath your feet.

That's how we approached the movies, too, in those days. Movies commanded our attention. We sat silently in those cavernous theatres, letting the light and sound wash over us in its attempt to deluge our prepared defenses to the argument being made. And that was the thing: movies were making an argument. Most were modern in their agenda — bourgeois, if not banal — but because the medium was so sensual and the environment so hallowed, the argument was thoroughly revitalized, often flaunting its contradictions with a maddening confidence as it beat the viewer into a defensive rage, or haplessly submissive tears.

In this now-vanished world, we read the critics, the bulk of whom volunteered themselves as the public's first line of righteous defense. This movie was good and sturdy, that movie was shaky, this whole line of movies was little more than a dim shadow of something that had shone masterfully some decades back, etc. It was a rare critic who acknowledged the personal appeal every movie aspired to. That appeal might hold all the comfort and nutrition of Kraft Dinner, or it could be a powerful feast of provocation that demanded a level of attention the viewer was resistant to admit, but either way it was meant to be personal.

No-one took the movies more personally than Pauline Kael, who died ten years ago, and is now receiving her first biography and another culling and collection of her writing. When she critiqued, her launching point was sexual metaphor, after which she explored where a picture's attempted seduction either succeeded or failed. We're told Kael wrote her reviews in longhand, on a lined yellow tablet, more often than not through the night on a tight deadline — sublimation on an epic scale. When the seduction succeeded (Last Tango In Paris being the most notorious instance) her reader could expect to feel the frisson of prurient discomfort; conversely, if the seduction had failed badly, her prose was withering.

Nobody writes like that about the movies anymore, and why should they? These days we can watch movies on our phones, and most of them don't much suffer from the shift in scale. In 1973 a movie that jilted all sensibility to the degree that Blatty's The Exorcist did practically forced the viewer out into the cold, to stumble home, sit down, uncap the pen and write. A movie like 2009's The Human Centipede, on the other hand, begs for — and receives — the South Park treatment: crudely animated circles with a lewd and dismissive point of view. That's the level of argument being made; that's the level of response required.

It's doubtful anyone younger than 45 will find much to take note of in Kael's life and work. It may seem like I'm reminiscing about those heady days when giants walked the earth, but we are living at a time when the attention Kael paid to a movie would seem wildly out-of-place. In a year when Terrence Malick's The Tree Of Life is considered the high-water mark for movies, why should a competing flick like Cowboys Vs. Aliens generate anything longer than a tweet? Pauline wouldn't have bothered with even that.

May I Taxi You To Your Next Link?

2011-10-21T09:18:00.016-04:00

Gulp -- another Friday! I'm in constant taxi-mode, with one daughter getting schooled 20 minutes away from my computer terminal, and the other neck-deep in rehearsals for a community theatre musical located 20 minutes off in the other direction. Is there some way to blog and drive at the same time? I don't mean in the way that Jim blogs -- that's fine enough, but he got there first, and I need some way to capture the thoughts that fizz over the surface of my consciousness the way hydrogen-peroxide fizzes over the surface of a wound.

Achievement in anything requires discipline in all things, of course, and I am not quite the embodiment of that precious trait. I do have "computer time," but rather than devote that time to composition, I prefer to scour the webs for thoughts to keep the fizz bubbling. Besides, it's easier to read than to write. So, as a stand-in for my own words, here are others you might dig just as much as I did:

There is a heap of God-verbiage to be had on the web, most of it ugly as sin, minus any trace of sin's surface appeal. I've been meaning to add to it, under the dubious conviction that if we leave it all to the pros who are certain of their convictions, then we might as well write the epitaph for our species (in which case I'll settle for this one.) One Old Pro whose name keeps coming up in these free-for-alls is Reinhold Niebuhr. It doesn't seem to matter what shade of the conviction spectrum a person falls on, Niebuhr has written something to affirm the arguer's point of view. What's up with that? Jordan Smith gives a short, and possibly too tidy, answer to that question.

In response to some nameless televangelist's cash-grab, Bono famously snarked, "The God I believe in isn't short of cash, mister." The evidence for such a God was probably to be found in Bono's own wallet, the contents of which will be increased by multiple reissues of Achtung Baby, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Today listening to that band throws me into Jerry Lewis conniptions, but 20 years ago I was very much into Achtung Baby and its near-immediate follow-up, Zooropa. Those albums, and the band's live shows, seemed to channel the excitement and anxieties that attended the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the rise of global media, better than any other act on the scene. But does that necessarily mean Achtung Baby deserves the Nevermind treatment?

It is all but given that the last two publishers in the world will be Amazon and Google. Should writers wring their hands, or celebrate?

And speaking of celebrating writers, Cowtown Patty celebrates James Lee Burke's Feast Of Fools as Burke's Magnum Opus. I'm a big fan of Burke, particularly his Hackberry Holland novels. This is a Feast I can't wait to tuck into.

Finally, Terry Teachout's laudatory review of "The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" struck several nerve centers for me. First of all, Mike Daisey's dramatic monologue exposes and flays with some mighty thorny truths about everybody's (including, especially, the evangelical church's) favorite product and brand. But secondly and not incidentally, Daisey's mode has pointed similarities to that of the late Spalding Gray, whose Swimming To Cambodia really should have placed in my Fifteen Film Faves. Gray is experiencing another, possibly final, resurgence in public attention thanks to the publication of his journals, to which Daphne Merkin applies her own particular zest of candid articulation here.

All of which leads me to think, what better, more pertinent tribute to Spalding Gray could there be than a proper Swimming treatment of Daisey's controversial performance?

The Latest Additions To My CD Collection, Courtesy Of ...

2011-10-14T10:17:00.016-04:00

It seems WalMart is fast becoming the final refuge to which the beleaguered audiophile (at least of the Hornbyan variety) must cling: any other vendor foolish enough to stock and display CDs is too busy filing receivership papers to stay abreast of audiophile tastes.

Which, if WalMart's stock is any indication, are drearily predictable and deeply mired in the past. Pink Floyd re-re-releases, new (and old) Alice Cooper, Bob Seger live . . . flipping through "What's New," the most recent act I'm stumbling across is the late Amy Winehouse. Hey-hey, my-my: welcome to my record collection!

Some ado is being made of the latest coat of paint to be applied to the Pink Floyd catalog, particularly Dark Side Of The Moon, which is celebrating yet another anniversary. DSOTM happens to be one of the first CDs I bought when I set up my original stereo system, and it is an album that's been ripe for the attention of professional knob-fiddlers. Even so, after considering my budget, Dark Side Of The Moon was not the album I put into my shopping cart: The Wall was.

There are a couple of reasons for this. I'm a little more sentimental about The Wall than I am about Pink Floyd's most classic album. The Wall was the first of Floyd's albums to reach my adolescent ears, so it left the deepest impression. It is huge. It is hugely overindulgent, it is hugely narcissistic, it takes every grievance it has about humanity in a hugely personal way, and no stroke applied in protest of this abysmal condition could possibly be too broad for the work at hand. The Wall best embodies exactly what a Prog Rock Concept Album should be.

I'm also a sucker for reproduced cardboard gatefolds, even if the reduced size has an unfortunate bubblegum card effect on Gerald Scarfe's nuthouse artwork. But the sonic tweaking more than compensates for this bit of miniaturizing. When I first contrasted the original CDs with the new production on this collection, it was the selections from The Wall that stood out. There are all sorts of creepy little noises of things getting squeezed and/or broken that never quite made it through the surface noise of the LP, or even the original digital transfer. I don't expect to be replaying this monstrous behemoth often, but for those occasions when the daily news requires a gloomy, British yawp, I will be reaching for The Wall.

I recently advised a friend to steer clear of the new Alice Cooper, Welcome 2 My Nightmare. He didn't ask for the advice, he didn't need it, and neither (probably) do you. But he was kind enough to solicit further thoughts on the matter. So I described it as, “One of those efforts where the addition of many big names — Bob Ezrin, Steve Hunter, Dennis Dunaway, Michael Bruce, Neal Smith . . . and Ke$ha — is a sure sign that nothing is working the way it should.” And I left it at that.

The number in the title indicates this is a follow-up to a well-known and deeply loved “classick” from the 70s — Welcome To My Nightmare. The trouble, I thought, probably started there. Why revisit an album that diehard fans have committed to memory for the last four decades?

Then again, why not? Vincent Furnier has made it clear he's too canny a showman to treat any of his albums as sacred writ, so why should his fans?

After playing the sequel another time, I retrieved the old album from the back of the closet and fed it into the player. Although it has a couple of songs I frequently put on playlists (“Department of Youth” and “Cold Ethyl”) it's been years since I listened to Welcome 1 from front to back.

I now realize why: Welcome 1 isn't much of an album, either. As with most Alice albums, the concept reads as a bit of an afterthought — a sales banner slapped on a collection of backlist retreads. If some fans kvetch about it, as they do on Amazon, well . . . it's a bit late in the game for that, isn't it? Alice runs a chop-shop. By now there isn't a single song of his which he hasn't ground up countless times and fed through the sausage machine.

So, yes: in 1975 it may have been possible to listen, without rolling one's eyes, to Vincent Price feasting on the scenery. Children singing like brats in thrall to an evil clown probably set the teeth of Nixon-era parents on edge, too. But 36 years later, even the Steven Suite tries the patience of jaded listeners who like their nightmares to move at a snappier pace.

Which, it must be said, Welcome 2 certainly does. The ballads have more oomph, the rockers rock, and the one song which does in fact disturb (“When Hell Comes Home”) is a propulsive grinder.

All of which leaves me a little baffled as to why Welcome 2 doesn't grab me. It's compulsively jokey, but that's usually a good thing, too. In fact the punchline to “I Gotta Get Outta Here,” in which the put-upon doofus who's been singing is set straight on the facts, cracks me up (response: “D'aaaah, excuse me?”). Oddly enough, it evokes for me the singular moment I most enjoy on Welcome 1: the second bridge in “Cold Ethyl” when Cooper says, “C'mere, Cold Ethyl! What makes you so c-o-o-o-o-o-l-d-d-d?” It's a throw-away line, but he is so snotty when he says it, it slays me.

Snottiness is the purview of the young, of course, and I am slow to recommend it (listen to any interview with Johnny Rotten from the last 15 years if you wonder how entertainingly an old-timer wears it). But it is a quality that sends me back to the old albums. I love to hear it.

In fact, I'd love to hear it better. Say, Coop and Co.: since you've already got my money with the new stuff and the old stuff, how's about taking a hint from Floyd and polishing up the classicks? As is, they sound terrible. Admit it: you're embarrassed. So why not rectify the situation? You know I'm not the only easy mark for such a naked cash-grab.

The only Bob Seger album I ever bought was Nine Tonight, in 1981. “Old Time Rock & Roll” was hoary even then, but a double album of The Silver Bullet Band's greatest hits struck me as too good a deal to pass up. The album didn't get much play, but I never regretted the purchase. There was too much energy on display for me to get uppity about ten bucks lost.

Thirty years later, there is also a suspiciously fine quality on display that makes me wonder just how “live” those recordings were. I hardly begrudge a showbiz schmoe like Seger for retreating to the dugout to apply a little studio spit, especially if his LIVE competition at the time included notorious bat-corkers like Peter Frampton and KISS. But it is amusing to hear, and still (as Lester Bangs took pains to point out) delivers more than reasonable value for the frugal listener's hard-earned buck.

I must confess that when she was alive, I lumped Amy Winehouse in with Britney Spears as a tabloid performer whose ouevre would never survive without the broadsheet antics, and left it at that without ever bothering myself to listen to her music. Since her death I've had several friends press me on the matter. Her CDs are now ridiculously cheap, so I finally caved and took them home.

Now I know what everyone else knows: this young woman possessed an astonishing depth of vocal and lyrical talent. Without attempting to tweak the public chorus, I'll just add that I tend to reach for Frank before I do Back To Black. The later album skates on a very thin and brittle sheet of self-awareness that is, at times, almost too difficult to listen to in retrospect. Still, she rises above the muck with a performance that conveys genuine good humour even as it acknowledges the inescapable bonds of gravity. It is a shame we've lost her.

Writers At The Table, Approach With Caution

2011-10-12T10:09:00.006-04:00

About a mile down the road from my house is Stone Orchard, the farm where Timothy Findley penned the bulk of his work. Findley was a significant star in the Can-Lit canopy from the 70s to the 90s, the first, brightest and possibly only age in which such a canopy could be said to exist. Being in the vanguard of the generation that came out of the closet, Findley had a unique perspective which he brought to bear on a remarkable breadth of social and personal nerve-centres. If you're curious, check out The Wars or Not Wanted On The Voyage.

Anyway, Stone Orchard was home to some lavish parties. So much of an artist's public and fiscal success relies not just on the quality of work, but also (and often primarily) on who knows who. Some artsy-types insinuate themselves deeply into a scene by throwing Gatsby-like dos. Not just artsy types, mind you: business types do this also. “Tiff” and his partner Bill Whitehead were in the business of art, and could be relied upon to host a fab shindig that invitees would never dream of turning down.

Margaret Atwood was a fixture, as were Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. After that I imagine the party list usually read like a Canada Who's Who: Robertson Davies, Carol Shields, Northrop Frye, Peter Gzowski. Leaven the firmly established with a few gorgeous up-and-comers, and keep the linens fresh, sort of thing.

I've always been under the impression that these folks generally stayed on very good terms. They didn't review each other's work, but actively promoted it. If a reviewer got a bit uppity about someone's new novel, it wasn't uncommon for the gang to circle the wagons and open fire on the dismal nit who spoke out of turn.

Put that many writers in the same room, however, and you might as well be stuffing cats into a sack. There had to be some friction. Just take a gander at Evan Hughes' delicious portrayal of the most recent group of writers to take on and take over the American Lit-Scene. Mary Karr, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides and the now inescapable David Foster Wallace are as fine a group of friends and lovers as those who drank and quarreled in Gertrude Stein's Parisian flat, with rivalries and snipes that echo into today.

It all gets me wondering. The scene-makers that gathered at Stone Orchard may have been Canadian, but they were ambitious, sensitive and prickly nonetheless. The parties took place during the free-for-all 70s, and conspicuously closed in the early 90s, when AIDS finally crashed the scene. Surely things got a bit thorny inside Stone Orchard, no? Revealing a little of the rancor and bloodletting that comes naturally to competing egos might go some distance to keep that age of Canadian letters from receding so quickly into the darkness.

Jim Harrison, Among Others

2011-10-05T12:09:00.002-04:00

Like Pete Dexter, I too am a fan of Jim Harrison. However, it will be some time before I get around to reading the new novel. I still have his last three books in the pile beside my bed, and I am very slowly picking my way through his memoir, Off To The Side. Happily for me, Harrison rewards slow reading, which may not be the greatest asset to his book sales (although it hasn't slowed my tendency as a buyer). The other weekend I watched this documentary (trailer below) of Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison. Snyder occupies the centre of it, as he should — a lifetime (more or less) of relative self-discipline has left him verbally articulate to a degree that his more indulgent brethren (ahem) can only aspire to.

Also for your consideration: Tom Bissell's fine account of encountering Harrison, both on and off the page.

The Best Game I Can Name

2011-10-04T08:53:00.007-04:00

“So you're a Leafs fan, then?”

This is the go-to assumption whenever I tell someone I'm from Toronto. In this case, my questioner was a young guy working a zip-line in Alaska. “No!” I said. I was tempted to add that I think the Toronto Maple Leafs and their unwavering fans embody everything that's wrong with the National Hockey League, but I contented myself with, “No, no. No.”

He nodded. “I'm from Minnesota,” he said, “and I just can't bring myself to cheer for the Stars. I'm not sure why it is, but they just don't excite me.”

“We grew up in Winnipeg,” said my brother, adding the unnecessary element of mischief.

“You happy to see the Jets come back?” asked the zip-line guy.

“I have friends who are,” I said. “My relationship to the NHL changed when the Jets were sold to Phoenix. I think I stopped being a fan of a team and learned how to become a fan of the game — kinda-sorta.” This is true. If a game is on, I'm happy to tune in and watch, so long as both teams are engaged. This discounts 90% of Leafs games, along with what I've seen so far of the new Jets.

I can't say I'm especially gratified to see the Jets return to Winnipeg. First of all, it really isn't a “return” in the strictest sense of the word: the Jets were sold to Phoenix, who still retain that franchise property. If that specific franchise had been sold back to Winnipeg, I might have been cajoled into a half-assed state of celebration. But there remains no-one on that team who ever called Winnipeg home for even the shortest duration. The team that, in the off-season, hoofed it out to the various satellite farming communities to play charity baseball games, the athletes who made the occasional school gym appearance to encourage kids away from drugs, etc. — that team has vanished.

What Winnipeg has instead is a team they purchased and moved from Atlanta — yet another southern city whose only prior exposure to ice was in their mint juleps. Winnipeg has purchased a re-entry into the NHL. And it has purchased, on promissory terms, several seasons' worth of NHL games which they will host. The only player to express unreserved delight at living in Winnipeg is dead. The rest of the team will have to get pointers on discretion from their colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton. There are only so many strip clubs in Winnipeg, and that is a city that thrives on talk.

I said none of this to the zip-line guy. “So who do you cheer for?” he asked.

“Whoever's playing an interesting game,” I said. “That's often Detroit. Colorado, occasionally. New Jersey. Actually, Chicago is a team that's almost always interesting to watch, even when they don't quite have what they need to go the distance. I've generally kept one eye on them, right from the 80s on.”

“I hear you,” he said. “I like Boston that way, myself.”

“Then you've had a good summer,” I said.

He grinned. “I've had very good summer.”

“I'm happy for you,” I said. And I was.

Alright, people: put on a happy face!

Image cadged from this site. Over here Ken Dryden offers some suggestions in aid of keeping the game healthy.

Monday, Bloggy Monday...

2011-09-26T11:05:00.004-04:00

Mondays begin with resolve and end in regret. Is it sunny? This is a good Monday to start fitness walking. Are there veggies in the fridge? Let's make a salad! Particularly after a weekend of hanging with classmates and purging the collective consciousness of embarrassing moments while marinating the liver in spirits, fine wine and Pringles, Monday can seem like a springboard into vast ocean of untapped potential.

But Mondays are also unrelenting. Everyone has to get back to work, or school. The day is either too long or too short, depending on which family member has your ear at the end of it. Salads take time to compose, and don't stick to the ribs. It's already 7:00. Who's up for a quick pasta dish? And what's pasta without a glass of wine? Good grief, I'm yawning already. Tell you what: let's do that walk tomorrow.

So why not flip it around and begin with remorse, shame and/or a profound sense of personal inadequacy? Take blogging: maybe you think you're reasonably disciplined about it, you've got a gentle grip on this business of being perspicacious without slipping too often into self-indulgence. One or two postings a week, boasting a word-count carefully parsed down to 350 or so should about do it — right?

Nope. Try 1,000 words — daily. See Mary Scriver or Steve Donoghue for examples. Inspired? (Lord, no! NaNoBloMo nearly killed me!) Good! Now get to work.

Nick Lowe, The Old Magic

2011-09-23T07:48:00.005-04:00

There's a lovely, very short bit on Nick Lowe in this week's New Yorker, which follows him as he shops for glasses. He makes mention of a clarifying moment he had as a rock 'n' roll star, I'm guessing in the late-70s, when he decided he wasn't going to be one of those aging performers aping the kids in an attempt to stay current. Instead he charted out an attitude and sound he figured he could properly wear into old age.

Having spun Labour Of Lust* through the summer months, and contrasted that with At My Age* and now The Old Magic, I would never have imagined in 1979 that the sound he was referring to would be akin to that of Max Bygraves or Guy Mitchell. But, especially in Mitchell's case, I think Lowe rather astutely latched onto a sensibility that works brilliantly. It's like he took Mitchell's approach to “Heartaches By The Number” — a weird performance in which Mitchell sounds like he couldn't be happier — and turned it inside out. Lowe also performs his narrators' voices as if they couldn't be happier, then makes it subtly clear what a shame this is.

Looks like Lowe has become the Elder Statesman of Cool.

Writer's 'n' Beans

2011-09-20T09:48:00.013-04:00

You answer the door. It's your cousin Margaret, presenting you with a hot caserole dish for the Thanksgiving dinner. You smile, or wince, and accept the dish. “Baked beans?” you say, dreading the answer. She silently smiles — or smirks.

The family gathers around the table, the dishes are served, and everyone has to admit: those are damn fine beans. “In fact,” your husband offers, “I don't believe anyone does beans quite like our Margaret.”

“They're different this year,” says your mother. “Margaret, you've done something different with the beans.”

Again the smile/smirk. “Cardamom,” she says. “I try to do something different every year. This was the year for cardamom!” Happy laughter and smiles all around for cousin Margaret's incomparable baked beans.

Your cousin Margaret's beans are my metaphor in response to Dwight Garner's plea for our Important Novelists to step up production. I say, with one caveat, that a novel every ten years ought to be the writerly ideal, especially if the writer is really good at what she does. The list of Important Novelists whose yearly dish of baked beans wore out my welcome — incomparable though that dish may be — is a very long one, and recedes to a vanishing point as time goes on.

Garner trots out Dickens and Trollope as examples of what volubility can accomplish, but what about Thomas Hardy? Much has been made of the negative review that truncated Hardy's career as a novelist, but what if the poisonous toad who wrote it actually did Hardy a favour, making Hardy's the name that rings through the ages? If Hardy had managed a Dickensian output, would we still talk about him? Who wants to read 30 novels detailing the carnage that occurs when our flightiest romantic yearnings meet the hard whetstone of reality? No, three or four books of that nature will do just fine, thank you. And, let's face it, soul-crushing disappointment is what most Important Writers are all about. If you want to deluge the market with product, best to be cheerful and unassuming (like Trollope) or a sly crowd-pleaser (like Dickens).

Caveat: there are some Important Writers who apparently need to get three or four questionable books out of their system before they knock off something truly delicious and nutritious. T.C. Boyle comes to mind. Actually, so does Hardy. Really nobody should be actively discouraged from writing — or publishing. But even if you're an Oates or an Updike or an Atwood who can be relied upon for a delicious bowl of beans every Thanksgiving, don't take it too personally if the overwhelmed guests at the table forgo the pleasure of eating them.

Any Tears For Borders?

2011-09-12T08:45:00.010-04:00

We were nervous when Chapters finally opened in downtown Toronto. Our little bookstore had recently celebrated its centenary — a narrow victory, from some vantage points, even if we were turning a profit. We were hustling just to stay relevant, never mind competitive.

The Bloor Street Chapters was the franchise's “flagship” store. The architect designed the façade to be reminiscent of an ocean liner. Obviously this store was going to be much, much bigger than ours.

It had been open for nearly a week before I mustered up the courage to check it out. It was indeed large, but still shy of the size and scale of some of the Borders and Barnes & Noble outlets I’d seen in California. I perused the stock and tried to ascertain the sales potential. Most of what I saw was backlist — books we didn’t have the shelf-space for, and wouldn’t have stocked even if we did. Backlist titles don't sell with nearly enough frequency to justify stocking. We’d just be sending them back to the publishers after three or four months of watching them grow yellow, a shabby business for both us and the publishers.

At the time, the government of Canada had just shut down a bid by Heather Reisman to bring Borders north of the 49th Parallel. The Canadian Booksellers Association was gratified; they'd fought Reisman with every resource they had, arguing that Borders’ distribution alone would be ruinous not just to Canadian bookstores, but to the entire publishing industry. I wondered if the Chapters model would be any better, but as I looked around their flagship store the one recurring thought I had was, There’s no point legislating against this. Too many people want it. Whether they could sustain it for anywhere near as long as 100 years was, I thought, doubtful. But regardless, that particular business model would just have to run its course.

The course has been run, so far as Borders is concerned. Some people are crying the blues, and I can sympathize. I’ve made purchases in Borders and Barnes & Noble. And Chapters — now Reisman's property — continues to get my money, chiefly with its remainders and magazines. But I’m not shedding any tears. I think it is a shame, in the most complete sense of that word, to see the “big” experiment fail. After witnessing the near extinction of small independents, it would have been a faint scrap of comfort to see something still standing. But so it goes. No more buffalo, as the bard has sung.

Photo, of a final stone being flung from within Borders' glass house, courtesy of Su.

Werner Herzog's Cave Of Forgotten Dreams

2011-09-07T09:34:00.009-04:00

As we walked out of the TIFF Lightbox, where Cave Of Forgotten Dreams was playing, my wife sighed rather happily and said, “I love Werner Herzog — he's a real character. But there's almost always a point in his documentaries when I think, 'You are so full of shit.'”

Some documentaries more than others, I might have added. As he's aged, those moments are fewer, but he still retains his capacity to test a viewer's bullshit-meter. Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is no exception.

The movie is an intriguing and worthy exercise: escort a limited crew into the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, get footage of the paintings and bring it back — rendered in 3D — to a public for whom this will be their only exposure; keep the pace languid, add some vigorous neo-classical performances to the soundtrack, interview witnesses and professionals and be sure to keep the camera rolling to catch the occasional eccentricity; keep personal commentary to a minimum; then cut and paste it in the editing room and release the final product to a grateful audience.

Does it work? The results are mixed. On a surprisingly primal level, the film is a success. The 3D rendering is the most excruciating I've experienced since the days of blue-and-red paper spectacles, yet it reveals aspects of character in the paintings which a traditional presentation would keep hidden. The lingering camera, the soundtrack's sacred keening and Herzog's wheezy monotone induce a dreamlike state — a desired effect. My wife noted how the commentators all resorted to English as a subsequent language, which brought a blunt simplicity to their analysis — also a desired effect.

At other times, when it seemed like the contours of the cave warped in an unintended reversal, the artifice of the presentation was impossible to ignore. I wasn't in the cave — I wasn't anywhere near the cave. I couldn't smell its mustiness, I couldn't feel the texture of the stalagtites and stalagmites. I was entirely at the mercy of the technology and the crew that employed it. Open the film with a statement like, “We will be the lest people to see these paintings, be-foah the cave iss closed — foah-effah,” and repeat it a couple of times, for emphasis, and resentment becomes part of the viewing experience as well.

I had to wonder if that wasn't also a desired effect. It wasn't as if an excursion to the Chauvet Cave had been a long-standing item on my bucket list, but geez-louise: greater souls than mine have chaffed under sentiments like, “I em hee-ah, where you will neffah be.” Herzog's post-script, in which he ponders just what a herd of albino alligators might make of it all, comes as very welcome comic relief.

There is something profoundly unsettling about these paintings. The mook who slapped his red-painted palm to the cave wall probably had an ego as big as Ozymandias' — or Werner Herzog's. Against all odds his statement has remained intact for over 30,000 years, placed in stark juxtaposition to the awe-inspiring portraits of the thundering forces that surround it. Like Herzog's films, it is as petty, bold, tragic, and comic a statement as anything humanity has put on canvas. God knows you've gotta be pretty full of something to pull off a stunt like that.

Player One by Douglas Coupland

2011-09-02T11:15:00.006-04:00

Alright, so I lied — or spoke too soon, at any rate. After Generation A I was determined to never again pick up another Douglas Coupland novel. But then the CBC announced Coupland as last year's Massey Lecturer; to clinch any potential listener disappointment, they immediately added that Coupland would be “lecturing” in a novel format. Well . . . I suppose that was indeed a “novel” approach to take, if only by CBC standards.

The Massey Lectures are a platform for a Canadian blowhard-at-large to summon his (and occasionally her) most pertinent insights gleaned from a respectable life's work. This frequently requires the person to resort to, in their case, extreme truncation, often producing the most accessible and thought-provoking work in their entire ouevre. Even when the personality invited is someone I've wearied of, I make it a point to tune in, or read the essays when the event is over. I'm always grateful for the experience.

As I was this time, too — although just barely. All of Coupland's foibles and weaknesses as a fiction writer are on full display. Some years back a former copy-editor of Coupland groused (anonymously, of course) that the job had been akin to shepherding a beginner's creative writing class. With that kvetch freshly resurrected in memory, and compelled by the recent internet fixation with marginalia, I picked up my pen and treated the book as a proof-text. The exercise produced pages like this and this, and a happier feeling for me as a reader.

Do I really need to comment on content? Coupland glosses over issues of identity, distraction, consumption and the capacity for empathy, the post-Protestant religious impulse, extinction and a few other fixations that keep nagging at him, but which he can't seem to give cogent voice to except through the mouths of superficially distinct characters engaged in an extreme form of group therapy. These “episodes” suggest a solipsist narrator of particularly high sensitivity, who is continually astonished by the intrusions other people make.

Does that sound to you like a bad thing? Then you probably should avoid this book. Otherwise, take it for what it's worth. Just remember: pens are required when reading Coupland.

Would The "Original" Conan Please Stand Up?

2011-09-01T08:25:00.023-04:00

The new movie is a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but not so bad as to qualify for Worst Movie Of The Year (Cowboys & Aliens and Captain America would nudge Conan The Barbarian out of competition, and that's just citing examples I've had the misfortune to see). Conan's problems stem from being an origin story, which might seem like the natural place to start, particularly with a hero that most of the public is only vaguely familiar with. But exploring Conan's origins presents challenges unique to the Barbarian.

The obvious challenge applies to all origin movies: making the story contemporary without thumbing your nose at earlier incarnations. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man succeeded by dramatically linking Peter Parker’s “spider” powers to his adolescent sexuality. Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins worked because the gothic spectacle of Bruce Wayne’s transformation was greeted with just the right smidgen of irony by movie’s end. And, to cite an example that sits closer to Conan, Disney’s recent incarnation of Tarzan worked (despite the presence of gorillas singing along to Phil Collins) by introducing movie audiences to the exhilarating sense of motion and spatial freedom that Edgar Rice Burroughs' books gloried in (contrast Disney’s tree-surfing with Johnny Weissmuller lazily swinging from one vine to the next). Lately filmmakers have erred on the side of caution, producing musty origin flicks that adhere too closely to stories that are decades old (see Thor or Captain America, for example).

But Conan's marketers also have to consider just which well to draw from: the original pulps, the comics, the Governator movies, the Saturday morning cartoons, the spin-off hack novels? Robert E. Howard's work appeals, since that's the embodiment that first took hold of the public imagination and never let go. But unlike Burroughs, Howard never devoted a novel's worth of print to divulging Conan’s past. Quite the opposite: the only Conan novel Howard wrote (in fact a “Kull” story Howard tweaked in hopes of salvaging a sale) occurs late in Conan’s life, when he’s been deposed from his kingdom. In the short stories when Conan or the narrator refer to the barbarian’s past, the references are perfunctory and oblique.

This isn’t entirely unusual, given the medium Howard was working with. Most pulp writers got their character’s origin story out of the way as quickly as possible, and dove into the action. Howard’s spin on this strategy was uniquely effective: make the action central, and the origin ephemeral. Drop hints, but never explicate.

The new movie explicates big time, a strategy that yields mixed results. The opening scene demonstrates at painful length how the age-old nostrum, "Show, don't tell," should probably have been reversed with respect to, “the boy was born on the battlefield.” Conan’s progress as a young barbarian, however, is successful entertainment: Leo Howard adroitly embodies an adolescent discovering how feral energy can be channeled into disciplined and fluid thrills on the battlefield.

The boy's interaction with his father, however, complicates things. The old man (Ron Perelman) is gruff and unyielding, allowing the audience to see the occasional glimmer of pleasure in his son’s natural ability, but offering no such indulgence to the boy. As I watched I couldn’t help but speculate on another reason why Howard skirted around origin stories: his own were a source of manifest discomfort, to say the least. Howard’s father was a bit of a cold fish. He kept his appearances at home brief, hectoring the young man to quit with the stories already and make something of himself, before disappearing again for days or weeks at a time to make the rounds as a country doctor. Howard’s tubercular mother was slightly more encouraging of his literary efforts, to the extent that she didn’t shut him down when he spent a night hammering and shouting out his stories. But I don’t think it’s out of line to suggest that her own struggles with isolation and alienation and deferred intimacy played themselves out to unfortunate, if unintended, effect in her relationship with her son. When it came time to face the blank page, who could blame REH for skipping origins altogether and fleeing directly to a pulp backdrop where a lone hero can express himself with complete physical, sexual and spiritual abandon?

Which raises another weakness in the movie: we don't get enough such expression. Once the barbaric mum and pop are dispensed with the rest of the flick plays, rather herkily-jerkily, as a revenge narrative. Jason Momoa is as close to a Howard embodiment of Conan as we’ve seen in the movies (personally, I’ve always imagined a juiced-up version of the late Chuck Connors) and the script has flashes of what Howard invested in the character. But as a narrative foil, Conan works best when he’s a sword-wielding trickster — akin to Yojimbo's samurai, James Bond, The Man With No Name, Han Solo and countless others — who struts into a room full of uptight citizens, and announces, “I’m here to show you how things really work.” Conan doesn’t have that environment here. Everything is already unmoored and up for grabs; consequently his dressed-up quest for revenge comes across as an almost petty affair for an epic figure to trouble himself with.

Petty, but not unentertaining. I enjoyed myself, but would advise against 3D. Conan fans and the morbidly curious are encouraged to read Michael A. Stackpole’s novelization(!), which surely aligns closer to the screenwriters’ original vision. While it, too, has flatfooted moments it yields a much more satisfying narrative and motivation than the final on-screen product. Best of all, Stackpole proves himself a capable pulp stylist, embracing its enthusiasms without overindulging its purple excesses. He's got my money if he ever decides to write a follow-up to this adventure.

The movie is likely to do well internationally, where the market for “swarthy” heroes who dispatch extremely white villains is quite large. In the meantime, who knows? Maybe in another 25 years someone will get the mix exactly right.

Logan Hill wrote my favorite review of Conan The Barbarian. Mary Scriver asks, Would You Date Conan? And for more better Conan explication ("'Splication'?"), run, do not walk, to Steve Donoghue's eloquent and incisive Cimmerian 'Stravaganza.

Conan The Barbarian, Defying The Ratings

2011-08-29T10:51:00.006-04:00

Does anyone bother with movie ratings anymore? There are kiddie movies, then there are adult movies, and no real gradation of the spectrum exists between the two extremes. As for the guardians at the gate, it’s been years since I’ve encountered an adult there, and what 16-year-old is going to tell an eight-year-old kid he can’t go see a “Restricted” movie?

In 1981, when I was 16, getting into a “Restricted” movie required a modicum of finesse. To persuade the adult behind the wicket I’d crease my brow (a few lines on the face to make me look older), then strive for a friendly confidence that didn’t cross the line into presumptuous swagger. I was nervous going into my first attempt, so I enlisted a classmate to tag along for moral support. The old gal who stood at the gate gave us the stink-eye. “Boys, I’m gonna need to see some ID.”

“Sure, it’s right . . . aw, nuts: I forgot my wallet at home.”

A smirk. “Same with your friend, I suppose.”

Vigorous nods, gormless smiles.

She heaved a sigh and wearily shook her head. “Get in there.”

We hustled into the foyer, where we congratulated each other with discrete high-fives. Then we lined up for popcorn — and bumped into another classmate, working the snack stand. She blanched. “What’re you doing here?”

Now was the time for swagger. “Watching the movie.”

“How’d you get past her? She’s tough! If she knew I knew you guys I could get fired!”

“Then stop talking and give us the popcorn already. With butter, please.”

Once inside the theatre, the swagger disappeared. My buddy and I silently contemplated the forbidden mysteries that were about to unfold. What were we going to see? The mind reeled. We had no clue.

What we saw was a joke — Conan The Barbarian. The guy playing Conan was much too large for the role and spoke like someone had wrapped a tourniquet around his tongue. Everyone wore a bad wig and no shirt — including the women, which got old surprisingly fast, even for two horny and hetero 16-year-old dudes. The pacing was sluggish to the point of torpor, and scenes that were intended to shock instead provoked loud guffaws, the biggest of which occurred when the bodybuilder, nailed to an enormous baobab, snacks on a vulture that looks like it mistakenly wandered in from the Muppet Show. So much for the frisson of the forbidden.

That 30-year-old memory played through my mind as I sat in the theatre on Saturday, waiting for the lights to dim and Conan The Barbarian 3D to begin. In a way, it felt like I was once again tempting the fates. To call this movie “critically reviled” is an understatement — even the rejuvenated and now overly-generous Ebert gives it a mere one-and-a-half stars. Now one of the script-doctors has published an anxious post-mortem of the movie in an effort to absolve himself of blame.

I have to admit I was actually thrilled to once again consider the question: just what was I about to see?

"Arrr, matey!" Just What Is The Groom Supposed To Wear?

2011-08-26T14:04:00.011-04:00

Last summer we attended a wedding where the bride, dressed in traditional white, was taken captive by pirates — dressed in traditional bandannas, cutlasses, eye-patches, baggy boots, etc. When the groom/buccaneer attempted rescue, he too was taken captive and forced at sword-point to plead for the life of his betrothed. Under this duress, he took a shaky breath, then broke into song and . . . you get the picture.

We knew the groom, and this contribution to the party was him to a “T”: young, dramatic, vigorously expressive, impatient with staid tradition. We'd only just met the bride, and liked what we saw. She and her maids were not only gorgeous, they were also genuinely good-humored, and sweetly indulgent toward the dudes galloping about the other side of the altar. Eventually the wedding proceeded as weddings are expected to. We took it all as a good sign for the couple in question.

The people we sat with at the reception dinner, however, had this to say: “He’s going to regret what he wore.”

Hm. Really? I mean, any more than other grooms do, when the blessed event is a distant memory and the kids are pulling out the pictures for giggles? No doubt there are Flickr accounts devoted solely to bridal gown disasters, but let’s be honest: the groom standing next to the gal wearing the fashion apocalypse is making her look like Coco Chanel. She may, in fact, resemble the Bride of Frankenstein, but he is still, in fact, Frankenstein. No groom escapes that fate.

The second most important question regarding the groom’s attire is, Is he comfortable? If so, than he’s as happy as he’s likely to get during the event. Is he having fun? Bonus! Are they both having fun? Well . . . that’s just magic.

Hey, here’s me in 1994, defying the odds with a bolo tie and ponytail! Timeless — when propped beside my good-humored, sweetly indulgent and drop-dead gorgeous wife.

Jack Layton, Loyal Opposition: July 18, 1950 – August 22, 2011

2011-08-23T07:37:00.006-04:00

Yesterday's news took my breath away. Four weeks ago, when Jack Layton announced he'd be absenting himself from Parliament for the rest of the summer to focus on his fight against cancer I imagined his was a dire prognosis. But my God, it's been less than a month.

Even leaning on a cane, he didn't appear hampered by his condition. When his wife Olivia joined him on the platform, the two seemed to get hot and bothered just courting the public vote. The world loves a lover — well, I did anyway. On Facebook I opined that Layton was the only national party leader whose smile didn't creep me out. Friends quickly reported other, quite different, reactions.

I voted for Layton in this last election, as well as some of the previous elections. It's likely he got my vote when he ran for mayor of Toronto, but I can't recall. Having said that, my support was not without criticism or concern. This last time around, in fact, I was determined to hold my nose and vote Liberal. Front page news on the nation's Sun tabloids, put to press in the final days of the campaign and announcing that Layton had been “caught” (and subsequently released without charges) in a massage parlor of ill-repute nearly 15 years ago, changed my mind. Nobody's come out and said Stephen Harper had anything to do with the publication, but considering the man's notoriety for micromanaging his party's campaigns and fighting dirty on the Hill, I daresay I'm catching the whiff of rosewater from Harper's palms.

I think that sums up why Layton got my support with some consistency over the decades. He could court controversy of the sort that threatened to put me off, but when it was time to hash things out in the Commons I usually had a clearer idea where he stood than I did of the Grits or Tories. Jack Layton came closer to embodying the ideal of Loyal Opposition than any of the rest of 'em — including, especially, the sneak who's presently running the show.

Links: Jack Layton's final letter to Canadians. Layton claimed professor Charles Taylor was perhaps the greatest political influence in his life. If you're a twenty-something Canadian you owe it to yourself to get acquainted with this man's ideas — especially if you think Layton's policies were wrong-headed. Start here.

Addendum: Here is a short quote from Prime Minister Harper. It seems likely to be in reference to this episode. It gets me thinking I should perhaps ease up a bit on the innuendo — August 25, 2011.

"Well, you do have eclectic taste."

2011-08-21T13:50:00.004-04:00

A jolly shout-out to C & M Books of Anchorage, AK, my most recent favorite used book store, where the proprietress greeted me with the above evaluation of the books I queued up to buy. Last Sunday I spent several hours there, poring over the shelves and piles and boxes of books. This is one of those fabulous places of considerable character, where there seem to be an endless supply of unexpected treasures silently pleading to be discovered. C & M Books also houses a formidable collection of aviation-themed coffee mugs. If you're in the neighborhood, do yourself a favor and drop in.

A Supposedly Fun Thing...

2011-08-18T06:10:00.003-04:00

Took a cruise to Alaska while celebrating my parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary. David Foster Wallace's title comes easily to mind, but the fact is we managed to have a great deal of fun. Still and all, DFW's dis-ease with that particular environment wasn't out of keeping. I have more thoughts on the matter, but 'tis the season for family and the negotiation of terrain. Consider this a promissory notice.

The Sheepdogs, On The Cover Of The Rolling Stone — And Deeply Entrenched In My Playlist

2011-08-04T11:24:00.011-04:00

My wife recently commented on the monthly fee that eMusic draws from our credit card. “You still get music from these guys?”

“Yep. I’ve grandfathered an introductory rate that still nets me 50 downloads a month — an incredible bar-goon.”

“So 50 new songs every month?”

“More or less.”

“What kind of music are we talking about? Have I heard any of it?”

The answer to the first question didn’t come easily. The answer to the second question did. She has her music, I have my music, we have our music. The girls have Glee. More often than not my monthly downloads don’t qualify for any of those categories.* But I keep with it, because it’s an inexpensive way to satisfy my curiosity.

eMusic’s stock and trade is stuff that gets played at Bonnaroo, or in the sort of nightclubs I lost the ability to locate when I became a father. A glance at my sidebar bears this out. Right now we have The People’s Temple, who seem to have recovered an echo from an unhappily concluded Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, and, on the super-hip nightclub side of things, the Handsome Furs. A couple of months ago there was Cut Copy, the lushly indulgent disciples of Human League, and Le Butcherettes, who sound like this picture looks:

A picture is worth 1000 words, but I feel like I ought to say more. WP, the quarter-century version, took a cussed and hearty delight in any sonic palette located just to the left of the radio dial.** WP, sliding toward the half-century mark, has become stingy about delight. You kids keep on rocking in the free world: I’m happy to listen. But that’s as much encouragement as you'll get from me.

“So what kind of music are you looking for?” was my wife’s natural next question.

In a flash of damning candor, I said, “I miss classic rock. I mean, I’m sick of hearing the standards being played over and over. I guess I want new classic rock.”

Good luck with that.

Occasionally I do luck out. My itching ears were well and truly scratched by the Supersuckers’ superlative Motherfuckers Be Tripping, as well as the neo-Psychedelic musings of Porcupine Tree. Alice continues to oblige, of course. Also, there was a brief moment when Kings of Leon seemed to be huddling over their Coleman stove and cooking up something promising.

And now we have The Sheepdogs, a Canadian band that wouldn’t have caught my ear if they hadn’t caught my eye by winning the Rolling Stone cover contest.

Again, Kings of Leon comes to mind because I think KoL strains to sound this good. The crucial difference is the Sheepdogs aren’t searching for a sound — they’ve nailed it down. If you spin this week’s release, Five Easy Pieces, or better yet, last year’s Learn & Burn, you’ll catch a heady bouquet of worthy influences: the edgy wistfulness of mid-career Guess Who, the tightly-controlled guitar-driven playfulness of Dinosaur Jr., the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, a slapdash of CCR when they were still having fun, and just enough of the Beatles to acknowledge the obvious and move on to the business at hand — putting on a rock show for the here and now.***

The fact that the production of Learn & Burn was financed by pocket change and returned empties astonishes me. At first spin, this does not come off as an “indy” project. The devotion to disciplined songcraft is remarkable — in contrast to the current norm of indecipherable wordplay, most Sheepdog lyrics actually make sense (though the band is still hip enough to title a song “Rollo Tomasi,” something the latent film buff in me deeply appreciates). And the musicianship is undeniably accomplished.

Further exposure brings out some amusingly rough edges. The obligatory traces of studio conversation are there, of course, contributing to a backyard party ambience. Then there’s the inclusion of a sax solo in “Right On,” a pleasing dash of mischief for this listener, and a huge middle-finger raised at what’s left of the reigning music industry. Atlantic is fortunate to sign an act that knows its mind and its sound to this degree. There’s little I’d bother tweaking, although I imagine that whoever Atlantic books to produce the next Sheepdogs album might offer some helpful tips on nailing vocal intonation. To my ears this little nudge could make the difference between great, which the Sheepdogs’ studio sound already is, to knocking the ball out of the park and into orbit.

It’s probably been 20 years since the cover of the Rolling Stone enticed me into a record store. I’m glad for this week’s interruption: Learn & Burn will be on near-continual rotation until Atlantic serves up the next Sheepdogs album. In the meantime anyone able to catch a Sheepdogs show, should, with all possible haste. I expect they’re mighty high from this experience, which will likely bring a whole new level of awesome to their performances.

*Unless it’s jazz, which gets played through the weekend.
** Something like this guy does.
***Prior to Learn & Burn we have two journeyman albums — Trying To Grow (2007) and Big Stand (2008, currently available as a free download on the band’s site). Although laid down with impressive assurance, these collections probably play best as happy reminiscences of a previously enjoyed live show.****
**** I remember the first two albums by U2 playing the exact same way.

Whither Life? Ivan Illich & Mark Edmundson Report From The Trenches

2011-08-03T10:22:00.004-04:00

This link, via ALD, arrives at a remarkable juncture. Last month a friend of ours — a contemporary — died of cancer. He claimed he was ready, and certainly embodied that trait. When I mull over his final days and compare them with my present, I suspect there have been times when I was more “ready” than I am now. If I were to qualify my current existence I might say I am maintaining an uneasy stasis — an illusion masquerading as perspective, of course, but the necessary steps beyond it are not altogether obvious to me.

Not long ago I listened to an old CBC interview with Ivan Illich, who provoked an audience of theologians by opening his lecture with, “To Hell with Life!” Illich was responding in large part to the emerging Gaia movement. Gaia and its offshoots foster an inchoate pantheism, which, perhaps to my peril, I don't find nearly as dismaying as Illich seems to. I haven't read any Illich, so I only have this rudimentary sense of where he's going with his assertion, but I suspect he and Mark Edmundson share a similar concern.

“People now pursue a means — staying alive — as though it were an end in itself. Epic measures of energy invest a rank banality, for in truth there is no sustaining meaning to be had, no triumph to be achieved, simply in the maintenance of biological life.” I keenly await Edmundson's book, Self & Soul: The Human Dilemma. As for Illich, the interview can still be obtained here. Scroll down to Listener's Choice > “Listener's Choice - May 13, 2011 - Ideas - Life as Idol.”

Hitting The Beach With Hipster Lit

2011-07-30T09:01:00.004-04:00

We just returned from our yearly retreat to Maine (surely la belle Province de la belle Province; Maine's schools would do well to teach French as a second language). Alas, I left the beach before I perused this link from Darko: Bookhampton's Hipster Lit Shelf by Macy Halford.

When we were packing for the trip I seriously considered carting Roberto Bolaño's 2666 down to the sand and sea, but reached instead for a used and very weathered copy of Buffalo Girls by Larry McMurtry — a complete hipster fail, on my part, but also an effortless, emotionally rewarding read.

Halford notes the absence of female authors, and offers as a correctional Flavorwire's Ultimate Hipster Reading List. I think the search for the female literary hipster could be aided by the additions of Sheila Heti and Miriam Toews.

Slow on the Posts

2011-07-23T18:10:00.002-04:00

I don't like to go a week without posting, but I'll claim fatigue: between cracking the whip around the ever-present teens, and succumbing to the heat, I don't have much gumption for finishing the posts I've started. My wife returns from yet another work junket tonight. Adult conversation will resume, and possibly a few thoughts of modest sophistication. Thank you for your patience.

Harry In Retrospect

2011-07-13T08:55:00.004-04:00

Today is a big deal for Harry Potter fans. For me, not so much. Back when I had the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of Potter mania, I stalled. I bought the first book, but found the author's tone too disagreeable to get me past fifty pages. Years later, when our family faced a lengthy car trip across the Canadian prairie I reached in desperation for the audio recording. To my surprise, Jim Dale's robust performance of the book won me over. He relayed the narrative as if, in fact, its twists and turns were jolly surprises to him. The next few years promised several lengthy car trips, so I bought or borrowed the rest of the series, which we finished last summer.

By then I was more than ready for it to be over. I'd grown weary of the Potter Plotline — begin with Squalid Episode in Harry's adoptive Muggle family; transport Harry to Hogwarts where he and his cohort sneak around to determine why Something Mysterious is happening; conclude with Perilous Quest and wrap it all up with Affirmational Epilogue — which Rowling took increasingly more time to lay out. I still wanted to know where it was all leading, but I tuned out for vast stretches of Dale's performance, often cluing in belatedly after someone in the car gasped with surprise.

Anyone who gets kids excited about reading, though, is someone to hold in high esteem, and J.K. Rowling more than qualifies. The Pottter Plotline worked, but more than that, the characters were compelling, especially to younger readers (again, as the characters grew to be all-too-convincing adolescents, my own interest thinned to near non-existence). But more than that, the magical environment these characters interacted in was entirely beguiling.

Near the end of the series, as the tone of the adventures grew increasingly gloomy, I can recall a critic tangentially lamenting that he hoped there might still be room in the (then) forthcoming books for another Quidditch match or two. It strikes me that this remark cuts closest to what has made those books and movies so successful: a landscape of enchantment, imagination and play that entices the reader to speculate and roam further. A little Googling seems to bear this out. Potter fan-fic is booming, and there are all sorts of folks trying to mount a successful Harry Potter on-line RPG.

RPGs . . . Harry Potter appeared just as Dungeons & Dragons was fading from suburban basements, and shortly before video games became persuasively immersive to both genders. Rowling so fabulously bridged that gap, I have to wonder: what might it look like to approach and weave together the next such nexus?

How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema

2011-07-12T08:30:00.003-04:00

While contemplating the aesthetic pleasures and rigors of Andrew Loomis, I couldn't help reflecting on some of the drawing instruction books of my youth. Foremost among them, to a degree that couldn't possibly be exaggerated, was How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema. Even into early adulthood, this book was the final word on drawing anything.

So how does it stack up in comparison to Loomis? None too shabbily, in fact.

Tropicália via Red Hot + Rio 2

2011-07-11T08:59:00.002-04:00

My weekly habit of purchasing a newspaper occasionally pays off musical dividends. Until I read J.D. Considine's enthusiastic rave for Red Hot + Rio 2, "Tropicália" was not a genre I was familiar with, nor had I heard of any of the "Red Hot" projects. I've little to add to Considine's appreciative appraisal, except that my own ear tends to incline toward the more eclectic tunes: "Ela" by Curumin, "Bat Macumba" by Os Mutantes and of Montreal, and "Aquele Abraço," a fabulous stew served up by Brazilian Girls, Forro in the Dark and Angelique Kidjo. And "Freak le Boom Boom" by Secousse and Marina Gasolina is so virulently infectious, it makes me a little crazy — in a good way (I think...).

The curious should not delay: this is the ideal soundtrack for summer soirées on the patio.

Figure Drawing For All It's Worth by Andrew Loomis

2011-07-08T08:15:00.003-04:00

Mark Frauenfelder's post-slash-rave prompted me to get this recently republished instructional book by Andrew Loomis. I take a closer look, with pictures, over here.

Hemingway Dis-Ease

2011-07-06T15:48:00.008-04:00

Julian Barnes explores Hemingway-induced dis-ease in a New Yorker short story this week, “Homage To Hemingway.” It’s not an on-line freebie, but for subscribers (or patients in the waiting room) it’s worth a look. For my purposes, I'll resist the temptation to quote one of the crucial paragraphs near the story's conclusion, and instead refer to Barnes' disclaimer prior to publicly reading Hemingway's “Homage To Switzerland” for a Guardian podcast back in December, an experience which seems to have generated the story:

I chose Ernest Hemingway because he is deeply out of fashion, still over-admired by the literary boys-with-toys brigade, still shunned by women readers put off by the macho myth. His style is wrongly thought to be both simple and imitable; it is neither. His novels are better known than his stories, but it is in the latter that his genius shows fullest, and where his style works best. I deliberately didn't choose one of the famous stories, or anything to do with bullfighters, guns or Africa. “Homage to Switzerland” is a quiet, sly, funny story (Hemingway's wit is also undervalued) which also — rarely — is formally inventive. It has a three-part, overlapping structure, in which three Americans wait at different Swiss station cafés for the same train to take them back to Paris. Each man plays games of the sort a moneyed and therefore powerful expatriate is tempted to play with the nominally subservient locals — waitresses, porters, and a pedantic retired academic. But as the story develops, it's clear that social power and moral power are not on the same side. I hope “Homage to Switzerland” will make you forget the swaggering “Papa” Hemingway of myth, and hear instead the truthful artist.

I got to wondering: is Hemingway out-of-fashion? Which circles would I have to travel in to know? I still love Hemingway — there are at least two-dozen short stories I’m very fond of (including “Homage”) and even a novel (The Sun Also Rises). I’m also familiar with Hemingway-induced dis-ease, particularly when it comes to The Sun Also Rises. The patent anti-Semitism cannot be overlooked; it’s a rotten impulse, to say the least, but Hemingway indulges it to deliberately position the Abrahamic religious-moral code as obsolete and vexatious. It’s the same code, of course, that provides the framework for Christianity and Islam, but it was the current norm to pick on the Jews — an easy and “acceptable” target. Hemingway sometimes had trouble resisting the easy target.

So, yes: loving Hemingway does take effort.

But love him I do. Recently, at the village thrift shop, I discovered (beneath a pile of Dan Browns) a copy of A Moveable Feast. It’s small enough to fit in my purse, a book made for travel and short exposure to the page. On Saturday as the women in my family bravely forged through the Ottawa crowds to catch a glimpse of Will and Kate, I sat in the shady patio of a café, swigged an iced coffee and lingered over the prose.

Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green auto-bus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness. The men and women who frequented the Amateurs stayed drunk all of the time, or all of the time they could afford it, mostly on wine which they bought by the half-liter or liter. Many strangely named aperitifs were advertised, but few people could afford them except as a foundation to build their wine drunks on. The women drunkards were called poivrottes which meant female rummies.

Hemingway situates the Café des Amateurs as a literal cesspool in the lowest aspect on the rue Cardinal Lemoine. He describes the effect the bad weather has on an already unfortunate scene, making subtle reference to his anxieties as a young man who is all but fleeing this dismal locale. The young Hemingway finally comes to “a good café that I knew on the Place St.-Michel.

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. But in the story the boys were drinking and this made me thirsty and I ordered a rum St. James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.

The older Hemingway, the rummy alcoholic fixated with medical photos of distended livers, now nearing the self-appointed end of his life, sees how desperately we fail to connect ourselves correctly to the narrative at hand.

A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. I was writing it now and it was not writing itself and I did not look up nor know anything about the time nor think where I was nor order any more rum St. James. I was tired of rum St. James without thinking about it. Then the story was finished and I was very tired. I read the last paragraph and then I looked up and looked for the girl and she had gone. I hope she’s gone with a good man, I thought. But I felt sad.

I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

Reading Hemingway isn’t difficult. In fact, it’s deceptively easy, which is one of his fundamental pleasures. There’s no shortage of writers who intimidate the reader, not just from reading the rest of their book, but also from approaching the blank page and pencil to commit to their own stories. But not Hemingway. Hemingway makes a reader feel like writing — a reader like Julian Barnes, certainly. And a reader like me.

Mickey Mouse: Race To Death Valley by Floyd Gottfredson

2011-06-28T13:35:00.002-04:00

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse: "Race to Death Valley" (Vol. 1) by Floyd Gottfredson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The genesis of a soulless corporate mascot gone global was, incredibly, a robust and vibrant affair that developed daily in the newspapers of North America all through the Great Depression. Via the pen and ink of Floyd Gottfredson, Mickey Mouse was portrayed as an embattled and even occasionally embittered little character who struggled mightily against the odds, sometimes just to keep from despair. The strips are reproduced at scale, with a clarity of contrast that brings out Gottfredson's fine line work. This is quite simply the very best reproduction that Gottfredson's work has received to date, surpassing (certainly) the original newsprint and even the glossy Uncensored Mouse collection from '89.

NB: this volume includes the legendary, "Mickey Attempts Suicide" storyline (a personal favorite).

View all my reviews

Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay

2011-06-23T07:11:00.002-04:00

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my first novel by Kay, even though my wife has been a fan of his writing for as long as I’ve known her. I’m reluctant to pick up fantasy, unless it’s of the mischievous po-mo variety — which seems never to have been Kay’s bent. I think I mistook his seriousness for an unsophisticated earnestness, and laboured under the misapprehension that Canada was offering up a fey Robert Jordan to the world of letters.

Guy Gavriel Kay is most certainly not that. Under Heaven is a meticulously wrought thriller that tightens its suspense through the various levels of intrigue — sexual, psychological, military, historical — that work subtle manipulations in the Emperor’s Court. At times I was reminded of the best of James Clavel’s work — Tai Pan, King Rat; Boris Pasternak’s deep, poetic yearnings of the soul during the heart-rending sequences of war also came to mind.

Minor kvetch: early in the novel a sequence of disastrous events is foiled by supernatural forces. It only happens once, and unfortunately had the effect of putting me on edge the rest of the novel, wondering when, or if, this was going to happen again. I don’t think I’m spoiling it for the reader if I reveal that this intervention is singular — in fact, my own reading would have been much improved if I’d known. I’m surprised at Kay’s choice, and think the novel might have worked better if he’d manipulated the scene differently.

Regardless, this very enjoyable and moving novel has nudged me into exploring more of Kay’s unique ouevre.

View all my reviews

P.S.: Goodreads chose an unfortunate cover. If that had been on the book I read, I wouldn't have read it. I do judge a book by its cover, for better or worse.

The Cyclathon

2011-06-21T10:26:00.005-04:00

Note: this is a dual post; my apologies to followers of both blogs.

When I was a kid in the 70s, the summer camp I went to held a yearly “cyclathon” fundraiser. Kids rode their bicycles to the camp; the camp collected money (and mailing addresses) from the marks who sponsored the kids. It was a pennies-per-mile arrangement, and the distance to the camp was rounded down to 100 miles, completed over two consecutive days.

I managed this feat twice, when I was 12 and 13 years old. I rode a CCM five-speed, wore cheap sneakers, tube-socks and polyester gitch purchased at the local “Style-Rite” store, and threw on a pair of recent cut-offs. T-shirt was optional (for boys) and using sunscreen (or “suntan lotion,” as it was so quaintly referred to) was unheard of.

There was a great deal to endure besides the dreary reality of churning through a day’s worth of Canadian grasslands. The event drew an enormous crowd of participants, which put me on edge even back then. Participants were divvied up into groups of six or eight; you could request, and be reasonably assured of, the company of a friend, but after that it was the luck of the draw who you wound up with. My memories of both groups are marked by disagreeable loud-mouthed lunks who were maybe two years away from impregnating and marrying their first wives. And despite the fact that everyone had just pedaled close to 60 miles that first day, it seemed like I was the only one keen on getting a good night’s sleep.

In the days leading up to my second cyclathon I was bed-ridden with a wrenching case of diarrhea. Nevertheless, the dawn of departure found me gingerly perched on top of my bicycle, ready to go. Ten miles later, I was lying in a ditch, staring up at the blue sky and wondering why I wasn’t on my bike anymore. I sat in the camp director’s truck for a few minutes, sipping on a warm coke and answering the man’s questions (“How much money did you raise? How are you feeling now?”). He urged me on, so on I went. Lunch was hot dogs, chips and pop; supper was sloppy joe sandwiches.

And yet — and yet — despite all this my predominant emotional memory of these two rides is one of happiness. Despite being too sore to walk, never mind ride, the second day of cycling felt like a gift. The flat and wind-swept prairies were decisively left behind for the rugged and rolling terrain of the Canadian Shield, a welcome variety that couldn’t help but lift the spirits. Even better, our group leader was now worn down to indifference, and no longer made any effort to keep the group together. Now my buddy and I could pedal in peace, enjoying the scenery and discussing what mattered most — Star Trek — while the others pushed ahead to see who could arrive at the camp and plunge into the frigid waters first.

But more than that, those trips offered a very welcome and lasting change in perspective. An adolescent kid living in a small town surrounded by seemingly endless prairie will tend to think of himself as “stuck” if he doesn’t have access to a car with a full tank of gas. A 12-year-old kid who got on his bike and pedaled from that small town to his favorite summer camp 100 miles away thinks very differently about his circumstances — so long as he has access to a bicycle. There are at least four guys I know from my cyclathon days who went on to do fabulous multi-week bicycle tours of exotic locales, long before “outfitters” showed up to offer their decadently comfortable and nutritious versions of the cyclathon.

Last Saturday as the fam celebrated my birthday with pecan pie on the porch, the younger asked me where I’d bicycled that morning. “Zephyr,” I said.

“Whoah. That’s far.”

It was a 65 kilometre round trip. But far? Well . . . .

1979, Revisited

2011-06-16T08:12:00.003-04:00

Over at the Onion AV Club, Sean O'Neal offers a perspective on the 1979 music scene that is considerably more cultivated than my own. Head over there for some relief from all this meatball rock.

Grade 9, Final Track

2011-06-15T06:45:00.003-04:00

"Up To My Neck In You," AC/DC

Okay, I lied. After yesterday's hokey song I couldn't see my way around any more fitting an endnote than an anthem from the Bon Scott years. Is it worth adding that this is a band that, so far as I'm concerned, never fully recovered from the death of their lead singer and best song-writer? I know the Mutt Lange albums brought in the money and cemented their fame in the USA, but seriously: once Bon died the songs struggled to achieve so much as a single entendre.

Anyway, it almost feels like a relief to end this disc, doesn't it? And it could have been so much worse. Some of the acts I considered and dismissed include: Styx, The Carpenters, Donnie Iris, Max Webster, Ian Thomas, Greg Khin, even (choke) Journey.

Thank your lucky stars, dude.

Alright: now it's your turn. Awaiting your reply,

Your godfaddah.

Grade 9, Track 21

2011-06-14T19:46:00.002-04:00

"I Remember You," Frank Ifield

But this Slim Whitman performance of the same song -- for Andy Kaufman! -- is more worth your viewing time.

Grade 9, Tracks 19 & 20

2011-06-13T08:48:00.002-04:00

"Face The Day," The Angels; "Don't Let The Morning Come," Parchment

One person's sunshine and lollipop can be another's lament for the light of the early morning sun. You get two of the latter, because I'm still fond of them both.

Grade 9, Track 18

2011-06-11T09:54:00.001-04:00

"Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows," Lesley Gore

Heh, heeeeeegh . . . .

Grade 9, Track 17

2011-06-10T06:36:00.005-04:00

“Gettin' Nowhere Fast,” Jason & The Scorchers

Wup — here we are at the present. But it was a mixed tape of Jason & The Scorchers songs that got this loopy tradition going, back when you and your dad were bachelors, and the song seems to fit the motif.

Rockin' photo source: Collin Peterson

Grade 9, Track 16

2011-06-07T08:48:00.001-04:00

“Rock The Casbah,” The Clash

There is a sound that a band makes when its members can no longer stand the sight of each other. If the listener hasn't been a fan from the beginning, she could be forgiven for thinking it's possibly their best sound to date. It is tight and bright and catchy as hell, but it also lacks a certain looseness, a sense of play behind the work that was so evident at the very beginning.

This is that sound.

Grade 9, Track 17

2011-06-07T08:46:00.001-04:00

“Theme To The Mod Squad,” Earle Hagen

Earle Hagen's not-so-mod ditty has made me want to sprint ever since I was six years old.

Winnipeg, And The NHL: "Winning Doesn't Just Happen"

2011-06-01T11:40:00.013-04:00

Winnipeg finally gets another crack at playing host to an NHL franchise. I should be happy — nay, ecstatic — for the city of my youth, but I’m having trouble finding that note.

If there’s a city on this continent that ought to be the North American Hockey Capital, it’s Winnipeg. You won’t find a longer, colder winter this side of Iqaluit; the locals love the game, more than any other sport they play host to; and I believe the season ticket sales will likely show the citizens to be as loyal to their team as Toronto is to its pathetic Leafs — if we analyze the stats on a per capita basis.

Scout around and the tenor of most analysts is a “The glass is at least half-full!” I’m resolutely “half-empty” in my perspective, so here’s how I see the Winnipeg situation.

The NHL has not been kind to Winnipeg. When John Ziegler and Brian O’Neill finally opened the door for the WHA, and Winnipeg’s Jets, to enter the NHL, it was under the condition Winnipeg put three of its six best scorers up in a reclamation draft. This, coupled with some characteristically bone-headed managerial strategies, reduced Winnipeg to a farm team scraping for its next big break.

After two abysmal seasons — one a record-setter, of the sort that people strive to avoid — Winnipeg learned to perform respectably enough in the grand scheme of things. But in a division dominated by Calgary and Super-Edmonton, they never made it past the first round of play-offs. Once Gary Bettman followed Gretzky’s lead and dug for gold in the southern states, the writing was on the wall for Winnipeg.

Guy Vanderhaeghe once remarked about life on the prairies, “We have our wealthy citizens — but they’re not that wealthy.” Nowhere does this hold truer than in Winnipeg. Does the place really have more money flowing through it than it did 15 years ago? A betting man could make a persuasive case that the US greenback is down for the count bringing those recently-capped players' salaries within almost-affordable range, but even so, what’s Winnipeg got beyond an assured fan base to keep a team happy and well-fed? Hydro, life insurance and a furniture factory. Who am I missing?

Weirdly enough, for a guy who consciously chose to move to Toronto, I actually feel protective toward the city I was born in. I can remember a disgruntled quaterback for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers trying to get out of his contract so he could play the NFL complaining that, when it came to life in the city, “There are only so many times you can go to the zoo.” I happen to think the culture scene in Winnipeg is more vibrant and inviting than it is in, say, Toronto. But if you prefer to live in a city where the temperature doesn’t dip below freezing, and your idea of seeing the sights is a strip bar with more than five poles — and let’s face it, I’ve just described 99% of pro hockey players — then Winnipeg can be a tough sell. And I haven’t even mentioned the mosquitoes.

But hey: maybe I’m out to lunch on all this. Maybe those young guys from Atlanta are keen to play for a crowd that’s passionate about the game. Maybe this is a sign that Bettman’s rethink of league expansion is finally pointed in the right direction. Detroit's a city that's been on the ropes for decades, and yet it’s got a Stanley legacy — why not Winnipeg?

Here’s the great thing about being a genial pessimist: nothing makes me happier than being proven wrong.

Go, Winnipeg. Go.

Grade 9, Track15

2011-05-31T07:15:00.004-04:00

“Satisfaction (Can't Get No),” DEVO

DEVO was the first rock 'n' roll circus act to dazzle me. Long before I heard them sing a single note I first read about them — in a science fiction magazine profile, cracking wise and even somewhat presciently about the future. Their industrial suits and goggles, the tweaking of retro-kitsch into something that could be seen either as corny or repulsive, depending on the moment, was smarty-pants MAD magazine stuff that held more appeal for me than the blunter aesthetic of their other punk compatriots. Rumors that they weren't at all disinclined to mix it up with disgruntled audience members only heightened their mystique. Like Spike Jones before them, they were deadly serious about their joking around.

So is their perversion of the Rolling Stones' anthem the final word on the so-called counter-culture of the 60s gone mainstream? Is it a jazz approach to rock 'n' roll? Or is it just another act in the ongoing circus, producing infectious fun for all?

All of the above, I think. And I still dig it.

Grade 9, Track 14

2011-05-25T15:41:00.004-04:00

“Echo Beach,” Martha & The Muffins

Driving back from a soiree at Grand Beach the summer of 1980, sand in my sneakers and hair, Winnipeg's two pop radio stations were playing this song every ten minutes or so. Seriously — it'd fade out, there'd be one or two different songs, a commercial break, then . . . “I know it's out of fashion, and a trifle uncool . . . .”

Contrary to the opinion being sung, these Toronto hipsters unleashed a lethal one-two punch of cool and CanCon. The guy driving the car and stabbing at the radio buttons was not amused. I thought it was a bit much, too, but I didn't mind.

I can't help it — I'm a romantic fool.

Grade 9, Track 13

2011-05-24T21:50:00.008-04:00

Saints' Roller Rink had a blue, nearly plastic finish to their rink floor, and the wax had a distinctively pastel smell to it. The sound of roller bearings and rubber wheels was equally distinctive, as was the odor of spilled Coke and the drugstore perfume that 14-year-old girls resorted to.

But nothing was so distinctive or so gut-wrenching as the advice and dressing up (or down) that I received at the hands of J___. “Adidas track jacket, good. T-shirt, no. Ditch the shirt, keep the jacket. Push up those sleeves, give the girls a bit of forearm. And whattaya got the zipper up so high for? Show 'em your chest, for God's sake.”

J___ was a lad who had clocked in considerably more face-time with girls than any of the rest of us had, so I paid attention, followed every bit of his advice to the (absence of) T, then staggered back onto the rink with my track jacket unzipped to my navel, the better to let the air dry out the acne on my scrawny, hairless chest. I remember a shared clammy hand during a “couples only” skate, and little else, because what else was there to remember about these miserable affairs?

Except this song. Wow, was this ever a weird song. Everything else that pounded through the speakers was related directly to the adolescent libido . . . but this? I had no clue what this song was about, and I'm sure I skated around in that witless clockwise direction with my jaw hanging open, trying to figure it all out.

“Repetitive song, Dad,” says the younger. Yes. Yes, it is. And that's part of its spooky charm. I liked this song, not just because it distracted me from everything I wasn't as a “man” but because it actually seemed to take a perverse delight in that seemingly unbridgeable gap. For about three minutes I could forget this whole business of trying to make myself presentable to the Mysterious Other, and marvel instead at the Mysteriously Foreign Self that was clomping around with heavy feet on a sticky plastic floor.

Grade 9, Track 12

2011-05-21T17:30:00.005-04:00

"Theme to The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie" by Henry Mancini.

Ah, Henry: how was it you were able to convey the glamour of plush shag and chilled gin as the masses gathered in their threadbare living-room sets and cracked open another tepid Bud?

Grade 9, Track 11

2011-05-20T14:25:00.006-04:00

"Tightrope," Janelle Monae

No, it doesn't date back to 1979. But I was getting tired of listening to guys who figure they're the cock of the walk, and I figured you might be too.

There's something about a woman in black suit, no? Something a bit Blade Runnery, only happy. Ms. Monae has gone and made the best case of them all for the Detroit Bailout.

Grade 9, Tracks 9 & 10: Disco Sucks! (Except When It Doesn't)

2011-05-19T12:15:00.009-04:00

“Miss You,” Rolling Stones
“Stayin’ Alive,” The Bee Gees

Midway through a ringette tournament, between games, I was sipping arena coffee and having one of those passing-the-time conversations with the parents of another player. The dad and I were mulling over how the rock ‘n’ roll scene had, like most forms of entertainment, morphed into an either/or situation where the acts were either entertainment corporations or cottage industries. Corporations don’t mess with The Colonel’s Secret Recipe that got them there, while the cottage industry types continually reformat and regenerate until the road finally wears them down. He and I considered the big names who’d become near-parodies of themselves, performing Greatest Hits concerts to sold-out arenas filled with kids and their shrieking grandparents: KISS, AC/DC, Alice Cooper, The Rolling Stones....

At this point his wife made a face and said, “The Rolling Stones, wow, I dunno: there’s definitely something creepy about those guys.” Her hubby and I glanced at her, our conversation momentarily coming to a full stop. To my mind, the entire band might as well dress and perform like addled pirates, given the extent to which their “creepy” factor has been replaced with camp. But somewhere in this woman’s psyche was a profoundly unhappy memory — probably courtesy of a cute but cretinous little shit who failed high school shop class — that haunts her decades later.

Her opinion was so emotionally genuine it seemed prurient to press her on it, so I left it alone. But as I mulled it over, it occurred to me that if any entertainment corporation has willingly messed with The Colonel’s Secret Recipe, it’s been the Stones. And nowhere is this willingness more apparent than in the 70s, when they dutifully trotted out several disco tunes that, bizarrely enough, don’t sound at all like they were dutifully trotted out.

How is it possible? The back-beat for “Emotional Rescue” and “Miss You” is so tightly strapped down, it actually sounds like Charlie Watts managed to add another button further up the collar of his dress shirt. Ronnie Wood gets his sole moment in the spotlight during “Emotional Rescue” and chews up the scenery for all he’s worth, while Keef slouches off for an extended smoke break (I’m convinced he can actually be heard sneering at Mick and Ronnie’s fannying about during the saxophone solo). For “Miss You,” Richards snuffs the butt and wearily reclaims his guitar, which is why I chose this song, and not the former, even though “Emotional Rescue” is the creepier of the two songs.

But they are both creepy songs, without question. As closely as they adhere to the rigid form of white disco, à la the Bee Gees, they also seem to subtly mock it: Mick by grotesquely aping the freaky white boy falsetto, Keef by strumming so far behind the back-beat it sounds like he’s already defying gravity in the coconut trees of Tortuga. Then there’s the lyrical business of laying claim to a reluctant lover. There’s none of the expected, “Aren’t we all just having a time?” dream-building going on. Nor is anyone getting “wooed” here; “enchanted,” maybe, if only by the dark specter of a Casanova who’s solely in love with himself. These songs are both celebrations of a very particular self-acknowledged egoism. The listener either gets with the program, or leaves the floor.

ANYWAY. The Bee Gees set the template for white disco; the Stones deliberately twisted it with their uniquely dark warp and woof. You get both — in reverse order: because the Bee Gees’ template is the generous one — the one people are still riffing off.

Prayer and Parable: Stories by Paul Maliszewski

2011-05-17T21:01:00.000-04:00

Prayer and Parable: Stories by Paul Maliszewski

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having followed Paul Maliszewski’s estimable forays as a critic and journalist-essayist, I was excited to explore his just-published collection of short fiction, Prayer and Parable. Readers already know Paul as hip and super-smart, a keen observer and a rigorous writer who resists the lure of pat summary and probes instead for the pertinent detail that brings a singular light to his chosen subject matter.

No surprise, then, that his fiction exhibits the same precision of attention. Paul’s style is lean and self-aware, without being show-offy and distancing. The settings of his “prayers and parables” range from the concrete “real” to the genuinely surreal, yet I found that every story conjured an almost dreamlike state for me, a place of quiet unease. Whether he’s exploring the jutting facets of social awkwardness in a seemingly civil setting, or the emotional confusion that comes with recognizing the fragility of life, Paul’s stories do indeed have an invocational quality to them that left me with the same sense of the sacred on display that I get at the better art galleries. While the panicking publishing industry generates ever-larger catalogues of lurid hyperbole, this book quietly slips in as a welcome gift of sane, devotional focus.

View all my reviews

Grade 9, Track 8

2011-05-13T15:31:00.002-04:00

“Neon Knights,” Black Sabbath

It could be persuasively argued that the Ozzy years gave Sab its staying power in the hearts and ringing ears of the public. But I have to admit I was unabashedly chuffed by the musical rearrangement Ronnie James Dio brought to the party, back in '79. Dio's wordplay sounded like Robert E. Howard had listened to Bob Dylan and decided the future was in Heavy Metal. Throw on a satin shirt with droopy sleeves, inject a little enthusiasm into that powerhouse voice, and you've got quite an engine to hook your music to. The band seems chuffed as well, if the pace and polish of the song is any indication. Note: this was the first song on the disc to get the girls' toes tapping.

RIP, Ronnie James Dio.

Welcome To Grade 9, Track 7

2011-05-09T08:04:00.004-04:00

“The Zoo,” Scorpions

I'm not much of a cross-country skier, but I do own a pair — bought from the local thrift store. The last time I strapped them on (two winters back) I noticed they were, “Made In West Germany.”

Wild, but true: the world I grew up in had two Germanys, West and East, and Berlin, their former capital, was similarly divided — by a formidable wall and countless stories of desperate people who tried and mostly failed to cross it. The place was lousy with troops and nukes from the US and USSR, waiting to flame the place like yesterday's newspaper. My grade 9 classmates were convinced World War III would start right there.

I'd read John LeCarre novels in my bedroom, trying to imagine this place I'd never seen. And I'd groove to this song by the West German band Scorpions, which described (I thought) a strip of decadent nightclubs somewhere in West Berlin. Today I discover it's really about a strip of decadent nightclubs in New York City — proving yet again that we each have our uniquely foreign muses.

"Forbidden Zone" Excerpt

2011-05-06T09:51:00.002-04:00

Look who traveled to Japan's nuclear ghost-towns, and lived to write about it:

William T. Vollmann, eh? There's something about the guy (his prolificity and perspicacity, for starters) that I find admirable/intimidating/frightening.

Welcome To Grade 9, Track 6

2011-05-06T07:41:00.003-04:00

“Marseille,” The Angels

Back in the 90s I got minorly hooked on the UltraLounge series, which served up platters of musical cheese from the late-50s, early-60s — tunes my parents recalled with a cringe. One of the more respectable collections was Wild, Cool & Swingin', which featured such semi-respectable hip-cats as Bobby Darin, Peggy Lee, Nat King Cole along with a couple of members from the Rat Pack. “Sinatra looms large over this collection,” read the liner notes, addressing the elephant in the room who clearly did NOT want to be associated with this rabble, “even in his absence.”

Similarly, you could argue that AC/DC looms large over this collection. In 79-80 there was no escaping their one-two punch of Highway To Hell and Back In Black. Thirty years' on, it seems you can't drop a puck or let the daycare out for the weekend without hearing the title tracks of the Mutt Lange albums. So no (more) AC/DC from me.

You'll get their touring compatriots instead. The Angels were Aussie, and appear to have been on good terms with the tiny terrors. As with Acca-Dacca, they frequently defaulted to a simplified Chuck Berry riff. But, college lads that they were, they couldn't help dressing it up just a tad. Thus singer Doc Neeson garnishes his pining for France's own Sin City with a little pidgin French, directed toward an unsuspecting “Mademoiselle” on the promenade. It slays me every time I hear it — rather like Mrs. Miller, that way.

Welcome To Grade 9, Track 5

2011-05-05T06:55:00.004-04:00

“And The Cradle Will Rock,” Van Halen

Bearing no relation whatsoever to Orson Welles' notorious socialist play of the Dirty Thirties, this tune is about a hoser deadbeat, whom the spandex-clad David Lee Roth exhorts to, “Rock on.” Dumb, dumb song. But back in Grade 9 we fellas used to crack each other up by parroting his mock-stern question during the song's bridge: “Have you seen Junior's graaaaades?”

Yep. That's all it took to get a larf out of yer chums, back in 1980. But back then we used to find all sorts of inexplicable stuff funny. Dan Ackroyd “impersonating” Jimmy Carter; a play-doh castrati getting squished by “Mr. Hand,” etc., ad nauseum. Simpler times, for simpler minds.

Welcome To Grade 9, Track 4

2011-05-04T09:14:00.004-04:00

“Hair Of The Dog,” Nazareth

Ah, but the Scots have all the righteous brawling songs.

True story: the younger daughter, while listening to this song, commented, “Girls don't get much of a break, do they, Dad?”

“How do you mean, sweetie?”

“Well, if you want to call someone something bad, it's usually goes back to a girl, even if it's a guy. Like, 'Son of a bitch' or 'bastard.'”

Sad but true. On the other side of that token, however, the surest way to wound a fella is to deride his so-called “manhood.” The emotional frailty that lurks behind that comical flap of skin couldn't possibly be overstated.

A lesson for a little later, perhaps.

Welcome To Grade 9, Track 3

2011-05-03T08:57:00.003-04:00

“Raise A Little Hell,” Trooper

I hate this song.

In my Grade 9 class there were two music options: Band or Guitar Band. If you couldn't muster the chops to play “Mary Had A Little Lamb” on plastic recorder, you were consigned to Guitar Band.

The only way to deal with a room filled with stoners, burnouts and goons of both sexes was to concede to their musical taste. Once he got the class settled enough, Mr. P__ cued up Thick As Thieves at top volume. The first power chord chimed, and 30 pairs of eyes squinted at their music stands in an attempt to discern what to do next. “People, it's 'A' — right? Remember 'A'? Pointer finger across the three center strings? That's your basic 'A' chord. Basic, because it's easy to remember . . . .” etc.

I witnessed this spectacle the first time I tiptoed out of Band class for a washroom break. I snickered and crept on. Little did I know this song was destined to be a year-long project for the band, so that by Spring a group of 30 or so slackers with cheap acoustic guitars could assemble for their begrudging parents and strum along to the record “in concert.”

“Raise A Little Hell,” echoing down a polished school hallway every day of the week for a year? Even a 14-year-old kid gets weary of that.

Welcome to grade 9.

Welcome To Grade 9, Track 2

2011-05-02T09:44:00.004-04:00

“My Mistake,” The Kingbees

I'm an easy mark for rockabilly revivalists — Stray Cats, The Blasters, and most recently Nick Curran have all coaxed a few “hard-earned bucks”* from my wallet over the years. I believe that all began in 1980, with this snappy single penned by Jamie James (born in Toronto, making this the first bit of CanCon on this disc).

*Dave Alvin would close a Blasters' concert by thanking the crowd, “For comin' out and spending your hard-earned bucks.” Classy guy.

Next song...

Grade 9 Summer Soundtrack, Track #1

2011-04-30T06:58:00.007-04:00

“Downtown,” Mrs. Miller

Best to kick off with a larf, I always say, and this catastrophic recasting of Petula Clark's cheesy crowd-pleaser always gets me giggling.

Someone from Winnipeg must have requested it from the local pop station, because in 1979 Mrs. Miller was experiencing something of a resurgence, and “Downtown” was all the rage on morning shows. It had been recorded over a decade earlier, and the DJs were now selling the urban myth that had grown like mold around the track: that this was a vanity project gone monstrously awry. It seems, at least from this article, that although Mrs. Miller had dabbled a bit with self-produced records, this was most definitely not that.

In fact, given the illustrious career that followed this release (Ed Sullivan, fer crying out loud!), there is no question that at some point Mrs. Miller was very much in on the joke. Did she know it from the get-go? Listen, and decide for yourself.

Next song...

This Year's Summer Soundtrack: This Is Me In Grade Nine

2011-04-29T10:21:00.006-04:00

To my godson —

Well, here you have it: this year's summer soundtrack. I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel, I know. I can't imagine there are too many tracks here that you're likely to enjoy. Heck, I've included one or two tracks that even I no longer enjoy. But it's been, what, seven or eight years of this? You're 17, dude! Time for you to send me a mixed CD.

But enough of the faux apologies — let's rock 'n' roll. As the Barenaked Ladies once sang, "This is me in grade nine."

First song...

Music Shorts

2011-04-28T11:19:00.012-04:00

The very first CD I ever bought was Robbie Robertson's self-titled solo album.

Actually, to tell the truth, I can't remember the first CD I purchased, but this could have been it. When I went shopping for stereo components there were three CDs in constant rotation at every store I visited, and each CD had exactly one song that received the “nudge it to 11” treatment, the better to illustrate the newfangled medium's bootstrap lows and crystalline highs: Sting, Nothing Like The Sun (“Englishman In New York”); Tracy Chapman (“Fast Car”); Robbie Robertson (“Somewhere Down The Crazy River”). I bought all three.

Anyway, I recently pulled out Robertson's old disc and gave it another spin. Although Robertson's swanning-about in “Somewhere Down The Crazy River” retains its off-kilter charm, I don't think the rest of the album has dated very well. More often than not, I found the other songs irksome with strung-together cliches and non-sequiturs.

Showdown at Big Sky
Darkness at high noon
Kiss tomorrow goodbye
That day may be soon

Exactly. Robertson has a catchy way of bending a guitar string and getting the sound he wants for the song he's built, but the album as a whole doesn't achieve much depth of perception.

Last month's How To Become Clairvoyant improves on that, by quite some. It's a confessional, along the lines of James Taylor, bordering on Jackson Browne. Musically, it's as finely crafted and highly polished as his previous solo albums. I'm not placing any bets on how well the album is likely to age, because I don't care: it's plenty good enough for right now. (Burgeoning musicians will definitely want to give the bonus tracks a spin, to confirm the plainest truth known to the pros: even adepts like Robertson and his partner-in-crime Eric Clapton approach the most intricately layered song with a super-simple acoustic lay-down first.)

Bruce Cockburn does what he does on Small Source Of Comfort. The new album continues to feed the sense that things are wrapping themselves up, if not necessarily on a global scale, certainly on a personal one for the aging singer. Nearly half the songs are instrumental, suggesting they may be communicating something more profound than the frustrated pleas of his lyrics.

Finally, ever since my uncle came home one Christmas with a Kurtzweil synthesizer for the kiddies to play around with, I've been a sucker for spacey dance tracks. Cut/Copy expands the tradition of Human League-type digital noodling to pleasing effect; anyone with happy memories of pretty young depressed things dressing up in black and getting a few pallid jollies in clubs that stuck with Depeche Mode, Erasure and Soft Cell should get a big kick out of Zonoscope.

I can't for the life of me recall exactly how I stumbled across Charanjit Singh's Synthesizing: Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat, but it really is quite the remarkable artifact. Recorded in 1982 (much of it in a single take) this album is one of those stunning moments when lightning strikes and leaves a charge that reverberates decades later. More than a curiosity, it is actually something of a game-changer, with its catchy Hindustani worldbeats and synthesizer manipulation. Widely available for pennies a glass at the usual legal download sites, and highly recommended.

Cage Match! Paul Simon vs. David Byrne!!

2011-04-27T08:20:00.007-04:00

I've been listening to So Beautiful or So What, Paul Simon's latest CD, and thinking, “This is absolutely brilliant. But do people care?”

The question is a hold-over from a snide discussion I initiated at a party, back when Graceland was all the rage. I was single at the time, and noted that my married friends all had and loved and played the album at soirées like the one I was at. Single hipsters like myself, on the other hand, preferred the stylings of David Byrne, who was just as fond of setting free-association lyrics to “worldbeat” textures. Both men had voices that communicated a forced innocence, but Byrne's was so patently false it was actually menacing — and sexy. “Menacing” and “sexy” were qualities a single young guy aspired to; Simon, on the other hand, was unabashedly sweet.

A quarter-century later, I have to admit that Graceland has probably edged out Stop Making Sense in my rotating playlist. It's also worth noting that I've been married for 17 of those years. So does Simon garner any of the breathless reverence that Byrne still does?

Nope. But it's only a matter of another week or two before So Beautiful or So What catches up to and supersedes Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

Jim Fusilli ponders Simon's legacy issue, here.

Mr. Hockey

2011-04-20T09:00:00.005-04:00

My wheezy old laptop from '98 finally fell apart. That was my "composition" computer. I didn't hook it up to the internet; I just used it for word processing, and that was it. I haven't yet replaced it, so ... you get a picture of Gordie Howe, circa 2001, courtesy of GQ and my scanner. Enlarge and enjoy.

Speaking of hockey, I'm having trouble enjoying the first round of playoffs. The teams I really want to see play each other have another round or two to go, and in some cases they're looking like they might not have it in them to get that far (I'm talking about you, Vancouver).

Leadership You Can Trust — To #*@% You Up

2011-04-13T09:55:00.006-04:00

I can't quite shake the feeling that if I don't engage in last night's Leader's Debate, I'm not engaging in my country's political culture. But really, what was there for a viewer to engage in? The three stooges in Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition leveled their accusations against the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister serenely shrugged and said, They're wrong. I gave 'em exactly what they asked for, but they just want to call another election. Those three sad souls, oh me oh my, could only gawp in disbelief and repeat platforms that haven't exactly been selling themselves.

Any elementary school teacher could tell you exactly what's going on here. There isn't a classroom that isn't blessed with the presence of one smug, supercilious little prick (equal opportunists should feel free to substitute the female anatomical counterpart) who wheedles and whines, bullies and cajoles, threatens and presumes, pokes, pinches and gropes anyone of either gender within reach, and in general behaves execrably — in the playground. Back in class, should one of the victims be foolish enough to raise the issue with the teacher, said cretin will don the most innocent look imaginable, and say the same thing over and over again: that's not at all what happened. If you'll just review the facts, you'll see that I'm the one being put-upon here. It's just that nobody likes me because I'm the only one in class who's nice all the time. Everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, wants to string this kid up from the highest limb. At the end of the day, however, most will just give this stinker a very wide berth and manufacture what fun they can from the classroom resources he can't be bothered with.

If there's a weakness in my metaphor, it's in portraying the Opposition as victims. Although there were moments when I felt some pity toward the physically infirm Jack Layton, for the most part the only thing these jokers fell victim to was their incapacity to engage — the Prime Minister and his pathological evasions, or the voters and their very real desire not to let any one of these asshats call all the shots on Parliament Hill. If we have to deal with the people we're given, then we'll accept a minority government, thank you.

But we never want to see the “Who? Me?” kid get his way.

Anniversaries, Stark & Beautiful

2011-04-08T06:52:00.006-04:00

I've lost track of who's responsible, but someone tweeted, "Wanna feel old? Kurt Cobain died 17 yrs ago."

Actually, if I ever want to feel old, I'll just take one of my daughters for a ride in the car. The conversation usually goes like this: "Hey, Dad: remember that time you took me to the store, and I did this, and you said that, and I said this? Remember that?"

You lost me at "store," sweetie.

Cobain I remember, of course. The anniversary of his suicide is something I take note of as well -- because he shot himself just a few days before I got married. Now, whenever someone makes a comment like the one that kicked off this post, I think, "That's right! Book the restaurant, buy the flowers, etc." Nasty, perhaps, but true.

Babies were born on March 8, 2011 and on September 11, 2001, for that matter -- any day of infamy you care to name. So it goes. The dire and the delightful coexist, and seemingly require us to remember.

I just want to make sure I don't neglect delight.

Steeping, Composting, What-Have-You

2011-04-07T11:43:00.002-04:00

I've been scrambling after loose threads lately, hoping to pull them together for one of my rare Unified Field Theory posts. One thread that keeps showing up is movie-biz guru Robert McKee, whose reiterations of Aristotle's Poetics continue to surface in some of the most unexpected venues. This surprises me, because I wondered if Charlie Kaufman hadn't pulled a George Lucas with the popular lecture-man. When someone takes hold of a teacher so boldly (and, one could argue in both cases, so badly) as Lucas did with Joseph Campbell and Kaufman did with McKee, other disciples of the ubiquitous lecture-man suddenly go into hiding, and claim other influences. At the moment, however, McKee remains very much in the various iterations of the written word.

Here's a link to an interesting mull-over the art and business of story telling, which touches on McKee, by the once-prolific Michael Blowhard. Philip Lopate eruditely tackles the thorny issue of adaptation here. Reading Lopate's thoughts, it struck me that such a subtle cross-pollination has been occurring, not just between the genres of novels and movies, but between many other platforms as well, including . . . video games. Here is some excellent pondering by Michael Mirasol (one of Ebert's "far-flung correspondents") on the worthy influence of video game artistry.

And, finally, author Steven Pressfield is an outspoken fan of McKee. The two have reciprocated blurbage -- McKee wrote the forward for Pressfield's War Of Art, a book which underwhelmed me five years ago, but has stuck in my craw discomfitingly enough to force me to rethink my original opinion. I still have difficulties with reading it, but Sunni Brown's visual summaries of the book cut through a heap of that. They're well worth a closer look -- go here, and give it some thought of your own. If you feel like posting your reactions, hit the "comments" below.

Canada! How Does It Work?

2011-04-02T10:17:00.004-04:00

I've linked to it on my The Facebook page, but it bears a link here as well. Word for word, Michelle Dean gives the most incisive — and entertaining — survey and analysis of the current Canadian political quagmire, for The Awl, here.

Dean quite properly leads with this photo of our penultimate Conservative Prime Minister, Kim Campbell:

Nick Lowe, Labour of Lust

2011-03-29T06:30:00.005-04:00

I was a little surprised at the “hosannas” that greeted the recent re-release of Nick Lowe's Jesus of Cool. I thought it was a tight album, acerbic in the same manner, if not quite as memorably, as his studio compatriot Elvis Costello. The 2008 CD kept the cheeky gatefold intact, and nearly doubled the original album length with extra tracks, few of which sounded like filler. But it took several plays before it made me a nominal believer. I was left with the impression that to really dig this album, the listener probably had to be there when it first came out. And 1978 was juuuuuust a little too early for me.

This year's re-release of Labour of Lust, on the other hand, I can get quite excited about — because I was there, doncha know. Lowe's acidic wit still burns, but Labour's production has a little more shine than Jesus did. It's got bounce and intelligence, but doesn't wear the latter so baldly as to distract from the former — the appropriate balance for any labour of lust, I should think.

Labour of Lust is this year's spring-cleaning soundtrack.

Update: I'm guessing Josh Hurst is a decade or two younger than I, but when it comes to Jesus Of Cool, Hurst is a True Believer. His thoughts on Lowe's ouevre are worth reading. So is his take on Labour of Lust.

Anton Corbijn's The American

2011-03-23T12:42:00.015-04:00

Whenever a big-bucks high-profile photographer moves to the director's chair, I'm game to give him some time. At the very least, the movie is likely to be a treat to look at, if not enter into.

Anton Corbijn's The American is quite the treat, starting with the retro movie poster.

Note the black/orange contrast: Hollywood seems to have set the blue/red scale to 10, for some reason. I suspect Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita set the standard. In any case, Corbijn nudges the blue/red scale to 11. And it actually works. Glamor is the business of articulating the unattainable, and heightening its allure via artfully composed contrasts. Corbijn's palette imbues the (chiefly Roman) locales with heightened cool exoticism. To say nothing of eroticism. Since George Clooney is already on board with Irina Björklund . . .

. . . and Thekia Reuten . . .

. . . and Violante Placido . . .

. . . what more needs to be said?

Oh. Story. Right.

The American is a rehash of the pro-assassin-losing-his-touch motif, and exhausts its capacity for surprise early in the film. Corbijn sets up the trade of assassin/arms dealer as a glamor profession, a premise which, if taken strictly at face value, is laughable (and was played for laughs, brilliantly, in The Matador). However, previous arty films have equated photography with murder, a metaphor well worth stretching in the viewing of this movie.

Glamor photographers and their models engage in a pointedly erotic mutual tease. Yet it is essential they both maintain a cool distance if the glamor is to remain intact. Spoiling any of it with the messy intimacies of, say, a head cold or flatulence or, God forbid, unexpected feelings of compassion for The Other is ruinous for a glamor photographer (well . . . most of 'em, anyway. Not everyone can be Richard Avedon). Can a photographer surrounded by gorgeous women permit himself to be vulnerable and intimate with any of them without throwing his entire game?

That's really as much as needs to be said about this flick, but since I raised the specter of sexual orientation in yesterday's posting, I might as well carry on and declare that, on the Kinsey Scale of Sexuality, The American is lodged resolutely in the Hetero side. Corbijn happily indulges in luscious nude scenes and has a European's lingering appreciation for the rolling enticements of a muscular derrière (which seems to catch the hetero woman's gaze, as well, I'd say).

Years ago, after I'd seen the first Mission: Impossible movie, my wife asked me what I thought. I said, “The movie is a mess that doesn't make a lick of sense. But when it was over, I felt like sprinting down European alleys.” After watching The American, I felt like taking a seat at a European café, ordering a strong Americano, then sitting back and scanning the crowds for the next potential assassin.

Odds are pretty good I'll be watching this more than once.

Some Brief, Reactionary Thoughts On 300 — Because That's All The Film Merits

2011-03-22T10:54:00.005-04:00

I watched Zack Snyder's 300 last night — my first, and (God willing) only, time. If the blogosphere is any indication, 300 has usurped Ridley Scott's Gladiator as the alpha-male-wannabe's movie of choice. I'd say I was equally entertained by both flicks — which is to say, not very. Back when I read the comic book it had never struck me as such a thin retelling of Rob Roy (wp). But there it is.

Alright: on to the ledger. On the minus side: yak, yak, yak/hack, hack hack; humorless cartoon hijinx, self-regarding seriousness way off the charts.

On the plus side: loved the digital texture(!), as well as much of the soundtrack; the script is an endless cornucopia of unintended giggles. And gay men must LOVE this film! Man, this film is gayer than Socrates on a bender in Lesbos! Back up that dump truck, Zack; we'll take those ironies right here!

Marginalia

2011-03-18T08:21:00.006-04:00

Whenever I had a university paper due, the library books I reached for were the ones that had been re-bound. The books were uniformly ugly: the re-binding was frequently lime green. The information within was often dated, the pages were leathery from overuse, and it was clear the next step for these resource materials was going to be the pulper. So why the preference? One word: marginalia.

Man, with some of those old books, the essays practically wrote themselves! Key texts were underlined (sometimes highlighted, which annoyed me with its visually jarring colors), and arguments for and against were outlined in the formerly white spaces on either side of the print, often with reference to other works I could look up and include. The feckless and inexperienced preferred newer books to these stinky old things. But at the end or early dawning of the day, who needed Cliff's Notes or even an essay-writing service when these troves were so freely available?

My own contributions to marginalia, on the other hand, should be ignored. Inspired by what I saw, I tried my hand at commentary. After a year or so, when I reread what I'd scrawled (in pen!) I was shamed in realizing what a pretentious twit I'd become. The marginalia promptly stopped.

Anyhow, teh interwebz is abuzz with the seemingly endangered art of marginalia. Will digital deprive us of this pleasure, this artform? Kevin Charles Redmon compiles a number of links exploring the issue, and contributes a few thoughts of his own. But so far, my favorite essay comes from Victor LaValle, who brings a ballsy disregard for the book as totem, over here. Perhaps the time to again uncap my pen has finally arrived.

Marginalia, David Foster Wallace-style.

Two Stars? Really?

2011-03-17T07:31:00.007-04:00

Allen Barra beats the drum for the written work of Barry Gifford, over here. Barra begs readers not to associate Gifford too closely with the films of David Lynch (although the two clearly enjoy collaborating). Matt Dillon's City Of Ghosts (IMDB) is probably closer to Gifford's literary mark, if you'd rather see a movie than read a book.

Some years back I read Port Tropique (A), and loved it. I reached next for The Sinaloa Story (A), and when I finished that I figured I'd about finished with Gifford, too. Some of the "snapshots" within those pages failed to catch my interest; others beguiled, and begged for further exposure, which Gifford resolutely denied. I would call the first book "accomplished" and the second "experimental" -- a judgment Barra strains to refute. Barra is also keen on The Cavalry Charges, so I figured I'd give Gifford another chance.

My review of it is here. Two stars strikes me as a bit harsh, but the javascript prompt for three stars is "I liked it" while two indicates "It was okay," which is pretty much what I thought when I'd finished the book. If nothing else, The Cavalry Charges served to remind me that the real excitement in a writer's life, even one as internationally fêted as Gifford, occurs on the page.

Another D&D Link

2011-03-17T07:18:00.002-04:00

By Grabthar's hammer, there must be something in the water. I hesitate to introduce D&D to my daughters, although I'm not at all sure of my reasons. I suspect it's mostly because, La-Z-Boy dad that I am, I couldn't be bothered to help them sort out the intricacies of gameplay. Besides, gameplay is the sort of thing they ought to be dishing out, and not some basement-bound fella on the far end of the spectrum.

The Financial Lives Of The Poets by Jess Walter

2011-03-10T09:37:00.001-05:00

The big-picture decline of my newspaper is no different than the decline of newspapers in most towns. Specifically, the time line looks like this:

1950s: TV arrives and it turns out that most people prefer having their news delivered by a guy on TV with molded plastic hair, smoking a cigarette.

1960s: Evolution and improved diet cause the first father in history to give up reading the paper on the toilet . . . much like the first fish that walked on land.

1970s: Literacy and newspapers reach their peak just as, ironically, actual reading begins to decline. (Side note: the guy reading the TV news quits smoking on air.)

1980s: Cable TV arrives and steals ad dollars from newspapers; soon entire channels are devoted to 24-hours-a-day news with three main components: (1) stories about celebrities, (2) police chases filmed from helicopters and (3) angry political hacks yelling at one another.

1990s: The Internet arrives, stealing even more advertising and compelling the last reader under forty to cancel his daily newspaper subscription so he can devote more time to masturbating to online porn.

2000s: eBay and craigslist combine to kill off classified advertising and car and house listings, which turn out to have been the financial backbone of newspapers. The recession crushes display advertisers, coolly finishing the job.

Present: After a long period of newspaper panic, publishers do increasingly stupid things to drive away what readers they once had, speeding up their impending death, which is now estimated to be somewhere around 2015.

Snippet from The Financial Lives Of The Poets, by Jess Walter. My review can be read here.

You Can Draw -- And Probably Better Than Roger Ebert Can

2011-03-09T07:55:00.004-05:00

"I began to haunt art supply stores, as if somehow one could purchase what one needed to be an artist. I loved the smell of the paints and papers, the chalks and wooden easels."

Here is an Ebert post I've been mulling over. It brought to mind the first time I joined my wife on one of her working trips to Europe. The first morning in Germany I took my coffee and journal out onto the balcony of our apartment, which offered a spectacular view of the Black Forest. There was no way I could write about it, so I took my black Uni-Ball pen and sketched what I saw. Because I've always preferred blank paper to lined, the page practically invited the activity.

I liked ... no, I'll be honest: I loved what I drew. It was rudimentary, and certainly wouldn't win me any awards. But just looking at those jagged lines immediately evoked a much larger sense of what I was taking in than any of the subsequent photos I snapped. For the rest of the trip I kept the journal close, taking it out at cafes and pretty much following the advice Annette Goodheart gave to Roger: draw in ink, don't erase.

If I ever get a scanner, I'll underwhelm you with some examples. In the meantime, I believe I'll reapply Ms. Goodheart's advice to my life and start sketching again. You should, too. It's what we've been hardwired to do.

Dungeons & Dragons, Part The Second

2011-03-09T07:40:00.005-05:00

Although I'm bitter at being scooped by Ethan Gilsdorf, it behooves me to link to his piece on mid-life campaigners. He admits that nostalgia is a crucial motivating factor, but uncovers a few others that hadn't occurred to me, including:

"Gamers are married, making babies. They are encouraging their kids to discard their Xbox consoles in favor of the communal storytelling experience that is the cornerstone of D&D."

More anon.

Dungeons & Dragons, Part The First

2011-03-02T06:30:00.008-05:00

“We’ve got a campaign going on in Ty’s* basement. Care to join us?”

Thus began, in the summer of ’80, my exceedingly brief history with Dungeons & Dragons. I was 15 years old, and getting ready to spend a few weeks at my aunt and uncle’s farm, where my activities would be chiefly devoted to practical concerns. A summer afternoon in a friend’s basement playing this game with the weird name seemed like a good stepping-off point.

Ron, the friend who made the invite, was a Tolkien buff who made my enthusiasm for Lord Of The Rings look like the superficial acquaintance it was. The basement “campaign room” was standard-issue 70s rec room: ceiling-mounted flourescent lighting, inexpensive paneling on the walls, shag rug, a beaten-up couch set and a stocked bar we were too mindful to abuse. Ty was “Dungeon Master” and spread his charts and sheets on the coffee table, which he sequestered to himself so that we couldn’t cheat.

As the graph paper and bizarrely-shaped die were produced, Ty explained the temporary character I was going to play. He might as well have spoken Japanese — or Elvish — the way he droned on. “You’ll catch on as you play,” he said.

It took a while. Ron showed me the map he'd drawn of the dungeon we were in. There seemed to be a lot of white space. “This is as far as we've got,” he said, pointing to a square. Earlier in the campaign he and some others had encountered and fought orcs, a gang of bandits, and some goblins. “Right now we're in a large room where the only item of consequence is a large tapestry hanging on the eastern wall.” He looked at Ty. “Can we remove the tapestry? Roll it up and take it with us?”

Ty shook his head. “You cannot.”

Ron asked about a few other techniques, including casting a spell of some sort. Ty wasn't budging on the tapestry. Ron huffed. “Alright, try this: with my lance, I gently lift the southeast corner of the tapestry and peer behind it.”

“You see a brick wall.”

“Is there a door, or some hidden panel?”

“All you see is a brick wall.”

“Ahm . . . have I got enough magic left to check for enchantments?”

“Yep.”

“Okay, then.”

“Still a brick wall.”

“Are you serious? What happens if I scratch the tapestry with the point of my lance?”

“Sorry, did you say you slash the tapestry?”

Ron's eyes lit up. “Is this a prompt?”

Ty retreated. “Clarification. I'm just asking.”

Ron leaned forward. “I slash the tapestry!” He made a sweeping motion with his hands.

Ty snickered. “A green, viscous ooze pours out of the slash, covering you and your party and killing you. Your campaign is over.”

This was when the many-sided die finally came into play, to be thrown at Ty the Dungeon Master, who quickly retreated behind the bar.

When tempers finally cooled, another campaign was initiated. The first thing our fictional band encountered was a group of traveling merchants. Once again, the lengthy Q&A. Once again, we might as well have encountered another brick wall. The way I understood it, Ty was a would-be novelist, hoping we'd suss out the plot as we snooped around his setting. To my mind, the obvious encounters in which a central or even secondary character might gain illumination were nothing more than cruel cyphers designed to frustrate players. I said so to my friend as we walked home for supper.

“Well, Ty is a particularly opaque Dungeon Master,” he said. “Ideally we'd have someone a little more generous with his detailing and characterization, like Kent.” Alas, Kent's summer with the Air Cadets had already begun, so the D&D bug never took hold of me.

Alright, now take a look at this:

That is a screen from “Wizard & Princess,” one of the earliest Graphic Adventure Games. See the command prompt, and the game response? That's just one example of the moribund stasis these games frequently lapsed into. If you weren't part of a discussion group — which, in this the early age of the telephone modem, would physically gather at the vendors that rented out these games — the odds that you'd ever see these games through to their designed completion were stacked against you. Although I finished one or two of the later, more user-friendly (read: “so simple an addled chimp could do it”) games, I never had the prerequisite patience to engage in the larger, ostensibly more rewarding graphic adventure games.**

No surprise, really, that these games were more robustly enjoyed by my friends who had devoted themselves to the intricacies of D&D. After all, there was something of value in that tapestry, or behind it, or somehow or other related to it. If we'd only had the patience and the persistence and the correct variation of inquiry we might have discovered just what that was . . . .

Richard Moss entertainingly unspools the quarter-century history of the graphic adventure game, which he reckons has all but concluded — or evolved to a superior format, depending on your point of view — with the advent of episodic games.

*All names have been changed, to protect the guilty.
**Including, most recently, Grim Fandango.

The Pokemon Card Game, As Hacked By Tots

2011-02-24T10:50:00.008-05:00

For several years running the girls conducted an ongoing game with the few dozen Pokemon cards they’d collected. The rules were clear to them (and created independently of the existing corporate rule structure) but confusing to me. The game seemed to involve courtship and marriage, and prolonged bouts of mischief — occasionally violent, always comic — conducted between clans of indeterminate character. Lengthy exchanges of dialog between cards was the norm. As stories developed, the girls would quibble over specific traits, but once the matter was settled, it remained settled.

As I watched the proceedings, two things struck me. First of all I was in awe at the voice and depth of character the girls would endow individual cards, which were little more than colorful cartoons on a small piece of cardboard.

Secondly, after witnessing them concoct their game and its world more or less on their own (they'd only seen one or two episodes of the television series, which failed to sustain their interest), I had to wonder if role-playing-games weren’t an innate instinct. As with many of the standardized games they played and enjoyed, cards were traded (via marriage, etc.) or lost (disease and violent death), but it wasn't enough just to play a variation on Old Maid: following an exchange the different characters would, at length, either lament or express relief at the outcome. In fact, the dialog between the characters (and the girls who played them) determined the shape of the game.

There seemed to be two objects to the game: 1) see who can get the other participant to laugh the hardest; 2) keep the game going for as long as possible. It didn't really end until this summer, when both girls gave their cards away after admitting they'd finally lost interest.

And yet an aspect of that early experience lives on in their video gameplay. If I eavesdrop on a Saturday morning session of LEGO Batman (always two-player mode, usually villains) I'll catch them talking to each other in the exaggerated tones of the characters they're manipulating. In fact, watching them play the game can be frustrating because there are frequent, extended periods when their gameplay isn't concerned with the dictated objective, but with horsing around in the environment and, yes, getting the other player to laugh.

It seems that, for my daughters at least, there are two impulses being met in games like this: the comic impulse, and, in assuming distinct voice and specificity of “another” character, the “acting” impulse.

When a person truly discovers those profound pleasures, she will rarely let go of them, and then usually only under great social duress (“Grow up and put the Barbies away, already!”). In fact, I'm wondering if these impulses are ever released at all? Is it not more likely that they are sublimated in the act of reading or watching, or given dictated expression in community theatres and church basements, or occasionally set free to entertain during a meal shared with a trusted audience?

Games! Huh! What Are They Good For?

2011-02-24T08:31:00.005-05:00

In a puritanical variation on the "But is it art?" question, Jane McGonigal wonders whether video games mightn't be good for gamers, in a "Mikey likes it!" way. Clay Risen protests the question: "(Games) can be a hell of a lot of fun. Isn't that enough?" Meanwhile, experienced gamer Michael Agger does the sensible thing and awards McGonigal points per talking-point.

I have my own thoughts on the matter, based entirely on anecdotal evidence compiled and collated from the annals of my own experience. I've played video games since Pong, I dabbled in D&D back in the day, and I've mulled over what brings my daughters back to a particular game.

Oh yes, I do have thoughts.

Nikolski, by Nicholas Dickner: A Final Defense

2011-02-17T12:10:00.015-05:00

Trussed up in his army-surplus sleeping bag, with his flashlight wedged under his chin, Noah examines the old map. He watches the mist rising from his mouth and thinks of Leonard, a classmate who at this very moment is busy stirring the venerable dust in Hydra in the Saronic Gulf. Noah has the feeling he is on the wrong island. He has thought several times of dropping out of university, but without a satisfactory alternative he could not bring himself to face the real world. And yet, here he is, stretched out on a bed of lichen, looking at an old map of the Caribbean, shivering (Nikolski, 163).

In 1991 I owned a portable word-processor. It was roughly twice the size of a laptop, and its unique storage cartridge could hold up to a half-kilobyte of information. I composed my final year’s worth of university papers on it, and one or two stories, then printed those out on the clattering daisy-wheel printer that came with it.

That printer broke down, time and again. There was an office equipment store across the street from where I lived, so I walked the item over for repair, and discussed matters with the store owner. It was a very small business, run from a bungalow house. We talked the trade. “Over 99% of my business is out there,” he said, with a vague wave. “You’re the only one who comes in.” After a few exchanges with the man, he looked me over and said, “I need a sales/customer service person to look after clients north of the 401. You interested?”

I thanked him, and said, “I’m afraid I don’t own a car.”

That exchange seemed to sum up too much of where I was coming from, and where I was — and wasn’t — going. I’d left the prairies for the big city, but what now? My brother was on the west coast, farming salmon. My sister was studying in England. I had friends studying in Paris, others teaching English in Tokyo, Seoul, and the newly liberated Prague and Berlin. Toronto was . . . well, the only certain thing I could say for it was it was expensive. The whole business of “what next?” had me in an abysmal state of mind.

A car — hell, it was a struggle scraping together enough coins for the self-addressed-stamped-envelopes that were returning my submissions with the usual rejection slips. And now I’d racked up a debt of a few thousand dollars to finish a degree that didn’t promise any sort of professional recompense upon completion. Was this really a good time to take out an additional loan to buy a car and apply myself to a trade whose future seemed increasingly dubious?

Instead I applied for, and got, a job at the city’s oldest bookstore. It seemed like a reasonable compromise. History would have to play itself out on television screens, while I settled in amongst the books to pay off my debts and contemplate my next move.

I should mention that I’ve always found it hard to establish ties to people. It seems I’m too withdrawn, too much of a homebody. None of my very few lovers was ever able to understand why I was content to make a living selling books. Sooner or later they would end up asking themselves — and, inevitably, asking me — why I didn’t want to travel, study, pursue a career, earn a better salary. There are no simple answers to these questions. Most people have clearly defined opinions on the subject of free will: Fate (no matter what you call it) either exists or does not exist. There can be no approximations, no in-betweens. I find this hypothesis reductive. In my view, fate is like intelligence, or beauty, or type z+ lymphocytes — some individuals have a greater supply than others. I, for one, suffer from a deficiency; I am a clerk in a bookstore whose life is devoid of complications or a storyline of its own. My life is governed by the attraction of books. The weak magnetic field of my fate is distorted by those thousands of fates more powerful and more interesting than my own (147).

Friendships formed, most of them with a profundity that continually catches me off-guard. We coupled up, disbanded, re-coupled. Children were born and raised, occasionally released to another's care. The lightness of it all was almost to be expected — the world is changing, who can keep up? — but the emotional depth and weight that haunted us all was the inevitable surprise. There are friends my wife and I see every two years or so, and in those rare meetings the relief we feel when we first catch sight of each other is palpable.

And now the bookstores are closing. There are more television screens than ever, and they are once again filled with crowds of people demanding change. Our children travel to distant countries, then return to the family table for supper. Their own social and sexual congress seems at once lighter and more haunted than what we remember from our early adult years. And is there any trade or profession they can rely on for provision?

This fingernail clipping of personal history is all I can offer by way of literary criticism to defend my attraction to Nicolas Dickner’s novel, Nikolski. Our personal stories have a shape and continuity to them that will not be denied, but these shapes elide. Late revelations are always forthcoming, and like the novel’s late revelations they confuse as much as they clarify.

Still, there is an appeal to this book that is almost musical. Like so many of Dylan’s marathon songs (“Brownsville Girl,” “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts”) this novel introduces people with passions that defy both summary and satisfaction. Dickner has said that, after hearing Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” for the first time, he threw the manuscript for this novel into the trash, and fled his apartment. I’m grateful he retrieved it and pressed on. This is a novel with a fade-out “conclusion,” suggesting the song carries on even after the listener moves on to the next bit of entertainment. It is as humane and optimistic a conclusion as literature can offer.

My earlier Nikolski ruminations are here.

The World More Full Of Weeping by Robert Wiersema

2011-02-10T15:25:00.001-05:00

The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Robert J. Wiersema dusts off a very old and very dark fable and pulls it into the here and now, in his short novella The World More Full of Weeping. The story is relayed in a deceptively straightforward manner, that cuts a direct route to the payoff. But the real surprises occur once the reader has had time to reflect on the subtle and disturbing connections layered throughout.

To say anymore is to rob readers of a short and powerful bit of writing. This can be read as a stand-alone work, or as a taster of Wiersema's unique alchemy of suspense which he brews to similar effect in his larger novels, Bedtime Story (A) and Before I Wake (A). Highly recommended.

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Oh Pure And Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet

2011-02-09T11:08:00.003-05:00

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Someone from Booklist has read Lydia Millet's Oh Pure And Radiant Heart and encourages would-be readers to “think Twain, Vonnegut, Murakami, and DeLillo.” Since I enjoyed the novel enough to finish it, I think I'm qualified to amend that list.

Twain: do not think Twain. Not even for a second. You're thinking “Twain” right now, and I'm telling you: no. Stop. Twain loved nothing more than, as the British punks say, “taking the piss.” Millet probably began her novel with the intention of taking the piss out of America's soul-withering reliance on nuclear arms, but when she's not focusing on that, she's putting the piss into so many other narratives — particularly the marriage of Ann and Ben, a bond which goes further than the novel's fantastic ending to strain all credulity — it frequently became difficult for me to take seriously what the author takes seriously. This is not Huckleberry Finn. This is not even Tom Sawyer, Detective. This is simply not Twain.

Vonnegut, Murakami: fairly apt comparisons, actually. Millet takes a cheerfully flaky approach to the most dire subject imaginable and uses absolutely everything she has at her disposal to make her argument sing and persuade, a tack similar to that of Vonnegut and Murakami. Having said that it is important to reiterate, I think, that Vonnegut and Murakami achieve their effect with varying degrees of success. Same, here. Oh Pure And Radiant Heart might not resonate as deeply as Slaughterhouse Five, but there is no denying the similarity of approach and effect.

DeLillo: yes. Lots and lots of DeLillo. The principal characters puzzle over the significance of the most arcane subjects that float across their field of vision, which sometimes yields surprising insights, and at other times yields unintentionally comic punchlines. This is definitely DeLillo, who can be obliquely terrifying and heartbreaking but who can also strain the patience of readers who finally have to get the groceries in from the car.

I will add one name to this list, a substitute for America's greatest satirist: Madeleine L'Engle, a fanciful writer who loved science, but for whom physics was not always metaphysics enough. L'Engle's raison d'etre as a writer was to explore the motivations that turned people from loving and lovable creatures into dire grotesques that would willingly exterminate another's — indeed, all — life. There are moments when Oh Pure And Radiant Heart reads like A Wrinkle In Time, utterly divorced of the daily and grounding concerns of family. This might be intentional; it is frequently effective. But it also generates a confused sort of loyalty in the characters, which just as frequently tried my patience as a reader.

It is surely a rich irony that New Mexico, which has played host to so many nuclear tests, is one of America's most fecund artistic locales and the launching site of various strains of New Age thinking and behavior. Is this novel a satire of this sort of vaguely arty, misplaced hope? Is it an evisceration of the mentality that absurdly relies on nuclear arms for a sense of safety? Does it lay bare a muddle that our society has persuaded itself is a mystery? Occasionally the novel succeeds at all of the above — too occasionally for me to give it a flat-out recommendation.

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